TIME: Almanac 1995

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ TIME: Almanac 1995 / TIME Almanac 1995.iso / time / 090792 / 09079927.000 < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1994-03-25 | 10.9 KB | 221 lines

<text id=92TT1992> <title> Sep. 07, 1992: In African-American Eyes </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992 Sep. 07, 1992 The Agony of Africa </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> COVER STORIES, Page 52 AFRICA In African-American Eyes </hdr><body> 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 <qt> <l>What is Africa to me:</l> <l>Copper sun or scarlet sea,</l> <l>Jungle Star or jungle track,</l> <l>Strong bronzed men, or regal black</l> <l>Women from whose loins I sprang</l> <l>When the birds of Eden sang?</l> <l>One three centuries removed</l> <l>From the scenes his father loved,</l> <l>Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,</l> <l>What is Africa to me?</l> </qt> -- 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. </body></article> </text>