ABSTRACT
Kojo Touvalou-Houenou and Marcus Garvey were similar in many respects although their cosmopolitanisms differed. Touvalou's rejection of French cosmopolitanism occurred in the 1920s, during the heyday of his Pan-Africanism, when he built strong ties with Garvey. Accordingly, Touvalou's cosmopolitanism is also a code word for free choice and swift independence from colonialism, not incremental integrationism into the metropole and its civilizations. Garvey played a major role in African anticolonialism of the 1920s since he was a strong circum-Atlantic ideological force that enabled Touvalou and his cohorts to imagine and actualize direct anti-imperial liberation struggle. Touvalou's search for relationships with the Universal Negro Improvement Association was concretized on August 31, 1924, when he delivered a speech at a convention of the organization in Carnegie Hall. Touvalou was an exception to this group of French blacks, since he was attracted to Garveyism even if he despised its emphasis on racial particularity.
