The American South and the Atlantic World

10. Princess Laura Kofey and the Reverse Atlantic Experience

10 Princess Laura Kofey and the Reverse Atlantic Experience Natanya Keisha Duncan On March 8, 1928, Princess Laura Adorkor Kofey was assassinated while speaking at a Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) meeting in Miami. A Ghanaian-born royal priestess whose transatlantic journey to the U.S. South took in England, Panama, Detroit, and Canada, Kofey had initially been acclaimed within that organization for her ability to revive struggling UNIA divisions in the Southeast and attract new membership. Between 1926 and 1928 she held camp-style meetings at baseball fields, public parks, church sanctuaries, and Masonic lodge halls such that the overflow forced many listeners to stand outside the edifices and line adjacent streets. As we will see, Kofey’s message was imbued with much of the standard black nationalist rhetoric of the 1920s, and she steadily endorsed what she saw as the central tenets of the UNIA program, but it also reflected her unusual background as an African prophetess and emissary to the black population of the United States. Kofey introduced into the heart of the UNIA a distinctively African and female voice that found particular purchase in Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. Mobilizing a personal knowledge and understanding of Africa that was quite rare among UNIA leaders and laity, she modified the Association’s repatriation agenda by shifting attention from Liberia to Ghana and other less developed areas of the continent and questioned the value of the organization’s “missionary” schemes as originally outlined by Marcus Garvey’s first wife, Amy Ashwood.1 More generally, she worked to promote concrete cultural and economic exchange between the United States and Africa that went beyond the sometimes highly romantic dreams of many Garveyites and challenged many of their stereotypes Princess Laura Kofey and the Reverse Atlantic Experience · 219 about the continent and its inhabitants. What she called for was simple: African Americans needed to make credible preparations to return to the interior of Africa, not least by developing commercial ties with the continent that were based around the distinctively African or African-derived skills and products that flourished mainly in the U.S. South. This essay focuses on Kofey’s dynamic two-year tenure in the UNIA and her attempts to establish a viable trade agreement between the UNIA and her native Ghana using Jacksonville, Florida, as a hub. These efforts continued even after the Association declared her persona non grata in late 1927, when her burgeoning popularity seemed to threaten the authority of Garvey and the UNIA’s largely male, often ministerial leadership in the South, and her militant form of international black nationalism jeopardized the strategic, if tenuous relationships the UNIA formed with local white authorities. Moreover, Kofey couched her work in the United States explicitly in terms of a diplomatic mission sanctioned by the peoples of Africa—more specifically by native Ghanaian authorities based in Accra to whom she had close family ties. Through her demeanor, lineage, and personality as well as through the particulars of her religious and secular teachings, she countered visions of Africans as docile, backward, dysfunctional, and in need of material help and moral uplift from their more sophisticated North American cousins. Whether dealing with matters of repatriation, commerce, religion, education, or politics, she helped to introduce, or more accurately to reintroduce, African American communities of the South and UNIA supporters to alternative, more positive images of Africa and its peoples. Ultimately, however, Kofey’s popularity reveals the potency of efforts by her and the UNIA in the South to reach out to and reclaim Africa and themselves, efforts to revalidate the kinds of transatlantic and diasporic connections that Kofey personified. Diasporic membership is often based on a “culture consciousness” that sets up polar opposites of a “here” and a “there.” The “there,” according to Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, is “invoked as a rhetoric of self affirmation” and reclamation of a place alleged to be stolen or hidden from the rightful owners .2 Bridging the gap between “here” and “there,” Laura Kofey resembled “Atlantic Creoles” in that she spoke a pidgin English, retained a pride in and utilized many discernibly African cultural, social, and philosophical traits, and attempted to engage in commercial business ties between the continent and the West.3 Borrowing from the formulation put forward by Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley, this essay suggests that 220 · Natanya Keisha Duncan Kofey’s presence in the UNIA and as a significant...