What's Your Name

Books by Kalamu ya Salaam

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What's Your Name?

By Kalamu ya Salaam

Wangui wa Goro is from Kenya. A long way from Kenya. She lives in exile in England. Unable to return to Kenya because of the clash of her human rights activism with Kenya's current barbaric administration.

She is both a creative writer and a translator. Her most well known work is the translating of Ngugi wa Thiongo's books into English. She is often identified as Ngugi's translator. Some people even assume they are related.

So there is a double frustration in her life. She can't go home because home is politically inhospitable -- she will be jailed or, worse yet, assassinated should she return. Additionally, her important work of translating overshadows her creative writing.

For a day or so, Wangui stays at the Marnico guest house but eventually moves to another hotel. Later when we all return to Accra after the colloquium, we are staying together at the Mariset Hotel in the East Condonment area of Accra.

There are two Mariset Hotels in Accra. This one is a lovely little, isolated accommodation. There is original contemporary Ghanaian art decoring the walls. The rooms are, for my taste, more comfortable than the Novatel. They have a small fridge in each room. We use ours for water and juice concentrates. There's a basket in the room with a fragrant potpourri and the telephones have the "standard American plugs" on them. Mariset's brochure notes them as "international" telephone hook-ups. I resist the temptation to jump on line and check my E-mail.

We see each other at breakfast and are soon conversing.

Wangui is traveling with her six year old son, Mbuguah. A son who has never seen Kenya. "The only time he was in Kenya was when he was a small seed growing inside of me." Mbuguah nevertheless identifies Kenya as home.

Wangui is also joined by Adotey Bing, the director of Africa Centre in London. I share some of the Tarzan manuscript with them.

I have been working at night throughout the trip and have already completed over seventy-five percent of the writing. Fortunately, in Cape Coast I was able to print out the manuscript. My Mac Powerbook has Apple file exchange. I've brought both Mac and DOS discs with me. The setup in the temporary Cape Coast colloquium office is DOS-based. I transfer the file to a DOS disc and print with no problem. There is no way I could have written all of this without a portable computer.

Even while many of my colleagues continue to resist using computers and hooking up E-mail, the fact is the computer revolution is irreversible. In Accra, one small record store on a nondescript side street had a computer. Between computers and advances in telecommunications, Africa will quickly be able to close a significant developmental gap.

Day to day communications across the continent, as well as between Africa and the rest of the world will take a gigantic leap in the next two or three years. This will unavoidably also advance Pan Africanism, a philosophy which seeks unity of the African world and thus grows closer to fruition simultaneously with increased, easier and more accessible communications. To my way of thinking, the computer revolution is a boon for our movement.

As the manuscript goes around the table, we talk. Wangui asks me about my name. She speaks Swahili and wonders how my Swahili name came about. I tell her I took my name at Kwanzaa in 1970 and that it was a political choice.

While we knew that the majority of African Americans came from the West Coast of Africa, we chose Swahili because it was the only African language that was the official language of an African country. Most African countries use the former colonial language as the official language. Swahili was also a Pan African, trade language spoken up and down the East Coast and throughout parts of Central Africa. It was a language that was not associated with any one people. It was easy to learn and had a basic grammatical structural.

Wangui corrected me. Although it was widely used by various peoples, it nevertheless was the indigenous language of a specific group of people. She then commented that she liked my name: "pen of peace."

Wangui is one of those gentle, iron-willed spirits who possesses a fierce quietness. As silent as a distant mountain in the moonlight, and just as unmoveable in her convictions. She speaks in a tone about two small steps above a whisper but she is also an independent thinker and a person of purposeful movement. From my brief observations during the few days we were together, I surmise there is very little wasted motion in anything she does. Because of her focused intensity, there is no danger that her quietness will be mistaken for shyness or timidness.

Wangui, her son, and Adotey had an earlier flight than we did, and so checked out early in the afternoon. At that time I saw a demonstration of her battle stancing, the kind of principle-based movement which I'm sure drove the Kenyan law and order fascists straight up their government walls. When the hotel bill was presented, Wangui refused to sign for the last day. Wangui's position, which she stated in calm nonnegotiable terms, was that they were not staying in the room that night and therefore should not be charged for it. The clerk said the policy was they should be charged for the night because they were checking out in the afternoon.

The clerk couldn't believe what was happening because all she wanted was for Wangui to sign for the bill. PANAFEST was going to pay for it. The money wasn't going to come out of Wangui's pocket. But for Wangui it was about principle and not money. Finally, Wangui drew a line separating the charges and signed for the other two nights but did not sign for the last day.

The whole exchange took maybe five or six minutes. The clerk had struck a rock. Wangui was like a tree planted by the water in her intransigence. There was no doubt in my mind that a woman such as this would be killed in contemporary Kenya which is rent by divisive neocolonial tribal politics.

The majority of African states are not politically ready to confront the limitations of tribalism and nationalism, a potent mix which is always self destructive. Moreover, as the conflagrations in Bosnia make clear, the extreme negative that results from mixing tribalism and nationalism is not a racial characteristic, even though, thanks to the cultural hegemony of colonialism, whenever one says "tribalism" one immediately thinks about either Native Americans or Africans.

But regardless of the location or source, we must confront and overcome the limitations of tribalism and nationalism. This process of overturning ourselves is the life work of Wangui wa Goro.

When confronted by a free thinking woman, there is no doubt that many of today's nominal African leaders (most of whom are not just male -- they are also "macho") will exhibit a negative response. Her traditional opponents notwithstanding, Wangui wa Goro's no nonsense, principled and fearless attitude is precisely the quality of leadership that (Pan-)Africa needs.

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Pan African leadership, as its history demonstrates, will come from unexpected places and in its own time. The first day we were in Accra we went to the DuBois Centre. DuBois, an ardent and globally significant Pan Africanist, is buried in Ghana.

W.E.B. DuBois did not start off his professional life as a Pan Africanist. In fact, when he was a founding member of the NAACP, he was often the only person of color integrating these meetings. Eventually, he broke with the NAACP. As important as his NAACP work was, it was as a Pan Africanist that DuBois made his mark internationally. He was one of the chief organizers of the important Pan African Conferences, international gatherings which fueled the then nascent African independence movements. Attendees included many of the initial heads of state of countries such as Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria.

DuBois' advocacy of Pan Africanism came as a surprise to some who identified DuBois as one of Garvey's staunchest and unremitting critics. In his book, Dusk of Dawn, DuBois sums up the conflict between himself and Garvey in a charitable fashion, displaying none of the bitterness and name-calling that was characteristic of their long running feud.

My first effort was to explain away the Garvey movement and ignore it; but it was a mass movement that could not be ignored. I noted this movement from time to time in the Crisis and said in 1920 that Garvey was "an extraordinary leader of men" and declared that he had "with singular success capitalized and made vocal the great and long-suffering grievances and spirit of protest among the West Indian peasantry." Later when he began to collect money for his steamship line, I characterized him as a hard-working idealist, but called his methods bombastic, wasteful, illogical, and almost illegal. I begged his friends not to allow him foolishly to overwhelm with bankruptcy and disaster "one of the most interesting spiritual movements of the modern world." But he went ahead, wasted his money, got in trouble with the authorities and was deported from the United States. He made a few abortive efforts later, but finally died in London in 1940, poor and neglected.

The unfortunate debacle of his over-advertised schemes naturally hurt and made difficult further effective development of the Pan-African Congress idea. Nevertheless, a third Pan-African Congress was attempted in 1923. It was less broadly representative than the second, but of some importance, and was held in London, Paris and Lisbon. Thence I went to Africa and for the first time saw the homeland of the black race.

Eventually DuBois repatriated to Ghana and, in so doing, gave his personal answer to the question of "double consciousness" which DuBois eloquently articulated in the The Souls of Black Folk.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

What is most interesting is that only after visiting Africa is DuBois able to articulate the Negro "message for the world." In a word, it is humanism. Africa can teach humanism. Upon reading DuBois' reflections on seeing Africa, I felt that in December of 1994 I had seen the same essence of Africa that DuBois saw in December of 1923 and wrote about in Dusk of Dawn.

And there and elsewhere in two long months I began to learn: primitive men are not following us afar, frantically waving and seeking our goals; primitive men are not behind us in some swift foot-race. Primitive men have already arrived. They are abreast, and in places ahead of us; in others behind. But all their curving advance line is contemporary, not pre-historic. They have used other paths and these paths have led them by scenes sometimes fairer, sometimes uglier than ours, but always toward the Pools of Happiness.

Or, to put it otherwise, these folk have the leisure of true aristocracy -- leisure for thought and courtesy, leisure for sleep and laughter. They have time for their children -- such well-trained, beautiful children with perfect, unhidden bodies. Have you ever met a crowd of children in the east of London or New York, or even on the Avenue at Forty-second or One Hundred and Forty-second Street, and fled to avoid their impudence and utter ignorance of courtesy? Come to Africa, and see well-bred and courteous children, playing happily and never sniffling and shining.

I have read everywhere that Africa means sexual license. Perhaps it does. Most who folk talk sex frantically have all too seldom revealed their source material. I was in West Africa only two months, but with both eyes wide, I saw children quite naked and women usually naked to the waist -- with bare bosom and limbs. And in those sixty days I saw less of sex dalliance and appeal than I see daily on Fifth Avenue. This does not mean much, but it is an interesting fact.

The primitive black man is courteous and dignified. If the platforms of Western cities had swarmed with humanity as I have seen the platforms swarm in Senegal, the police would have a busy time. I did not see one respectable quarrel. Wherefore shall we all take to the Big Bush? No. I prefer New York. But my point is that New York and London and Paris must learn of West Africa and may learn.

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African life with its isolation has deeper knowledge of human souls. The village life, the forest ways, the teeming markets, bring in intimate human knowledge that the West misses, sinking the individual in the social. Africans know fewer folk, but know them infinitely better. Their intertwined communal souls, therefore, brook no poverty nor prostitution -- these things are to them un-understandable.

On the other hand, they are vastly ignorant of what the world is doing and thinking, and of what is known of its physical forces. They suffer terribly from preventable disease, from unnecessary hunger, from the freaks of the weather.

Here, then, is something for Africa and Europe both to learn; and Africa is eager, breathless, to learn -- while Europe? Europe laughs with loud guffaws. Learn of Africa? Nonsense. Poverty cannot be abolished. Democracy and firm government are incompatible. Prostitution is world old and inevitable. And Europe proceeds to use Africa as a means and not as an end; as a hired tool and welter of raw materials and not as a land of human beings.

I think it was in Africa that I came more clearly to see the close connection between race and wealth. The fact that even in the minds of the most dogmatic supporters of race theories and believers in the inferiority of colored folk to white, there was a conscious or unconscious determination to increase their incomes by taking full advantage of this belief.

And then gradually this thought was metamorphosed into a realization that the income-bearing value of race prejudice was the cause and not the result of theories of race inferiority; that particularly in the United States the income of the Cotton Kingdom based on black slavery caused the passionate belief in Negro inferiority and determination to enforce it even by arms.

This is the DuBois who lived out his last years working in Ghana. This is the DuBois, his eyes opened by Africa, who committed class suicide by siding with the development of the African masses rather than remaining a lionized intellectual in America. This is the DuBois whom most of us seldom encounter. A DuBois who tired of the high wire, double consciousness balancing act, and decided to cast his total lot with Pan Africanism.

DuBois was an intellectual: first, last and always. His was no romantic nor nostalgic cleaving to Africa. He was a rationalist unswayed by emotionalism and appeals to sentimentality. Here's how he described himself in Dusk of Dawn, his autobiography written when he was seventy years old as a summing up of his life:

My leadership was a leadership solely of ideas. I never was, nor ever will be, personally popular. This was not simply because of my idiosyncrasies but because I despise the essential demagoguery of personal leadership; of that hypnotic ascendancy over men which carries out objectives regardless of their value or validity, simply by personal loyalty and admiration. In my case I withdrew sometimes ostentatiously from the personal nexus, but I sought all the more determinedly to force home essential ideas.

One of the most forceful of those ideas is this seldom quoted insight in which DuBois locates the fervor and future of Pan Africanism squarely in the masses of the diaspora.

From the eighteenth century down the Negro intelligentsia has regarded segregation as the visible badge of their servitude and as the object of their unceasing attack. The upper class Negro has almost never been nationalistic. He has never planned or thought of a Negro state or a Negro church or a Negro school. This solution has always been a thought upsurging from the mass, because of pressure which they could not withstand and which compelled a racial institution or chaos. Continually such institutions were founded and developed, but this took place against the advice and best thought of the intelligentsia.

Pan Africanism will have its day. Will future rise. But not because of ideas, no matter how prescient or how logical. Rather Pan Africanism will rise because the masses of we African people in the diaspora will find that their brightest future is located in the complex matrix/nexus of African unity and not simplistically in the countries wherever we may have been born as a result of colonialism and the slave trade. Our brightest future will be wherever we can band together and work with and for each other as a specific manifestation of Africa, whether that be at "home" in the Americas or abroad, in the diaspora or on the continent of Africa.

The secret of Pan Africanism is that it is about Africa the people and not simply about Africa the land. Make no mistake, the control of Africa the land mass is important. But the ultimate measure of civilization is the social welfare of the people and not the material level of industrial development or lack thereof.

Africa: The children smiling. The women toiling. The men struggling mightily to make things work: old cars, crumbling buildings, underdeveloped townships. The people. Waking up. Walking. Working. Talking. Touching. Singing. Dancing. Collectively.

***

Tomika. Jamilla. Shaqiel. Kunta. Kwame. Lashawna. Tariq. Kenya. Rhodesia. LaToya. Keasha. Aiesha. Damieka. Damella. Shawneeka. Tupac. Assata.

And the list goes on and on and on. African-sounding names picked by the working class to illustrate their identification with Africa even when they don't know one word of an Africa language.

To some people this is all laughable.

Pan Africanism is laughable.

Africa is laughable.

These nonsensical, totally homemade, made-up, crazy sounding names: laughable.

Laugh if you want to, but Africa is alive. It's alive and its the working masses keeping Pan Africanism alive. All across the diaspora.

A child is conceived in Kenya and born in England. His mother teaches him that Africa is his home.

In Ghana we met elderly African American women. Quiet. In their sixties. Some of them married to Ghanaians. They've been there twenty, thirty years. Not thinking about returning.

In America there are thousands and thousands, thousands and thousands of African Americans who will never return to Africa but who turned out to support both Winnie and Nelson Mandela when they separately toured the United States.

The will is alive in the hearts of the masses.

The worsening conditions of our inner cities waters the tree of Pan Africanism. As massive lay-offs increase and government entitlements decrease. As personal security can no longer be guaranteed, and, indeed, insecurity and fear become the norm. As family ties unravel and people find themselves living not blocks or a few miles away from the nearest relative, but living in different states separated by thousands of miles. And, conversely, as the world shrinks because of technological advances in telecommunications and computers. All of this contributes to the development of Pan Africanism.

What is now a leap of faith, tomorrow may be but one small and rationale step toward a better life.

As the skilled and semi-skilled working masses of us: the teachers and mechanics, social workers and industrial equipment operators, postal workers and truck drivers, nurses and medical care providers (e.g. x-ray and laboratory technicians, therapists and nutritionists), administrators and office workers, accountants and retail merchants, as those of us who work everyday and help make the world go round, as we assess our relative positions and, increasingly, opt to investigate and exercise other options, particularly the option of living and working elsewhere, for us Africa will become more and more attractive.

Pan Africanism's most pressing problem is not a lack of will but a lack of leadership. Committed and inspiring leadership which can articulate and implement solid plans which provide linkage and opportunity. Leadership. But it's coming.

And the bulk of this leadership will not be the extraordinary individual geniuses but rather will be composed of the ordinary, hard working laborers who will choose a historic option, and, in so doing, make real the promise of Pan Africanism. The leadership will rise from among the most capable of the masses. From those whose strange and funny names are illustrative of an undying African dream. From those who right now may not even have a clue. No concern for Pan-anything. Just young and full of themselves, looking to make a way in the world and sure to find no way. None of their names inscribed anywhere. And they will be forced, by circumstance and by the intransigence of our historic oppressors (both internal and external), these young people, if they are to become even marginally productive as adults, these young people will have to struggle for their rights. Indeed, even if all they want to do is party, they will have to struggle for their right to party. They will have to struggle just to live.

The nineties will be both the best of times and the worse of times to be young, not to mention gifted and black. But out of the ever encroaching social malaise which threatens to engulf all of us, a new wave of leadership will emerge. A leadership which will turn to Africa, the Africa within all of us as well as Africa the continent. Some of them will "choose" to turn that way. Others will turn toward Africa because they have no other viable choice. In the long term, in terms of the social development of the masses of our people, linking and uniting Africa, that is the only way ahead available to the leadership that is coming.

From: Tomaniqua. Nefertteti. Ashanti. Cinque. The leadership is coming. From: Oduno. Latifa. Tiaji. Bomani. It's coming. Leadership, the last missing puzzle piece, is coming.

Source: Kalamu ya Salaam. Tarzan Can Not Return to Africa, But I Can -- PanaFest 1994

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update 2 November 2007