Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/090792/09079927.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 11KB | 224 lines

                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 52

AFRICA

In African-American Eyes


The motherland is a source of increased pride for U.S. blacks.
Now it is time to face some unpleasant truths under the veil
of romanticism

By JACK E. WHITE


    What is Africa to me:

    Copper sun or scarlet sea,

    Jungle Star or jungle track,

    Strong bronzed men, or regal black

    Women from whose loins I sprang

    When the birds of Eden sang?

    One three centuries removed

    From the scenes his father loved,

    Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,

    What is Africa to me?

    -- Countee Cullen, Heritage


    Every black American who journeys to Africa seeks an
answer to that question -- and I was no different during the 2
1/2 years I spent as a Time correspondent on the continent I
think of as the motherland.

    On Goree Island, a rocky outcropping in the harbor of
Dakar, Senegal, stands the Slave House, through which thousands
of African captives passed on their way to the New World. I
inspected the holding pens where terrified men and women were
imprisoned until they could be loaded aboard a slave ship bound
for America, and looked out across the Atlantic through what the
guide called the Door of No Return. Like every other black
American who has shared the experience, I wondered if some
unknown ancestor of mine had walked through this very doorway,
and I could not hold back the tears.

    Some months later, I visited the beach at Badagry, not far
from Lagos, Nigeria, which was an important slave-trading port,
a place where manacles and other purported relics of the
commerce in human beings are on display. The proprietor, an
aging woman, told some Nigerian friends of mine that she would
charge them 50 kobo (about $1) to examine the artifacts. You,
she said, pointing to me, pay two naira (about $4). I protested
that if the chains were indeed genuine, which I doubted, they
might have been used to bind one of my ancestors; therefore, I
didn't understand why I should pay four times as much as
Nigerians to get a look at them. Two naira, she snapped back.
At that, my Nigerian friend John Chiahemen suggested we leave,
explaining that "she must be a descendant of those coastal
tribes who sold your people to the white man in the first
place." All I could do was laugh and walk away.

    And so it went in country after country as I chased the
stories about Africa that usually interest the Western press:
the coups, the starving refugees, the monumentally mismanaged
governments, the ugly dictatorships. Everywhere I went, I felt
a sense of kinship with the people I covered, who looked like
long-lost friends and relatives back in the U.S. From the moment
I set foot in Africa, I had a sense of having come home.

    But with time and greater knowledge, that powerful
awareness of the genetic link between Africa and its lost
children was alloyed with a more complex emotion: a realization
of all that was lost when our unwilling ancestors made their
transatlantic voyage. Our centuries in America have transformed
black Americans into a Western people. The boxer Muhammad Ali,
after visiting Africa, joked that he was glad "my great
granddaddy caught that ship." The point is that whether or not
we rejoice in the fact, our ancestors did come to America, and
not many of us can ever go completely home again.

    Lacking detailed knowledge of precisely where our
ancestors came from, whether they were Fon or Ashanti or Serer,
African Americans have tried to adopt the continent as a whole
as a place of origin. But that indiscriminate embrace poses
problems of its own: Which of the hundreds of languages and
cultures that flourish in Africa are we to call our own? What,
for example are African Americans raised in the Christian faith
to make of religious and cultural traditions such as female
circumcision, which is still widely practiced in Africa? I once
met a Kikuyu physician in Kenya, who had been educated in
London. He deplored the health hazards posed by performing the
ritualistic mutilation with unsterilized knives on dusty
ceremonial grounds. So when his daughter came of age, he
arranged for the operation to be done in a modern hospital --
because without it she could not marry a Kikuyu man.

    The strength of such traditions limits the degree to which
American blacks can identify with Africa. Yet from time to time
some black Americans have immersed themselves in the trappings
of African culture. Recently, a black lawyer in Washington
refused a judge's order to remove a Kente cloth shawl while
appearing in court because it might influence black members of
the jury. Some of us, including one black member of Congress,
have cast aside our "slave names" and adopted African ones. Many
of us celebrate pseudo-African holidays like Kwanzaa, in
addition to Christmas. Across the land, there is a push for
"Afrocentric" education. Increasingly, we call ourselves African
Americans, or even, like rap singer Sister Souljah, simply
"Africans," dropping any connection to America from our
definition of our tribe.

    I applaud these trends, because they stand in healthy
contrast to the shamed repudiation of Africa and everything
African that dominated our thinking as recently as a generation
ago. It was not until the civil rights movement set us on the
still unrealized path to first-class American citizenship that
we could feel proud enough of ourselves to embrace an ancestral
homeland that had long been equated, in our minds and those of
whites, with backwardness and degradation.

    Nonetheless, I would argue that these are for the most
part superficial expressions of solidarity with Africa. They
have as much -- or more -- to do with our search for identity
in the U.S. as they do with our connection to that distant
continent. An African American is, after all, an American. And
in any case, what we choose to call ourselves does nothing, by
itself, to deepen our understanding of what Africa and Africans
are truly like. Many of us remake the past to suit the needs of
the present, imagining that we are all descended from African
kings and queens or that the land our forebears left behind was
some kind of earthly paradise, a la the late Alex Haley's Roots.
This romanticism, however, can draw the veil more tightly over
our eyes. For us, Africa is not so much a lost continent as an
imagined one.

    There has always been an understandable tendency among
African Americans to dismiss bad news about Africa as racist
lies. During the late '70s, for example, a certain civil rights
leader tried to persuade black American professionals to lend
support to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Reports that Amin had
slaughtered tens of thousands of his people were brushed aside
as inventions of the racist Western propaganda machine. The
truth, of course, is that until Amin was chased into exile by
Julius Nyerere's Tanzania, he was one of the most murderous
tyrants the world has known. His country, once one of the most
beautiful and prosperous in Africa, is still recovering from his
depredations.

    Until quite recently, we have tended to explain away
tyranny perpetrated by blacks against blacks across the
continent, attributing it -- sometimes correctly -- to
manipulation by former colonial powers or by Washington.
Genocidal ethnic conflicts such as the vicious clan warfare now
taking place in Somalia go largely ignored. Conversely, black
Americans have directed enormous rage at the oppression of black
Africans by white South Africans, for the good reason that it
is the brutally undemocratic African society that most closely
resembles our own.

    The slow-motion collapse of apartheid was brought about in
part by international trade sanctions adopted by the U.S.
government because of relentless pressure from African Americans
led by Trans Africa, a lobbying group based in Washington. There
are some signs that this victory may be ushering in a new, more
mature relationship between African Americans and Africa.
Randall Robinson, TransAfrica's executive director, is one of
the orchestrators of this welcome change. He notes with
justifiable pride that the imposition of sanctions on South
Africa marked the first time black Americans significantly
changed U.S. foreign policy. Doing so instilled a new confidence
in African Americans about their ability to bring about change
in this country, and in Africa as well.

    Though it has been little noticed by the press, Robinson
and like-minded black politicians and businessmen have been
gradually doing away with the double standard that condemned
oppression by South Africa's white regime while ignoring
oppression elsewhere on the continent. As long ago as 1990, a
group including Robinson, Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King and
several black elected officials and labor leaders issued a
statement calling for an end to the "violence and tyranny"
inflicted by Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi's one-party
government. Robinson has since repeated the criticism in
appearances before U.S. congressional committees, adding Zaire's
Mobutu Sese Seko and other African tyrants to the list.

    Robinson points out that the end of the cold war has set
the stage for a new and uncertain era of relationship between
the U.S. and Africa. Now that America is no longer engaged in
a twilight struggle with the former Soviet Union, it no longer
needs to prop up African despots like Mobutu to keep them out of
the enemy camp. Thus the U.S. is free to live up to its
idealistic commitment to representative government by lending
aid to the fledgling democratic and human rights movements that
are springing up across the continent. The question is whether
in a time of fiscal impecunity and crying needs in the newly
independent countries of the old Soviet empire, the U.S. will
invest in the economic basket cases of Africa.

    That is where the evolving African-American lobby led by
Robinson comes in. His hope is to add another arm to
TransAfrica's effort: a training school for young black foreign
service officers and academics who could become a permanent
inside-the-system pressure group for increased U.S. aid to
Africa. But Robinson also points out that the effort cannot
succeed unless African Americans take a consistent moral stand
regarding oppression throughout Africa. Like other black
Americans who want to assist our motherland, he recognizes that
we can succeed only to the extent that we accept Africa for what
it really is -- not by holding on to what we imagine it to be.