Like his friend and colleague Alexander Crummell, Blyden believed that it was incumbent upon the American Negro, perhaps out of reciprocity, to serve as the vanguard in the reclamation of “the continent” and “the race”; Crummell maintained that “both our positions and our circumstances make us the guardians, the protectors, and the teachers of our heathen tribes.”7 It is, however, worth noting that even Pan-African nationalism was sometimes infected with a certain ambivalence and condescension toward its African brothers and sisters, the very same condescension felt by those who longed to leave Africa far, far behind in the historical past. As James McCune Smith, a black American physician educated at Edinburgh and friend of Frederick Douglass put it in the middle of the nineteenth century, the American Negroes’ identification with Africa, and their habit of calling themselves “African,” waned as the Civil War approached:
The terms by which orators addressed their leaders on [the day the African Slave Trade was abolished in 1808] was universally “Beloved Africans!” The people in those days rejoiced in their nationality and hesitated not to call each other “Africans” or “descendants of Africa.” In after years the term “Africa” fell into disuse and finally discredit.8
Still, the ardent desire to honor and reclaim the Negro’s link to Africa—by color, by history, by culture, by “blood”—never entirely disappeared, even among those who refused to romanticize the American Negro’s return to the Continent. Instead, for those so inclined, Africa became a metaphor for an ancestral greatness, for roots, for spirituality, in which American Negroes could share. Mary McLeod Bethune, the great black activist and educator, identified herself as “my Mother’s daughter,” and claimed that the “drums of Africa still beat in my heart.”9 Frederick Douglass, echoing a belief voiced by John Stuart Mill in 1850, railed in 1854 against “the fashion of American writers to deny the Egyptians were Negroes and claim that they are the same race as themselves. This has . . . been largely due to a wish to deprive the Negro of the moral support of the Ancient greatness and to appropriate the same to the white man.”10 Alain Locke confessed in 1925 that Negro Americans had shared a “missionary condescension . . . in their attitudes toward Africa,” which was “a pious but sad mistake. In taking it, we have fallen into the snare of our enemies and have given offense to our brothers.” Locke went on to say that “Africa is not only our mother, but in light of most recent science is beginning to appear as the mother of civilization.”11
Among black scholars, then, the role of Africa was hotly disputed. As the historian Carter G. Woodson put it: “[T]he contemporary school of thought which taught that the American Negro had been torn completely from his African roots in the process of enslavement had done incalculable harm, especially in the education and training of younger Negro scholars.”12
In part, this dispute stemmed from the absence of “African Civilization” in the college curriculum. W. E. B. Du Bois himself—the greatest American Negro intellectual in the twentieth century and an ardent Pan-Africanist who would emigrate to Ghana, where he died in 1963 editing the Encyclopedia Africana—even he once confessed that he had no idea of the depth of the history of African civilization until the German-born anthropologist Franz Boas revealed this to him in a lecture at Atlanta University in 1906. Moreover, Paul Robeson had to attend the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in the early thirties to learn “that along with the towering achievements of the cultures of ancient Greece and China there stood the culture of Africa, unseen and denied by the looters of Africa’s material wealth.” “I am a Negro with every drop of blood and every stir of my soul,” Robeson declared. “I want to be more African.”13 The effect of the West’s systematic ignorance of African history was to treat it as if it had slept for millennia, even as the rest of the world’s civilizations erupted. Marcus Garvey, for example, the most passionate Pan-Africanist of his generation (the one preceding Robeson’s) and the father of the modern “Back to Africa” migration movement, argued that “when Europe was inhabited by a race of cannibals, a race of savage men, heathens and pagans, Africa was peopled with a race of cultured black men who were masters in art, science, and literature.” Nevertheless, “You do not know Africa,” precisely because “Africa has been sleeping for centuries—not dead, only sleeping.” Garvey demanded that Africans take charge of their own destiny: “Wake up, Ethiopia! Wake up, Africa! Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed, and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations. Africa for the Africans at home and abroad.”14
Garvey’s popular movement, which struck a certain spiritual chord with working-class blacks in Harlem in the late teens and early twenties, resonated powerfully, if sometimes ironically, with American Negro intellectuals as well, in the form of a primitivistic embrace of “Africa” that was just as unrelated to African reality, in its way, as its opposite—racist stereotyping. The literary movement of the twenties known as the Harlem Renaissance, along with its cousin, the Francophone movement known as “Négritude” (born in Paris in 1934), were based in large part on a primitivistic romance with an “Africa” that never was. These lines from the Senegalese poet Leopold Senghor could be the epigraph of the Négritude movement: “Bare woman, black woman / clad in your color which is life, in your form which is beauty.”15 A poem by the Jamaican Claude McKay, who moved to Harlem and was a pivotal figure in the Harlem Renaissance, is typical of one American version of the romantic recreation of a misty African past. Its title, “Outcast,” reveals the sense of alienation and loss the poet feels, isolated from the haven against racism that Mother Africa once was to black people:
For the dim regions whence my fathers came
My spirit, bondaged by the body, longs.
Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame;
My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs,
I would go back to darkness and to peace,
But the great western world holds me in fee,
And I may never hope for full release
While to its alien gods, I bend my knee.
Something in me is lost, forever lost,
Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,
And I must walk the way of life a ghost
Among the sons of earth, a thing apart.
For I was born, far from my native clime,
Under the white man’s menace, out of time.16
Africa, the ultimate source of our identity, Africa, the paradise lost by slavery, is the home for which we are destined to search, yet never retrieve:
Subdued and time-lost
Are the drums—and yet
Through some vast mist of race
There comes this song
I do not understand,
This song of atavistic land,
Of bitter yearnings lose
Without a place—
So long,
So far away
Is Africa’s
Dark face.17
Africa, for these poets, is the proverbial grail, the definitive sign of identity and authenticity desperately sought, yet never to be recovered. This seeking, without ever finding, is the mark of the American Negro’s alienation, the fate of black people living in a majority white culture far removed from Africa’s maternal embrace.
Despite the popularity of Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement and the romantic yearnings of the Harlem Renaissance in the twenties, many African American intellectuals remained ambivalent, at best, about their putative relation to Africa throughout most of the twentieth century—at least until the advent of the Black Power and the Black Studies movements in the late sixties. The novelist Richard Wright’s attitude is typical: “I could not feel anything African about myself,” in part because Africans “had sold their people into slavery,” he wrote in 1954. After a sojourn in Ghana in the early fifties, he concluded, “I had understood nothing. I was black and they were black, but my blackness did not help me.”18 European slavery and
colonialism, in the end, had been good for Africa, he argued outrageously, because their vengeance had forced Africans to sever themselves from “irrational ties of religion and custom and tradition”—in other words, all of the hallmarks of traditional African civilization. Sounding a still all-too-familiar note, he told a conference in Paris two years later, “I do say ‘Bravo!’ to the consequences of Western plundering, a plundering that created the conditions of the possible rise of rational societies for the greater majority of mankind. . . .”19 So much for the Harlem Renaissance writer’s attempt to transform Africa’s image for American Negroes through primitivism. As Alain Locke had warned at the time, “Even with all our scientific revaluation, all our ‘New Negro’ compensation, all our anti-Nordic polemics, a certain disrespect for Africa still persists widely.”20
One could write a dissertation about the range of African American emotions about Africa, as several scholars have. My point in rehearsing these disparate attitudes, from romantic black nationalism to the disgust and anxiety articulated most clearly by black apologists for slavery and colonization, is that the question that my daughters dared me to answer in 1994 on our 3,000-mile train trip through Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Tanzania has in one form or another vexed fully three centuries of African Americans. In (virtually) dragging them, at the ages of fourteen and twelve, to Africa, I was arranging for them to experience this conundrum of cultural continuity and discontinuity for themselves.
My own initial encounter with Africa had come much later in life than theirs. While an undergraduate at Yale, I spent half a year working in an Anglican mission hospital in the village of Kilimatinde in the center of Tanzania. Toward the end of my stint, I hitchhiked, with a recent Harvard graduate, Lawrence Biddle Weeks, across the equator: We began in Dar es Salaam, went north to Mombasa, on to Nairobi, and from there into Kampala, Uganda, a day following ldi Amin’s 1971 coup. At the Congolese border we were denied entry—we were too green to offer the expected “dash,” or a small bribe—so it was on down to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, to get new visas, then back up to Goma on Lake Kivu. On the back of a truck full of empty beer bottles, driven by a kindly Lebanese merchant, Larry and I spent six days slowly making our way through tropical rain forests and the bush before arriving in the city of Kisangani, the major port of the indomitable Congo River, just in time to catch the riverboat as it started its five-day journey to Kinshasha, near that great river’s mouth. In two months’ time, we traveled from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic without ever leaving the ground.
My attitudes when I first came to the African Continent in 1970 were as romantic as any; in my sophomore year I had read Du Bois’s account of his own first visit to the Continent in 1923, and it certainly had shaped my own expectations:
When shall I forget the night I set foot on African soil? I am the sixth generation in descent from forefathers who left this land. The moon was at the full and the waters of the Atlantic lay like a lake. All the long slow afternoon as the sun robed herself in her western scarlet with veils of misty cloud, I had seen Africa afar . . . The spell of Africa is upon me. The ancient witchery of her medicine is burning my drowsy, dreamy blood. This is not a country, it is a world, a universe of itself and for itself, a thing Different, Immense, Menacing, Alluring. It is a great black bosom where the spirit longs to die. It is life so burning, so fire encircled that one bursts with terrible soul inflaming life. One longs to leap against the sun and then calls, like some great hand of fate, the slow, silent, crushing power of almighty sleep—of Silence, of immovable Power beyond, within, around. Then comes the calm. The dreamless boat of midday stillness at dusk, at dawn, at noon, always. Things move—black shiny bodies, perfect bodies, bodies of sleek unearthly poise and beauty. Eyes languish, black eyes—slow eyes, lovely and tender eyes in great formless faces. . . .21
Upon arriving in the village, I had written to a black classmate back at Yale, “I am nursing at the breast of Mother Africa.” Six weeks or so later, his reply arrived: “Dear Skip—I have been nursing at a few breasts myself. Get a grip, my brother!” By then, I was quite embarrassed by and already disabused of my romantic pretensions. My very first night was spent in tears, wondering what could have possessed me to pledge to live in a village of 500 people, with no electricity, telephones, television, or running water, and where the “express” bus (which delivered both telegrams and the mail); passed through just twice each week. Please write to me, I begged my friends, because I love to read. After half a year assisting the delivery of anesthesia alongside a band of Australian missionaries, my most naive fantasies about the immediacy of my African heritage were cured. The Wagogo villagers and surrounding peasant farmers and the neighboring Masai herdsmen were not simple extensions of my putative African family but peoples with their own discrete histories and their own unique cultures.
I would return to Africa many times after that first extended stay in 1970–1971, but it was on the trip I made, in the company of my reluctant family, to film the episode of the Great Railway Journeys series that I got the idea for a film series and book about ancient African civilizations and its lost wonders, which I thought of as an African version of “The Seven Wonders of the World.”
To compile a list of these wonders, I invited the suggestions of several scholars of African Studies, from Africa, Europe, and America. I collated their responses and arrived at two dozen, including the familiar and less familiar: the Nile, Niger, and Congo Rivers; the Sphinx; the Great Pyramid of Cheops and the Valley of the Kings: the Asante Kingdom and Yorubaland; Dahomey and the slave castles in West Africa; Great Zimbabwe; the Great Mosque at Djenne; the Sankoré Mosque at Timbuktu; the Dogon people; and several others. Since the items on this list conveniently, mercifully, clustered (no fewer than four—the Niger, Djenne, Timbuktu, and the Dogon—are in Mali, for example), I realized that I could encompass most of them in six journeys. My quest to encounter the glories of Africa’s past would be a journey of discovery, for the readers and viewers, of course, but for me as well.
Traveling by Land Cruiser, camel, and dhow, interviewing kings and peasants, priests and prophets, renowned archaeologists and local taxi drivers, market women and Imams, I sought in these travels, not so much to answer directly my daughters’ questions about what African Americans today bore in common with their African ancestors, but to discover who, indeed, “the African people” were and what, in fact, they had contributed to civilization—especially before the Europeans arrived to enslave many of them, colonize their land, and exploit its natural resources. I knew that any meaningful explanation of what Africa was to me would depend on discovering what Africa was, and is, both to Africans and to all of us, to the world’s great family of questing peoples. What was the legacy of art and cultures to which they gave birth? I sought to answer these questions not only on behalf of my own children, but on behalf of all of us who believe that the world’s collective civilization cannot be fully understood without our awareness of its historically suppressed or discarded parts. Through this book and its accompanying film series I hope to contribute in a small way to restoring those parts to their full glory for a shared appreciation, critique, and understanding.
Why do I believe this to be necessary? Are the achievements of Africa really so fully suppressed? Let’s face it squarely: When most of us think of Africa, the images that come to mind are of poverty, flies, famine, war, disease, and limitless acres of savanna inhabited only by majestic game. How many culturally literate Americans know anything at all about the truly great ancient civilizations of Africa, which in their day were just as complex and just as splendid as any on the face of the earth? Who among us is uninfluenced by the images of Africa perpetuated early in this century by the stories of Tarzan: twenty-three novels, sixteen movies, and a syndicated comic strip, each depicting the inevitable, natural dominance of the scion of a titled English family over Africa’s flora, fauna, and its half-witted denizens? (So popular had Tarzan become by 1929 that the New Orleans Times-Pi
cayune only half-jokingly suggested that if Tarzan were to run for president in 1929, he would receive as many votes as incumbent president Herbert Hoover!)22
Europeans have since the early days of their own civilization been fascinated, if not obsessed, with both Africans and the African continent; but the West has been content more often to use Africa for the projection of fantasies from its collective unconscious than to acknowledge it as an actual place to be encountered and analyzed dispassionately, where human beings have forged their own individual identities and collective histories. While this huge continent is the birthplace of humankind, its history of systematic victimization mocks its numerous contributions to the development of civilization. From the very beginnings of documented contact with Europeans, Africa and its peoples have often been misinterpreted to justify one European interest or another. The very name Africa, Ali Mazrui asserts, illustrates how Europe and Western ideology began to shape attitudes about African culture and history.
The etymology of the word “Africa” is uncertain. Adrian Room maintains, “The name derives directly from Latin Africa or Greek Aphrike, and was applied not to the whole continent but to a region that originally corresponded to modern Tunisia.”23 Valentin Mudimbe points out that “Aethiops” was “the proper name of Vulcan’s son in Greek mythology,” and “is the generic qualification of any dark-skinned person.” By the time of Isidorus, “Aethiopia” “qualifies the continent”: “the land or the continent is called Aethiopia because of . . . the heat (calore) or the color (colore) of the people living near the sun that burns them.” By the first century AD, Africa had been subdivided by geographers into three regions: Egypt, Libya, and Aethiopia, “the last corresponding more or less to sub-Saharan Africa.”24 Indeed, many scholars believe that “Ethiopia” in ancient Greek writings more often than not refers to the civilizations of Kush and Meroë in present-day Sudan; a word—like “Zanzibar,” “Ghana,” and “Abyssinia” (derived from Arabic roots)—that refers to the black or brown colors of its inhabitants.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 57