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Why Africa Is Not Israel in Today's
African-American Thinking
Rudolph Lewis
Zionist
sentiments by African Americans toward Africa declined
radically in the 1990s, while they have risen, though in
a secular form as part of geo-politics, for Israel among
American Jews and even among right-wing evangelical
Protestants. This shifting of sentiments is
well-documented in African American history. Usually,
the shift toward Africa rose out of despair and
hopelessness and shifted away from Africa as matters
improved for African American advancement within the
United States. Pro-African sentiments were probably at
its strongest during the decades of the 1950s and 1960s
when anti-colonial movements in Africa coincided with
the civil rights and Black Power struggles in America.
Pan-African sentiments, which have their origins in the
Americas, flourished during this period. Post-colonial
and post-civil rights realities altered this positive
regard for Africa. But there are other problems with
this analogy.
Analogies are imaginative and they seldom represent
practical realities, especially when comparing people
and their relationships. American and European Jews are
largely the same people with the Israelis even though
they differ in language. They are largely middle-class,
cosmopolitan, and literate. The ability of American Jews
to exert political pressure within the United States
with regard to Israel is much more substantial than that
of African Americans with regard to Africa. Moreover,
Israel has been at the critical center of geo-politics
for over a half century. First, Israel was important in
stemming the rolling tide of Communism. But also it was
important in the efforts of the West to control trade
routes in the Middle East and its access to Mid-East oil
reserves. In short, Israel is a pawn for some Western
strategists for Western domination of the Middle East.
This
scenario has no comparison with regard to Africans and
African Americans though similar and broadly constituted
biologically and to a superficial degree culturally.
Unlike Jews in the Diaspora and Israelis, African
peoples and African Americans do not share a vital
religious and racial mythology and a sense of “we the
people” with a common past and a common destiny. So much
has happened to African Americans between the capture of
their African ancestors, the Middle Passage, and their
created world in the United States. Our histories are
varied. Most of all, we suffer from lack of knowledge of
each other; of our differences and our assets.
In the
real world, we are more competitors than comrades for
scarce resources. We are both rising from poverty and
oppressive environments created by governments of the
West. We are still suffering from inadequate education
and bad communication systems. For our relationships to
develop further, the lack of connecting and stimulating
systems must be addressed. Only then will centuries of
hurtful myths be undermined and make way for a more
intimate cooperative spirit to develop. This process of
reconciliation and education must be guided and led by
writers, artists, and professionals in both hemispheres
rather than heads of states.
Historical Background in the Americas
We,
Africans of the Diaspora, are a people born in the hands
of Western oppressors and violators of liberty. We have
a dual negative heritage— the Atlantic slave trade as
well as the violation of the West’s own marker of its
humanity, namely, the Rights of Man. Ours was a poor
bargain. Black people in the Americas have endured
restrictions of racial oppression and terror for three
centuries. Black Africans everywhere are still alleged
to be materially backward because they are restrained,
incapable of right thinking, and lack the right
religion. African Americans were cut off for centuries
from Africa. They underwent extreme de-culturalization,
especially in what became the United States. Though
there some survivals that deeply influence our New World
culture, we are a people who know very little about
tribes, clans, rituals and their formalities; all of
which set us apart from much of African cultural life
and yet provide reasons for a mutual understanding and
broad cooperation.
We
African Americans came into conscious existence with the
rise of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the nation of Haiti,
around the turn of the 19th century. The Haitian
Revolution provided a guide and a sense of mission for
New World Africans. But there are always severe
repercussions even with the most successful of
revolutions. The entire West turned against this
government of blacks and brought them to heel. Gunboat
terrorism has been the response of both France and the
United States to Haitian independence. Although Haitians
supported freedom movements throughout the world, they
are now among the most despised, impoverished, and
brutalized people in the Americas. Haiti has become a
whipping post for France and US foreign policies.
Probably the most African of all the peoples in the
Americas, African states, many with great wealth, have
done little to reach out and support Haitian
independence, security, and development, though Haitian
professionals have migrated to Africa to assist in its
development. Of all the African Heads of State and
Government; only President Thabo Mbeki of the Republic
of South Africa gave special significance to the
celebration of
Haiti’s 200th anniversary, in his address entitled,
“African
Diaspora in the 21st Century.” After his ouster as President of Haiti
by the United States and France, South Africa also
provided Jean-Bertrand Aristide sanctuary. Obligations of assistance must
be mutual if true friendships are to develop
fruitfully.
African Americans as a Distinct People
African
Americans are a relatively new people, belonging to the
modern era that is barely two centuries old. Although
their cultural consciousness coalesced during the
slavery period in the early 1800s; mainly through songs,
tales, and speech especially among the Negroes of the
South, their national consciousness developed primarily
in the twentieth century. This process gained impetus by
mass migrations away from the South to other states in
order to escape racial oppression. The process was
further popularized by such books as Alain Locke’s
The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925). In
contrast, the unbroken ancient heritages of most African
peoples can be traced back thousands of years. These
heritages of African peoples were carried over intact
into their recently developed nation states and
developing nationalisms. The different historical and
cultural orientations make for a different sensibility
and outlook. Important, though, is the need to respect
and understand these different historical moments for
both Africans and African-Americans.
For
over two centuries, we, African-Americans, have
sustained a folk spirit, with an African underbelly,
that developed primarily in the rural agrarian societies
of the southern states, where slave labor generated
capital in the production of tobacco, cotton, and sugar.
This folk spirit manifests itself in animal tales (Bruh
Rabbit and Bruh Fox) or updated ones about Monkey and
Buzzard as in the story “Straighten Up and Fly Right,”
which can be found in Toni Cade Bambara’s
Tales and
Stories for Black Folks (132-133). But there are
also the human tales, like High John the Conqueror,
Shine, and Stagolee (or Stagger Lee). Such stories have
found their way into our modern poetry, music, and
scholarship. Note Harvard University Press publishing
Cecil Brown’s dissertation as a book,
Stagolee Shot
Billy, in 2003.
This
folk spirit manifested itself in song and instrumental
music. Though primarily an oral people before the
abolition of slavery, we were a people also of the Book.
Our Anglo-Christianity then was overwhelmingly
Protestant and evangelical in mood and tone. From these
religious developed the spirituals, which retells
biblical stories in songs as inspiration material for
survival. This music gradually developed into what is
now called gospel music, which had had an international
impact. The great
Mahalia Jackson, now deceased, is
known internationally. The freed Negro of the South
developed more secular forms, like
blues and ragtime.
Jazz music is constantly being reenergized by the blues,
which can be found everywhere on all the continents.
There is also dance, where we might find a heavy African
influence. Most of the popular dances of the twentieth
century had their origins among the Negro folk,
including the Charleston and the Lindy Hop.
Africans and African-Americans, along with their Native
American counterparts, were all ushered into the modern
era by Christian missionaries. Their form of religion
attempted to supplant the religion the former slaves
learned of their own initiative. Our intellectual
history nevertheless began in the missionary schools
where we developed our first understanding of racial
difference and “blackness.” Missionary education taught
us quickly that education, did not trump the color of
the skin. Almost all present-day American black colleges
and universities began as denominational schools that
were established especially for “freedmen” at the
conclusion of the Civil War (1865).
In
these seminary-like schools, we African-Americans in
large numbers came in formal contact for the first time
with Western culture. We read Latin and Greek and
Shakespeare, absorbed all prejudices of the West and
kept ourselves updated with their sciences and
discoveries. We learnt too well that God organized the
world according to a hierarchy of racial bloods with
distinct traits and gifts. This learning was one of
those paradoxical discoveries we embraced and
embroidered and it is one under which we are still
struggling to free our minds and spirit.
But
African-American life has for centuries been a
crossroads. Our ‘bloodlines’ are mixed with those of
Native Americans and those of European peoples. Then
there are the literary influences. The Hebrew Bible and
the New Testament have particularly been great resources
for the development of our distinctive racial myths and
a sense of “we the people” with a peculiar destiny.
There is a leitmotif throughout our thinking that likens
us to the Biblical Hebrews in their Egyptian and Roman
oppression. Among us, every child born was
traditionally, a potential prophet like Moses. Nathaniel Turner was a “Moses.”
Harriet Tubman,
Booker T.
Washington, Marcus M. Garvey and Martin Luther King, Jr.
were all ‘Moses’. Our imaginative lives have been
filled by race and the ramifications of racial
oppression; rather than by ancient tribal and clan
traditions.
Among
U.S. black intellectuals, the ancient “black empires” of
Egypt, Ethiopia, and Ghana have been inspirational
because of their past influences on the development of
world cultures and civilizations. With these literary
discoveries, we were encouraged. These provided us with
tools for an intellectual battle against the most
vicious attacks on our humanity as black people. Coming
into prominence in the 1830s and 1840s, minstrelsy and
black-face comedy—‘dehumanizing white entertainment’ in
which black life is parodied and reduced to nonsense—are
more or less permanent aspects of American culture and
they, seemingly will continue for some time to have
their sting. In a sense we are caught, if not trapped,
as Houston Baker suggests in
Modernism and the Harlem
Renaissance (1987), between the minstrel mask
and the African mask (58-69).
Emigration & Pan-African Sentiments
By the
early 19th-century, African-Americans had joined
missionary and civilizing movements to redeem pagan and
Islam-influenced black Africa. One of our most prominent
and intellectual missionaries was the Episcopalian
priest Alexander
Crummell
(1819-1898), who wanted a
black Christian republic in Liberia. ‘We’ [Blacks]
carried with us to Africa, as missionaries, all our
contradictions and all the Anglo-American prejudices of
class, race, gender, and religion.
Through
emigration movements and schemes from the 1840s onward,
African identity became significant to us. Looking for
an alternative to Liberia, Martin R. Delany (1812-1885),
a Negro abolitionist writer and later an officer in the
Union Army, explored the Niger Delta region and reported
his findings to the British. The Niger Delta was ripe
for cotton production. Africa rather than the Southern
United States could be used as a British source for
cotton. Slave labor was no longer necessary to satisfy
the British textile industry. On the heels of Delany’s
scheme to undermine slavery in the Southern States came
the American Civil War. Delany became an officer in the
Union officer. With the abolition of slavery, Delany
abandoned his African emigration scheme. [What were
these findings and how do they relate to your
discussion?].
Except
for a minor interest in Liberia by persons like
Alexander Crummell, African American interest in Africa
waned after the American Civil War. Reconstruction
(1865-1875) fully occupied the interest of African
American leaders, including Martin Delany. But the
Reconstruction period was a failure and Southern racists
reassembled their power and the Negro was
disenfranchised. The Ku Klux Klan and mob power rose to
dominate political and social life in the South on the
withdrawal of troops and federal protection to the freed
slaves. There arose again emigration schemes to escape
terror and Jim Crow. Some recommended emigration to
western states like Kansas. But there were others who
again look to Africa as an escape from oppression.
Bishop
Henry McNeil Turner (1834-1915), a prominent Bishop of
the African Methodist Episcopal Church, participated in
the Civil War as chaplain and in Reconstruction as a
director of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia. When
Reconstruction went sour, Bishop Turner advocated
African emigration. He traveled extensively in Africa:
Zambezi Country, Transvall, Pretoria, Rhodesia,
Basuotoland, Matabele, Watal, Kaffraria, cape Colony,
and West Africa (Life and Times, 147). According
to M. M. Ponton, Turner “heard the voice of his people
welcoming him back home, in that Macedonian cry, ‘Come
over and help us!’” (Life and Times, 77). For
Turner, the road was clear for the building of an
African civilization, led by the negroes of the United
States. “Bishop Turner hungered and thirsted more for
political power and civil authority than he did for
ecclesiastical control,” Ponton concluded (Life and
Times, 77)
Our
imperial and religious view of Africa concretized itself
most widely in the 1920 Convention in Harlem organized
by Marcus M. Garvey (1887-1940), a Jamaican, whom the
conventioneers from Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean
elected “President of Africa.” In some measure, Garvey’s
vision of Africa, though well meaning, was heavily
influenced by a fantasized vision of Africa. 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 (1868-1963), Harvard’s
first black Ph.D. (1896), 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. He saw the impact of
African sculpture and Negro “spirituals” on modern
European artistic productions. In 1903, he published
The
Souls of Black Folk:
Essays and Sketches, in which he argued that the
gifts of America’s black folk had intrinsic worth: our
songs, music, art, dance, religion [a species of African
mask], if rightfully developed, could alter the destiny
of the world.
In 1905
Du Bois and others created the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the first
mass protest organization that propagandized an
appreciation of African folk culture and the defense of
African independence against European militarism. As
editor of its organ, Crisis, Du Bois wove a
masterful fabric of art, literature, and politics that
influenced millions. In 1919, Du Bois was the chief
organizer of the Pan-African Congress [also organizing
and attending meetings of the Congress in 1921, 1923,
and 1927].
In addition,
throughout the 1930s and afterward, Ethiopia and Liberia
remained important in that they provided opportunities
for black men in vital roles on the international stage.
With its royalty, Ethiopia, more than Liberia, appealed
to our preferred romantic view of Africa. While Ethiopia
was far away; Liberia was far too close. Capitalized by
Southern slaveholders, primarily, the black planter
colony of Liberia was never popular among the
African-American masses or their leaders. Liberia was
not fully supported by U.S. foreign policies. The
thousands of African-Americans who immigrated in the
19th century to Liberia were isolated. They were unable
to rejoin their brothers back in the States, their
mother country, like other planter colonies that had a
continuing stream of new blood.
In a sense, Liberia was
made for tragedy, for its African-American leaders
looked ‘backward’ rather than sinking down and
coalescing with the native populations in an egalitarian
spirit. In a way, Liberia’s failure is also an
African-American failure in our relationship with Africa
and Africans. Liberia’s failure to be inclusive came to
a head in the coup of the1980s that brought Sgt. Samuel
Doe to power. After massacring segments of the Americo-Liberian
leadership, President Doe was invited to the Ronald
Reagan White House. Thereafter Liberia’s peoples
suffered over two decades of brutal and devastating
civil war, which was led in part by
Charles Taylor, who
later seized the reigns of government. There is hope
that, Liberia, with the first female president in
Africa,
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, will shape its future
along a new national identity and promote investment
that would develop its citizens.
In the
1930s, especially after the Italian insurgency led by
Mussolini’s racist propaganda, modern Ethiopia and
Emperor Haile Selassie were lionized throughout Black
America. There was massive effort in defense of
Ethiopia. Organizations were formed, ‘monies’ were
collected, and volunteers were enlisted to fight the
fascists. Newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier
sent reporters to cover the war, and one Courier
writer, George S. Schuyler
(1895-1977), serialized
favorable fictional stories (Ethiopian Stories), like “Revolt in Ethiopia: A
Tale of Black Insurrection Against Italian Imperialism”
and “The Ethiopian Murder Mystery: A Story of Love and
International Intrigue.” African-American masses
enthusiastically gave their support in defense of
Ethiopian integrity. However with the death of Emperor Selassie, our romantic interest in Ethiopia also waned
and died.
The
Post-Colonial Period
Overall, African-Americans’ political romance with
Africa and its people declined, radically, in particular
after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the
1994’s 100 days of genocide in Rwanda. Although, white
colonial oppression has ended in Africa, the predominant
images of Africa, with its stark realities, undermine
the hope and good feelings that African-Americans had
toward Africa when its leaders, like Kwame Nkrumah
(1909-1972) and Sékou Touré (1922-1984),
were engaged in liberation struggles. There is a
tendency in the Western media to portray modern Africa
negatively. This is despite the fact that Tarzan is dead
and the National Geographic is more sensitive in
its coverage of tribal life.
For
many, the massive crises of Black Africa seem insoluble.
Most Africans have yet to enjoy the benefits of modern
living and modern technology. Free public education for
all is still unavailable in Africa, even in oil rich
countries. In the post-colonial, post-Mandela era, in
addition to genocide in Rwanda, millions are terrorized
and starved in Ethiopia, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone,
Congo and Zimbabwe. The major African images on
American TV today, are emaciated black babies, piteous
refugees, hacked bodies and white bones of mass
slaughter.
The
majority of the African-Americans have become rather
tepid and timid about Africa and its peoples. They do
not see Africans as great and magnanimous people that
they imagined them to be. However, despite this downward
spiral and the negative racialist programming, many
middle-class African-Americans, through their own
resources, have developed an expanding cultural
sensibility about Africa and a 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.
Academically-oriented African-Americans continue to
travel to Africa, to countries like Ghana and Senegal,
primarily, but also Nigeria and South Africa. Ghana
offers dual citizenship for African-Americans. Ghana is
also through its “The
Joseph Project” developing a tourism
market among this class of African-Americans. Overall,
however, vital historical, cultural and economic ties to
African nations or corporations like those between
American Jews and ‘Israelis’ remain a dream. Africa is
not a second home for most African-Americans, although
cults of African Zionists still exist among us in cities
like Chicago and New York.
Present
Economic Realities
Outside
the academy, labor-workplace competition stimulates
considerable friction. Most immigrants, including
Africans, on arriving tend to adopt the white American
view of black-Americans as lazy, ignorant, and violent.
They live in different zip codes and go to separate
churches. This lack of social contact and intimacy among
heavily exploited ethnic groups, provide fertile ground
for vicious kinds of ignorance. While summer ethnic
festivals are helpful, we largely remain unfamiliar and
unsympathetic towards each other’s struggles, hopes, and
dreams.
Capital, manufacturing and communication technologies
are concentrated outside African and African-American
societies. The new international competition is fierce
and the African masses—both at home and abroad—suffer.
Whether it is oil or tin or copper or nickel—needed for
the new technologies—those who dig or mine these
resources do not profit from their work, while a few
African middle-men and western capitalists rake in
billions from African labor and natural resources.
We of
the Americas are no longer isolated, however, by time
and space, from Africa and the rest of the world. In
this post-colonial, post-King era, our “economic
subjectivity” remains bound in Euro-American chains of
dependency. We are all now caught up in the global
network in which a third of the world’s citizens lives
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.
Despite
these shortcomings, the machinations of global capital
operating through the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
and the World Bank, restricting investments in needed
services for the development of human resources, have
shoved African and African-Americans into each other’s
arms. Too often we are in conflict with the other’s
interests. We are all now in the same un-sea-worthy
economic boat of globalism, which provides opportunities
for friendship and collaboration as well as perils.
Wages in this new market of unskilled and skilled work steadily
decline. This new globalism has thus generated a
universal uneasiness among African-Americans.
Unlike
American Jews, African-Americans are not overwhelmingly
middle-class in their standard of living. A third of
African-Americans live in poverty in the richest country
in the world. Jobs in auto, steel, textiles and other
industries that raised many African-Americans into the
middle-class have moved away from American cities like
Detroit and Baltimore to Japan and China and other Asian
countries, resulting in high under-employment and
unemployment rates. The service economy has expanded
with low wages and benefits. In Baltimore, Johns
Hopkins—its hospital, university and other
auxiliaries—have replaced Bethlehem Steel as the city’s
largest employer.
Too
often, capital restricted and focused dislodges and
disperses masses of populations. African-Americans now
find themselves in competition with the poor of Africa,
Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In general,
they feel besieged by immigrants and political refugees
from across the globe—Mexico, the Caribbean, Latin
America, Asia, as well as Africa. They all undermine
stable and increasing wages, not only in urban centers
but also in rural areas where low wages are ubiquitous.
We are all now suffering from low wages, inadequate
health care and nutrition, poor education and technical
training. All these events have occurred during a period
that has cut funding on urban services.
In
addition, African-Americans, in the last twenty years,
have suffered an increasing criminalization of its
population and loss of the electoral ballot. With the
undermining of economic and political security and
advancement within the United States, international
racial consciousness and sympathy have been exacerbated
among the masses. Among the newly rich
African-Americans—athletes and other entertainers—more
weight is placed on defending their privileges as
Americans rather than developing a Pan-African identity.
They are consumers of the present rather than investors
in an African-American future. Certainly they have
little interest in African development. As Du Bois
pointed out oppressed peoples cannot liberate
themselves, alone. The masses need a conscientious
Talented Tenth or a Talented Fifth—writers, artists,
publishers, and other educated professionals—willing to
speak for and make severe sacrifices on behalf of their
people. Africans need more vital cooperative
relationships and coordinated activities to address the
negative impact of international capital and media
concerns.
Too
often we, African peoples remain servants and sycophants
of Western culture, capital, and political management.
We see ourselves mostly through the critical lens of FOX
News and the BBC. Words, images and deeds shape our
vision and bring things to life or destroy progress and
hope. We who stand apart from the masses 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.
The new
communication technologies offer possibilities for a new
age of enlightenment in which understanding,
cooperation, and collaboration can be fostered. We need
a cyber technology immediately that is operative in
Third World and other oppressed environments lacking
electronic and communication services. There are ten
million African-Americans online, a situation which
provides a unique opportunity for Africans at home and
abroad. African intellectuals must develop new
mechanisms, fresh perspectives, and cooperative outreach
platforms that will inform our people about what is
going on and how the tide can be turned favorably for
‘black’ progress internationally.
References
Baker,
Jr., Houston. 1987.
Modernism and the Harlem
Renaissance. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
Delany,
Martin R. 1861. "Official Report of the Niger River
Valley Exploring Party" (New York and London, 1861).
Reprinted in "Search for a Place," edited by Howard Bell
(University of Michigan Press, 1969).
Du
Bois, W. E. B. 1903.
The
Souls of Black Folk:
Essays and Sketches.
Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.
Locke,
Alain. 1925.
The New Negro: An Interpretation . New
York: Albert and Charles Boni.
Ponton,
Mungo Melanchthon. 1917. The Life and Times of
Bishop Henry M. Turner, (Atlanta: A. B. Caldwell
Schuyler, George S. 1995.
Ethiopian Stories,
compiled and edited by Robert A. Hill. Boston.
Northeastern University Press. *
* * * *
posted 20 October 2007 / update 7 July
2008 |
