What Africa Means to Blacks

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What Africa Means to BlacksAuthor(s): Roger WilkinsSource: Foreign Policy, No. 15 (Summer, 1974), pp. 130-142Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1147934 .

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cities nor support an assault on the state of Israel.

A successful black lobby for Africa must maintain a certain distance from the African liberation movements in order to maintain its own credibility with the American public, demonstrating by its own actions the hands-off posture that is the most forward

policy America can support. Certainly, there is vast room for progress when the United States joins Greece, Portugal, South Africa, and Spain on the negative end of an 88 to 7 General Assembly vote on recognition of the black-controlled Republic of Guinea Bissau in Portuguese Guinea. A quarter century after the smaller Jewish community enjoyed instantaneous recognition of Israel, the black

community has not even made an issue of Guinea Bissau, let alone mustered public support for defiance of Portuguese colonialism. The British were not so fortunate, nor was the Russian-sponsored government in Warsaw.

African Policy 8~ Black Americans (2)

WHAT AFRICA MEANS TO BLACKS

by Roger Wilkins

"What is Africa to me?" the poet asked in a hymn of praise to the lush, rich darkness of the American Negro's past. Usually, in the old days, most people remembered only the question-and forgot the poem. For most blacks of my generation, who grew up in the 1930's and 1940's and came to full

height-if not to maturity-in the 1950's, the answer was simple: nothing. Nothing except a reminder of shame; irrelevant except for our need to repress and forget it in our drive for assimilation here in America. Only a handful of the few who went to

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black colleges with future African leaders- as some did at Lincoln with Kwame Nkru- mah-had some sense of kinship with that continent. And there were the intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois. (Only there weren't many other black intellectuals like Du Bois.)

So, in the days before World War II, the links between Negro America and Africa were laden with negative feelings. Negro impact on foreign policy was nil. There was too

"My 'old country' is Mississippi, and I can trace the trail only three generations back.

... ."

much business to be done with the "man downtown," who hired and fired and had the power of life and death, with the lady whose house was to be cleaned every day, or with the welfare department. There was no time to give even a passing thought to the Department of State.

Black heads in those days were shaped by white fantasies about the black past, present, future, and psyche. It is different now. That difference and how it came to pass is the key to the answer I offer ever so tenta- tively to any question eliciting a prediction about the black impact on American policy toward Africa.

The place to start, I suppose, is with a sense of how and why ordinary citizens of the United States become involved in foreign policy issues. As a young lawyer in the late 1950's and early 1960's, as an AID func- tionary in the Kennedy Administration, and as a foundation executive in the early 1970's, I observed this process. People became involved in foreign policy mainly because they did business in foreign countries. Whether they were clients of the law firm where I prac- ticed, supplicants for investment guarantees at AID, or business acquaintances in later years, they were concerned and effective because they had valuable connections overseas. They may have embroidered their own interests with sophisticated policy formulations

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or sharp insights about the nature of foreign relations. Their motivation and their clout, however, came from the bedrock of international commerce.

As a bright-eyed youngster in the early 1960's, I went to hear a liberal white Amer- ican academic make a learned and graceful plea that America begin a gradual effort to loosen the yoke of racism strangling South- ern Africa. The first member of the audience to participate at the end of his speech re- minded him that 90 percent of the gross con- tinental product south of the Sahara was extracted from the economy of South Africa. And so it went.

When I was growing up there was no black business to speak of. The business of black Americans-Negroes, we called our- selves then-was survival. Survival, and clawing to be free of the psychic strait jackets in which white America had imprisoned us. It isn't useful to dwell here at length on the history of slavery in the United States, except for the purpose of attacking the question, "Can the blacks do for Africa what the Jews did for Israel?"-which is very close to that wretchedly unfair question that has plagued us for years, "Why can't the blacks be like the Jews?"

The Blacks Can't Be Like The Jews

Blacks can't be like the Jews because their histories and their traditions are very different. Our experience in slavery here in Amer- ica is the key element in that difference. The Jews possess a long and continuous international tradition of surviving the hostility and oppression of national majorities. Al- though most American Jews are firmly American, their heritage contains an impor- tant historical connection to an "old country" and a feeling of present and future connection to a promised land. Neither this yearning for a promised land nor Hitler's Eu- ropean bloodbath are paralleled in the black American experience. Nor is there a rich line of continuity. Ours is an American experience, and obstacles and opportunities are gen-

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erally perceived as American-as within America.

Slavery broke our continuity. My "old country" is Mississippi, and I can trace the trail only three generations back, to Holly Springs, where it seems to peter out. Slavery broke the link with Africa. Our first Amer- ican experience was to be de-Africanized and made into chattel. A newly arrived slave was stripped of his past. His language was for- bidden and, wherever possible, he was sep- arated from his people. Then a new and de- meaning past was made up and given to him. If he showed gumption, he was sold off -"down the river," so to speak-away from his family. It was a firm reminder that he was property, not a person. The lesson was clear: whiteness was humanity and blackness was machinery. He was stripped of his African religion and given something new

"To identify with the black clods of Tarzan's Africa never entered my mind."

-something American. It was a bastardized form of Christianity, in which bestial sub- missiveness to the master was next to God- liness. All of that, coupled with raw power, worked to make him an American machine, not an African one. The strait jacket was as strong as iron and just about as durable.

The prevailing fantasies held by Amer- ican society reinforced all of this. If England was a model of hardy gentility and France was a model of cultural richness, Africa was a model of savage darkness leavened only now and then by the enlightened and high- minded touch of good white people who would rather light a candle. Even 75 years after Emancipation, my images of Africa were initially from Tarzan stories and Little Black Sambo, which, though originally about India, contained enough racism to be loaded onto us. The way to success for talented and lucky young blacks was assimilation. This required adoption of white values starting

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from the inside out. One had to look as white as possible, to adopt as many white stan- dards as possible, and to reject as much blackness as possible. To call someone black was an insult of a high order. In order to achieve, one had to distinguish oneself from blacker and poorer Americans. To identify with the black clods of Tarzan's Africa never entered my mind.

I remember now with rue an eighth grade history class in the virtually all-white school I then attended. The teacher, a shriveled woman whose blondness had artificially out- lasted all normal expectations, asked each of us to stand and tell in turn where our fam- ilies had originated. Many of the kids in the class were Dutch-Vander Jagt, De Young, and Ripstra were their names. My pal, Andy, was Scotch-Irish. Then it was my turn. I stood up and lied, and burned with shame. Not because of the lies, but because I had been asked to expose a deeper shame. "Some of my family was English," I said-and probably not so bad a guess because Wilkins is an English name--"and the rest of it came from... Egypt." Egypt!? Well, it was in Africa, but not very. Then I sat down. That was 30 years ago and it still burns.

Africans In America

So there wasn't psychic room for Africa. And when Africans met black Americans and sensed this, there was not much room in their hearts for us either. Once, at college, I

happened by chance to sit alone at breakfast with a medical student from Nigeria. He looked up, stiff-faced and superior, and nodded a cold wordless greeting. I returned it in kind. We each read through the meal and when he finished, he stood and uttered the only full sentences that ever passed between us. "You know what I'm going to do when I get home? I'm going to write a book called 'In Darkest America.' " I returned without a word to my newspaper, an unspoken epithet crashing around inside my head. "That idiot," I thought, "thinks he's better than I am. Even though he's an 'exceptional one,

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Wilkins

I know where he comes from." White Amer- ica had me firmly in her grip even then.

But finally, the ice floe began to break. World War II had finished the colonial system abroad and had raised black expectations at home. Ghana became independent just about the time Martin Luther King, Jr. be-

gan leading moral crusades for racial justice. By and large, the people who marched with Martin and dented the system in the South and proved that they could participate in their destinies were not the light-skinned high-yellow achievers of the North. They were just plain folks and many of them were very dark. Nkrumah and his people were black. Soon there was a flood of new African nations entering the United Nations.

It was a heady time and hopes were high. Black ambassadors came in colorful garb, rode in limousines, and spoke-if they were from the francophone countries-perfect French. They were the representatives of successful black liberation movements who touched our lives just when our own home-

grown assaults on the outward scales of American racism were beginning to bear fruit. Then came the Sharpsville massacre. Sixty-one dead. Universal white racism ar- rested the mind and froze the moment. An- ger was growing toward expressible rage as Bull Connor's police dogs in Birmingham gave a sharp American echo to the clatter of rifle fire in South Africa. White racism seemed indivisible and spanned oceans. The same mentality that forced grown men to swelter in diamond pits for a few cents a day was

prepared to blow up a church and four little girls. The yearning for better wages and less oppression in South Africa was the same yearning for improvement shown by black parents who wanted better education for their children in Alabama. The lesson became clear. Those weren't monkeys over there, as we had been taught. They were our brothers.

Rage at common oppression rapidly began gnawing away at old habits of mind and spirit. Portugal wouldn't let go, nor would the white Rhodesians and South Africans.

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Here at home, honor, courage, and death failed to provide much of America's bounty for the cities' ghettos. After the high tide of the civil rights movement, illusions about America were shattered for young blacks. In the civil rights movement, even the guiding hand of white liberalism began to feel op- pressive and heavy. Black Americans had learned that there was something better in life than being pawns of white fantasies; we were humans too. Our new-found belief in our own humanity led us away from white values toward our own individual blackness and each other. We took a distance from America's values and moved toward a pride in our past and a romance with our African homeland. "Africa was stolen from us," we thought, "but we would reclaim it and we would revel in our blackness."

That was in the late 1960's. It was the high tide of a heady second emancipation which mainly touched the young. Serious black college students were as likely to say that they would devote their lives to good works in Africa as they were to tell an itin- erant questioner that they would return to the South Side of Chicago, to Harlem, or to the cotton fields of Mississippi. The struggle was universal and black American skills had to be shared with our brothers abroad, so they said.

But, as in any romance, reality began to rear its head. Exhilaration is, after all, a transitory emotion, and rage, intensely and massively felt, is impossible to sustain. There were marriages to be made, children to be reared, and livings to be earned. And also, there was the reality of Africa and the still complicated nature of the relationship between black Americans and black Africans. African feelings of superiority still persist; witness, for example, the strong reluctance of large numbers of African cab drivers in Washington, D.C. to pick up blacks. But the black world has even more faces. When I timidly asked one driver, whom I took to be both friendly and African, what accounted for this attitude, he replied, "Don't ask me.

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Wilkins

I'm from Trinidad. We always get blamed for things the African drivers do. I don't understand those people."

And black Americans are also taking a second look, Recently, one middle-aged, middle-class black American woman, after a particularly hot, clammy, and uncomfortable three-week stay in West Africa, reported to friends back home, "I'm glad my folks

caught the slave ship." A brilliant young American lawyer with extensive contacts in Africa put it more precisely, if less colorful-

ly: "It's hard to be romantic about Africa once you've seen it. You see the colonial

mentality transposed into black heads. You see blacks exploiting blacks. It's not very pretty." One young man, a former member of the Black Panther party, told me upon his return from an East African country, "Man, they're still into using skin lighteners and hair

straighteners. I'm gonna go to work at the

drug center down on 125th and forget it."

Political Sophistication

But if romance has dimmed, something stronger and more mature has taken its place. A lot of the fluff has been burned off the ini- tial tide of enthusiasm, leaving a stronger, harder core of serious interests at many levels. The loss of shame about Africa was not the

only thing blacks gained in the 1960's. There was also a sudden growth of political sophistication. With that sophistication, there grew an awareness-no matter how unromantic an eye blacks might now turn on that continent-that what happens to blacks in Africa has implications for blacks here at home.

This stems partially from the new awareness in black circles that politics is international, that economics is international, and that racism is too. If nothing else ham- mered that home, the Vietnam war did. It would be hard to find a serious black in the United States who does not believe that the war was profoundly racist. The widely repeated refrain which swept through black communities-"No Vietcong ever called me

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nigger"--captured the feeling. It is also

widely held in black circles (and correctly so, I think) that the tactics of napalm, de- foliation, free fire zones, and terror bomb- ing at Christmas would never have been used against a tiny white adversary. Blacks believe that the war and the tactics used in it offer some rough calibration of how at least some American whites feel about non- white people in general and about blacks here at home in particular.

Nor have black Americans missed the im-

plications of the fact that Dean Rusk never once set foot in Africa in all his eight years as Secretary of State. It has been clear, ever since the heyday of the Agency for Interna- tional Development under President Kenne- dy, that African programs, small as they were, were the first to feel any squeeze that came along. And, as Jeffrey L. Hodes recent-

ly noted in the black magazine Encore, the U.S. response to the continuing tragic drought in the six Sahelian countries has been both halting and parsimonious. Thoughtful black Americans cannot help drawing parallels between the U.S. response to starving blacks in Africa and the official indifference to the children of Harlem or to the semistarvation of blacks in many parts of the American South.

Whites may have trouble understanding the relationship between black Americans and black Africa. Yet whites understand their own international concerns perfectly well. A New York Times editorial, which

expressed deep concern with the growing polarization in Britain just after Mr. Heath announced the February election, made the

point precisely: "Though primarily involved with their own political, economic and in- dustrial crises, Americans cannot fail to be concerned as Britain enters what may be its period of greatest strain and trial since the darkest days of World War II. A polarization of British society and a paralysis of British democracy would gravely threaten the survival of democracy and of political civility everywhere." Parallel to this, Amer-

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Wilkins

ican blacks feel that continued oppression in Southern Africa, and the continuation of policies which are based even on subliminal racism toward the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, threaten not just political civility, but also black survival everywhere.

The 1960's affected large numbers of black Americans whose lives will be filled with black concerns, which will include, to some degree, an intense interest in what happens in Africa. Some of these black Amer- icans are focusing almost exclusively on things African. The majority are not, but they feel powerful moral constraints to pay careful attention when major issues affecting Africa are raised.

A Change Has Come

And things are changing. The Leadership Conference on Africa-a group composed of leading civil rights figures-used to have ceremonial and largely ineffectual conferences with Dean Rusk in the early 1960's. Charles C. Diggs, Jr., a black congressman from Michigan, now chairs the House Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa. He thus has a leading role in how the House thinks about African matters; he also helps to raise the sensibilities and shape the sensitivities of black Americans on African issues.

An increasing number of black American businesses-from leasing firms to travel services-are doing business in Africa. Jesse Jackson of Chicago and Leon Sullivan of Philadelphia-major figures in the black American community-have made impor- tant efforts toward building bridges to Africa and influencing official American policy on Africa. Black journalists employed by the general media travel more frequently to the continent to focus the attention of the nation on its problems and developments. Al- though the romance is gone, there are serious contacts between concerned black Americans and the liberation movements of Southern Africa. Black intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Caribbean are work- ing together in a community of scholars, to

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trace the flow of black bodies across the seas and the progress of black spirits up through time.

There is no doubt that the ties are be- coming stronger and richer. African Libera- tion Day Celebrations are regularly held and widely attended in cities around the United States. Africare, an organization profession- ally led by black Americans, is developing a comprehensive health program for the countries in the Sahel. Black America's infra- structure-the churches, fraternal groups, organizations of workers, and people on the street who have never before contributed to anything-now raise money for African projects.

This does not mean that in time the relationship of black Americans to Africa will parallel that of American Jews to Israel. (It is interesting that the common usage is black Americans on the one hand and Amer- ican Jews on the other.)

Israel is a small country representing, to a greater or lesser degree, the hopes and the grieving memory of a whole people. They have agreed on Hebrew as a common language. Jewish solidarity is more effective because of a heightened sense of identity due to the horrors of the Third Reich, and a common and easily identifiable set of "enemies" who make the news regularly-the Arab countries and the Soviet Union.

Africa is a large and complex continent with more than 30 countries south of the Sahara in varying stages of development and degrees of oppression. Some independent countries still look to Europe for inspiration and even guidance. Others are in the process of Africanization, proceeding at varying paces and with varying successes. In some countries, liberation struggles are under way while in others, white rule looks unchallengeable in the near future. The situation is not easily comprehensible except to the most serious students. And, furthermore, black African fratricide leaves most black Americans con- fused and reeling. And the "enemies" of Africa, unlike the "enemies" of Israel, are

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as elusive as the continent itself: besides the obvious enemies-Portugal and South Africa -there is "big business" in Africa, residual

exploitation from the colonial powers and their representatives, the foreign military and weapons lobbies.

Moreover, the Jewish religion has emphasized the special mission of the Jewish people, and the nature of Judaism itself has

helped cultivate one of America's most im-

portant intellectual communities. Black reli-

gion-with an almost purely fundamentalist and nonintellectual base-has emphasized a fatalistic survival ethic wherein rewards will come in the afterlife to those who can put up with hell on earth.

In addition, despite the loss of shame, Africa is our motherland in only a theoret- ical sense. It is a lucky-and rare--black person who can know with certainty his family's place of origin on the continent.

Nevertheless, although the relationship of American blacks to Africa won't be like that of the Jews to Israel, it will never be the same as it was before. The shame is gone. The massive, intense rage has quieted for now, but it is not dead. American blacks expect blood to flow thickly through the cities and across the countryside of Southern Africa some day. Their political power here at home and their sophistication about how to use it is growing. If blacks rise for liberation on the continent, black Americans will watch with care and passion the actions that their own government takes in response. The passion and interest of the younger people will be most critical, for they will probably be mature professionals and politicians if and when the conflagration does occur.

Recently, I was in a liquor store and saw a middle-aged friend of mine shopping with his son, a law student. My friend started to buy a bottle of Portuguese ros&. His son said, "You ain't bringin' that stuff into our house." The bottle stayed on the shelf. Dol- lars did not flow from those particular black hands into Portuguese pockets because the young man of the house was enraged by

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Portuguese colonialism in Africa. It might not have hurt the Portuguese war efforts in Angola and Mozambique very much, but it said something about what is going on in the heads of black people here, particularly the young. It wouldn't have happened 20 years ago, but it will happen much more often in the future.

African Policy 8' Black Americans (3)

CAPTIVE OF NO GROUP

by Donald F. McHenry

The place: Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The occasion: a regional meeting between young college students and the foreign policy panel of the 1970 White House Conference on Children and Youth. The discussants: a young black female student and a white se- nior official of the U.S. Department of State. "Don't you feel," asked the official, "a particular interest in Africa?" "Why should I have a particular interest?" asked the student, in the liberated manner of today's youth. "Shouldn't everybody care about Africa?" "Of course," responded the official, "but I would think you would have a special interest in Africa, just as I have in Scandinavia, because that's where my family was from."

Thus, a brief but typical discussion, echoed with increasing regularity in recent years, based on the assumption that blacks should be and are primarily interested in Africa. Only the analogy is usually made to the Jews and Israel. But it might just as easily be the relationship between any hyphenated Amer- ican group and U.S. policy toward the country from which their ancestors came, however many generations ago. America is "a nation of immigrants," and its politicians will never let that fact be forgotten.

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Documents

What Africa Means to Blacks