Writing
in 1965, the distinguished British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper argued
against the idea that black people in Africa had their own history:
“There is only the history of the Europeans in Africa,” he declared.
“The rest is largely darkness.” History, he continued, “is essentially a
form of movement, and purposive movement too,” which in his view
Africans lacked.
Trevor-Roper
was echoing an idea that goes back at least to the early 19th century.
But it wasn’t always this way. When the young Prince Cosimo de Medici
(1590-1621) was being tutored to become the Duke of Tuscany — about the
time that Shakespeare was writing “Hamlet” — he was asked to memorize a
“summary of world leaders” that included Álvaro II, the King of Kongo, along with the Mutapa Empire and the mythical “Prester John” of Ethiopia. Soon, however, even that level of knowledge about African history would be rare.
Perhaps
it shouldn’t surprise us that ideas about Africans and their supposed
lack of history and culture were used to justify the enslavement of
millions of Africans throughout the New World, especially during the
19th century when sugar production was reaching a zenith in Cuba and
cotton was making growers and manufacturers rich. What is surprising is
that these ideas persisted well into the 20th century, among white and
black Americans alike.
When
I was growing up in the 1950s, Africa was the shadow that both framed
and stalked the existence of every African-American. For some of us,
such as Paul Cuffee and Marcus Garvey, it was a place to venerate, a
place to escape the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow. For so many others
of us, however, it was a place to run away from. After all, scholars
such as the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier insisted that the horrors of
bondage and the trans-Atlantic crossing had severed any meaningful
cultural or religious links between black folks on either side of the
ocean, when in fact enslaved Africans brought with them their religious
beliefs, music and ways of seeing the world.
When
I was a child, one of few insults between black people more devastating
than the “n-word” was to be called “a black African.” Far too many of
us had been brainwashed into believing that the darkness of the skin of
the stereotypical African on stage and screen reflected the darkness of
the cultural and intellectual soul of an entire continent of people, the
continent of our ancestors.
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Almost
all African-Americans descend from black people who managed, somehow,
to survive the Middle Passage and the soul-crushing ordeal of slavery,
America’s “peculiar institution,” as it was called in the 19th century.
My oldest ancestor in the Gates line is a woman named Jane Gates, who
was born in 1819. She was a shadow, too. I first saw her portrait in
1960, when I was 10 years old. Unlike her mixed-race descendants, she
looked “African,” we thought, so that’s how we referred to her: Jane
Gates, the African.
I
used to wonder where she had come from, and who her people were; what
language her mother spoke; what was her mother tongue. Later I would
learn that Jane couldn’t have been born in Africa, since the slave trade
to America ended in 1808. But her grandparents could have been
Africans, and quite probably left the continent from the Gambia River or
just north of Congo, “almost certainly on a British ship,” the
historian of the slave trade David Eltis tells me. Only DNA can tell me
more. Her tightly wound hair and those high cheekbones and that glassy
stare were all of Africa that had been left behind for her
great-great-grandchildren to ponder. Where were your people born, Jane
Gates, the African? Could we ever bring your people’s culture and
history out of the shadows?
It
was hard enough in the 1950s to wrap one’s head around the slave
experience, outside of shaping signifiers such as “Gone With the Wind”
and Disney’s “Song of the South.” But Africa and its Africans? Who could
imagine more about Africa than “Tarzan” and “Ramar of the Jungle”?
Except for the relatively few African-Americans who saw through such
racist fictions of Africa, drawn upon to devalue their humanity and
justify their relegation to second-class citizenship — people such as
Garvey, Henry Highland Garnet, Martin R. Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois (who
would die a citizen of Ghana), Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou — far
too many of us felt that “Africa” was something of an embarrassment.
Richard Wright, the great novelist, published a book titled “Black
Power” in 1954 about feeling that way.
That
began to change for me sometime around 1960, the year that 17 European
colonies became independent African countries, following Sudan in 1956
and Ghana in 1957. I was in the fifth grade by the time these countries
were born, with arresting names such as Togo, Madagascar and Somalia,
and more familiar ones such as Senegal, Nigeria, Gabon and the Congo.
Our geography teacher, Mr. McHenry (our only male teacher), hung a map
of the world listing recent events in front of the blackboard every
Monday. Our task was to master the details of nine or 10 newsworthy
events. Africa was all over this map.
That’s
how my love affair with Africa began. I memorized the names of the new
countries and the names of their leaders — Patrice Lumumba and Moïse
Tshombe, Léopold Senghor and Kwame Nkrumah — and exotic-sounding city
names: Dar es Salaam and Mogadishu, Dakar and Kinshasa. Then we read an
incredible story, perhaps from Reader’s Digest, about a boy who walked
across the Equator. I wanted to cross the Equator, too.
So
many of the students of my generation at Yale were introduced to
African art and culture through a wildly popular course taught by the
eminent art historian Robert Farris Thompson. Studying these things
within the womb of the black cultural nationalism of the late ’60s and
early ’70s made the appeal — the lure — of Africa irresistible, as Du
Bois might say. So, when opportunity knocked, I answered the door.
The
door that opened Africa to me was an exceptionally imaginative gap-year
program at Yale. It sent 12 students to work (not study) in a
developing country between sophomore and junior years. I ended up
working in an Anglican mission hospital in a village called Kilimatinde,
in the middle of Tanzania, about 340 miles from Dar es Salaam, with a
population of about 6,000 today — far smaller than when I arrived there
in August 1970. Several months later, I would hitchhike across the
Equator with a recent Harvard graduate named Lawrence Biddle Weeks,
ending up in Kinshasa before flying to Lagos, then on to Accra, to visit
Du Bois’s grave. Two years later, I would find myself in the Cambridge
University classroom of the great Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka,
slowly but inevitably falling in love with the idea that I might become a
professor of African studies.
African
history is replete with riveting stories that refute centuries of
stereotypes about black people and that show our shared humanity: Our
common ancestor, Mitochondrial Eve, 200,000 years ago; the out-migration
of our anatomically modern Homo sapien great-grandparents 50,000 to
80,000 years ago; the still-magical Nile River kingdom of Egypt and its
rival Kush around 3,000 B.C.; and Emperor Menelik II’s heroic stand on
the plains of Adwa on March 1, 1896, when, blessed by a replica of the
ark of the covenant, he soundly defeated an Italian army.
African
history is an encounter with “kings and queens and bishops, too,” as
the song says, including a black queen of Meroe who defeated the Romans
in 24 B.C., then confiscated and buried a statue of Augustus Caesar
before her throne so that her subjects could gleefully walk on his head.
The third nation in the world to convert to Christianity was Ethiopia,
in A.D. 350. How many of us know that the Sahara was a trading highway
or that the ruler of Great Zimbabwe, in the late Middle Ages, dined off
porcelain plates made in China?
Africa
— contrary to myths of isolation and stagnation — has been embedded in
the world and the world embedded in Africa. There was nothing empty or
blank about it except the willful forgetting by the Western world, after
the onset of the slave trade, of Africa’s long and fascinating history.
Though
not very likely, I like to think that Jane Gates’s grandmother would
have passed down even one of these many riveting stories, and eventually
it would have been passed down to me. Our challenge today is to ensure
that more and more stories like these become a central part of the
school curriculum, as well as the stuff of documentaries and the
mythologies of Hollywood, so that they will never be lost again.
Correction: February 5, 2017
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that a Yale University gap-year program abroad more than four decades ago had been funded by the Mellon Foundation.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that a Yale University gap-year program abroad more than four decades ago had been funded by the Mellon Foundation.
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