Telling
the Truth about Africa
Letting Her Become What She Can and Will Be
By Rudolph Lewis Africa and America, for
centuries, have interacted like mother and son. On a personal
level this complex relationship has been at once creative and
destructive. Africa gave up enslaved men, women, and children by
the hundreds of thousands who brought America many gifts (not
only labor but music, dance, and words) that have enriched the
cultural and social life of the modern United States. Africa
also supplied the uranium (of Congo mines) used to produce the
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seldom in all its
history has Africa acted consciously for self.
Though much in common, neither has had a stomach for the
other. One praises the potato and fries, the other raves over
cassava and fou-fou. One has been relegated to service and the
other to rule. One is given to song, dance, and celebration; the
other to work, reason (denial, and sacrifice. One is primitive
and ancient;
the other modern and contemporary.
Africa as “mammy” to America is a longstanding image.
Though lovable and serviceable she is a pitiable and forlorn
character, for her children, unlike the “old-time Negro,”
lack “reliability, regularity, and faithfulness.” They do
not know their “place.” Stereotypical, these are not the
sentiments of contemporary ethnologists and sociologists and
other such specialists. But this popular perspective lingers.
Anxious to become their betters, these sons of Africa are
seized by the twin demons of fear and ambition and become a
Colonel Mobutu or a Bigger Thomas or a Charles Taylor or a
Biggie Smalls or an Idi Amin and so soon after they have won
their freedom or their independence, lauding the glory of their
people. In their specialized isolation our elite of the
thoughtful and the well connected, seemingly, turn but to money
and power, with the loss of dignity or scruples or an absolute
turn to criminality.
And then there are the vicious wars that engage the masses of
Africans—we see bloated bellies of famine, machete-swinging
genocide on today’s world news, and the peoples of Africa
still languishing miserably in their huts or shanties without
electricity, clean water, literacy. Can the masses of African
people be more than just a human potential—can a middle-class
life become as ubiquitous in Africa as America? We all wonder
when.
In two centuries we American Negroes have come to understand
that it is an exceedingly difficult prospect not to assess the
modern world except through the eyes of a racialist: chances or
opportunities are few of making a true white friend. Since
Nasser died African heads of state wonder whether an African can
have a true Arab friend.
We American Negroes may indeed be the harshest critics of
Africa when we have few opportunities to make her better than
she was or is or what she might become. We living comfortably
(comparatively) here in America, at the bottom of things, Africa
is of little daily interest to us. For instance, at a recent
conference in the mountains of Virginia—of the leading
African-Americans writers and poets—not one writer or scholar
mentioned the tragedy of Darfur, the genocidal society of
Rwanda, the land question in Zimbawe, the great white wealth and
greater black poverty of South Africa. What can be promised
those Africans—who are the lowest of the low—who have not
gotten the cars, the villas, the lavish government posts?
Be patient, cool as a cucumber. Nkrumah to Lumumba.
Though color and race tie the best minds of America to
darkest Africa, they nevertheless enjoy the comforts of
America’s middle-class life with its access directly or
vicariously to the wealthiest of the world. I speak of that
unique item called the “credit card.” What share we have in
the diamonds or the gold of the Congo and South Africa or the
oil of Nigeria and Sudan? What share the masses of Africa have
in their nations’ wealth?
What urge for Pan-African unity is there for the Hausa woman
who walks twelve miles carrying water on her head? It’s a nice
postcard. But is it reasonable for her now to think of Africa as
Du Bois or Nkrumah thought of Africa, a half century later? What
pay is in the notion of a “United States of Africa” for a
Congo soldier holding a death-killing machine in his hand who
can’t afford a pack of cigarettes to ease his nerves? For
those left out of the fruits of independence or civil rights
bills, uneven development and opportunity can be countered only
by the psychic web of tribal or gang affiliations or immersion
in religious enthusiasm, or, worst, ethnic vengeance and
violence.
Africa appears altogether as a different glorious reality for
those endowed Afrocentrists chairing programs at Harvard or
Temple. The motherland becomes an object of study and
celebration, and grants. But these American elites speak of the
“mysteries of the African soul” more in terms of tribal
religions and ancestor worship and their accoutrements of
ceremony (the imaginative aspects of African consciousness)
rather than the day-to-day distortions of greed brought on by
Western economic exploitation and social injustices that exist
now on a global scale, with American corporations often the
beneficiaries.
How can these other “mysteries” be adequately explained
and be of significance to the semiliterate, the homeless,
America’s middle-class, to make a difference? That we have
adopted an alien culture that does not serve our countrymen?
The mysteries of Pan-African struggle, interred in their
black coffin decades ago, do not command the hearts, minds, and
souls of what Richard Wright called the “black Western
elites.” That was the era of Du Bois and Garvey, Nkrumah and
Padmore. Togetherness “to establish social justice and make
sure everyone has just remuneration for his labor” is as dead
as Lumumba. How many
indeed are ready for the “sublime struggle” that will lead
Africa “to peace, prosperity, and greatness?”
Like Moise Tshombe our path leads away from “the center of
the sun’s radiance.” Every deal now is a private one.
That’s what makes the economy run: the individual chance to be
wealthy. Individual energies summoned for self-interest as a way
of life. In that thin air, that Sahara sand, the seeds of
idealism and sacrifice, which live in the acts and words of a
W.E.B. Du Bois or a Lumumba or a Richard Wright cannot take
root. In these awful times, martyrdom is the stuff of legends
and action films. We have cheated ourselves out of that
vision—that wisdom that comes from suffering.
posted 5 October 2004
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updated 3 October 2007 |
