Late one moonlit night, about a month later, African residents at Labadi Beach noticed strange shadows at the ocean’s edge. Curious, they went with their torches to investigate. To their enormous surprise, they discovered that the shadows were those same black Americans, now searching furiously in the low tide for their passports! I’m afraid this anecdote—apocryphal as it may be–defines the arc of my own experience: I love arriving in Africa, almost as much as I love returning home to America.
What else have I learned from my own African journey? I have learned that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the great natural expanses of the Indian and Atlantic Ocean, the Congo, Niger, Limpopo, and Nile Rivers, the Ethiopian Highlands and the Sahara Desert, were not insurmountable barriers for the Africans who lived near to them. Like all civilized peoples, Africans saw such natural wonders as highways, through which to connect with other human beings and civilizations. If trade is the enemy of distance, it is also the godfather of movements among societies that result in the exchange of ideas, languages, and genetic materials, as well as in the barbarity of enslavement. It is the result of one instance of that barbarous practice in the eighteenth century—the enslavement of a woman who came to be called Jane Gates—that I am an American. I have learned that I am neither Fon nor Beninian, Asante nor Ghanaian, Swahili nor Kenyan, Nubian nor Sudanese. Though not a member of any one of these great peoples in particular, I am as a descendant of a West African slave and of ex-slaves, the product of a truly Pan-African new world culture forged out of the crucible of slavery. However deep and abiding my love of the African continent and its people, I am an American, albeit an African American, destined to call this place, and not that unimaginably varied massive continent, my home.
Finally, I have come to understand a truth that may be the only meaningful answer to the daunting question put to me by my daughters on that suffocating train ride through Zimbabwe seven years ago. Africa is not only the cradle of the human community, it is the mother of Civilization itself. All human civilization wears Africa on its face, just as surely as my daughters and I do, as their children’s children will, as do we all. And until the West—and the rest of us—knows Africa, we can never truly know ourselves.
NOTES
1.Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997).
2.See The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Philip S. Foner, ed., vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 351.
3.Marion Berghahn, Images of Africa in Black American Literature (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 40. Bradford Chambers, ed., Chronicles of Black Protest (New York: New American Library: 1969), 52.
4.Frederick Douglass referring to the African Civilization Society, Apropos of Africa: Sentiments of Negro American leaders on Africa from the 1800s to the 1950s; compiled and edited by Adelaide Cromwell Hill and Martin Kilson (London: Cass, 1969), 164.
5.Edward Wilmot Blyden, in Marion Berghahn, Images of Africa in Black American Literature (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 51.
6.Henry S. Wilson, Origins of West African Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1969), 242, 246.
7.Ibid.
8.Dorothy Sterling, ed., Speak Out in Thunder Tones: Letters and Other Writings by Black Northerners, 1787–1865 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 1973), 1.
9.Richard Newman, African American Quotations (Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx Press, 1998), 13.
10.Frederick Douglass, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered.” An address before the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College at Commencement, July 12, 1854 (Rochester, N.Y.: Lee, Mann and Co., Daily American Office, 1854).
11.Alain Locke, ed.; with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad, The New Negro (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992).
12.Ulysees Lee, The ASNLH, The Journal of Negro History, and American Scholarly Interest in Africa, in Africa Seen by American Negroes (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1958), 409.
13.Newman, African American, 17.
14.Ibid., 15.
15.Leopold Sedar Senghor, Selected Poems (London: Rex Collings, 1976), 33.
16.Berghahn, Images, 128–129.
17.Ibid., 130–131.
18.Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995).
19.Ibid., xxvi.
20.Newman, African American, 16.
21.W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 117, 123.
22.See Edward H. McKinley, The Lure of Africa: American Interests in Tropical Africa, 1919–1939 (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), 68.
23.Adrian Room, African Placenames (Jefferson, N.C.: 1994), 13.
24.Valentin Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994), 26–27.
25.Ali Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1986), 23.
26.Joseph E. Harris, ed., Africa and Africans as Seen by Classical Writers. The William Leo Hansberry African History Notebook (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1977), 82.
27.Ibid.
28.Homer, Odyssey, Book 1; translated by Robert Fagles; Introduction and Notes by Bernard Knox (New York: Viking, 1996), 25–30.
29.Odyssey, Book 5, 309–320.
30.Diodorus Siculus 3, 1–5.
31.Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, 78.
32.Ibid., 78.
33.Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), 99.
34.C. G. Seligman, Races of Africa (London: T. Butterworth, Ltd., 1930), 96.
35.Basil Davidson, Old Africa Rediscovered (London: Gollancz, 1964), 29, 37.
36.Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1965), 9, and also see opening remarks of the first lecture of a series by Hugh Trevor-Roper by the same name in The Listener Magazine (Nov. 28, 1963), 71.
37.Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie, African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).
38.Mazrui, The Africans, 12.
39.Caroline Neale, “The Idea of Progress in the Revision of African History” in Writing Independent History: African Historiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 112–117.
40.John Reader, Biography of a Continent (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 4.
41.Jared Diamond, Guns and Germs: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 377.
SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Wonders of the African World (New York: Knopf, 1999).
BLACK LONDON
ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE years ago, I took a job at the London bureau of Time. New in town, I had set out on foot from Bayswater Road for the Time-Life Building, on New Bond Street. Soon I was desperately lost and desperately trying not to show my desperation. It was that time of the morning when the only people around were those who actually worked on the street, and they all seemed to speak an alien tongue. This was my first time in England, where I was to live for the next few years, but I might as well have been in Vladivostok: I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. Then I saw a black face and, out of habit, eagerly approached: at last, in this strange land, a brother. The man was cleaning the sidewalk outside a men’s clothier’s, dousing the concrete with soapy water and sweeping it over the curb. I gave him a prayerful look: Could he possibly tell me how to find New Bond Street? The man stared at me quizzically, and when he opened his mouth he sounded exactly like every other workman I’d encountered.
I was dumbstruck; it was as if the voice were the work of an unseen ventriloquist. Though I must have known better, I had, on some level, always assumed that my black compatriots sounded black because they were black: I’d assumed (I cringe to relate now) that the shape of our African lips had something to do with our characteristic conson
ants and vowels. Black comedians like Godfrey Cambridge could “do” a white voice—they delighted in it—but you didn’t think they could really keep it up for very long. I spent the next weeks studying first generation English blacks as they spoke, mesmerized by the sight of protuberant lips forming sounds—whether plummily R.P. or blurry and filled with glottal stops—that were indistinguishable from those of their white counterparts. It took a while for the novelty to wear off. My initial travels through black London, then, were for me a succession of spit-takes: black people who sounded English without even trying.
What bliss it was to be black and living in London! How free you felt from the mundane prejudices of race-obsessed America! Here was a country where the boundaries between the races had been erased. Or so, for a time, I could imagine. I eagerly sought out London’s island immigrants: the Trinidadians in Ladbroke Grove; the Barbadians in Finsbury Park, Notting Hill Gate, and Shepherd’s Bush; and the Jamaicans (who then made up—as they continue to do—more than two thirds of the West Indian population) concentrated in Brixton. As I soon learned, the history of Britain’s West Indians—as a substantial presence, rather than the occasional anomaly—went back only to 1948, when a boatload of nearly five hundred Jamaicans docked at Liverpool. Postwar England had a pressing need for manual labor, and the West Indians provided a convenient source. There had, of course, been people of African descent in England for centuries; the National Portrait Gallery currently has an exhibition devoted to Ignatius Sancho, who corresponded with Sterne and was painted by Gainsborough; and, long before Enoch Powell, Queen Elizabeth I demanded that all the blacks in England pick up and leave. But this was the first time they had established themselves as a collective presence, in numbers that grew to two hundred thousand within a decade and a half. Black London—and it was in London that the great majority of them pooled—was born. The Jamaican poet Louise Bennett called the process “colonization in reverse.”
The presence of the black Gastarbeiter inevitably caused a certain unease among the natives. You wanted to be good hosts, of course, but you were hard pressed to know what to do when the guests forgot that they were guests. And that was the trouble with those postwar West Indians. You’d welcomed them into your home (so nice they could stop by), but now the hour was getting late. And, though you’d turned up the lights, noisily switched on the Hoover, even asked if you could call them a cab—done everything you politely could—they still didn’t get the message: You can all go home now. That’s when the sense of panic began to rise.
The blacks arrived at a time of “overemployment,” but, as the sixties wore on, overemployment turned to underemployment, and a new and newly disaffected generation found itself out of luck and out of place. If many of them had no jobs, though, they did have their folkways; and in the contest of cultures bangers-and-mash was no match for curry goat. That sense of cultural difference was itself the cause of further unease. Britain had always had its own internal ethnic clashes, but they were familiar and, for the most part, unthreatening, the stuff of music-hall caricatures—“When Ah take a couple o’ drinks on a Sa’day night, Glasgow belongs tae me!”
Gradually, my enthusiasm for the Afro-Saxon diaspora soured into frustration at its marginality and powerlessness. I’d arrived from a land where James Brown and Jimi Hendrix—and Miles Davis and John Coltrane—ruled; where an entire generation, so it seemed, had with pen and brush taken up the task of self-representation. In London, the only cultural vitality appeared to come from forms that were borrowed, essentially unmodified, from the Caribbean. I would visit London’s leading black bookstore, the New Beacon, and find that nearly everything on the shelves was from the West Indies or America. “How can they be English?” John La Rose, the poet and publisher who ran the store, used to say to me about his fellow-expatriates. “Their entire culture is West Indian.”
On Saturday, the younger generation of Britain’s recent immigrants would gather at some vacant house that had recently been “liberated” for the occasion, the electricity and gas reconnected for an evening’s bacchanalia. It was called “goin’ blues,” and although the site changed from week to week, you rarely had to ask where it was being held: you could hear it half a block away, as the reggae thudded through the adjoining council housing. You paid your twenty pence at the door and entered into sweltering, Caribbean heat. The floors trembled from the enormous bass loud-speakers. Upstairs, people queued for hot food and for Johnnie Walker served in Coke cans. Everybody was smoking ganja; you could get high just from breathing. But what always struck me was how joyless it all seemed: nobody spoke or even laughed. Expressions were hard, affectless. The only white man I ever saw at a blues party was the one who distributed cocaine and ganja. “Him not white,” an acquaintance told me. “Him da pusher mon, dat all.” Otherwise, the only words you’d hear spoken all night were in the imperative mood. “Pass da ganja” and (if you accidentally brushed by someone in the crowded room) “Don’t touch me, mon.” Not jubilation but escape was the order of the night. And their language itself was another means of escape. “Da rotted kayan” were the police; “da monkeys” or “da natives” were the English; “Babylon,” with a pleasing semantic symmetry, could refer either to England or to Jamaica. There was even a peculiar nomenclature for cognition: a Jamaican friend used to tell me, “Da monkey understands. But da black mon overstands.” The one thing they could all overstand was that, no matter how many drinks on a Saturday night, London did not belong to them.
Twenty-five years later, a culture that is distinctively black and British can be said to be in full flower, both on the streets and in the galleries. “What we had before was the Afro-Caribbean presence in Britain,” says Stuart Hall, a professor of sociology at the Open University, who is, among other things, black Britain’s leading theorist of black Britain. “But the emergence of a black British culture can now be seen. For the first time, being black is a way of being British.”
This development is partly a reflection of social engineering: in the after-math of the riots that swept Brixton and other black neighborhoods in 1981, employment measures like Section 11 were adopted, accelerating the placement of blacks in public sector jobs and helping to create something of a black middle class, however tiny. It’s partly a reflection of the entrepreneurial ethos of Thatcherism itself. And it’s partly a reflection of the liminal status of a new generation that was always looking both ahead and behind. “You know that if you go into a smart boutique on Oxford Street,” Hall says, “one of the things you will find is a very smart, good-looking black woman. Blacks become objects of desire in curious ways, with some secret umbilical connection to what’s cool or exotic or sexy, or to the body or to music—all the things that Puritan English culture both reviled and desired. They’ve turned marginality into a very creative art form—life form, really—and they’ve done so at the level of youth culture, of music, of dress. They’ve styled their way into British culture. Which isn’t hard, of course—it’s one of the most unstylish places in the world.”
Among those who have styled their way into British culture is Ozwald Boateng, the first black tailor, he says, to hang out his own shingle on Savile Row, and, at thirty, the youngest. His parents came from the Ashanti region of Ghana, and he has a West African’s dark-chocolate skin, though at six feet three he’s tall for a Ghanaian. More than Boateng’s blackness, his brashness makes him an anomaly on the street: Slick Rick meets Paul Stuart. Even the shop’s décor—the mustard-yellow walls, the purple carpet, the cerise velvet that drapes the freestanding dressing room—seems a deliberate affront to the staid establishments that surround it. But what makes him so subversive, sartorially speaking, is his conservatism. “Balance” is Boateng’s rallying cry as a maker of men’s suits, and I’m impressed, too, by his ability to strike a balance between bland assimilation and strident racial self-assertion. He tells me that he’s “a big believer in being Ashanti,” but he also declares, “I love the whole pompous cast of English tradition
.” He recounts an annual occasion when the tailors from Savile Row have a formal, sit-down dinner. “And all the Lords, and everyone—it’s a men’s club. Really a staunch British organization. And every so often there would be a toast to the Queen, so you’d stand up: ‘The Queen, the Queen!’ It’s like totally fantastic.” You sense in Boateng a deliciously camp devotion to the ways of little England: he finds them—well, fetching. And how, I inquire, did he dress at this congregation of the sartorial centurions, the last guardians of tradition? Did he wear gray flannel? Boateng appears to be aghast at the possibility. “Actually,” he says, squaring his shoulders, “I wore a black velvet suit with a slight glitter in it.”
To see what’s new here, it helps to talk to someone who has succeeded under the terms of the older covenant, and can remind you that in the more rarefied circles of London society you’re still unlikely to encounter a black face. The dress designer Bruce Oldfield, whose clients include the Princess of Wales, was adopted as a child by a white woman who lived in rural England. “I don’t think I really saw black people en masse until I was about twenty-one, when I came to London and lived in Brixton,” he says. At any rate, the visible signs of Oldfield’s Jamaican heritage are pretty discreet. “I have a great rapport with Arabs, because they think I’m an Arab,” he tells me, with a low, mischievous chuckle, “Which is handy, because they’ve got a lot of money, and they like buying flashy frocks.” These days, Oldfield has left Brixton for behind, and the London he inhabits is essentially color-free. “I mean, if I go into a trendy restaurant, like the Caprice or the Ivy, I don’t see many black people,” he says. “I just don’t see black people where I go. I’m rarely in a house where there’s another black person, socially.” He speaks of all this matter-of-factly, and yet it’s clear that he sees himself, finally, as an interloper in the circles he moves through. “English society is very compartmentalized,” he says. “There are black people who cross over, obviously—there’ll be an interior decorator, a designer, people like me.” Yet there’s all the difference in the world between thinking that you belong and thinking that you’ve crossed over. Oldfield doesn’t quite manage a smile when he tells me, “I cross over because I’m amusing and witty and charming.”
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 59