Today, communities of Nigerians flourish in major American cities such as Houston and Dallas. Sierra Leoneans attend college in the United States working part time jobs in order to send remittances back to their families in West Africa. This year hundreds of African American tourists will visit Gorée Island, drawn by the weight of history and memory to uncover their African pasts. These scenarios speak to the larger narrative of modern U.S.–West African relations; the social, cultural, political, and economic bonds that date back for centuries and that have, in recent years, drawn these two world regions into increasingly closer contact. It is this complex, often contradictory, relationship that is the subject of this volume.

A Brief History of U.S.–West African Relations

U.S.–West African relations can be traced back to the era of the transatlantic slave trade, which saw between nine and thirteen million Africans transported to the American continent. Although the majority went to Brazil and the Caribbean, an estimated 400,000 slaves, or roughly 4 percent of the total, were carried to British North America. This group of Africans and their African American descendents established the basis for the relationship between the United States and West Africa.

While these early contacts brought enslaved laborers from West African shores to American plantations and left the enduring legacy of the African diaspora in the American continent, modern relations can be traced to the early-nineteenth-century development of the so-called “legitimate trade” on the West African coast and the establishment of the colony of Liberia in 1822.