The racial assumptions of the nineteenth century were not just scientific; they were also moral. People didn’t only belong to natural racial types; they also had a natural and proper preference for—indeed, they had special obligations to—their own kind. Edward W. Blyden, one of the founders of Pan-Africanism, who was born in the Caribbean but moved to Liberia as a young man, expressed this thought as well as anyone. “Abandoning the sentiment of race,” he wrote in a Sierra Leonean newspaper, in 1893, was like trying to “do away with gravitation.”
