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Why
Africa Ain't Israel
In
Today's African American Thinking
By
Rudolph Lewis
Continental Africans and African Americans
though similarly constituted suffer broadly from a lack of
knowledge of our differences and our assets. Both rising from
poverty and oppression still suffer inadequate education and
communication systems. This shortage of connecting and
stimulating systems is in need of necessary repair if centuries
of hurtful myths are to be undermined and a more intimate
cooperative spirit is to be developed. Writers, artists, and
professionals—rather than heads of state—of both lands must
lead this reconciling and educational process.
African Americans are a relatively new
people, fostered in the modern era, barely two centuries old. In
contrast, the unbroken ancient heritages of most African
peoples, despite recent nationalisms, can be traced back
thousands of years. These historical and cultural orientations
make for a different sensibility and outlook.
That must be respected.
We Africans of the Americas came into
conscious existence with the rise of Toussaint L’Ouverture and
the nation of Haiti, whose people are now the most impoverished
and brutalized in the Americas, a whipping post for France and
USA foreign policies. Of the fifty or more heads of African
states only Thabo Mbeki, President
of South Africa, gave any special significance to the
celebration of Haiti’s 200th anniversary, in his
address titled, “African Diaspora in the 21st
century” and in his harboring of President Aristide.
We Africans of the Diaspora are a people
birthed in the hands of oppression and liberty— the Atlantic
slave trade and the propagation of the Rights of Man. We are a
people who know practically nothing about tribal and clan and
their formalities and rituals—all of which sets us apart from
much of African cultural life, and provides hurdles to a mutual
understanding and broad cooperation.
We Africans of the Americas have for three
centuries endured the restrictions of racial oppression and
terror. We Africans everywhere however still cringe under the
charge that our material backwardness exists because we lack
restraint, right thinking, and right worship. In this
post-colonial, post-King era, our “economic subjectivity”
remains bound in Euro-American chains of dependency.
We of the Americas are no longer isolated,
however by time and space, from Africa and the rest of the
world, whether we recognize it or not. We are all now caught up
in that global network in which a third of the world’s
citizens live on two dollars or less a day. We all live on a
planet in which three top billionaires swamp the combined wealth
of 600 million people. We both now suffer from great excesses
and thus great tensions.
For over two centuries, we African Americans
have sustained a folk spirit founded primarily in the rural
agrarian societies of the southern states, where slave labor
generated capital in the production of tobacco, cotton, sugar,
and more slaves. Though primarily an oral people we are a people
also of the Book. Our Anglo-Christianity is overwhelmingly
Protestant and evangelical in mood and tone.
We Africans and African Americans, along with
Native Americans, were both ushered into the modern era by the
missionary treatment. The dominant source of our intellectual
history began in missionary schools where we developed our first
understanding of racial difference and blackness. Missionary
education taught us quickly that education, precious as it was,
did not trump the color of the skin.
In the seminaries for the first time we came
in contact with world culture. We read Latin and Greek and
Shakespeare, absorbed all of the prejudices of the West, and
kept abreast of their sciences and discoveries. That God
organized the world according to a hierarchy of racial bloods
with distinct traits and gifts was one of those paradoxical
discoveries we embraced and one under which we still languish.
African Americans cultural life for centuries
has been a crossroads. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament
have been great resources for our development of distinctive
racial myths and a sense of ourselves as a people. There is a
leitmotif throughout our thinking that likens ourselves to the
biblical Hebrews and their Egyptian and Roman oppression. Among
us, traditionally, every child born was a potential prophet like
Moses.
Among US black intellectuals for a century or
more, ancient Egypt, Ethiopia, and Ghana have been inspirational
in their past influences on the development of world cultures
and civilizations. These literary connections encouraged and
provided us tools in which to do intellectual battle against the
most vicious attacks on our humanity as black people.
By the early 19th-century African
Americans themselves had joined missionary and civilizing
movements to redeem pagan and arabised black Africa. One of our
most prominent and intellectual missionaries was the
Episcopalian priest Alexander Crummell, who played a significant
role in US Blacks founding Liberia after France defeated Haiti.
We carried with us there all our contradictions and all the
American prejudices of class, race, gender, and culture. Through
these mid-century emigration movements, African identity first
became widely significant for us.
Our imperial and religious view of Africa
concretized itself most widely in the 1920 Convention in Harlem
organized by Marcus M. Garvey, a Jamaican, whom the
conventioneers from Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean elected
President of Africa. In some measure Garvey’s vision of Africa
was shown to be a fraud. Garvey’s rhetoric and his
distribution of The Negro
World nevertheless developed broadly for the first time a
black internationalist perspective and a new opportunity for
cooperation among Africans everywhere.
For African Americans, W.E.B Du Bois,
Harvard’s first black Ph.D., was the scholar and intellectual
of the 20th century who displaced the dominance of the Christian
missionary spirit in our African concerns. He provided us with
new eyes. His Berlin training taught him that the German
peoples’ folk spirit and culture provided a foundation for
classical German art, music, and literature. In 1903 he
published The Souls of
Black Folk, in which he argued that the gifts of America’s
black folk had intrinsic worth—our songs, music, art, dance,
religion—and rightfully developed could alter the destiny of
the world.
In 1905 Du Bois and others created the National
Association of Colored People (NAACP), the first
mass protest organization that propagandized for an
appreciation of African folk culture and the defense of African
independence against European militarism. Throughout the 1930s
and afterward, Ethiopia and Liberia continued also to remain
important in that they provided opportunities for black men in
vital roles on the international stage.
Capitalized by Southern slaveholders
primarily, the failed planter colony of Liberia was. never
popular among the African American masses or their leaders and
it was never fully supported by US foreign policies. Liberia’s
failure to be inclusive came to a head in the coup of the1980s
that brought Sgt. Samuel Doe to power, and thereafter two
decades of brutal and devastating war.
Those few thousands of African American who
emigrated in the 19th century to Liberia became
isolated and never refreshed themselves with those like
themselves like other planter colonies that had a continuing
stream of new blood. Thus, in a way, Liberia’s failure is also
a failure in our relationships with Africa. Liberia was made for
tragedy. In the 1930s modern Ethiopia and Haile Selassie were
lionized, especially after the Italian insurgency led by
Mussolini’s racist propaganda. But our interest in Ethiopia
waned and died with the death of Selassie.
Today, the great majority of the African
American folk are rather tepid and timid about Africa and its
peoples. Though Tarzan is gone and the National Geographic is
more sensitive, the worst images of modern Africa still appear
prominently in the media. The major African images on American
TV now are emaciated black babies, piteous refugees, and the
hacked bodies and white bones of mass slaughter.
Despite
this American racialist programming, middle-class African
Americans by their own resources have developed an expanding
cultural sensibility about and taste for things African—art,
music, clothes, food, religion, and dance. Such cultural
exchanges continue to revitalize African American culture, which
in some ways dominates American popular culture, which is
influential internationally.
This prosperous class of African Americans
has also expanded the West African tourist trade in countries
like Ghana. Nevertheless, vital historical, cultural, and
economic ties to Africa or African nations comparable to that
between American Jews to Israel remain a dream. Cults of African
Zionists however still remain among us in cities like Chicago
and New York. Very few see any promise of a home in modern
African nations.
Unlike American Jews and Israel, we Africans
and African Americans do not share a religious racial mythology
and a sense of ourselves as one people with a common past and a
common destiny. Despite this shortcoming, the machinations of
global capital operating through the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the World Bank have shoved African and African
Americans into each other’s arms.
We are all now in the same un-sea-worthy
economic boat of globalism, which provides opportunities as well
as perils for friendship and collaboration. Capital restricted
and focused dislodges and disperses masses of populations. All
resources are commodified and all need international currency
for food, health, and education. And wages for unskilled work
steadily declines.
International competition has become fierce.
Capital and technology are concentrated outside of African and
African American societies. Though liberated from colonialism
and Jim Crow, respectively, we remain servants and sycophants of
Western culture, capital, and political management. Many African
Americans are now placing more weight on defending their
privileges as Americans than developing a Pan-African identity.
In the post-colonial, post-Mandela era, we
have observed mass genocide in Rwanda, millions terrorized and
starved in Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo and Zimbawe.
African Americans’ political romance with Africa and its
people has declined radically. Many feel besieged by immigrants
and political refugees from all sides – Mexico, the Caribbean,
Africa, and Asia – who all undermine stable and increasing
wages for African Americans, not only in urban centers but also
in rural areas where low wages are ubiquitous.
Away from the academy, labor-workplace
competition stimulates considerable friction. Most immigrants on
arriving tend to adopt the white American view of black
Americans as lazy, ignorant, and violent. US zip codes and
churches, of course, are organized ethnically, so there is
little social contact and intimacy, among heavily exploited
ethnic groups. Except during summer festivals, we are unfamiliar
and unsympathetic towards each other’s struggles, hopes, and
dreams.
The massive crisis of Black Africa seems
insoluble, while a third of African Americans live in poverty in
the richest country in the world, set in competition against the
poor of Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. All suffer from low
wages, inadequate health care and nutrition, and poor education
and technical training. In addition, African Americans suffer an
increasing criminalization of its population and lost of the
electoral ballot.
With “ethnic conflicts” on the rise,
Africa has indeed been politically modernized. But most of the
peoples of Black Africa have yet to enjoy the benefits of modern
living and modern technology. Taken root at home and abroad,
racial consciousness has exacerbated the external international
economic pressures under which weak nations operate.
As Du Bois pointed out oppressed peoples
cannot liberate themselves without a counter conscientious
Talented Tenth – writers, artists, and other professionals –
willing to make severe sacrifices on behalf of their people. We
Africans at home and abroad need more vital and cooperative
relationships and coordinated activities to undermine the impact
of international capital.
Words and image shape our vision and bring
things to life. We Africans at home or abroad see ourselves
mostly through the critical lens of FOX News and BBC. We who
stand apart must generate better journalists and better
propagandists with fresh ideas and approaches on reaching
greater numbers of our peoples. There is much work before us in
need of urgent attention. Our cultural and political exchanges
must be deepened as well as extended.
We need a cyber technology immediately that
is operative in Third World and other oppressed environments
lacking electronic and communication services. There are however
ten million African Americans online, which provides a unique
opportunity for Africans at home and abroad. Africans and
African intellectuals must develop new mechanisms, fresh
perspectives, and cooperative outreach that inform our peoples
what is going on and how the tide can be turned favorably for
black progress internationally. |
