Langston Hughes was 21 in the summer of 1923, when he boarded a ship in the Brooklyn dockyards heading for West Africa. The 1920s was the Jazz Age, and the time of the black arts movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. As Hughes puts it, "The Negro was in vogue." Caught up in the neo-Romantic "primitivism" was a new fascination with Africa, its tom-tom exoticism, its black vitality. Hughes was as prone to employ these stereotypes as everyone else; the difference was that he was one of the few who actually made the voyage to Africa. Eager to escape the humiliation of racism in America, he hoped to find a truer, freer self in the home of his ancestors. His first sight of the coastline filled him with excitement: "My Africa, Motherland of the Negro peoples!" He would respond viscerally to the beauty of the landscape and the people, but he left Africa feeling rebuffed. Africans treated him like a white man. Years later, in his memoir The Big Sea , he would mock his naïve hopes and illusions...
Richard Wright was another who had no time for Du Bois's romance with Africa;...Africans saw him as an American. The Western-educated elite did not give a damn that he was in their country. As for the Africans he met as he traveled around, Wright found himself at a complete loss. They stared at him and giggled. They evaded his questions. Even their laughter, he felt, was an evasive tactic. He was shocked that people urinated openly, in public. He was (unlike Du Bois) repelled by the women's naked breasts. The poverty distressed him, and he blamed the heinous crime of European colonialism. But he also decided that these people, with their superstitions and ancestor worship (he described these as "rot" and "mush"), did not know how to help themselves. Soon he was writing in his journal: "Africa! Where are you? Are you a myth?... I'm in despair. I find myself longing to take a ship and go home." The book that resulted from the trip, which, ironically enough, is titled Black Power, is honest, almost painfully so, about Wright's complete sense of estrangement.
I want to stop here for a moment. Anyone surprised by the idea that an African-American would be seen as not only foreign but as "white" is simply not a serious black scholar nor are they a Pan-Africanist of any serious stripe. It is an unfortunate occurrence that people confuse the racial categorization of African with the cultural categorization of African. When I as a Pan-Africanist call myself an African, I consider it no different than a White person who has never set foot in France, or parents had never stepped foot in France, calling themselves Europeans or even American. It should be understood that for a great deal of white people American means white and that white designation is imported from Europe. That French "American" is no more French than I am when we discuss culture, yet that individual feels no shame and sees no problem with the logic that they are French, meaning, in reality, white. Similarly, though I designate myself an African, I do not designate myself as a Yoruba, Igbo, Fante, Assante, Mandinka, Wolof, Kikuyu, Shona, etc. I have no proof of any such specific connection, nor do I need to in order to be African.
So what ethnicity is the African outside of America? Simply put the African outside of Africa can be seen as distinct as Kikuyu are from Yoruba. The "new world" Africans come in a variety of ethnicities; We can say we have the Haitian African which can be seen as a subset of the Caribbean African, which includes the Jamaican African , the Guyanese African, the Bejan African, in each of theses groups we see particular Africanisms in terms of culture yet we see a new culture born of the specific history of slavery. I do want to make a special note of the African-American. Unlike the Caribbean Africans, who because they represented the majority of the societies they found themselves in, were able to keep ahold of more specific Africanisms that can be easily traced back to specific ethnic groups in Africa, the African-American ethnic group, especially those in the northern portions of America, is far less Africanised, in general. This is why, when an African-American travels to Africa, he or she is specifically pointed out as American or white. The African-American is far more socialized as a European/American, in terms of socializing and even general views of non-Americans (note I did not say non-whites).
Let me take a page from my own life. When I was at Tuskegee I spent a great deal of time, in my senior year with the foreign students, predominantly Africans. Many of them would live in the married student housing primarily because many of them had difficulties with black American students who generally treated them like shit. In this housing complex you had people from Zaire, Senegal, South Africa, Nigeria, Zambia, Ghana, etc. living together. What was also very interesting to me at the time was the close relationships that they had with people from the Caribbean. They all acknowledged their differences yet in terms of speaking styles, social habits, musical tastes, etc. these groups tended to socialized together with the Caribbean students being the most fluid (they would socialize with African-Americans more often).
I was generally accepted by this group. I say generally because it was clear that I was "American" but I was "different". What made me different was in a large part that I did not fit the mould of the "typical" urban black male that they saw on TV and had the fortune to see up front and personal. I had a wider taste in music and most importantly not only was I interested in the culture, I did not generally have the general condescending attitude that Americans are known for. I also respected their own expertise in terms of experience in relation to my politics. What the experience taught me was that Pan-Africanism, as a social experiment was in fact feasible if the so called leadership created the atmosphere in which it could thrive. I must say though , that relative to the experiences discussed in the article, I was here and not in any of the particular countries that the students had come from.
But in relation to the article, I can relate my experiences in Jamaica, the country of my parents birth. Each time I have been to Jamaica I have been rightly perceived as a foreigner. In fact at one point I was nearly kidnapped by some boys who thought some rich family members would pay for me or that I had money or valuables on my person. I have never felt like a "Jamaican" I did not grow up there, I do not have the general stereotypical "Jamaican man" character. Thus I am not a "Caribbean African" and I recognize that. However, that does not make me an American, nor does it detract from being an African. Thus it is important for those reading this and the article to understand that self designating as "African" does not tie one to any particular group and that it is a mistake on your part to make such an assumption.
Let's examine another portion of the article:
He went to Ghana with a mental image frozen in the early 1970s, and found Accra full of SUVs, mobile phones and blaring hip-hop music. When he and his cousin went to a discothèque one night, Eshun was taken aback by the sleek young couples who emerged from Mercedes sports coupes carrying brand-name sunglasses and handbags. In restaurants, he winced at the way the "big men" barked orders and snapped their fingers for service, and the subservience of the waiters made him cringe. On his walks around the city, he noticed that people fell silent as he passed. In an inland village, a friend pointed out that everyone was talking about him; they took him for a black American with too much money. Leaving Kumasi on a bus, Eshun was disconcerted by the slogan on the seat in front of him: We'll Get You There Alive. Tied to the roof of the bus were a flock of goats that screamed throughout the journey, while the bus driver turned up his radio. At sunset every day, Eshun was attacked by clouds of savage mosquitoes.
In a secondhand bookstall in Kumasi, he came across Black Power . "Given the confusions of my own trip I had nothing but sympathy for Wright," he observes. After a month traveling around, Eshun had the same reaction as Wright: "I couldn't wait to leave."
Well of course Eshun wanted to leave, He had became a London-African by his upbringing. He spent most of his life in a country where there might be mosquitos 2 months out of the year. It is little wonder he found the constant mosquitoes bothersome. But that's not the real "eye opener" here. What is incredibly important here is the ascendancy of Black-American street culture in Ghana or elsewhere. In essence many Africans have embraced some of the very things that many African-Americans despise about the culture they find themselves in. Furthermore, the disconcertion that Eshun felt at the "big men" barking orders, is evidence of the cultural gap that Africans in European dominated (by numbers) societies find when they return to their motherlands. The same can happen when one of the new world Africans travels to another new world African place.
What is lacking in the article, which is soooo blatant, is the lack of perspective from people who do live in Africa and are comfortable there. What of the opinions of people like Molefi Assante or other activists? What of the African Americans who moved to South Africa? What of their current situations? I think the article was intended to throw a wrench into the idea of Pan-African unity rather than actually discuss the issue of a Pan-African identity.
Technorati Tags: Africa, Black Education, critique, Culture, Pan-Africanism
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