Reflections on Race Relations: A Personal Odyssey
Godfrey Mwakikagile, Reflections on Race Relations: A Personal Odyssey, New Africa Press, 2021, 520 pages.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One:
My Early Years:
Colonial Tanganyika and The United States:
Similarities in Race Relations
My background
Colonial administrators and race relations in my home district
My life in Rungwe District
Growing up under British colonial rule
Racial inequalities under colonial rule and after independence
Similarities between colonial Tanganyika
and the United States
Part Two:
My life with African Americans
Inspiration to go to the United States
and my first encounter with a Black American
Establishing ties with African Americans in Tanzania and my destiny
Sponsored by African Americans
My life in Detroit
Crossroads
Part Three:
From Detroit to Grand Rapids
Aquinas-Tanzania connection
My life in the black community of Grand Rapids
Malcolm X's connection to Grand Rapids
Baxter Neighborhood
Part Four:
Beyond Black and White
Black and unequal
A personal journey:
From Africa to America
Racial incidents and stereotypes
Blacks and intelligence:
My personal experience
Visible yet invisible
Black Africans and Black Americans:
Common identity and common destiny in America
Other racial encounters
Racial profiling:
My encounters with the police
Across the spectrum:
Persistence of racism
Part Five:
Reflections on Race Relations: A Personal Odyssey
Flawed from the beginning as a racial hierarchy: Structural imbalance
United yet divided as a nation
Blacks as prime target
Second civil rights movement?
A moral choice
Acknowledgements
THIS WORK is based on my experiences when I was growing up in Tanganyika during British colonial rule. It is also based on what I saw, observed and experienced for many years when I lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and in other parts of the United States but mostly in Grand Rapids.
Therefore, I have firsthand knowledge of what I have written about from an autobiographical standpoint.
But my personal experience is also relevant to the issues I have addressed in a broader context beyond the autobiographical, covering two continents.
I have also benefited from the works of others in terms of documentation for which I am profoundly grateful to them.
I wish to express my profound gratitude to Michael Longford, author of The Flags Changed at Midnight: Tanganyika's Progress Towards Independence. It is an account of the last years of British colonial rule in Tanganyika, my home country, which became Tanzania after uniting with Zanzibar.
His account on Rungwe District in the 1950s when he worked there as an administrator in the colonial service proved to be indispensable in illuminating some of the subjects I have addressed in my book. I grew up there and in other parts of Tanganyika in the 1950s.
I also like to express my grateful thanks to Professor John Illife whose book, East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession, has been equally useful in that context. He has written about some of the doctors my father knew and who became prominent in their profession and in the history of the country as a whole.
They came from the same district where I was brought up and where my parents and grandparents – and even some of my great-grandparents – were also born and brought up.
My father went to school with one of them. The doctor became president of a national organisation for African government employees during colonial rule.
I wish to record too my grateful appreciation of the work of Professor Paul Bjerk on the early years of post-colonial Tanganyika. I have used his book, Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960 – 1964, to document my work on some of the subjects I have addressed about those years. His book is one of the best on the first years of the country's post-colonial era.
Also special thanks to Professor Sarah L. Smiley for her incisive analysis of Dar es Salaam as a segregated city. I went to school and also worked in Dar es Salaam for four years. I bear witness to her testimony.
My debt of gratitude also goes to Professor George Yancy for his candid exposure of the racism he suffered at the hands of his fellow academics which is also a brutal reality many other black scholars have to endure everyday on campuses across the nation.
I am equally grateful to the rest whose works I have cited in their appropriate contexts. They include James Baldwin, Nathan Glazer and Cornel West for their probing insights into the American condition in terms of race relations.
The context in which I have framed and provided my analysis is applicable to other works I have written on race relations – a subject I have addressed extensively in this book – and in terms of my experience as someone who has lived in two countries on two continents, a background that has helped to shape my perspective on how I look at life in multiracial and multicultural societies. I have, for that reason alone, some advantages of looking at life from the perspective of two worlds – the First and the Third.
My work has its shortcomings. And I take full responsibility for that.
I have stood on the shoulders of others so that I can see far, scanning the horizon. There is still so much to see, and so much to learn.
Introduction
THIS WORK is partly autobiographical and partly historical. It also addresses contemporary issues which are not of an autobiographical nature.
It was, from a personal perspective, inspired by my interest in comparative analysis of my life in Tanganyika during British colonial rule and in the United States, a country, like Tanganyika when I was growing up, ruled and dominated by members of one race.
That is the comparative aspect of this work, focusing on similarities and differences between the two countries in terms of my life in both countries; hence the personal aspect of it.
In terms of my life in the United states, I have focused on one city where I lived the longest, in fact, longer than I did in Africa; coincidentally, a city on the banks of a river like my home village in Tanzania which is also on the banks of a river. Our house, built on a hill, is only about twenty yards from the river in an area of green hills with luxuriant vegetation including guavas, bananas, coffee, tea farms and plantations and pine trees.
My book is also, in general, a study of race relations in colonial Tanganyika and in the United States. And because this is partly an autobiographical work, I have also written about race relations based on my personal experience in the city where I lived the longest and in other parts of the United States where I also lived and visited.
My personal experiences in terms of race relations constitute a significant part of the book. It is from this perspective that I have tried to provide some insights into the complexities of race relations in the American city where I lived for many years, and in the United States in general, knowing that my experiences are an integral part of the human experience and are important to an understanding of race relations in the American context only when they are viewed as an integral part of this collective experience.
It has been one long journey through life from colonial Tanganyika – and independent Tanganyika, renamed Tanzania, after uniting with Zanzibar – all the way to the United States. Only God knows where and when my life is going to end. The future was never meant for us to see.
I just hope – hope is better than despair – that when I leave this world, it will be a better place than it is today, mired in conflict and dominated by people who couldn't care less if an entire segment of mankind – the poor of all races, and people they just don't like or because they don't look like them – vanished from the face of the earth; forgetting that by diminishing the humanity of others, they also diminish theirs.
Part One
My Early Years:
Colonial Tanganyika
and the United States:
Similarities in race relations
THE STORY of my life begins in a country that was known as Tanganyika in East Africa. It was ruled by Britain and before then by Germany.
My background
I was born at six o'clock in the morning on Tuesday, 4 October 1949, at a government hospital in the town of Kigoma in the Western Province of Tanganyika under British colonial rule. The country united with Zanzibar in April 1964 to form Tanzania.
A quiet town and unknown to most of the world but an important port on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, Kigoma got international attention – among some people – in the mid-sixties when it became the rear operational base for Che Guevara during his secret mission to Congo-Leopoldville where he led a contingent of Cuban troops and fought on the side of the nationalist forces of the assassinated Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba, against the pro-Western government supported by the United States, Belgium and other Western powers as well as apartheid South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Six miles south of Kigoma is the the smaller and historic town of Ujiji. It is the oldest town in western Tanzania.
It earned a place in the history of African exploration and imperial conquest when the ailing missionary doctor and explorer, David Livingstone, was found there in November 1871 by the Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley who uttered the famous words: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
Many people thought Dr. Livingstone was dead after nothing was heard from him since he left Britain for Africa in January 1866.
There is even a mountain range in my home district of Rungwe in southwestern Tanzania that was named after him. It is known as Livingstone Mountains, also as the Kipengere Range, whose highest mountain is Mount Rungwe in Rungwe District.
My father, Elijah Mwakikagile, who once worked at the internationally renowned Amani Research Institute in the late 1940s, was a medical assistant during the British colonial era. He was one of the very few in the entire country of 10 million people.
Medical assistants underwent an intensive three-year training after finishing secondary school and worked as a substitute for doctors. They were even called madaktari (doctors) in Swahili and formed the backbone of the medical system in Tanganyika.
There were fewer than 10 doctors in colonial Tanganyika in the 1940s and 1950s and only 12 at independence on 9 December 1961. And there were fewer than 300 medical assistants during those years serving millions of people in a vast country of more than 365,000 square miles the size of Texas, Oklahoma and West Virginia combined. My father was one of them.
There were not many educated people in Tanganyika during those days – even in the 1960s – and those who had secondary school education were considered to be members of the educated class constituting the elite because of the jobs they were able to get. Their income earned them middle-class status.
My mother, Syabumi Mwakikagile (Mwambapa, her maiden name), was a pupil of Tanganyika's prominent British feminist educator and later member of parliament Mary Hancock.
Mary Hancock played a very important role in the history of colonial Tanganyika and after independence as an educator. She was a pioneer in the area of education for women.
Born in England in 1910, she went to Tanganyika in 1940 to work in the colonial service as a volunteer teacher. Her focus was on education for girls. And she worked diligently to achieve her goal.
My mother was one of her pupils in the early 1940s at Kyimbila Girls' School in our home area in Rungwe District. Miss Hancock was the founder of the school.
The district is ringed by misty blue mountains in the Southern Highlands in the Great Rift Valley in southwestern Tanganyika, a region bordering Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) and Malawi (once known as Nyasaland).
Both countries were renamed after independence.
The Southern Highlands Province was divided into Mbeya Region and Iringa Region after independence.
My home district, Rungwe, is in Mbeya Region. And my home village is about 25 miles north of Lake Nyasa and from the border with Malawi.
I attended the same school my mother did, renamed Kyimbila Primary School, many years after it was transformed into a co-educational institution. I was a pupil at Kyimbila from 1956 to 1959.
The school, which is still there today, is two miles south of the town of Tukuyu, the district capital, and two miles north of my home in Mpumbuli village.
Tukuyu was also the capital of Rungwe District during German colonial rule. The town was then known as Neu Langenburg. It was founded by the Germans who established a colony known as Deustch-Ostafrika (German East Africa) in 1891.
The colony comprised three territories: what came be known as Tanganyika, Ruanda (later renamed Rwanda) and Urundi (renamed Burundi).
They ruled my home country for about 18 years.
Coincidentally, the town of Neu Langenburg was destroyed by an earthquake in 1919, the same year German rule ended before the British took over and renamed the country Tanganyika in 1920 when they officially assumed control of the territory. It was also the British who renamed Neu Langenburg – Tukuyu.
Had Germany not lost World War I, the history of my home country would have been entirely different and I may not even have been born.
I have fond memories of childhood growing up in Rungwe District and visiting the town of Tukuyu in the late 1950s and throughout the sixties, my years of innocence as a child and as an adolescent approaching adulthood.
Even life in the past in what came to be known as Rungwe District – as in other parts of the country and Africa as a whole – before the coming of Europeans had its own beauty and innocence in terms of not being polluted and corrupted by foreign influences.
Its idyllic past – my focus is on Rungwe here – charmed, intrigued and fascinated the first Europeans who visited the area.
In some respects, the African way of life in the past could very well have been the envy of many people outside the continent. For example, in one of the most famous passages in the history of African exploration, British explorer Joseph Thomson wrote about the Nyakyusa people of Rungwe in a way that left the unmistakable impression that some Africans lived far better than many of their contemporaries in Europe, including many in some of the richest countries in the “civilised” world.
Thomson stumbled upon the Nyakyusa in 1879 in the southern highlands north of Lake Nyasa and wrote the following in his work, To the Central African Lakes and Back:
“It seemed a perfect Arcadia, about which idyllic poets have sung, though few have seen it realized.
Imagine a magnificent grove of bananas, laden with bunches of fruit, each of which would form a man’s load, growing on a perfectly level plain, from which all weeds, garbage, and things unsightly are carefully cleared away. Dotted here and there are a number of immense shady sycamores, with branches each almost as large as a separate tree.
At every few spaces are charmingly neat circular huts, with conical roofs, and walls hanging out all round with the clay worked prettily into rounded bricks, and daubed symmetrically with spots. The grass thatching is also very neat. The tout ensemble renders these huts worthy of a place in any nobleman’s garden.” – (Joseph Thomson, To the Central African Lakes and Back, 1881, Vol. I, p. 267; quoted by Alison Smith, “The Southern Section of the Interior of East Africa 1840 – 1884,” in Roland Oliver and Gervase Mathew, History of East Africa, Vol. 1, Oxford, England, UK: Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 258. Joseph Thomson, quoted by Godfrey Mwakikagile, Africa and the West, Huntington, New York, USA: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2000, p. 29).
Our imperial conquerors were impressed just as much but for different reasons. Our interests did not coincide with theirs.
Colonial administrators and race relations in my home district
When Tanganyika came under colonial rule, the people of the country lost their rights.
We were not full citizens during colonial rule. We were colonial subjects and were identified that way.
Subjects are not citizens even in their own country when they are ruled by a foreign power. They are subjected to humiliation, they are at the mercy of their conquerors, and they don't have the power, in their own country, to enforce their rights to which they they are entitled as equal human beings.
My home district of Rungwe was one of the areas of Tanganyika which could have been a battleground for racial equality had whites decided to settle there in large numbers.
The climate of Rungwe District, ideal for farming, was highly conducive to settlement by Europeans because of its mild temperatures.
Settlement of large numbers of whites would have led to seizure of land and displacement of the indigenous people in this densely populated district, as happened to the Kikuyu in central Kenya, sparking Mau Mau.
The climate of Rungwe District was and still is near-temperate, with temperatures ranging between 40°F and 80°F, sometimes in the 30s in the morning.
I remember when I was growing up, we used to wear sweaters, especially in the morning, because it was very cold, in the 30s.
When I was a student at Songea Secondary School in southern Tanzania with some of my colleagues from the Southern Highlands Province, some of our fellow students from other parts of the country, especially from coastal regions and elsewhere, used to call us “Highlanders.”
The entire Southern Highlands is known for its cool climate, low temperatures and a lot of rainfall. Njombe District in what is now Njombe Region – once a part of Iringa Region – is sometimes even colder than Rungwe District.
All that made the area very attractive to Europeans. As Michael Longford who was a junior colonial administrator in Rungwe District in the early 1950s stated in his book, The Flags Changed at Midnight: Tanganyika's Progress Towards Independence:
“I reached Tukuyu on 2nd October (1951), exactly two months after I had left London.
I had been rather disappointed at being told by Harry Braddell (District Commissioner – D.C. – of Chunya District, also in the Southern Highlands Province) that I would not be going to Mbeya, but the beauty of the scenery as we approached Tukuyu completely reconciled me to my change of posting.
Tukuyu was the Headquarters of Rungwe District, named after Mount Rungwe, an extinct volcano a few miles north-east of Tukuyu township.
Usually the first comment one heard about Rungwe District was that it was the wettest district in the whole of Tanganyika. The rainfall in Tukuyu averaged about 120 inches per year, in contrast, for example, to Chunya, which was less than 100 miles away (north), but where the average annual rainfall was only about 30 inches.
There was a quite simple geographical reason to explain the freak climate of Tukuyu. The district was surrounded to the west, north, and east by a range of mountains shaped like a horseshoe. To the south lay Lake Nyasa. When water from the lake evaporated, the clouds were usually blown towards the mountains, but were seldom high enough to pass over the top of the mountains, so the water condensed and fell as rain over a comparatively small area.
Unlike most of Tanganyika, which was only green during the rainy season, Rungwe District remained green the whole year round. The soil was fertile, and on the high ground the peasant farmers grew abundant crops of coffee and bananas. On the low-lying plains near the lake they grew rice.
The countryside along the Mbeya-Tukuyu road was lovely, and the final approach into the town itself was even more beautiful. Flowering tropical trees lined the road on both sides. I had seen jacaranda trees and flame trees in other towns, but never before in such profusion. The houses were all neat and in good repair, and many of them had pretty gardens, a luxury which was rare in other districts.” – (Michael Longford, The Flags Changed at Midnight: Tanganyika's Progress Towards Independence, Garcewing Publishing, Leominster, Herefordshire, UK: 2001, pp. 14 – 17)....
Many Europeans did not settle in Rungwe for different reasons including scarcity of land in a very small and densely populated district. Still, the area was ideal for them because of the climate. According to a census of non-Africans conducted in 1952 and cited by Michael Longford his book, there were 113 Europeans during that period. They were outnumbered by Indians. There were 369 Indians, mostly in Tukuyu and some of them in the town of Kyela about 27 miles south of Tukuyu.
As was the case with all the other colonial administrative officers, life for Michael Longford was very comfortable, and financially rewarding, sharply contrasted with the meagre earnings of his African servants:
“There were surprisingly few Asian officials in Tukuyu, though we had an outstanding Indian Sub-Assistant Surgeon, and most of the shopkeepers in the town were Asian.
Teddy Kingdon let it be known that I wanted to employ a number of servants including a cook and a houseboy-dhobi (Indian word for laundry boy, washerman, washerwoman), and I was astonished at the huge number of people who turned up at the Boma to be interviewed at the appointed hour.
My Swahili was still not good enough to do the interviewing myself, so Teddy asked all the questions and interpreted the answers to me.
At the end of an afternoon which I found great fun, I had taken on a cook called Bernard Mwakilima, who was paid 55 shillings a month, a housebody-dhobi, Timothy Mwakapombe, an ex-askari in the King's African Rifles ('askari' means 'soldier' in Swahili but also any uniformed official in the public sector including a policeman; the term is both singular and plural), who would receive 45 shillings a month, and a woodcutter called Atupele, whose sole task was to keep my household supplied with firewood for cooking and heating. He would receive 15 shillings a month.
I also engaged a 'kitchen toto,' toto being the Swahili world for child. This was the cook's son Issac, who would scrub the pots and pans and be taught by his father the rudiments of European style cooking. He was delighted to be offered 12 shillings a month.
I felt slightly ashamed at the very low rates of pay that were eagerly accepted by the people who were looking for work, but my own starting salary was only £550 per annum.
While it seemed excessive for a bachelor to have four domestic servants, they had no labour-saving gadgets like washing machines or vacuum cleaners to help them, and the derisory wages which I paid helped my staff and their families to pay their poll tax and to have a marginally higher standard of living than they would have got either from casual labour or from the sale of their cash crops. The cook and the houseboy were also provided with free living quarters for themselves and their families behind the bungalow where I lived.
Most of the Government officials in Tukuyu lived in a group of houses on the south side of the Boma, but my bungalow stood by itself on the side of a hill to the east of the township.
It had two bedrooms, a large living room which also served as a dining room, a verandah, and a bathroom. The kitchen was separate, but connected to the main house by a covered passageway.
The footpath from my house up to the Boma was extremely steep, and occasionally, when the ground was very wet, I slipped on the way down to my house and landed painfully on my backside....
I got constant pleasure from the superb view of Mount Rungwe from my living room. Sometimes the mountain looked bright and sunny; by the light of a full moon it was even more beautiful; but when the storm clouds gathered it could look very threatening indeed. It never looked dull.” – (Ibid., pp. 19 – 21).
Life was good for the British and other whites in colonial Tanganyika, and even after independence, made even more comfortable by the large number of African servants they could easily get because of the abundance of cheap labour provided by the “natives.”
The food was also very cheap, again from the “natives,” who sold their agricultural products at a market in Tukuyu just as their counterparts did in other parts of Tanganyika. I remember the market in the town of Tukuyu very well.
Rungwe District is one of the most fertile areas on the entire continent, not just in Tanzania, with a variety of food crops in abundance and green vegetation all year round. There has never been a shortage of food in the district; famine unheard of.
The market in the town of Tukuyu was “flooded” with a variety of agricultural products and at very affordable or very low prices because there was so much of it.
I remember women selling various types of foods at a huge discount as sunset approached to make sure it was all gone before they left to go back to their villages, walking, as all of them did. I sometimes bought bananas from them when I was in town.
I also remember the field, just below the boma, where whites used to play golf and tennis. Some of them came from Mbeya, 45 miles north of Tukuyu, to play with their colleagues in Tukuyu.
As a child under ten years old in the late 1950s, I now and then went to the field with other children, just walking around, and we would pick up tennis balls left there by the players. They knew children like them. We used them as football. I remember some women sometimes handed them to us after they finished playing tennis.
Although I was just a child in the 1950s, I knew and still remember very well that whites lived far better than we did in terms of material comfort and even social status, a racial disparity which assumed even more significance when the campaign for independence gained momentum in the mid-fifties and reached its peak in the late 1950s, especially in 1958 and 1959.
Whites in Rungwe District, as in other parts of Tanganyika, also segregated themselves. They justified that on grounds of shared identity: people of the same racial and ethnic backgrounds had the right to exclude those who were different from them. As Michael Longford stated:
“In common with minority groups all over the world, the members of the racial minorities in Rungwe tended to associate for social and recreational purposes with other people with similar backgrounds and interests and who shared a common mother tongue.
Even though I disapproved strongly of what I had seen of apartheid in South Africa, I accepted that freedom of association is a basic human right, and did not question the right of any group to form a recreational club and to restrict the membership to a particular category of people.
The Rungwe Club had already existed for many years by the time I arrived in Tukuyu, and its constitution stated that membership was exclusively for Europeans. It was taken for granted that any European official posted to the District would apply for membership of the Club and be elected by the Committee, and that any member and his family would then be able to make use of all the facilities which the Club provided....
Membership was not confined to Government officials. It also included European employees of the various tea estates in the District. Estate managers and engineers did not normally make very much use of the Club in the middle of the week, but at weekends they would drive in to Tukuyu to take part in any activities organised by the Committee, and to meet friends and have a drink or two with them.
European missionaries seldom if ever applied for membership. Some missionary societies paid such low salaries that their employees probably could not have afforded to join, and I think that many evangelical missionaries did not approve of alcohol.” – (Ibid., p. 32).
He went on to state:
“The Rungwe Club was quite comfortably furnished and well equipped. It had a 9-hole golf course, which I never used, a hard tennis court, which I used whenever I could, a library, a battery-operated record player, and a well-stocked bar.
Although all the quarters occupied by expatriate officials had water-borne sanitation, the Club itself only had two unattractive little bucket latrines, one for Ladies and one for Gentlemen, behind the main building.
After sundown, most of the male members preferred to go outside and retire behind a tree rather than patronise the Gents' loo. 'Seeing Africa' was the colloquial equivalent of 'spending a penny' in Britain.
The day-to-day management of the Club was by an elected Committee, and not long after I arrived I was invited to become the Treasurer. This involved me in regular dealings with the Head Bar Boy, Samweli, who spoke excellent English and had been employed by the Club for many years. Whenever I checked the stocks of bottles locked in the drink cupboard, the amounts were always correct....
Matrimonial discord was not the only cause for arguments in the Club.
Some Colonial Service officials were more progressive in their attitudes to social development and welfare than others, but in broad general terms the political views of non-officials were far more right-wing than those of people in Government service.
At times the atmosphere in the Club became heated when tea estate workers expressed strong disapproval of progressive policies in general, and of certain actions taken by officials in particular cases.” – (Ibid., pp. 32 – 34).
There was, among some whites in Tukuyu and other parts of Rungwe District as elsewhere in the country, total disregard for the lives of black people, not just for their well-being.
Michael Longford heard some of his fellow whites at the Rungwe Club in Tukuyu in 1952 say any white man had the right to drive regardless of how drunk he was even if he ran into and killed some blacks whose lives meant absolutely nothing to them:
"I found the remarks made in the Rungwe Club by certain people employed on the tea estates were quite intolerable. One said, fortissimo, that it was the right of any white man to drive home, even if he had drunk a bit too much. Another added that knocking down a few black children on the road was not important, as Africans bred like rabbits anyhow.
I found such comments incredibly offensive in themselves, but I was particularly shocked that they should have been expressed so shamelessly in the presence of Samweli, the Head Bar Boy, who certainly understood all that was being said.” – (Ibid., pp. 34 – 35)....
Longford also brought up the case of Dr Mehta showing that even Indians, however successful, were not accepted by some whites. They did not want to socialise with them. But given a choice, between blacks and Indians, they probably would choose Indians and not mingle with any black, however successful. Indians were clearly higher than Africans in the social hierarchy and even in terms of acceptance by whites. But they still had some problems with some of them:
“There were three times as many Indians as Europeans in Rungwe District. Nearly all of them were traders or shopkeepers, and most adults were married with large families. They arranged their social lives with other members of their own communities, Hindus with Hindus and Muslims with Muslims.
There was only one Indian working for the Government, Dr Mehta, whom I liked and respected greatly. He was later deservedly promoted to the rank of Medical Officer, but while he was still only a Sub-Assistant Surgeon he did not mix with Europeans. I think this was due as much to his not wanting to feel under an obligation to reciprocate hospitality on a small salary as it was to the reluctance of Europeans to befriend him, but his private life must have been very lonely.” – (Ibid., p. 35).
Indians themselves didn't like mingling with other people, especially blacks,
I went to Tukuyu many times in the 1950s and 1960s, only four mils from our house, shopping at Indian shops or simply looking around to see what I could buy later after I got some money. There were many African customers interacting with the Indian shopkeepers – the shop owners. Some of them even spoke Nyakyusa, the local language, as the customers haggled over prices with them. They were friendly. But that was all. There was no social interaction between Africans and Indians.
My father knew some of them and sometimes bought items from them on credit. I went with him a number of times. I remember they always spoke to him in English, a language he knew very well. Indians were not fluent in Swahili as much as they should and could have been.
My father also had a Somali friend, Rajab, in Tukuyu, who also owned a shop like the Indians did. I went to his shop with my father a number of times. Rajab was fluent in both Nyakyusa and Swahili. He also had a family. They lived in the same building where they had the shop just like the Indians did.
There were no Africans who owned shops in Tukuyu during those days. But some of them, only a handful, worked as watchmen for Indians and spent the night outside in front of the door, guarding the entrance.
One of them came from our area. He was the father of one of my schoolmates, Kennan Mwambopo, who came from Nkuju village which was a part of Kyimbila. Kennan was also head of our dormitory in boarding school at Mpuguso. He was three years ahead of me in school and was a friend of my first cousin Owen Mwambapa. My maternal uncle Chonde Mwambapa and his family also lived in Nkuju village, only a short distance from our house; not more than half a mile.
I remember Mr. Mwambopo used to ride a donkey – four miles – to Tukuyu, going to work at night as a watchman, providing security for the Indian family he worked for. He used to go in the evening before sunset and returned home in the morning.
There were times when we saw him while walking on the same road. We saw him in the evening riding his donkey on his way to work when we were returning home from Tukuyu and in the morning when we were on our way to Tukuyu as he was returning home.
In one way, his job and status symbolised the social and economic gap between Africans and Indians.
The social boundaries were firmly established along racial lines – black, white, Asian – and no one seemed to question let alone challenge that. It was each to his own. And there was no animosity towards each other, besides contempt for Africans by whites and Indians because of the perceived inferiority of black people.
Even when Indians performed some of their funeral ceremonies in an area that could have been considered to be African, outside the boundaries of Tukuyu town where Indians and whites lived, there were no complaints by black people who lived close to that area...
I also remember very well the signboard on the road, on the right-hand side as you go to Tukuyu, that marked the boundary between the urban area and the native area in terms of administration. Written on the signboard, in black against a white background, were the words, “Native Authority.” That is where “Native Authority” began, extending south, and that is where it ended, going north, just before entering the town of Tukuyu.
But that was only symbolic in terms of power for the native population which they supposedly had through traditional rulers and institutions. In reality, they were under full jurisdiction of the colonial authorities.
The sign was highly symbolic in another sense besides its significance as a demarcation between “native” and “non-native” territory. It symbolised the absolute power the colonial rulers had over the indigenous people. They are the ones who were responsible for the demarcation, separating Tukuyu from the native area, with Tukuyu being exclusively under white control, hence white power, since it was the headquarters, and the center, of colonial administration in Rungwe District.
The colonial rulers made sure that they kept the “natives” in their place, separate from and under whites. There were even some Africans who were brainwashed into believing that was the nature of things, with whites “ordained” to be leaders and to be on top of blacks.
Notions and attitudes of racial superiority even seeped into and became ingrained in the minds of some people of mixed race, known as half-castes in East Africa, who identified themselves with Europeans or simply thought they were better than blacks because they had white ancestry; although it is also true that there were some Africans who did not like or accept them in spite of the fact that they were also partly black. In some cases, disdain for each was reciprocal.
But they also found themselves in a predicament for which they were not responsible and became victims simply because of what they were: half-castes or “coloureds.” It happened in Rungwe District and in other parts of the country. Longford stated the following about some of the ones he knew in Rungwe:
“There were ten people (in Rungwe District) described in the 1952 Census as 'coloured,' and I got to know three of them well.
I felt particular sympathy for the plight of the first generation of children born to parents of different races. They were seldom completely accepted either by the communities of their fathers or their mothers. At that time, racial discrimination was not practised just by bigoted members of the white community. Many Africans were as prejudiced against coloured people as the most racist Europeans.
Kyela was the second largest settlement in the district after Tukuyu. It was situated in the low-lying plains not far from Lake Nyasa, and it had a thriving market, a well-attended school, and a very busy local dispensary which was mainly for out-patients but had a few in-patient beds as well.
The Medical Assistant in charge of the dispensary was called William Manning. William Manning's mother was an African. His father had previously been the Governor of Nyasaland, and in the early 1950s the town in Malawi (then still known as Nyasaland) that is now called Mchinji was still called Fort Manning, in his memory.
Children of mixed race born in Tanganyika did not have access to the privileged education available to white children, and William did not have any formal qualifications as a doctor, but his medical skill and his dedication to the patients he served were very highly respected indeed, and his outstanding work was later recognised with the award of an MBE.
He had married a woman who was also of mixed parentage, and they had several very intelligent children.
I met two of their daughters and one of their sons. Their son Tom had blue eyes and fair hair but his features and the texture of his hair looked African. One daughter, Christine, was dark-skinned and exceptionally pretty. The other daughter, Julie, was not so pretty as her sister, but was academically brilliant. She graduated in law and became a successful lawyer. After the country achieved independence, she became Tanzania's Attorney-General.
William Manning seemed reasonably happy, because he was devoted to his family and he had a satisfying job, even though the salary of a Medical Assistant was far less than he deserved.” – (Ibid., pp. 35 – 36).
Although people of mixed race faced problems during colonial rule, just as black Africans did, they were provided with equal opportunities to succeed in life just as other Tanganyikans – later Tanzanians – were after the end of British colonial rule. Julie Catherine Manning was one of the best examples.
In 1963, she was the first woman to enrol as a student to study law at the University of East Africa. She studied law at the University College of Dar es Salaam which had the faculty of law. Three colleges constituted the University of East Africa: the University College of Dar es Salaam, the University College of Nairobi, and Makerere University College. President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania was the chancellor of the university.
Ten years later in 1973, Julie Manning was appointed by President Nyerere as a judge of the High Court of Tanzania. She became the first African woman in East and Central Africa to serve as a High Court judge.
Before then, she worked as a draughtswoman in the Attorney General's Chamber. In 1975, President Nyerere appointed her Minister of Justice, making her one of the first two women to serve in the cabinet. She served as Minister of Justice for about 8 years until 1983. In the same year, she was appointed senior diplomat to serve as a counsel at the Tanzania High Commission (embassy) in Ottawa, Canada.
Julie Manning earned distinction as one of the most prominent women and female leaders in the history of Tanzania together with a few others such as Bibi Titi Mohammed who played a major role in the struggle for independence, and Lucy Lameck, the first woman to hold a ministerial post in Tanganyika who was also a leading figure in the independence movement.
Lucy Lameck held dual posts of Deputy Minister for Cooperatives and Community Development between 1965 and 1970, and Deputy Minister of Health between 1967 and 1972. There is also a street in Berlin, Germany, named after her.
Julie Manning is equally held in high esteem in Tanzania and as a role model for women, her mixed-race identity being irrelevant to that.
There were other people of mixed race in Rungwe District when I was growing up there during colonial rule in the 1950s. They were also victims of racial discrimination. One of them was Cyril Wallace who was not allowed to join the Rungwe Club in spite of his status as a fully qualified doctor because membership in the club was exclusively for whites. As Michael Longford stated in his book:
“One of the other medical establishments in Rungwe District was also run by a person of mixed race. Cyril Wallace was a fully qualified doctor who was also an ordained Anglican priest. He was in charge of a large and well-managed leprosarium at Makete (about three and a half miles southwest of my home in Mpumbuli village – comment added by Godfrey Mwakikagile).
Cyril and his assistants gave loving care to a few hundred lepers, many of whom were disfigured and evil-smelling.
Cyril's father had been a doctor working in the Caribbean, and had there married a black woman. Cyril had graduated at a British university and qualified as a doctor. His wife Linda was Egyptian by birth, and a coptic Christian. They had no children.
Cyril had the rank of Medical Officer and was on a much higher salary scale than William Manning, but he was not eligible for membership of the Rungwe Club. Like William Manning, Cyril Wallace was also awarded the MBE for his exceptional work, but he died of cancer soon after the award was made.
The Wallaces were on home leave in Britain when I first arrived in Tukuyu, but I met them both soon after they returned. They were very hospitable people, and we often visited each other's house.
One Sunday, I was having lunch with them at Makete when Linda started to talk about the suffering that the colour of their skin had caused them.
She gave as an example the air journey that they had recently made from Britain to Dar es Salaam. The plane had developed a fault in Nairobi, and the aircrew had told all the passengers that they would not be able to continue the journey until the next day, but that accommodation had been booked at the airline's expense for all of them by name in one of the best hotels in Nairobi.
When Cyril and Linda reached the hotel, however, the white girl at the reception desk absolutely refused to admit them. Linda and Cyril had called the girl's attention to a blackboard behind the reception desk, where the names of guests were entered beside the appropriate bedroom numbers.
The notice-board indicated that room 23 had been reserved in the name 'Dr and Mrs Wallace', but that made no difference to the hotel's policy.
After trying unsuccessfully at a number of other hotels, the Wallaces had eventually spent the night in the airport waiting-room.
I expressed my horror at the way they had been treated, and Cyril then said that they were both devoted to children, but had decided before they got married that they would never have a family of their own, as they did not want to bring children into the world to suffer in the way they themselves had both suffered.
I should have expressed myself more diplomatically, but I told them that I thought it would be a privilege for any child to have parents like them, and that I felt their decision had been understandable but misguided. Linda then began to cry gently, and Cyril put his arms round her and kissed her. I too found this visit a very painful one, but it did not harm our friendship.” – (Ibid., pp. 36 – 37).
Those were just some of the racial indignities educated Africans including my father, as well as others with less or no formal education, were subjected to during British colonial rule in Tanganyika.
There was another doctor from Rungwe District who was unfairly treated during colonial rule. But he did not practise there.
His name was Francis Mwaisela. He went to Malangali Secondary School, the same school my father attended. I don't remember if my father said he met or knew him the way he knew Benjamin Mwakosya, another doctor also from Rungwe, who also went to Malangali, and who once was President Nyerere's personal physician.
But I remember he talked about Mwaisela – and about Mwakosya – now and then when he was talking to my mother and even knew how Mwaisela died.
When I asked him if he and Mwaisela were in school together at Malangali, he said by the time he got to Malangali, Mwaisela had already left after finishing his studies; so had Mwakosya, which leads me to believe that Mwaisela and Mwakosya were probably together at Malangali as schoolmates and maybe even as classmates.
My father's interest in them, and why he talked about them, stemmed from three reasons. They were in the same medical field, my father being a medical assistant. They went to the same school or schools, even if at different times; my father being a classmate of Wilbard B.K. Mwanjisi since primary school who also became a doctor. They all came from the same district, Rungwe, and in the same area. Mwakosya and Mwanjisi came from an area only a few miles – not more than five – from where my father grew up. I remember he said Mwaisela came from Kyela which was then still a part of Rungwe District.
There was another doctor who also came from Rungwe District, Swedi Mwankemwa who was a contemporary of Mwaisela. He later became Regional Medical Officer in Morogoro. He also studied medicine at Makerere University College.
Mwaisela was one of the examples of highly successful Africans who, in spite of their success, were not rewarded accordingly during colonial rule because of their racial identity. He was trained as a doctor at Makerere University College, one of the best academic institutions in Africa, and was excellent in his field. Yet he was grossly underpaid; so were his colleagues.
There is even a ward named after him at Tanzania's largest hospital, Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar es Salaam. It's known as Mwaisela Ward in honour of his achievements and as one of the first African doctors in Tanganyika before independence.
I met his son at Tanzania's medical school at Muhimbili National Hospital in 1972 a few months before I left for the United States.
I used to go there to visit two medical students, Hezekiah Mwakasala and Reuben Lwesya who were my schoolmates at Mpuguso Middle School and were then studying medicine. Hezekiah was my classmate at Mpuguso. Reuben was one year ahead of us but all of us were together in boarding school at Mpuguso during the same time.
The son of Dr. Mwaisela, who was also Francis Mwaisela named after his father, was their friend. He later became a successful doctor in the United States.
Professor John Illife in his book, East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession, stated the following about Mwaisela and some of his colleagues, many of them of humble origins:
“The first East Africans to practise modern medicine had generally been of low status. Makerere's medical students, by contrast, often came from privileged strata within colonial society. By the late 1940s they were the leading element in East Africa's educational elite. Apprenticeship had carried menial connotations, but the Medical School was declared by de la Warr to be East Africa's closest approximation to university education.
In reality, however, much of the Medical School's work was a 'hands-on' training in practical skills under direct supervision by a qualified doctor.
Ironically, that probably made it particularly effective. A medical education at Makerere acquired its high reputation precisely because it successfully combined the academic and the practical....
A.K. Kibaya, a leading early Ugandan doctor, was...a son of the manse, as were Barnaba Kununka, Godfrey Binaisa – future President of Uganda and one-time medical student – and two early Tanganyikan doctors, John Omari and W.B.K. Mwanjisi. In Tanganyika, Charles Mtawali's father was a policeman and Swedi Mwankemwa's a carpenter, while Francis Mwaisela, perhaps the most impressive early student from Tanganyika, was born to a hospital orderly, as was Justin Gesa, a future Ugandan Minister of Health....
Entry to the medical course was so competitive that there was room for some brilliant young men of humble origin....
In 1936 exactly half Makerere's students were from Buganda. They were even more dominant in the Medical School, where the first two classes to complete the course were all Ganda, the only other entrant, from Acholi in northern Uganda, having dropped out. The first successful Soga student from south-eastern Uganda, Ivan Kadama, later Uganda's first African DMS, qualified in 1937 and the first northerner, Alexander Odonga, later a leading surgeon, in 1948.
Medical students from Kenya and Tanganyika were still too few for ethnic origins to mean much; there was a broad correlation with educational advantage – Kikuyu especially from Kiambu, Luo, and Luyia from Kenya, Haya and Nyakyusa from Tanganyika – but it was not complete: Bondei and Chagga were prominent among Tanganyikan students but not in the Medical School....
The motives for this first generation are hard to quantify, especially because few were still alive in the late 1990s. Probably the most important motive was simply that medicine was the longest, most difficult, and most prestigious course, for although this deterred some students, it challenged others who had already tasted success in a fiercely competitive school system....Childhood experiences could be formative. 'Another thing that made me interested in medicine,' Swedi Mwankemwa recalled:
'When I, myself, I had a small abscess in my foot, and during those days anaesthesia was not available. The way I was handled by the nurses and the doctor who incised the abscess and relieved me from pain – I was very struck and said that oh, it is a very good job done, and since then I developed an interest in medical care.'
Another influence in his case was a role model (Charles) Mtawali, who examined his school in 1943, 'and I was very much impressed by the way he addressed us.'
The first three Makerere practitioners were especially influential as role models, as probably was Francis Mwaisela during his service in Nzega.” – (John Illife, East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 67, 68, 69, 70).
African doctors were also concerned about quality, not just quantity. They wanted to be the best doctors, an achievement that also went with prestige:
“In August 1962 Swedi Mwankemwa, Regional Medical Officer in Morogoro, told a visitor that 'Makerere doctors [are] worried about prestige. The public will regard the AMO (Assistant Medical Officer) and the R[ura] Medical P[ractitioner] as doctors.'” – (Ibid., p. 127).
But prestige did not reflect their financial status despite their dedication to service.
And important as African doctors were, there just weren't enough of them to meet the needs of the country before and even after independence. Even when medical assistants were included, my father being one of them in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was still a shortage of critical staff in the medical field.
Still, doctors remained role models even when they were not rewarded accordingly. Mwaisela was one of them, a household name in Rungwe District among those who heard about him and his achievements as a student and eventually as a doctor. He was one of two doctors I heard about the most when I was growing up in Rungwe District. The other one was Benjamin Mwakosya. As John Illife stated in his book:
“Of Mutahangarwa's Tanganyikan contemporaries, the most gifted was Francis Mwaisela.
The son of a hospital worker at the northern end of Lake Nyasa, he had a brilliant career at Makerere before undergoing the normal initiation at Sewa Haji.
Eager to marry his Jamaican-raised fiancée, he complained bitterly in 1943 that his salary of Shs. 160 a month could barely support even a bachelor, although the budget he submitted allocated twenty-seven of those shillings to cigarettes and thirty to games and entertainments. 'The general out look at present as far as my life is concerned is very gloomy,' he protested:
'I have been brought up to such a level in life that I can neither cope up with my own peoples life, nor that of a civilized man. To get married to a girl of any reasonable standard, for instance, in order that I should maintain that standard of education I enjoyed at School, is literally to commit suicide.'
These girevances were never satisfied, but in 1944 Mwaisela was posted to Nzega, a station much like Shanwa with a dilapidated forty-six-bed hospital built twenty years earlier by the Native Administration. He married his fiancée, and there, like so many vigorous young doctors at their first station, Mwaisela flourished.
He toured dispensaries, he helped the African midwife who ran the busy maternity clinic, he handled 723 inpatients and 14,010 outpatients during 1947, treating them for syphilis and malaria, constipation and ulcers, anaemia and anthrax.
He was centre-half of the football team and president of the Social Welfare Centre, which he insisted on making a place of education: 'knitting socks and sweaters alone is not enough.'
The Swahili press published a string of letters from Nzega thanking the government for sending him. The local Arab and Indian communities, who had initially denounced his appointment, came to welcome it. European officials counted him as not only a colleague but a friend, a rare occurrence at that time.
In 1948 he was one of the first East Africans (together with Charles Mtawali, also from Tanganyika) to study medicine in Britain, taking the Diploma in Public Health at Wolverhampton.
Then he returned to Nzega, and there, in 1951, he was drowned while shooting, apparently when trying to save an Indian child.
His death robbed Tanganyika of a man who would surely have been among its leaders at independence.
But Nzega produced, in Aloysius Nhonoli, the country's most distinguished physician of the next generation.” – (Ibid., pp. 82 – 83).
Low salaries, largely attributed to racism, drove many African doctors out of government service. They went into private practice. One of them was W.B. K. Mwanjisi from Rungwe District. As Professor Illife stated in his book:
“The lure of private practice also spread to Kenya (besides Uganda), where the first African private practitioner, Samson Mwathi, opened a surgery in 1957 in Nairobi, where five other Africans soon followed him, among them Munyua Waiyaki, who had qualified in South Africa and Britain, and Njoroge Mungai, trained in South Africa and America. Jason Likimani also entered private practice at this time.
The only Tanganyikan addition to the list was W.B.K. Mwanjisi, a Makerere graduate who left government service in 1954 to practise in his home area at Tukuyu.” – (Ibid., p. 101).
My father was also underpaid when he worked as a medical assistant at government hospitals in different parts of Tanganyika and suffered racial discrimination in different ways. He eventually left government service but for other reasons as well, according to what my mother told me.
He never told me why he left government service and I never asked him why.
My mother also told me some of my father's “friends” – so-called friends – were very jealous of him because of his excellent performance at work.
But there is no question that, regardless of how good he was at work, he was not rewarded accordingly because he was black.
White colonial rulers and other whites did not accept black people as equal to them and were determined to maintain the status quo: keeping blacks in a subordinate position in terms of social status that was inextricably linked to financial success.
Racism spared no-one who was black under direct white supervision and even under remote control from the centre.
Orders from colonial administrators, telling you what to do and what not to do, had a direct impact on your life. That is what colonisation meant. You were just a colonial subject of the imperial rulers from Europe, not an equal citizen in your own land.
Although Tanganyikans who were not white suffered racial discrimination during colonial rule and were “kept in their place,” there were also divisions among themselves. They all were an integral part of the British Empire but on different levels in the social hierachy.
Blacks were despised the most by other nonwhites, including some half-castes in spite of the fact that they were half-black themselves. Not all of them felt that way, but there were those who did. Some of them even claimed they were “white” or “European.”
The case of John Marsh in Rungwe District in 1952, which ended in tragedy, illustrates this point. As Michael Longford stated in his book The Flags Changed at Midnight: Tanganyika's Progress Towards Independence:
“The main cash crop grown in the south of the district was rice, and there was a small rice mill at a village called Ipinda. The name of the manager was John Marsh.
I had heard his name mentioned, and knew that he was the illegitimate son of a British gold-miner who had worked in the Lupa gold-fields and a Nyakyusa peasant woman.
People said John was very intelligent, and had been the head clerk of a tea estate before he was appointed to take charge of the mill at Ipinda.
After I had been in Rungwe for nearly a year, I happened to visit Ipinda on safari, and was warmly welcomed by John Marsh, who showed me round the mill and told me everything I ever learned about the technicalities of milling rice.
After we had looked round the mill, I accepted with pleasure John's invitation to have tea and biscuits with him.
His quarters in the mill compound were poorly furnished and rather bleak, and the tea was served by a sulky-looking servant. There may have been a woman somewhere on the premises, but I did not see her.
After I finished my tea and was preparing to continue on my safari, John said that his lorry had to make a journey in the same direction that I was going. If I would find it useful, I was welcome to travel on the lorry myself with my tent and camp kit and the people who were accompanying me. I left, having formed a very favourable first impression of John Marsh, though I thought he seemed sad and lonely.
A few weeks later, Police Inspector Hesron Mwakalumbwa knocked on my office door in the Boma at Tukuyu and asked if I could remand a prisoner in custody for two weeks while a case was prepared for preliminary inquiry. I agreed, and was astonished to see John Marsh in handcuffs, charged with murder. I was the magistrate who later committed him for trial by the High Court, and the facts of the case were not in dispute.” – (Ibid., pp. 37 – 38).
Longford went on to state:
“John Marsh had been one of the customers at a native beer-club. When an African had asked for his glass to be re-filled, John had been quite sober, but had said so loudly that all the other customers heard him, 'You can't have any more. There's not much left, and all there is is for me because I'm a European.'
Another African had then said, 'Don't talk rubbish! You're not a European. You're a black man just like us. If you weren't black, you wouldn't be drinking beer with us now!'
John said nothing, but walked out of the beer-club.
Forty minutes later he returned, carrying his shotgun which he had collected from his home. He pushed the door open and shouted, 'Who says now that I'm not a European?'
The same African repeated his insulting remark, and it was the last thing he ever said. There were about twenty witnesses to the killing.
There was no question about the identity of the killer, and I committed John for trial on a charge of murder. The High Court convicted him, and he was sentenced to death.
While he was awaiting execution, John asked to have an interview with me. He told me that he had a small savings account, and asked me if I would be willing to be named as the administrator of his estate. He explained that, if his illiterate old mother received his total savings as a single lump sum, the money would all be spent on one lavish funeral drinks party, and she would then be left completely destitute.
John wanted me to give her a small amount of money every month to support her after he was no longer there to do so himself.
I said that it would be unwise to appoint any individual officer by name to carry out his wishes, as officials were all liable to be transferred to other districts.
I advised him to nominate 'District Commissioner of Tukuyu' to administer his estate, and I promised to record his wishes on the appropriate file, and to do my best to ensure that they were respected.
Before any sentence of death was carried out, every case was the subject of a full report by the District Commissioner, or an officer acting on his behalf. This report was then examined by the country's Executive Council, who were required to advise the Governor on whether or not to commute the death sentence to one of life imprisonment, having regard to all the facts of the case and the previous character of the convicted murderer. In this case, the Governor (Edward Twining) exercised his prerogative of mercy, and John Marsh began a long sentence of imprisonment.
I never saw John again, but I was told that while in gaol he studied privately and that he eventually qualified as a civil engineer. After completing his sentence, he practised successfully in Dar es Salaam.
Nothing could ever bring back to life the man John had killed, but the case strengthened my view that not all murderers are entirely evil.” – (Ibid., pp. 38 – 39).
It was a tragedy that could have been avoided.
In the context of race relations in colonial Tanganyika or anywhere else where members of the dominant race have stereotypical views of the people they dominate and control, identifying a member of the “superior” race with those of an “inferior” race can be perceived as an insult. That is how John Marsh felt. He called himself “European,” hence white, when the person he killed called him “black” and “African.”
Yet, on empirical and rational grounds, it was perfectly right to call John Marsh “African” and “black” because his mother was “African” and “black” if the identity of his father as a white man justified calling himself “European,” hence “white.”
Had Tanganyika evolved into another South Africa, with half-castes or coloureds classified as members of a distinct racial category if the country had a large number of them, and even with some of them identifying themselves that way just to separate themselves from blacks, it would have been more racially divided and would have had very serious racial problems; it was already bad enough for black people to face racism from whites, Asians and Arabs, let alone having another group – of half-castes – added to the list to “give them hell.”
The tragedy of all this is that there is another dimension to it and it's very disturbing.
There are some blacks who wish they were born half-caste – or were a product of any kind of mixed parentage – because that would have made them “better” than black people, thus enhancing their social status. There are even those who like people of mixed race more than they do fellow blacks.
This was never a problem in colonial Tanganyika when I was growing up; and it didn't become one after independence. But there was an incident I witnessed at Mpuguso Middle School in the late 1950s – 1958 or 1959, probably 1959 – before I enrolled as a student there in 1961 which is highly instructive in this context.
The school had annual sports events – sprinting, long jump, high jump, pole vaulting and so on – which were also attended by non-students.
I remember one of the students who participated in that was a half-caste named Napoleon. He was a boarding student, staying in one of the dormitories at the school. He excelled in pole vaulting and won on that day. I remember that very well. And he drew applause, deservedly so.
What I noticed even at my tender age as an eight or nine-year old was that there were some boys my age and others in their early and mid-teens who paid him great attention. They seemed to admire him more than they did other athletes.
I remember he was tall, slender and with a light complexion.
Their admiration for him went beyond his athletic skills. It extended to who and what he was as a half-caste, with some of them saying “I'd like to be Napoleon,” “I want to be like Napoleon,” “I'm Napoleon.”
Racism had taken its toll on the minds of some young Africans who, at their impressionable age, may have really believed that other people including half-castes were superior to them simply because of what they were: non-black or not entirely black.
There was also a Somali student at Mpuguso Middle School when I was there. He was aloof; an aloofness that did not help him since there were no other Somali students he could turn to for company. He was also tall and thin with a light complexion. He had a haughty demeanour which could have been attributed to his identity as a Somali among “Bantus” or “Negroes” with whom he did not share racial identity.
I dealt with him a number of times. I was in charge of the dispensary at the school, together with another student Fred Mwakasungula, and dispensed medicine for various minor ailments afflicting the students and referred them to a bigger dispensary that was about a mile from our school and served the people in the area.
The teacher who assigned me that responsibility was George Kikowe who was responsible for the dispensary besides his normal duties as a teacher. He came from Tanga and knew my father when he also worked in Tanga before I was born. I don't remember if my father told me they were also schoolmates or classmates at Malangali Secondary School.
That is how I came to assume responsibility for the other students as their “doctor” at the school dispensary, because of George Kikowe, who was also one of my teachers. When I look back, I still wonder why I was chosen for such a major responsibility since I was one of the youngest students at Mpuguso.
One of my “patients” who stood out among the rest was the Somali student. He was two or three years behind me. His arrogance also made him stand out among other students.
Not all Somalis have an arrogant attitude towards other Africans, so-called Negroes or Bantus who are despised by many of them and were even enslaved in Somalia for hundreds of years. The ancestors of the slaves came from Tanzania more than 300 years ago. After they won their freedom, the Tanzanian government announced in June 2003 that it would accept them, grant them citizenship and give them some land in the coastal region of Tanga where their ancestors came from. They were members of the Zigua ethnic group and still speak the Zigua language and follow Zigua traditions.
There are Somalis who think they are better than “Bantus.” And they are not an insignificant number, adding another dimension to the complexity of race relations in colonial Tanganyika and even after the country won independence. It is a problem that exists even today even if in mitigated form.
However, in terms of power, it was racism practised by the colonial rulers and white settlers which had a profound impact on the colonial subjects during those years when I was growing up in the Southern Highlands Province and when I spent some time in other parts of Tanganyika – in the Western Province and in the Coast Province – in the 1950s. Social clubs exclusively for whites exemplified this problem.
Like all the other social clubs which were exclusively for whites, including the Mbeya Club in neighbouring Mbeya where I spent some of my early childhood and of which I have vivid memories before we moved to Rungwe District, the Rungwe Club in my home district was a microcosm of Tanganyika as a racially divided society whose racial hierarchy was fortified and consolidated by colonial government policies, and reflected the extent to which – not just in the context of Rungwe – whites were willing to go to maintain racial purity and their status not just as members of the dominant race but as members of a superior race in our country; my father being one of the victims of such discrimination.
The British manager of a business in the town of Tukuyu who told my father in the late 1950s he could not eat his lunch in the office they shared was probably a member of the Rungwe Club that was exclusively for whites.
I saw him a few times when I went to see my father during my visits to Tukuyu. I also saw his son who was about my age.
When I was writing my book, Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties, in 2006, some of the whites who were in Tanganyika during those days and whom I got the chance to interview once lived in Tukuyu or knew the place. One of them was close to my age. But I didn't think he was the son of the manager who insulted and humiliated my father in the late 1950s.
Yet, the late 1950s were clearly a turning point in the history of Tanganyika. The Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the party that led the struggle for independence under the stewardship of Julius Nyerere, had just won general elections in September 1958 and February 1959 and was on the verge of forming a new government – known as self-government – just before independence.
It won all 30 seats in the Legislative Council (known by its acronym LEGCO), the colonial legislative body that would now be transformed into a representative assembly. Among the winners were Europeans and Asians who were members of TANU or independents who supported TANU and its non-racial policies.
I even remember when Nyerere, the leader of the independence movement in Tanganyika, came to Tukuyu and addressed a mass rally in 1958 and 1959. I attended the rallies when I was a pupil at Kyimbila Primary School two miles south of the town of Tukuyu. Other pupils were also there together with the adults.
I even remember how Nyerere was dressed. He wore a light green short-sleeved shirt.
He rode into town standing in the back of a Landrover and was introduced at the rally by Samuel Mwambenja, chairman of TANU in Rungwe District, who knew and worked with my father after independence when my father became a district councillor.
Nyerere was an excellent orator and excellent teacher who got his message across to everybody who listened to him. When he spoke at the rally, he knew children were. He saw us when he was looking around.
I remember it rained on one of those days. He said the colonial rulers hoped he would just disappear, somehow, washed away by the rain, as the audience laughed and clapped.
I was not in Tukuyu when Michael Longford was there from October 1951 to November 1952. Even if I had been, I would have been too young to venture out on my own and walk around the town of Tukuyu.
I was two years old in October 1951 when he first went to Tukuyu. My parents and I together with my sister Maria were in Morogoro in the Coast Province in 1952 where my brother Lawrence was born on Monday, 29 September 1952. My father worked as a medical assistant at the government hospital in that town which later became the capital of Morogoro Region.
Michael Longford started working in the colonial service as a cadet and was sent to Rungwe District in October 1951. He was 23 years old. He rose through the ranks and finally became the District Commissioner (D.C.) of Lindi District in the Southern Province.
Before then, he served in the colonial service in Iringa, Tabora, Ulanga and Songea. He also became Private Secretary to the Governor of Tanganyika, Sir Edward Twining, in Dar es Salaam.
As a junior officer in the colonial service, he was a magistrate of the lowest rank. As he himself stated:
“In every District Office in which I served, there was always a list of the distribution of duties of the District Commissioner and the District Officers....The duties that an officer was expected to perform varied greatly from district to district....When there was no...specialist officer available in the district,...the responsibility...fell to one of the District Officers.
There was no Forestry Officer or Labour Officer stationed in Tukuyu, so the list of my duties included matters connected with forestry and labour, although these did not take up very much of my time.
I spent much more time in the District Court. All District Officers were magistrates and coroners, but there were three classes of magistrate. District Commissioners were first-class magistrates, with power to impose sentences of up to two years' imprisonment. District Officers who had been confirmed in their appointments were second-class magistrates, with less extensive powers. Cadets were third-class magistrates with very limited powers....A cadet usually dealt either with comparatively trivial cases like petty shoplifting, minor traffic offences, wilful neglect to pay poll tax, or preliminary enquiries into very serious cases.” – (Ibid., pp. 21, 22).
During his ten years in Tanganyika as a colonial administrator, Longford witnessed the country's transition from colonial rule to independence.
But one thing remained unchanged during that transitional period: the way the people lived, mostly their traditional way of life, in their traditional societies which had existed for hundreds of years; although “modern civilisation” introduced by Europeans and their Western ways of life as well as other influences also have had an impact on the lives of Africans through the years.
Even today, the Nyakyusa in Rungwe continue to live basically the same way as peasants and farmers in the same villages where they have lived for generations.
They live in a district that gets an abundance of rainfall year round, one of the highest in the world, enabling them to grow a variety of food crops including cash crops such as coffee and tea.
The luxuriant vegetation includes guavas and a variety of edible berries and other fruit growing wild, pine trees and many others.
When Europeans first came in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they found the Nyakyusa had virtually been untouched by outside influences since they first arrived in the Rift Valley district in 1500.
It is a district of many rivers and small lakes, ringed by mountain ranges which form its borders.
On the northern border of the district is Rungwe Mountain, a dead volcano, one of the highest in East Africa.
The only opening on the borders of the district is Lake Nyasa. Part of the lake is in the district. The district’s southwestern border is also the Tanzanian-Malawian border.
Its mountain ranges in the east which form its eastern border are named Livingstone Mountains after the famous missionary-explorer Dr. David Livingstone who passed through the area during some of his famous travels to the Great Lakes region of East and Central Africa.
It is in this district that a pocket of Africa’s pristine beauty was stumbled upon by British explorer Joseph Thomson in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is also in this district that one of the last encounters between Africa and Europe took place, an encounter Afrocentrists and many other Africans wish had never taken place, anywhere, in Africa. As British historian Alison Smith stated about the district and its inhabitants and their encounter with foreigners:
“The lakeside scene (of Lake Nyasa) was in the early part of the nineteenth century one of relative peace and stability...At its north-western corner, one enclave of people succeeded, almost to the end of this period, in defending themselves from attack, and remained little touched by outside influences of any kind up to the time when they came under the observation of the first European visitors.
The Nyakyusa people inhabited the pocket of superbly fertile country…
The Nyakyusa afford an outstanding example of the level of comfort to which, given a sufficiently favourable environment, African life could attain even with a simple Iron Age culture.
Possibly it was this very degree of social consciousness and material well-being which, together with their numerical concentration and their remoteness, enabled them for long to repel their attackers.
The most distinctive feature of Nyakyusa society was the age-village, whereby male age-groups, together with wives and children, formed villages until the children became herd-boys and in turn hived off to form settlements of their own. They also had chiefs…
Cattle were the Nyakyusas’ chief pride and care. They hung them with bells, and stalled them in cleanly byres, separate from their own dwellings.
But they were also skilled agriculturalists, whose carefully ridged and manured plots climbed far up the valley slopes, planted with maize, yams, and sweet potatoes, but above all with bananas, the staples of their ample diet.
The stability of an intensive cultivation, moreover, together with the need for protection from a heavy rainfall, caused them to be expert builders, and their conical huts, set about with banana groves from which the fallen leaves were swept daily, made an unforgettable impact on the African traveller.” – (Alison Smith, ibid., pp. 257 – 58).
One such traveller was, of course, the explorer Joseph Thomson who as Alison put it, “had just come down through the mountains that separate this lakeside paradise from the bare and inhospitable uplands which largely comprise what is now the Southern Highlands region of Tanganyika.”
Thomson’s writings, To the Central African Lakes and Back, which were published in two volumes in London in 1881, are among the most famous and important works in the history of the imperial conquest of Africa.
He was one of the last explorers towards the end of the nineteenth century which had opened up the continent to the greed of the imperial powers, and Europe had finally arrived, permanently. It would be almost another century before Europeans were sent packing and Africans got their land back and started rewriting their history distorted by the imperial conquerors.
In my home district of Rungwe, the town of Tukuyu and its very founding symbolised conquest by Europeans. It also symbolised imperial might as the nerve centre of the colonial power structure in the district over an indigenous people who, as elsewhere across the country and the continent, were no more than colonial subjects – not equal citizens – dominated by our conquerors and rulers from Europe.
My life in Rungwe District
My home in the village of Mpumbuli is almost exactly four miles south of Tukuyu. On the road across River Lubalisi from our house is a milestone with an inscription, “4 miles,” the distance from and to the town of Tukuyu.
Mpumbuli village is an integral part of a larger area known as Kyimbila after which the school founded by Mary Hancock was named; so was the Moravian Church in which my parents and I as well as all my siblings and all our relatives in the area grew up. It is known as Kyimbila Moravian Church. And it is still there today.
Mary Hancock, my mother's teacher and founder of Kyimbila Girls' School, was also a friend of Julius Nyerere and his family since the early 1950s before Nyerere became prime minister and later president of Tanganyika:
“Maureen Cowan and Mary Hancock have told me about Tabora Girls' School, of which both have been headmistresses. Miss Hancock is a devoted friend of the Nyerere family; while Julius and Maria Nyerere were struggling with financial difficulties, two of their children lived with her.” – (Judith Listowel, The Making of Tanganyika, London: Chatto & Windus, 1965, p. 428).
And as William Edgett Smith stated in his book, We Must Run While Others Walk: A Portrait of Africa's Julius Nyerere:
“Miss Mary Hancock, a peppery little Englishwoman who had come to Tanganyika in 1940 'to help the black people, as we called them then,' has recalled, 'Oh, that man, how he thinks! The civil servants in Musoma couldn't see why I remained his friend after he declared for Uhuru. We civil servants had to be careful, you know – we couldn't attend political meetings.
I would say, 'He's my friend. If you can't differentiate, I can.'
Well! You should have seen the civil servants change when it became clear that he was winning.'” – (William Edgett Smith, quoting Mary Hancock, We Must Run While Others Walk: A Portrait of Africa's Julius Nyerere, New York: Random House, 1972, p. 84; W. E. Smith, Nyerere of Tanzania, Faraday Close, Worthing, UK: Littlehampton Book Services, 1973, p. 65; The New Yorker, Volume 47, Issues 27 – 35, 1971, p. 84).
Mary Hancock was the District Education Officer (DEO) of Musoma in the 1950s when she first met Nyerere and his family. Musoma was Nyerere's home district. – (See Pat Holden, Women Administrative Officers in Colonial Africa 1944 – 1960, Oxford Development Records Project, 1985, p. 194).
She later, in the late 1950s, became a Provincial Education Officer (PEO) for the Lake Province and was based in Mwanza, the provincial capital.
Miss Hancock also became headmistress of Tabora Girls' School in the Western Province.
Besides teaching at Kyimbila Girls' School in the Southern Highlands Province in the early 1940s, she also founded Loleza Girls' School in the town of Mbeya in the same province during the same period.
In fact, Loleza Girls' School had its origin at Kyimbila Girls' School. As Osija Mwambungu stated in his book, Veneer of Love, about one of the students at Kyimbila Girls' School:
“I met Esinati for the first time in 1946 at Kyimbila Girls' School before it moved to Mbeya as Loleza Girls' School. She acted a leading part in a play called Snow White, when we were practising Christmas plays and carols. She later qualified as a State Registered Nurse in England, at Barnet.” – (Osija Mwambungu, Veneer of Love, Nairobi, Kenya: East African Literature Bureau, 1975, p. 74).
Mary Hancock became a citizen of Tanzania and a senior education inspector. She was elected Member of Parliament (MP) in 1970. Fondly known as Mama Hancock, she died in October 1977:
“In 1970, she was nominated to Parliament by the women's organisation, Umoja wa Wanawake wa Tanzania (UWT) and elected by the National Assembly (Parliament). Mama Hancock was a much loved and respected figure. A requiem mass was celebrated by the Cardinal Archbishop in Dar es Salaam Cathedral on 28th October.” – (“Obituary: Mary Hancock,” Tanzanian Affairs, August 1977 – January 1978).
I remember my mother talking about Mary Hancock as a devoted teacher and very strict disciplinarian during her days as a pupil at Kyimbila Girls' School in the same area where her maternal uncle and my great uncle Asegelile Mwankemwa served as the pastor of Kyimbila Moravian Church.
He was the first African pastor of the church, one of the oldest Moravian churches in Tanganyika, later Tanzania. The church was founded by German missionaries.
Kyimbila Moravian Church was built by the Germans in 1912 and ministered by them. The first missionary was sent to Kyimbila in 1907. According to a historical work, The Moravian Church in Tanzania Southern Province: A Short History:
“Kyimbila Station: This station is just seven kilometres from Lutengano. The distance from Kyimbila to Rungwe is about 20 kilometres....The decision was reached to send a missionary in 1907, who was to perform all pastoral duties (at Kyimbila).” – ( Angetile Yesaya Musomba, The Moravian Church in Tanzania Southern Province: A Short History, Nairobi, Kenya: Institut Francais de recherche en Afrique (IFRA), 2005, p. 36).
Historical works also show the role the Germans played in establishing Kyimbila not only as a mission but as a German settlement and as a plantation:
“ There were some attempts to establish rubber plantations in the southern highlands region. The missionaries of the Hermhuter Mission at Kyimbila in Langenburg District successfully established a plantation of Landolphia stolzii busse. In 1907 they had planted four hectares with 4,000 vine plants and 2,000 support trees.” – (African Economic History, African Studies Center, Boston University, 1993, p. 126).
The church at Kyimbila was built in an area where the Germans also established a tea estate in 1904 which did not become fully operational on commercial basis until 1926. It came to be known as Kyimbila Tea Estate.
The first Moravian Church in Rungwe District was established near Mount Rungwe in 1891. According to the history of Moravian missions:
“The Berlin Missionary Society was already at work in German East Africa; with that Society the Moravian Church did not want to compete and, therefore, to prevent friction or overlapping,...the two Societies, working side by side, will found stations north of Lake Nyassa....
In 1891 the campaign began. For twenty-three years the chief leader and superintendent of the work in German Nyassaland was Theodore Meyer, son of Henry Meyer, the pioneer in Hlubiland. One of his colleagues was a Swiss, Theophilus Richard, and these two, pushing north from Lake Nyassa, discovered, at the foot of Mt. Rungwe, a spur of the Livingstone Hills, a splendid sight for the first station. The date was August 21st.
The two men had never beheld a more gorgeous scene. On the north-west rose Mt. Rungwe; on the west lay a dense forest; on the south-east lay the teeming dales of Kondeland; and gazing southwards towards Lake Nyassa....
Rungwe seemed an ideal site for a mission-station. The land was high, the water pure, and the air clear and bracing.” – (Joseph E. Hutton, A History of Moravian Missions, Internet Archive).
There was also a land dispute between Kyimbila Tea Estate and the congregation of Kyimbila Moravian Church which had a sad ending:
“In 1951, the African congregation of Kyimbila Mission turned to the UN, desperate for help. They felt betrayed by their own missionaries who had apparently sold the church lands to a tea estate without informing the congregation.
They were told that all the buildings would have to be torn down within a year. The mission owned the land freehold, and it had the legal title to sell it.” – (Ullrich Lohrmann, Voices from Tanganyika: Great Britain, the United Nations and the Decolonization of a Trust Territory, 1946 – 1961, Munster, Germany: LIT Verlag, 2008, p. 311).
The tea estate won the case and the church was demolished in the sixties. The congregation found another site, a short distance farther north away from the estate, and rebuilt the church but with a different architectural design.
When the original church building went down, so did its history, including a part of the history of those of us who grew up there not only as members of the church but also as residents of the area of Kyimbila where the church was built.
People of the younger generation, and those who were born after it was torn down, have no memory of it.
It was a historical building and would have served as a monument and as a reminder of the area's history and the coming of German missionaries to the region had it been left intact. After being demolished, it is as if it had never even existed.
After the spot where it stood was taken over by the tea estate, the memory was also erased, except in the minds of those who knew where the church was during the old days when Asegelile Mwankemwa became the first African pastor and continued to serve the congregation for many years.
When Kyimbila Primary School was founded in the early 1940s, it became inextricably linked with the church, not only because of its proximity to the church, built in the same area, but also because almost all of the parents of all the children who went to school there were members of Kyimbila Moravian Church. The children themselves went with their parents to the same church.
Kyimbila Girls' School was one of the few, very few, girls' schools in Tanganyika and had a great reputation for academic excellence because of Mary Hancock and her colleagues as well as the students themselves. Machame in the region of Mount Kilimanjaro was another one:
“Both Kyimbila and Machame Government girls' schools have had girls in Standard IX this year and about twelve girls are, in spite of difficulties, continuing to Standard X in 1950.
Kyimbila School has become in many ways a centre of social life for the District....
At Kyimbila, the Government girls' school in the Southern Highlands Province, a successful performance was given of the Merchant of Venice adapted to the circumstances of a production in Swahili.” – (Tanganyika Department of Education, Tanganyika Territory, Annual Report of the Education Department 1944, Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, pp. 22, 18).
One of my teachers at Kyimbila Primary School in 1956 and 1957 when I was in Standard One and Standard Two was Eslie (also known as Esili) Mwakyambiki. He knew my parents and talked to them, especially my father, quite often. He was later elected Member of Parliament (MP) representing Rungwe District. He was also appointed by President Nyerere as Deputy Minister of Defence and National Service when he was a Member of Parliament.
Years later, in January 1971, I came under his supervision again when I went to Ruvu National Service camp. National service was mandatory for all those who had completed secondary school, high school, college and university education. Mwakyambiki was head of the camp at Ruvu when I was there.
That was before he became a Member of Parliament and Deputy Minister of Defence and National Service. National Service included basic military training for six months.
All my brothers and sisters also attended Kyimbila Primary School.
What I learned at Kyimbila left an indelible mark on my mind at a very early age in terms of how I perceived education. I never wavered in my commitment and determination to go as far as I could in school until I ended up in the United States, more than 8,000 miles away from home, in pursuit of my goal.
My earliest years in colonial Tanganyika were not typical of the lives of most children in my country during that period and even after independence because of my father's level of education, the kind of job he had and the income he earned as a government employee in a country where most people could not even read and write.
The parents of the vast majority of the children were illiterate. Many of them did not earn steady income. Most of the children were born at home, not in hospitals, and that is still the case today.
I was born at Kilimani Hospital and lived with my parents in one of the government houses for government employees in Mwanga, on a street with the same name, in the town of Kigoma when my father worked as a medical assistant at the same hospital.
I later moved to Ujiji with my parents where my sister Maria was born at a Roman Catholic hospital on Sunday, 1 April 1951.
The rest of my siblings were also born in different parts of the country: Morogoro in the Coast Province, and in Mbeya and Tukuyu in the Southern Highlands Province, where my father worked.
I am the first-born in my family and was named Godfrey by my aunt Isabella, one of my father's younger sisters.
I was baptised when I was only two months and three weeks old on Christmas day, 25 December 1949.
I was baptised by Reverend Frank McGorlick (from Victoria, Australia), a Scottish minister of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Kigoma my parents belonged to. But I was brought up as a member of the Moravian Church at Kyimbila in Rungwe District.
Years later, when I was writing a book, Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties, I got in touch with Reverend McGorlick's wife Barbara in Victoria, Australia. She told me that they continued to live in Tanganyika, later Tanzania, until the early 1990s and that her husband died in 1993. I got in touch with her in 2005.
I also got in touch with their son Richard during the same time. He also lived in Victoria, Australia. He grew up in Tanganyika, later Tanzania, as did his siblings.
My father played a critical role in my early life and education.
He was a very strict disciplinarian and taught me at home when I was attending primary school from Standard One to Standard Four and during the first two years of middle school in Standard Five and Standard Six before I left home to go to boarding school at Mpuguso, three miles away, when I was 13 years old.
I was a day student during the first two years of middle school (1961 – 1962), going to school in the morning and returning home in the evening just as I did for four years when I was in primary school from 1956 to 1959.
I entered Standard Five at Mpuguso Middle School in January 1961 when I was 11 years old, the same year I started learning English.
My father also taught me when I was out of school and went home during holidays in my last two years of middle school in Standard Seven and Standard Eight.
My mother, who taught Sunday school and was a volunteer adult education teacher for some time teaching adults in our area how to read and write, also taught me at home when I was in primary school.
Kyimbila Primary School was within walking distance, two miles from our home, although that may have been somewhat long for a child under years of age to walk everyday. The school was about twenty yards off the road going north to the town of Tukuyu.
From the time I was six years old in 1956 until I was ten in 1959, I walked to school, and back home from school, four miles everyday, five days a week. That was a total of 20 miles in one week and 80 miles in one month. In one year, I walked 960 miles, and 3840 miles in four years. That was almost 4,000 miles, about half the distance from my home country, Tanzania, to the United States.
In my first two years at Mpuguso Middle School from 1961 to 1962, when I was a day student, I walked six miles everyday – three to school and three back home from school – for five days a week, a total of 30 miles.
I sometimes rode a bicycle my father bought me. It was a small bicycle, right for my size.
I was the only student who rode a bicycle to school and one of only two who wore shoes, which made me uncomfortable, seeing the other students walking – actually running – to school every morning, barefoot, and in very low temperatures, in the thirties or low forties, and returning home in the evening the same way but walking more than running. It's cold in the Southern Highlands.
Very often, on our way back home – a few of us came from the same village and walked together – I did not ride my bicycle. I simply walked with the other students, pushing my bicycle I rode earlier to school, just to be with them and walk just like they did.
Walking 30 miles in one week to and from middle school did not seem to be very long distance because it became routine for us just as it was when we walked to and from Kyimbila Primary School.
In one month, I walked 120 miles to and from Mpuguso Middle School and 1440 miles in one year. In two years, I walked 2880 miles, almost 3,000, about the same distance from New York City to Los Angeles.
It was all worth it and enabled me to be what I became years later: a relatively educated person, news reporter and writer of modest achievement, and one of the people who got the chance to travel to other countries and eventually live in the United States for many years but still with the intention of returning to the land of my birth and upbringing.
I grew up in a politically conscious family. My parents were friends with some of the leading figures in the struggle for independence in Tanganyika. They included Austin Shaba, my father's co-worker as a medical assistant and earlier his classmate at the Medical Training Centre (MTC) at Tanganyika's largest hospital, then known as Sewa Haji, in the capital Dar es Salaam, later transformed into the country's first medical school.
Founded in 1897, Sewa Haji Hospital was renamed Princess Margaret Hospital in 1956 by the British colonial rulers and Muhimbili by the new African government soon after independence.
Years later, Austin Shaba became a cabinet member in the first independence cabinet in which he served as Minister of Local Government under President Julius Nyerere and later as Minister of Health and Housing. He also served as Deputy Speaker of Parliament and as a Member of Parliament for Mtwara.
When I was a news reporter at the Daily News, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I once interviewed Shaba on the telephone. That was in 1972, several months before I left for the United States.
He was, during that time, chairman of the Tanganyika Sisal Marketing Board in Tanga, a coastal city, then the second-largest in the country after Dar es Salaam.
When I introduced myself to him, he asked me:
“Are you Elijah Mwakikagile's son?”
I said:
“Yes.”
He went on to say:
“I know your parents and knew you when you were a child.”
When I was growing up, my parents told me about some of the people they knew, especially my father's classmates, schoolmates and co-workers who were involved in the nationalist movement during the struggle for independence. One of them was Austin Shaba.
I also knew some of them, especially those who came from our home district of Rungwe.
One of them was John Mwakangale, my father's classmate since primary school from Standard One at Tukuyu Primary School in Rungwe District to Malangali Secondary School in Iringa District in the Southern Highlands Province. They came from the same area, five miles apart, in Rungwe District and knew each other since childhood.
I remember when I went to see Mwakangale one day in July or August 1971 at his office in Dar es Salaam. He was chairman of the Tanzania Tea Authority and casually remarked, “You're Elijah's son,” without even mentioning my father's last name, indicating how they knew each other so well and for such a long time since childhood.
His office was close to the headquarters of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, within walking distance, where I worked briefly during that time before I went back to the Daily News....
Mwakangale became one of the prominent leaders of the party that led the struggle for independence, Tanganyika African National Union (TANU. He was also one of the prominent leaders of the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) which was founded in Mwanza, Tanganyika, in 1958 under the leadership of Nyerere.
Mwakangale was also the first leader Nelson Mandela met in newly independent Tanganyika in January 1962 – just one month after the country emerged from colonial rule – when Mandela secretly left South Africa on 11 January to seek assistance from other African countries in the struggle against apartheid and wrote about him in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.
Tanganyika was the first independent African country Mandela visited and the first in the region to win independence. He went to other African countries using a travel document given to him by the government of Tanganyika. The document stated:
“This is Nelson Mandela, a citizen of the Republic of South Africa. He has permission to leave Tanganyika and return here.”
Tanganyika was chosen by other African leaders in May 1963 to be the headquarters of all the African liberation movements under the leadership of President Julius Nyerere when they met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to form the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).
John Mwakangale was also a member of parliament and served in the cabinet as Minister of Labour under Nyerere in the early part of independence.
Professor John Iliffe in his book A Modern History of Tanganyika described John Mwakangale as a “vehement nationalist.”
He did not even want American Peace Corps in Tanganyika and accused them of causing trouble. He was quoted in a news report, “M.P. Attacks American Peace Corps,” which was the main story on the front page of the Tanganyika Standard, 12 June 1964, stating:
“Wherever they are we always hear of trouble, you hear of people trying to overthrow the government. These people are not here for peace, they are here for trouble. We do not want any more Peace Corps.”
American Peace Corps were some of my teachers in middle school and secondary school in Tanzania.
One of them was Leonard Levitt who was my teacher at Mpuguso Middle School in 1964. After he returned to the United States, he became a prominent journalist and renowned author. He wrote, among other works, An African Season, the first book ever written by a member of the Peace Corps, and Conviction: Solving the Moxley Murder, about a homicide which received extensive media coverage because it involved a member of the Kennedy family.
Not long before he left for the United States after the end of his two-year service as a Peace Corp teacher at Mpuguso, he came to Songea Secondary School in 1965 to see his fellow Peace Corps teaching at our school....
We were playing basketball at Songea Secondary School when Levitt and the other Peace Corp teachers at our school came to see us play. I got the chance to talk to him for the last time on that day. I never saw him again even when I was in the United States. He died of cancer on 18 May 2020.
His fellow Peace Corp volunteer at Mpuguso Middle School, Mr Wayne as we called him, was also one of my teachers. He said he came from Colorado. We did not know his first name as much as we did Levitt's. He was quiet and did not talk as much as Leonard Levitt did.
Unfortunately, I remember him for an incident that should never have happened. That was in 1964.
One day, one of my classmates in Standard Eight was not paying enough attention to Mr. Wayne when he was teaching and was brutally punished for that.
He just happened to be looking down at his notebook or something else instead of looking at the teacher in front of us. It was an infraction that almost got him paralysed. He violated the unwritten rule of not paying attention to the teacher as much as he should have, although only momentarily.
Mr. Wayne was furious. He had a blackboard duster, thick and heavy, in his hand and threw it at the student so hard, right into his face, that he almost broke his nose.
The student bled profusely right there in class and kept on wiping off blood, over and over, without the slightest concern by Mr. Wayne about the student's well-being. He kept on teaching and the student sat right in his chair until the end of the class.
The student was in the row on my right straight from me. We had three rows of chairs and I was in the middle row.
We were young – I was only 14 years old – and did not see things in terms of race when we should have in their proper contexts. We saw Mr. Wayne simply as a teacher; harsh, yes, but a teacher nonetheless, and nothing else.
It was excessive punishment, what he did to our classmate, still punishment that would not have been meted out against him had he been paying attention to our teacher. Yet it stayed in my mind for many years. I still haven't forgotten it and never will.
When I was in secondary school in my late teens, I was able to view the incident in the broader context of race and wondered if Mr. Wayne would have been so harsh and brutal had the student he punished or wanted to punish and had our entire class been white.
I concluded then, and I still maintain today almost sixty years later, that had the student been white, Mr. Wayne would probably not have thrown the blackboard duster at him at all the way he did, and with such anger, when he almost fractured our classmate's nose. He could even have killed him after inflicting what could have amounted to a lethal blow in his face.
He threw the blackboard duster so hard, and from only a few feet away, that it was clear to us even at our tender age, that he intended to hurt our classmate and inflict great bodily harm on him. It was as if he was throwing a baseball in a baseball game with all the force he could muster; only that he wanted to really hurt this particular student. It was tragic and unforgettable.
When he looked at the student and at the rest of us, he may even have conjured up images of a people not worth of respect by members of the higher breed – whites and even other non-blacks including Asians and Arabs who think they are better than black people – as if we were an inferior sub-species of mankind.
There are some non-blacks who consider us to be on the lowest rung of the evolutionary ladder, which is utter nonsense and sheer superstition. That is what racism is, superstition without any rational basis or explanation.
It defies logic to think that intelligent people can be racist, hence blind to reality, and without common sense.
I don't think Mr. Wayne was a racist – he may only have been infuriated by what he perceived to be disrespect by our classmate – although his behaviour on that day, and the way he chose to punish him, may imply he was.
I believe he was genuinely interested in helping us just like the other Peace Corp volunteers were, although there were some people in Tanganyika – and elsewhere in Africa – who thought they came with bad intentions (as spies and so on) or with a paternalistic attitude and that some of them may have been racist.
Perhaps some of them were even benevolent racists with a paternalistic attitude towards Africans reminiscent of Albert Schweitzer. Even if some of them were, what is important to remember is that nothing, absolutely nothing, stopped them from doing what they intended to do when they went to Africa, which was to teach. And they accomplished their mission.
We deal with such people everyday from all parts of the world. They include doctors, missionaries, technical experts in all fields and we accept their contribution to our countries.
We will never know how they feel or what they think about us as black people. As long they do their job, that's fine.
That is not condoning racism, it is just being realistic. If we know they are racist or find out that they are and they mistreat us or insult us, we should ask them to leave. But many of them never show their true feelings towards us.
So we end up working with them and they end up working with us in our countries and we are grateful they they are helping us. This applies to American Peace Corps who came to Tanganyika in the sixties and thereafter.
There is no question that Mr. Wayne was not patient with the student he injured seriously. He could have warned him instead of delivering such a devastating blow, throwing the blackboard duster at him and hitting him in the face so hard as if he was trying to kill a cobra or some other kind of dangerous creature.
The incident had some parallels to what happened to me eight years earlier in my first year in school – in primary school – in 1956 when I was attacked by a dog as I explain later.
Years later, I felt the attack could have been avoided had the owners of the dog valued the lives of the children who walked past their house on their way to school.
There are probably some people of all races, not just blacks, who don't believe Mr. Wayne would have thrown a blackboard duster, and so hard, at a white student in Tanganyika, in the United States, or anywhere else.
He felt insulted by a black student because he was ignored by him when he was teaching. And that triggered something in him, prompting him to deliver what could have been a fatal blow to the student.
He could have been equally ignored, hence insulted, by a white student elsewhere. But the outcome would probably have been different.
Mr. Levitt was never physically abusive to us; nor was Mr. Wayne except for that single incident involving one of our classmates. And he did not talk the way Mr. Levitt did; he spoke in a low voice, sometimes in a nasal tone, his voice subdued.
Levitt was not quiet at all. He was also loud but only when he wanted to get our attention in and out of class.
I never tried to get in touch with Leonard Levitt in all the years I lived in the United States although I later found out where he was; maybe I should have even if it was just to thank him for doing an excellent job as our teacher at Mpuguso Middle School and tell him I had written some books through the years.
And I will never forget what he said when he introduced himself to us in class at Mpuguso in the early part of 1964 when I was in Standard Eight, what Americans call the eighth grade, my last year at that school where I enrolled in 1961. He said:
“My name is Leonard Levitt. I am a Jew from New York City.”
He even worked as a news reporter at the Detroit News in the same city where I once lived and attended school, although I don't know we were in the same city during the same years. He was also a reporter for Newsday in Long Island, New York, for many years from 1975 and worked for other media outlets including Time magazine. I was still in Detroit in 1975. That was the year I graduated from Wayne State University.
I never knew where Mr. Wayne was and would have equally thanked him had I succeeded in getting in touch with him if I tried to do so.
They taught at Mpuguso Middle School, located about 20 miles north of the Malawian-Tanzanian border, from 1963 to 1964, a two-year service mandated by the Peace Corps. They taught me only in my last year at Mpuguso. I went to Songea Secondary school in 1965.
Both of them help bring back memories of my student days at Mpuguso and of my youthful innocence during those early days of independence which was a time of great expectations for us without knowing what lay ahead for our country as a newly independent nation.
What was yet to come was not always pleasant. It was a rough road of harsh realities of nationhood, as we later learned. We did not know that when we were young students at Mpuguso, a school with a reputation for academic excellence and rigorous discipline even in extra-curricula activities.
All we knew was that we were now independent and would probably have more opportunities to succeed in life and live better lives than we did under colonial rule; which did not turn out to be true in all cases.
Yet some of us succeeded. Three of my classmates became doctors, one of them in Wales, the United Kingdom, where he still is today after living and working there for many years.
One of our schoolmates who was one year ahead of us also became a doctor. Others went into different fields after acquiring higher education.
Leonard Levitt returned to Tanzania in September 1981 to see what had taken place in the country through the years since he left. He wrote an article about Mpuguso Middle School and Tanzania in general which was published under the title, “Tanzania: A Dream Deferred,” in The New York Times Magazine, 14 November 1982:
“I first arrived in Tanzania in 1963, as a teacher in the Peace Corps, in the heady days just after independence from Britain. The school I was assigned to was in the southern highlands, in blue mountains shadowed by clouds and mist. It was a setting as pristine as the ideals that had brought me there.
The school was named Mpuguso,...an upper primary school – that is, it included grades 5 to 8....
My students, nearly all of them boys, were as bright and hard working as any I'd ever known....The boarders – those whose fathers owned enough cows to sell in order to pay the 150 shillings, or $20-a-year fees – studied in their classrooms until midnight by a kerosene lamp hung from a rafter. Hunched over their desks, they squinted and scribbled as the light became fainter and fainter.
The goal of each student was to pass his exam for secondary school, where there were places for only a quarter of them. Passing the exam was the first step necessary to leaving their villages and entering the modern world of the 20th century, which to them meant a world where everyone wore new clothes and shoes, listened to transistor radios and rode in cars and airplanes. To my students, this was the promise of uhuru, or independence from British rule.
Uhuru had been won by the young and charismatic President Julius K. Nyerere, who so eloquently urged a new and better life for Tanzania and for Africa.
The son of an illiterate tribal chief from a village not unlike Mpuguso, Nyerere had been a teacher himself – hence his Swahili title of Mwalimu.
Educated in Britain, he had translated Shakespeare's Julius Caesar into Swahili.
More important, Nyerere had persuaded the British to quit Tanzania without firing a shot.
Among Western liberals and intellectuals, he came to be regarded as a kind of African philosopher-king.
He was perceived as a selfless leader, a man who disdained violence; a nonracist who offered Tanzanian citizenship to any European or Asian who wished to remain; a benevolent socialist who wished to rid Tanzania, indeed all Africa, of its triple plagues – ignorance, poverty and disease.” – (Leonard Levitt, Tanzania: A Dream Deferred,” The New York Times Magazine, 14 November 1982).
He went on to state:
“In September 1981, 18 years after I first arrived in Tanzania, I returned to find my students, and from them, perhaps, to learn something of what had happened to the country. They were all as delighted to see me as I was to see them, and to my surprise they remembered even the most obscure details about our time together – words I'd spoken, lessons I'd taught, books I'd given them.
On the surface many members of this first generation of uhuru's beneficiaries appeared to have prospered. Of the 10 I saw, half had studied abroad; nearly all held Government jobs....
In the lobby of the Kilimanjaro (Hotel in Dar es Salaam) I meet one of my former students, whom I will refer to here as Rashid. I remember him as a small, light-complexioned boy, younger than the others. Now, though he is still short, his color has darkened and he has gained weight, giving him the portly appearance of prosperity.
'So, Mr. Levitt. How are you?' he says to me, standing in the lobby. He is wearing slacks and an open-neck sport shirt, the dress of the urban Tanzanian. He smiles. ''How are things?'
This colloquialism reminds me of the fine linguist Rashid was. Remarkably, at Mpuguso, he learned to speak English with barely an accent.
''Do you remember the book you gave me, Mr. Levitt, when you left Mpuguso?' he says. ''Inside you wrote, 'To Rashid, you have been a pleasure to teach. I am sure one day you will study in the United States.' Well, Mr. Levitt, I have not yet been to the United States, but I have studied in Europe.'
We walk upstairs to the hotel lounge and order two Kilimanjaro beers (which, when available, cost 20 shillings, or $2.50, a bottle) while Rashid begins telling me about himself. 'As I am sure you know, Mr. Levitt, I passed my exam for secondary school. After secondary school, I passed Form V and Form VI on my own and was accepted at the University of Dar es Salaam, where I received a degree with honors in international marketing. I am now,' he says proudly, 'the manager of a small, private tourist company. So you see, Mr. Levitt, I am doing very well.'
A few days later, I visit Rashid at his office. It is in an Indian, or 'Asian' – as Indians are called – section of the city, and consists of a small room off the sidewalk. The room is filled with old men in Muslim skull caps and long white gowns.
Perhaps to explain why his small tourist company is smaller than he indicated, perhaps because he decided he would rather confide in me than attempt to impress me, Rashid begins speaking in a rapid voice. 'You see, Mr. Levitt, with my degree in international marketing, I became an assistant manager with the T.T.C.,' he said, referring to the Government-run Tanzania Tourist Corporation, which has taken over most segments of Tanzania's once-lucrative tourist industry. 'I did very well there. I was sent to Sweden for a year's course of study. And I received a scholarship to study in France and was studying French in preparation.'
He pauses. 'Mr. Levitt, my superior was jealous of me. I was better educated than he, and he resented my success. A year ago, a woman tourist made a complaint against me, and my superior dismissed me. I was in Sweden at the time and was recalled. My scholarship to France was canceled. I was out of work for nine months. I was married to a young girl, and we had two small children. I had no money and the poor girl was so upset she ran away. I had to send the children back to my mother near Mpuguso'....
He recalled the days he was in the former Southern Highlands Province whose capital was Mbeya during colonial rule and after independence and about some of his former students he met in Mbeya:
“There are two ways to travel overland to Mpuguso. A new tarmac road built by the Americans runs from Dar southwest to Mbeya, the regional capital of the southern highlands; from Mbeya, another new tarmac road, built by the Germans, runs south past Mpuguso, 50 miles away, and continues down to the Malawi border....
There is also the Tazara Railway, built by the Chinese, which runs from Dar to Mbeya, and then southwest into Zambia completed in 1976....
We arrive in Mbeya, about 50 miles from Mpuguso, early the next morning. I remember it as having been a lovely place set in the mountains, with purple jacaranda trees and Asian dukas (shops) lining its two main streets. In its center was the British settlers' Mbeya Club, with a bar, squash court and nine-hole golf course with 'greens' of black tar, and which only the year before uhuru began accepting African and Asian members....
The Mbeya Hotel also remains, a relic of the colonial past where visiting Tanzanian dignitaries from Dar es Salaam are now put up and where, at night, at the bar, the elite of Mbeya's officials congregate....
I introduce myself to the young African at the front desk, but I am unprepared for his reply. 'Are you the Mr. Levitt from Mpuguso school?' he asks. He introduces himself as Azim A. Mwinyimvua, though he prefers to be called Bwana Simba, or, in English, Mr. Lion.
Bwana Simba remembers me, he says, because as a schoolboy he visited Mpuguso for a track meet and attended the Friday night debates when I was debate master. We had debated topics of the students' choosing, such as 'Resolved: It Is Better to Marry an Educated Girl Than an Uneducated Girl,' or 'Resolved: It Is Better to Have One Wife Than Many Wives.'
Bwana Simba, it turns out, is the manager of the Mbeya Hotel. He apologizes for the state into which it has fallen, explaining that although he studied hotel management in Nairobi and in Italy, there is no money and no trained staff to maintain its former standards. He does his best for me, however. He places me in the hotel's deluxe suite, which consists of a bedroom, sitting room and bathroom with a light bulb, and a chandalua, or mosquito net....Bwana Simba assigns special staff members to clean my room and serve my meals....
There is also a Peace Corps worker in Mbeya. The Peace Corps was dismissed in the late 1960's by Nyerere, ostensibly in protest against the United States' involvement in Vietnam. Meanwhile, in the villages, the Government spread rumors that Peace Corps workers were spies. Ten years later, in the late 1970's, Nyerere was feted at the White House by President Carter. Subsequently, he proposed that the Peace Corps return.
In keeping with its new image of pragmatism and practicality, as opposed to my generation's unskilled idealism, the Peace Corps worker in Mbeya is a forestry specialist....
In Mbeya I find one of my students, whom I will refer to as Henry, and who is now a teacher. Like Rashid, he was one of my brightest and most hard-working pupils. He was gifted in all subjects, but was especially interested in English and history.
He has grown a beard but I recognize him immediately. And he recognizes me. 'Levitt! Is it really you?' he shouts as I arrive at his school. He tells me he is not teaching English or history, as I'd imagined, but science. 'At secondary school my headmaster encouraged me to pursue a degree in agriculture,' he explains. 'I received a scholarship to study abroad – a six-year course in the Soviet Union.'
He was there three years, he tells me, but returned home. 'I became sick there, Mr. Levitt. I could not work. I could not concentrate on my studies. I was laughing, and crying. I do not know why. I was sent back to my village and remained there an entire year. When I became better, I took this job.'
He tells me he does not enjoy teaching science and has applied to the university in Tanzania to complete his degree in agriculture, so that he can go abroad again. 'I want to travel. I want to go to the West, to Europe, to America. Then, after some years, I will return to Tanzania.' But without his degree, he says, he will be unable to leave Tanzania. 'Mr. Levitt, if I am not accepted at the university, I do not know what I will do.'
He also tells me he married last year. His wife is a teacher and she is three months pregnant. But he is not pleased about becoming a father as most Africans would be. He is afraid. 'When my wife has the baby and stops working, it will be very hard for us. It is very expensive here in Mbeya. I do not know how we will live.'
Listening to him, my former student who is now a man, who has traveled abroad and suffered a breakdown, who is married and is soon to become a father, I find myself thinking back 18 years to when he was a young boy in a white Mpuguso school uniform. Hard as he had worked, hard as he had studied, in retrospect his life seemed simple then. He had had a goal. He had succeeded. He had passed his exam, graduated from secondary school and gone on to study abroad. Yet something had gone wrong. He had achieved his goal, but his success had created other, unforeseen problems.
No longer was he content to be a teacher, to have a wife and children, as he might have a generation before. Now he wanted something else - to travel to the West....
He also noticed changes at Mpuguso; it was no longer the school he once knew:
“Mpuguso has also changed. It is no longer an upper primary school; instead, refresher courses for school teachers are now given there. One of Tanzania's proudest boasts is that it has provided free primary education for all school-age children. In each village I pass on the way to Mpuguso, a primary school stands by the side of the road....
At Mpuguso, I walk along dirt paths I remember, past rows of brick houses where we teachers lived, past my own brick house, where two African women sit in the doorway. A new row of classrooms has been built alongside our old ones....”
He returned to Dar es Salaam where he met some of his students he once taught at Mpuguso whom he hadn't met yet during his visit to Tanzania:
“Back in Dar es Salaam I meet with my student George. He is a communications officer for the meteorological department at the airport, an imposing-sounding title. He'd been an excellent student, with a gift for mathematics. He was older than most of the boys and he had a steadiness and maturity beyond that. He'd wanted to become an engineer. I expected much from him.
'Mr. Levitt,' he begins, 'you will be very disappointed in me when I tell you about my life.'
He tells me that he passed his exam at Mpuguso and was accepted at Tusamaganga Secondary school, one of the best-known in the country. But in 1967, his second year, he contracted a severe case of malaria. 'I was in Iringa Hospital five months,' he says. 'When I came out, I found I could not concentrate on my studies. And I especially could not concentrate on mathematics. I failed my exams. Mr. Levitt, you will not believe this, but I failed mathematics.'
So George dropped engineering and instead joined the meteorological department.
'But I am only a communications officer. Not a meteorological officer. I simply push papers. When I try to concentrate, to use my brain'....”
He further stated in his article:
“Of all my former students, the most successful turns out to be Oscar Mwamwaja, who has become a pilot for Air Tanzania. It is a prestigious job, for there are few qualified African pilots. Of the 40-odd pilots at Air Tanzania, half are foreigners.
We meet on a Saturday evening in the lounge of Dar es Salaam's Kilimanjaro Hotel. Little Oscar – who was smaller than the other boys – is now tall and thin, a few inches taller than I. He is wearing his navy-blue Air Tanzania uniform and he walks with jaunty confidence, in the manner of pilots everywhere.
'I was in the States, you know,' he says. 'I trained for two years in Texas. I've also been to Europe and to India, where I trained to fly the 737's.' Watching him so poised, listening to him speak so casually of being a pilot, it is difficult to remember Oscar had once been a 'day boy' at Mpuguso school....
'Life is not good here in Tanzania now, Mr. Levitt,' he says, leaning toward me and lowering his voice. 'Our salaries have been cut. The best pilots are leaving the country.'
As he speaks, a young African plunks himself down at our table and sits staring off into space. Gradually, he joins our conversation. When he leaves, Oscar looks at me. 'Do you know him?' he asks. I shake my head. 'A stranger sits down at our table,' he says. 'Who is he? Maybe he is a spy. You know, Mr. Levitt, there are spies at all the hotels. They are there to spy on foreigners, like yourself.'
Although I was not to see Oscar again, I was to hear of him. Last February, after I'd left Tanzania, an Air Tanzania 737 on a domestic flight was hijacked by three men and forced to fly to London. There, the hijackers surrendered, released their passengers and read a proclamation demanding the resignation of President Nyerere.
A few weeks later, I received a letter from Rashid in Dar es Salaam. 'You will get a shock to learn that the Air Tanzania plane which was hijacked to London was being manned by Oscar Mwamaja as copilot,' he wrote.
Then last month, I received a letter from Oscar himself. He was in Nigeria. 'This surely will be a surprise for you,' he began, 'especially to hear from me being in Nigeria. ... Maybe you know I was involved in the hijacking which happened in Tanzania in February. That was a terrible experience.'
He went on to say he had been shot in the back, but no major organs had been touched and in London the bullet had been removed. He said he had resigned from Air Tanzania and left the country 'for my peace of mind.'
He told me he was now working as a flying instructor in Nigeria, and that he hoped to go to the United States. He asked me to write him a recommendation to a university in California. He gave no indication that he had any intention of ever returning to Tanzania. Even Oscar, the most successful of the young Africans I had known, no longer saw a future for himself in Tanzania. 'At the moment, I don't miss home much,' he wrote. 'I have a lot to do here and life isn't that difficult..'”
He wrote me from Zaria, Northern Nigeria, when he was a flight instructor there.
Leonard Levitt also wrote about Mpuguso Middle School and his experience there in his book An African Season. It was first published on 1 January 1967 by a major New York publisher, Simon and Schuster.
His book stands out not only because it was the first to be written by a member of the Peace Corps but also because it is one of the important works about Africa's early years of independence, the euphoric sixties; it has withstood the test of time and become timeless and has immortalised Mpuguso Middle School....
My father who knew and spoke excellent English also knew my American Peace Corp teachers at Mpuguso Middle School and talked to them now and then. He also knew all the other teachers at Mpuguso, including the headmaster during that time, Richard Mwakibete whose brother, Moses Mwakibete, was also our headmaster earlier in 1961 before our Peace Corp teachers came two years later in 1963.
The Mwakibetes came from the same area we did and grew up around the same time my father did. Their home was about two miles from my father's childhood home and they knew each other when they were growing up. They later became our relatives-in-law when one of their younger brothers married one of my sisters.
They all – the two older Mwakibete brothers, my father and others of their generation – attended school only during British colonial rule, unlike the people of my generation.
The people of my generation were a product of two eras, colonial and post-colonial, and of the colonial and post-colonial educational systems and formed a bridge between the two.
My parents were some of the very few Africans who got the opportunity to go to school during colonial rule. Even primary school education was considered to be an asset; secondary school education, a major achievement and the backbone of the educated elite and the country's civil service even after independence in a country which hardly had any university graduates during that time.
Besides Austin Shaba and John Mwakangale whom I mentioned earlier, my father's other classmates included Wilbard B.K. Mwanjisi from Standard One at Tukuyu Primary School to Malangali Secondary School....
Another classmate of my father was Jeremiah Kasambala at Malangali Secondary School....
I remember he used to correspond with my father. When I was at home in Mpumbuli village with my parents in the sixties, I sometimes went to the post office in Tukuyu to get our mail. We had a private mail box at the post office in my father's name and some of the letters I got came from Jeremiah Kasambala.
My father was one of the few people who had private mail boxes in Rungwe District during those days. Most of the people in the district used mail boxes of different institutions in their areas including churches. For example, in our home area of Kyimbila, they used the mail box of Kyimbila Moravian Church to get their letters.
Most of the time, my father got the letters himself.
I remember at least on one occasion in the evening after supper when we were sitting together, he said to my mother he received a letter from Jeremiah Kasambala and would be answering him soon.
I once spoke to Kasambala on the telephone in 1978 from Grand Rapids, Michigan, when he was head of the Railways and Harbours Corporation appointed by President Nyerere; that was after serving in two cabinet posts in the 1960s.
I called him at his office in Dar es Salaam and he asked me when was I going back home.
He said he had spoken to my father recently and they were all expecting me to return to Tanzania just as I told them I would one day.
I told him I was going to, but didn't know exactly when. He then wondered whether or not “you just want to be a professional student.” I said no, that was not my intention. I could hear him laughing in a subdued tone.
When I talked to him, I had been in the United States for about five years, which seemed to be a very long time for someone to keep on saying, “I'm still a student.”
Kasambala was also a close friend of my uncle, Johann Chonde Mwambapa, my mother's elder brother and father of Brigadier-General Owen Rhodfrey Mwambapa, his first-born and my first cousin whom I mentioned earlier.
Another friend of my father was Robert Kaswende, head of the police station in the town of Tukuyu – for the entire district – in the early 1960s where one of my maternal uncles, Benjamin Mwambapa, was head of the Criminal Investigation (CID) Department. Benjamin was the immediate younger sibling of my uncle Chonde, as he was popularly known....
Benjamin Mwambapa was seven years older than my mother who was his youngest sister. And by another coincidence, he also ended up working with one of my father's old friends, Robert Kaswende, at the police station in Tukuyu where Kaswende served as police chief of Rungwe District.
Robert Kaswende met and knew my parents long before he came to Rungwe District.
I remember one day when he came to our house in Mpumbuli village to visit my parents in the early sixties.
It was late afternoon and sunny. He parked his car on the road just across the river from our house where we used to catch the bus on our way to Tukuyu, four miles north, when we went shopping or to get some mail from our private mailbox.
It's a small river, called Lubalisi, and there is no bridge across it on which you can drive a car straight to our house. You step on a meandering row of medium-size stones which serve as an improvised bridge to cross the river and get to our house which is on a small hill only a few yards from the river bank: about 20 yards.
That's how he came to our house. My mother was also there, including some of my siblings....
In the same village of Mpumbuli about two hundreds yards from our house was the home of Brown Ngwilulupi and his parents. That was where he was brought up together with his brothers and sisters.
The village is typical of Rungwe District, covered with luxuriant vegetation, and getting a lot of rain. Sometimes, there is so much rain that it rains for weeks straight, almost everyday. We don't even have any sunshine during the rainy season except for a few days; there are times when we don't have any for weeks.
It was from this village where my father's journey to school started; so did Brown Ngwilupi's. He and Brown walked to school everyday. They walked four miles to Tukuyu when they were pupils at Tukuyu Primary School. They started school there in Standard One in 1936, according to what my father told me.
Both were beneficiaries of academic acceleration and skipped some years – multiple grades – in school because they were excellent students, hence academically prepared for such a jump.
My father also told me he and Brown were the same age, only three months apart.
Brown Ngwilulupi was the only classmate of my father from that area....
Tukuyu became the capital of Rungwe District for the first time during German colonial rule when it was known as Neu Langenburg.
After the town was destroyed by an earthquake in 1919, the new colonial rulers, the British, continued to use the same administrative buildings left by the Germans after they lost World War I.
I visited the district headquarters, known as boma in Swahili, although the term means more than that. It was used to mean “district office” and even “cattle stockade” but mostly “district office” during colonial rule. The term also means “fortress.”
Coincidentally, two of my former schoolmates at Songea Secondary School ended up working there after they finished their secondary school education. One of them was Willie Nchimbi from Mbinga District in Ruvuma Region. I forgot the name of the other one but I remember he came from Mtwara Region.
One of the most memorable things about the boma in Tukuyu is its location. It is on a hill from which we could see Lake Nyasa, about 30 miles south on the border with Malawi.
My father also had strong ties to the administrative headquarters of Rungwe District in Tukuyu because of his position as a district councillor since the early 1960s....
Not only did Brown Ngwilulupi and my father come from the same village four miles south of the town of Tukuyu; they grew up in the same village before they became classmates from Standard One at Tukuyu Primary School to Malangali Secondary School. Malangali was – and still is – in Iringa District, one of the top schools in colonial Tanganyika where my father was head prefect.
One of their teachers at Malangali Secondary School was Erasto Andrew Mbwana Mang'enya who later became Deputy Speaker of Parliament in the year before independence, a cabinet member after independence and Tanganyika's permanent representative to the United Nations. Mang'enya was also chief of the Bondei, an ethnic group in the Usambara Mountains in Tanga Region in northeastern Tanzania.
During those days when my father and Brown Ngwilulupi were students at Malangali – and even before then – and when I was growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, Rungwe and Iringa districts constituted the Southern Highlands Province together with two other districts: Njombe and Chunya. The Southern Highlands together with the rest of provinces – seven altogether – were divided into regions in 1963, about two years after independence.
Brown Ngwilulupi and my father later became relatives-in-law. My mother Syabumi Mwambapa and Brown Ngwilulupi's wife Lugano Mwankemwa were first cousins to each other and were born and brought up together in the same household of Lugano's father who was my mother's maternal uncle and younger brother of her mother, Asegelile Mwankemwa, the pastor of Kyimbila Moravian Church in our home area.
The first African to hold that position which had previously been held by German missionaries who founded the church, he worked as a pastor for many years and was highly respected in the area and beyond because of ministerial work and leadership.
My father and his classmates were born around the same time in the mid- and late 1920s. That was just a few years after the British became the colonial rulers of Tanganyika in 1920.
Before then, when the country was ruled by Germany and known as Deutsch-Ostafrika (German East Africa), it included two other territories, Ruanda and Urundi, together known as Ruanda-Urundi, which were renamed Rwanda and Burundi after independence.
My father and his colleagues were an integral part of the nationalist wave that began sweeping my home country, Tanganyika, and the entire continent in the 1950s when I was growing up.
It was one of the most important decades in the history of Tanganyika and of Africa as a whole in terms of liberation from colonial rule whose enforcement and even justification for its existence included racial segregation.
Growing up under British colonial rule
My life under British colonial rule in Tanganyika was simple as a child growing up. But it was also one of subordination as a colonial subject regardless of age.
I experienced racial segregation many fellow Africans did not in other parts of the continent.
Segregation in Tanganyika had striking parallels with segregation in the southern part of the United States where signs designating racial categories on facilities such as toilets and water fountains were common, sanctioned by law and tradition.
Black people in Tanganyika, especially in towns, were subjected to racial injustices on a scale unheard of in some African countries. As Trevor Grundy, a British journalist who was a sub-editor at the Daily News during the same time when I also worked there as a news reporter, stated:
“The British turned Tanganyika into an undeclared apartheid state that was socially divided between divided Africans, Europeans and Asians....It was British-style apartheid – their secret was never to give racial segregation a name.” – (Trevor Grundy, “Julius Nyerere Reconsidered,” review of Thomas Molony, Nyerere – The Early Years, africaunauthorised.com, 4 May 2015).
Tanganyika was clearly a racially stratified society when I was growing up. Racial segregation was an accepted way of life. Few Africans challenged the status quo. Whites enforced it vigorously, keeping black people “in their place.”
There were many incidents of racism in colonial Tanganyika.
In my book, Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties, I wrote about the British settlers I interviewed – then living in different parts of the world including Britain, Australia, South Africa, the United States, Fiji, and the Middle East – and what they said about life in those days. One of them stated the following about their life in colonial Tanganyika:
“The behaviour of the white settlers towards the Africans was not always as good as it should have been. Mind you, many of the white people were unsettled by the war, totally footloose and earning more money in East Africa than was possible back ‘home.’ Many should not have been given work out there. Too much money and not enough facilities to spend it on....
I remember being shocked to hear one European admit that he treated his dogs better than he treated his African staff.
Many of the Africans looking for work stated very clearly that they would only work either for a priest or a teacher. If work was not available then they would wander off in search of work elsewhere....
Whites and Africans just did not mix. The white population had their meeting places and the Africans likewise.
I was not aware of any Europeans who were opposed to the status quo. Whites and Blacks just did not mix. Except, that is, in Church. The Europeans sat on the left and the Africans sat on the right hand side of the little straw covered church in Nach (Nachingwea in southeastern Tanganyika). My mother was frequently the pianist at the services....
The House servants were a vital part of everyday life; but were very firmly kept in place.
I did though, witness one distressing event. An African was walking along a town street (in Nachingwea), minding his own business, when an Alsatian leapt at him from the back of a pick-up truck. The African was shocked and scared witless.
He leapt out of the way and into the road. He landed in the path of an oncoming car. The (white) driver of the car only just managed to pull up in time. He leapt out of his vehicle and punched the hapless African in such a way that his jaw was fractured. Dad took it upon himself to ferry the unfortunate man to the local hospital....
The Europeans had arrived and taken over the best land for themselves. There was an overwhelming feeling that the African 'so newly brought out of barbarism' was incapable of looking after himself without the benevolent eye of the European. For the most part White and African got on. Mainly this was because the African 'knew his place'....
Many Europeans were aware that not enough was being done for the welfare of the Africans, but were unwilling to say so for fear of disturbing their own newly acquired life-style.
My father had signed a contract to head a school for Europeans (in Nachingwea). He was not allowed to teach African children. The only Africans who got near the place were those learning to become office workers. They came to what was effectively nightschool....
The idea of being led by Africans was anathema to a great many Europeans....
Before we returned for the last time to the UK we were living in Nakuru (Kenya). Dad was in the process of taking over Greensteds School. The positioning of the buildings was perfect, absolutely alongside the Rift Valley.
The Mau Mau uprising had just started. White settlers living away from civilisation were seen as easy targets. Many Europeans chose to carry guns....
As children we were taken once a week to a firing range and issued with 5 x 0.22 cartridges and expected to hit a tiny target. This I found immensely difficult. Because of the seriousness of the situation, the school was allocated a detachment of Africans from the ‘King’s African Rifles.’ They patrolled at night.
Nothing ever happened that I got to know about, except that the local Police station was raided by the Mau Mau; they stole 30 African Police uniforms and got away without being spotted....
The general feeling amongst the Europeans was that all this was a little local nuisance and that given time and a few strongarm European tactics, the indigenous population would be subdued.
As we all know that situation escalated.
Another of the silly aspects of the Mau Mau situation was that the colonial ladies took to carrying small pistols and had different coloured holsters to match whatever outfit they were wearing.” – (Nicholas Edmondson, UK, interviewed by Godfrey Mwakikagile, Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: New Africa Press, 2010, pp. 258 – 259, 260 – 263, 266).
Contempt for Africans by whites was a continental phenomenon. Even whites from other parts of Africa who visited Tanganyika expressed the same racist views, reflecting the attitude they always had and the contempt they showed when dealing with blacks.
Donald Barton, a District Commissioner (D.C.) in Tanganyika from 1952 to 1961, wrote about some white Rhodesians – from Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe – he met on a ship, Liemba, on Lake Tanganyika and how they felt about Africans, an attitude he said he didn't share.
Born in industrial Lancashire, northwest England, in 1927, he went to Tanganyika with his wife and joined the colonial service. Both their children were born in Tanganyika. As he stated in his book, An Affair with Africa: Tanganyika Remembered:
“Northbound on the Liemba our passengers included several young white Southern Rhodesians, men and women. Otherwise well-mannered and behaved, they spoke of Africans in general in the most offensive and disparaging way.
On this small piece of evidence we were glad that we were living in Tanganyika, where there was little racial tension and relations were on the whole relaxed and amicable.
This encounter had a particular personal relevance, for had I not been selected for the Colonial Service I had a broadly similar job lined up in the Southern Rhodesia Civil Service; it would probably have been a brief career, ending in resignation.” – (Donald Barton, An Affair with Africa: Tanganyika Remembered, Hertford, England: Authors Online Ltd., 2004, pp. 66 – 67).
Barton contended that the number of racists among whites in Tanganyika was small, although he was also explicit in his admission that they did exist; an account complemented by stories and examples of hardship and other experiences British settlers and administrators had when they lived in colonial Tanganyika:
“It was always a matter for surprise and dismay how the small handful of scoundrels, incompetents, and wastrels amongst us ever came to be recruited, and retained once found out.
This view was perhaps priggish, and it was in any case unrealistic to suppose that even a carefully chosen sample of English society deposited in foreign parts would not contain its quota of bad hats. However it often seemed in practice that the damage done by the racially prejudiced, the bullies, and the dishonest amongst us, was disproportionate to their small numbers – especially as local politics took on markedly racial overtones in the middle to late Fifties.
One such was Ivor. He had been a cattle dealer somewhere along the Welsh border, where he was well known to the police and magistracy for a range of dubious activities which straddled the dividing line between sharp practice and downright crime.
Ivor was no fool and he certainly had the wit to gull the Colonial Office into taking him on as a Livestock Marketing Officer. In this capacity he was based at Dodoma, our Provincial Headquarters, whence he made forays into the outlying districts.
His function, like that of the South African LMO who featured earlier in this chapter, was to organise and conduct stock markets, thereby supporting, in Kondoa district, our efforts to reduce the domestic animal population.
I was unaware of the full extent of Ivor’s malpractices, but certainly he engaged in some private trade in sheep and cattle; and made a bit on the side by charging buyers and sellers a small commission for changing notes into coin. He was loud, uncouth, and in appearance he could have stepped right out of one of Breughel’s more bucolic paintings.
We did not see a great deal of Ivor, but on one rare occasion early in 1953 I was thankful that he was in the vicinity.
I was on tour at Bereko again, this time with Sylvia and Oliver Cromwell, our dog. I had work in the area which would occupy me for the best part of a week, and since we had no transport of our own, we had been dumped there as usual with our baggage, and with Mzee to do the cooking. We would be picked up on Saturday.
On the second day Sylvia complained of pains in her abdomen; they persisted through the night and were still there the next morning. We tended to be rather blasé about aches and pains, but it could be appendicitis. We were just about half way between two hospitals which were suitably equipped, one at Dodoma 140 miles to the south, and the other at Arusha 140 miles to the north in the next Province.
We preferred Arusha; it was cooler, and we had yet to go there. But how to get there? If we waited at the roadside a bus or lorry would come along sooner or later, but it would be slow and uncomfortable.
Then I remembered that a cattle market was due to be held that day, just a mile or so down the road towards Kondoa. There could have been any one of several LMO’s manning it, but in the event it turned out to be Ivor.
I explained our predicament, and with only brief hesitation he kindly offered to run us up to Arusha in his Standard Vanguard pick-up.
Whilst we waited for him to settle his business I entertained the curious by putting Oliver through his paces. He had only one trick, but it was infallible; no matter how prolonged the temptation he would never eat without permission.
The onlookers were greatly impressed, one of them so much so that he offered £2.50 in cash for our hoodlum dog, nearly double the going rate for a cow that day. I felt Oliver would have been proud had he known how highly his comprehension and obedience had been valued; the offer was politely declined.
The journey to Arusha was hair-raising; more than once we wished we had taken our chance on a bus. There was so little traffic on the road that it could not fairly be said that Ivor drove with a total disregard for other road users. But he certainly drove with a total disregard for his own vehicle and for the safety of its occupants.
We hurtled along trailing a cloud of dust, crashing into potholes, sliding into ruts, rattling over corrugations, thudding into the concrete drifts let into the road to take water across during the rains. It was a relief to reach the tarmac on the outskirts of Arusha three hours later.” – (Ibid., pp. 81 – 82).
The smaller white population in Tanganyika unlike that of the white settlers in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa and even in neighbouring Kenya, partly if not largely explained why there was not much racial tension between blacks and whites in my home country. There was less direct contact and fewer personal encounters between members of the two races the two because of that,
Still, racism and contempt for black people among many if not most whites – who were mostly British just as in Southern Rhodesia – in Tanganyika was a fact of life and the norm rather than the exception. Few whites, if any, challenged the status quo which guaranteed them a privileged status, placed them above blacks, and enforced segregation.
There was a delicate balance in relations, hence little conflict, between blacks and whites in Tanganyika mainly because white people, being in the dominant position, made sure members of different races were kept separate from each other. Also, black people knew their place in a racially stratified society as subordinates – no more than colonial subjects at the mercy of their white rulers.
Julius Nyerere, who led the struggle for independence, explained this relationship between blacks and whites as the country was approaching independence and talked about the future of Tanganyika, what it would or should be, after the end of colonial rule. As he stated in an interview with Drum magazine in March 1959 almost three years before independence:
“Tanganyika will be the first, most truly multiracial democratic country in Africa.
When we get our freedom, the light of a true multiracial democracy will be put high upon the top of the highest mountain, on Kilimanjaro, for all to see, particularly South Africa and America.
Tanganyika will offer the people of those countries free entry, without passports, to come and see real democracy at work.
As long as we do not have a popular government elected by the people on democratic principles, we will strive for freedom from any kind of domination. We regard the [UN] Trusteeship as part of a scheme to keep Tanganyika under the British Crown indefinitely. The greatest enemy of our vision is the Colonial Office.
But Tanganyika cannot be freed by drawing up resolutions or by tabulating long catalogues of the evils of colonialism. Nor do we find it enough to tell rulers to quit Tanganyika. It will be freed only by action, and likewise the whole of Africa.
Continued colonialism is preventing investment in this country. Germany, for example, cannot invest money as long as the British are still here.
I agree that the country lacks technicians. So what? Shall we give the British another 40 years to train them? How many have they trained in the past 40 years?
As far as money for a self-governing Tanganyika is concerned, Tanganyika has not been receiving much money from the British taxpayer at all. For the past 11 years, Tanganyika has only received Pounds 9 million. I can raise 100 times that within a year if it becomes necessary.
I believe that the continued, not existence, but citizenship of the European would be taken for granted had not the white man created a Kenya, a Central Africa [the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland], a South Africa and other similar places and situations.
African nationalism is not anti-white but simply anti-colonialist. When George Washington fought the imperialists, he was fighting for the divine right of Americans to govern themselves; he was not fighting colour.
The white man wants to live in Africa on his terms. He must dominate and be recognised by the rest of the inhabitants of this continent as their natural master and superior. But that we cannot accept. What we are after is fellow citizenship, and that is exactly what is frightening the white man.
The question is not whether we must get rid of whites, but whether they must get rid of themselves. Whites can no longer dominate in Africa. That dream is gone. Africa must be governed by Africans in the future.
Whether an immigrant African will have an equal part to play in this free Africa depends upon him and him alone. In Tanganyika, we are determined to demonstrate to the whole of Africa that democracy is the only answer.
We are being held back, not by local Europeans, but by the Colonial Office and, I believe, by Europeans in neighbouring countries, who are frightened of the possibility of success in Tanganyika.” – (Julius Nyerere in an interview with Drum magazine, March 1959, reprinted in Godfrey Mwakikagile, Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: New Africa Press, Third Edition, 2010, pp. 148 – 149).
Colonial rulers did not want to relinquish power if colonialism continued to benefit them. And they enjoyed their privileged status during colonial rule. It was unthinkable for them to live under a government that was predominantly black. Equality with blacks was anathema to most whites in colonial Tanganyika – and even after independence – as was the case in other colonies across the continent.
Black people were considered to be inferior to whites and they were treated that way, not very much different – if at all – from the way black people were treated in the United States during the era of segregation and even after that. Parallels were almost exact.
All that – the indignities of colour bar experienced by Africans and the racial inequalities which clearly separated members of different races – was common when I was growing up in Tanganyika.
Although Nyerere was uncompromising on matters of racial equality and independence for Tanganyika and Africa as a whole, he was also willing to work with the British in areas where their expertise was needed to help our country move forward, especially soon after the end of colonial rule.
In his book, An Affair with Africa: Tanganyika Remembered, Donald Barton included a letter Nyerere wrote, in his official capacity as prime minister, asking British expatriates to stay and continue with their work that the government needed to be done in building and developing the new nation of Tanganyika.
The letter was not addressed to specific individuals but collectively to all British administrative officers. It was sent to them individually by simply adding a name to a copy of each letter. The letter was dated 1 May 1961, seven months and eight days before Tanganyika's independence on 9 December:
“Office of the Prime Minister
P.O. Box 9000
Dar es Salaam.
CMC 17/65/049
1st May 1961
Dear Barton,
I feel I should write to you personally at this time when you and numbers of your colleagues may feel that you must make decisions about your future.
Some Administrative Officers have, I know, already decided to leave Tanganyika, and to them I would say thank you for what you have done and good luck in whatever you decide to do.
To those of you who are undecided, the first thing I want to make clear is that my Government, and therefore the great bulk of the people of Tanganyika whom we represent, are really in need of your help; and we will be for a long time to come. I have said so on many occasions, both in the Legislative Council and outside. So have several of my colleagues, although their references to you do not always get as well publicised as one or two speeches which are contrary to Government's policy and which do harm to Tanganyika.
Anyway, let it be clearly understood that such wild remarks as were recently reported as having been made by Mr. Mwanjisi in Cairo do not reflect my views or my Government's or those of the vast majority of the people of this country. You can account for them by the heady atmosphere in which they were delivered; and so I hope you will ignore them.
At all events, let me repeat here that it is not only technical officers we wish to retain. We need our experienced administrators, our corps d'elite as the Governor called you the other day, because it is they who keep the whole machinery of Government working.
I did not feel I could write to you in this personal fashion until we, as a Government, could see that you were being properly treated materially. Now that the Flemming award has been made and the compensation scheme is in being, I feel entitled to ask you to stay and help us. That is not to say that I think you will have no difficulties. I know many of you will have serious worries about education, although we have done what we can to help you there with the allowances that make it easier for you to educate your children in your own country.
Some of you may feel, though I believe you are wrong, that medical and other services may deteriorate; or that there will be less companionship with people of your own background on out-stations.
I do not brush these worries aside as though they do not matter, but I want to appeal to the sense of mission which our Administrative Officers have always felt. It is your sense of mission which has seen you through the challenges of the past. I can offer you challenges too and I don't think they are so very different from the challenges that brought you out here. Together we still have got to make something of Tanganyika that we can all be proud of; and surely that is enough of a challenge for anyone in a continent where so much ill-feeling and unhappiness abound.
So I am not suggesting that from now on no irresponsible statements are going to be made by junior politicians in this country. Such a suggestion would be silly. What I am seriously suggesting is that you should not be put off from your great task by such statements and by such irresponsibility.
I am not suggesting that you will have no trials and difficulties and frustrations in the future. I am suggesting that the difficulties alone should not head you off from playing a part in this country where the chances of constructing a genuine community of goodwill are stronger than anywhere else in Africa.
It is my duty to appeal, as I have done above, to your sense of duty towards Tanganyika. But perhaps you will feel that it is not my business to appeal to your patriotism towards your own country. Nevertheless, I want to do so, because I feel so strongly that British interests and the interests of Tanganyika are the same in this regard.
All the leaders of British political life and all the leaders of this young emergent country are remarkably united in their desire to see Tanganyika off to a good start and in their views as to how this can best be done. Would not Britain's interests be damaged as well as Tanganyika's if you and your colleagues left us in such numbers that the fabric of government could not be properly maintained? Could you feel happy, if you had left us for any but the most strong and compelling reasons if we then proceeded to make a mess of our trust hero because we had not enough British administrators to help us?
And so I am asking you to stay with us if you possibly can. Stay with us and help in a job which will, I am sure, be as full and as varied and as challenging as anything you have done hitherto.
If you can stay indefinitely, that is what I would like best – subject only to our Africanisation policies, and I have said before that we are so desperately short of trained Africans that these policies are unlikely to affect you adversely for a good time to come. If you cannot stay indefinitely, then I would ask you most seriously to consider whether you cannot stay for the next two or three years with us, for it is those years, above all, which will be our testing time.
I attach to this letter a note from my Permanent Secretary, which, in the light of plans already announced, indicates the kind of openings for which I need you. I hope you may consider where you can best fit into the pattern and let your Provincial Commissioner know.
Yours sincerely,
Julius K. Nyerere
Office of the Prime Minister
P.O. Box 9000
Dar es Salaam
To: All Expatriate Administrative Officers
Openings in Tanganyika for Administrative Officers
I append below details of the openings which will be available to expatriate Administrative Officers who elect to remain in the service of the Tanganyika Government under the provisions of the Compensation Agreement.
C.I. Meek
Permanent Secretary.”
The critical shortage of trained personnel in many areas somewhat compromised our independence as a country, one of only two on the entire continent which won independence in that year. The other one was Sierra Leone on 27 April 1961, coincidentally almost exactly three years before Tanganyika united with Zanzibar on 26 April 1964 to form Tanzania.
There was even shortage in the ministry of foreign affairs, a highly sensitive ministry, where there were some openings for expatriate administrative officers. As C.I. Meek stated in his announcement for job openings especially for administrative officers including advisers and magistrates:
“Applications have recently been invited for vacancies in Tanganyika's Foreign Service. Owing to the limited financial resources of this territory, it is unlikely that a large number of embassies will be established immediately. However, there will be a need for some expatriate Administrative Officers to fill administrative posts in Tanganyika's overseas embassies.”
Barton, who was on leave with his family, had this to say in response to Nyerere's request for British administrative officers to stay after independence and help the new country meet some of its needs for high-level manpower:
“Late in February 1961 I was in the throes of packing preparatory to departure. There were no professional packers, and the chore of filling twenty-odd trunks and wooden boxes was spread sweatily over a period of three or four weeks. Sylvia and the children had left in November....
Despite the very persuasive letter sent to most of us by Julius Nyerere urging us to stay on, family considerations prevailed over personal inclinations, and after much agonising I took the ‘severance package.’
The report on my visit to Israel occupied me rather desultorily later in the year,, and was despatched to the office of Julius Nyerere a week or two after independence in December 1961. By then I had begun a new, and brief, career in ICI. A year later I was on my way back to Africa, this time to Nigeria with the British Council.” – (Ibid., pp. 228 – 230).
Even some high-ranking government officials were expatriates and remained in office for varying periods after independence.
They included Ernest Vasey, British, minister for finance since February 1960; Roland Brown, also British, who was the attorney-general and who stayed in office for several years after independence.
It was also Roland Brown who was asked by Tanganyika's president, Julius Nyerere, to draft the Union Treaty uniting Tanganyika and Zanzibar in April 1964 to form Tanzania. Zanzibar was represented by Ugandan lawyer Dani Nabudere, a staunch Pan-Africanist like Nyerere.
Unfortunately, dependence on expatriates showed how desperate we were for assistance.
Such dependence also gave our former colonial rulers something to be proud of, as a people who were accomplished in their fields and even superior to us, thus justifying imperial conquest of Africa.
Some of them even gloated over our dependence on them: “See? We told you – you were not ready for independence!”
Imperial might got a new lease on life not only in post-colonial Tanganyika but also in other African countries which remained heavily dependent on our former colonial masters for many years after independence.
Colonial rule was clearly justified on grounds of racial superiority of our rulers. And such perception, of Africans as an inferior people, spanned the entire spectrum: social, economic, cultural, political and intellectual.
Therefore, I am no stranger to racism. I experienced it in colonial Tanganyika.
That is why when I came to the United States as a student eight years after my country's independence, stories of racial injustices including segregation when it was legally sanctioned in the southern states until the sixties and still persisted thereafter, not only in the South but also in the North and in other parts of the country, did not surprise me at all. Because I grew up in Tanganyika under segregation, I was prepared to cope with any situation involving racism in a way I may not have been able to had I not encountered it before.
Some black conservatives say they have never experienced racism in the United States or they have experienced it but not as a major problem in their lives. They also contend that it is no longer a major problem anymore, anywhere, in the United States.
It is a highly contentious subject, kindling the ire of many blacks, and inflaming passions across the colour line. But that is another subject outside the scope of this work.
I have addressed the subject of racism in America in some of my books including Black Conservatives in the United States, Across the Colour Line in an American City, In the Crucible of Identity , and On the Banks of a River.
I have also written about it in Life under British Colonial Rule: Recollections of an African and how it affected me and other blacks in Tanganyika during those days.
Other books in which I have written about racism in Tanganyika include Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties, Tanzania under Mwalimu Nyerere: Reflections on an African Statesman, and My Life as an African: Autobiographical Writings.
Africans in Tanganyika were subjected to indignities of colour bar similar to those under apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the United States, although not as rigid but equally humiliating.
Lavatories and toilets were labelled “Europeans,” “Asians” and “Africans.” Some hotels and bars were labelled “Europeans.” Africans knew, right away, they could not be served if they went in there.
There were other places, even if not labelled “Europeans” or “Asians,” where black people were denied service even if they insisted there were no signs barring them from being served.
It was the epitome of humiliation based on race.
There were separate schools for Europeans, Asians and Africans.
Facilities for Africans were the worst.
I was born at a time when racial equality and freedom from colonial rule was a distant dream for black people in Tanganyika and other parts of Africa.
Racial discrimination was not only a way if life – it spared no-one from the most humble to the most exalted. Even African leaders campaigning for independence were subjected to the same racial indignities which continued even after the end of colonial rule, especially during the early years, but drew a swift response from the new government which was predominantly black and multi-racial. As I state in my book Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era:
“Mwalimu himself [Julius Nyerere] had experienced racial discrimination, what we in East Africa – and elsewhere including southern Africa – also call colour bar. As Colin Legum stated in a book he edited with Tanzanian professor, Geoffrey Mmari, Mwalimu: The Influence of Nyerere:
I was privileged to meet Nyerere while he was still a young teacher in short trousers at the very beginning of his political career, and to engage in private conversations with him since the early 1950s.
My very first encounter in 1953 taught me something about his calm authority in the face of racism in colonial Tanganyika. I had arranged a meeting with four leaders of the nascent nationalist movement at the Old Africa Hotel in Dar es Salaam. We sat at a table on the pavement and ordered five beers, but before we could lift our glasses an African waiter rushed up and whipped away all the glasses except mine.
I rose to protest to the white manager, but Nyerere restrained me. 'I am glad it happened,' he said, 'now you can go and tell your friend Sir Edward Twining [the governor at the time] how things are in this country.'
His manner was light and amusing, with no hint of anger.'
Simple, yet profound. For, beneath the surface lay a steely character with a deep passion for justice across the colour line and an uncompromising commitment to the egalitarian ideals he espoused and implemented throughout his political career, favouring none.
Years later his son, Andrew Nyerere, told me about an incident that also took place in the capital Dar es Salaam shortly after Tanganyika won independence in 1961 near the school he and I attended and where we also stayed from 1969 – 1970. Like the incident earlier when Julius Nyerere was humiliated at the Old Africa Hotel back in 1953, this one also involved race. As Andrew stated in a letter to me in 2002 when I was writing this book:
'As you remember, Sheikh Amri Abeid was the first mayor of Dar es Salaam. Soon after independence, the mayor went to Palm Beach Hotel (near our high school, Tambaza, on United Nations Road in Upanga). There was a sign at the hotel which clearly stated: 'No Africans and dogs allowed inside.' He was blocked from entering the hotel, and said in protest, 'But I am the Mayor.' Still he was told, 'You will not get in.' Shortly thereafter, the owner of the hotel was given 48 hours to leave the country. When the nationalization exercise began, that hotel was the first to be nationalized.'
Such insults were the last thing that could be tolerated in newly independent Tanganyika. And President Nyerere, probably more than any other African leader, would not have tolerated, and did not tolerate, seeing even the humblest of peasants being insulted and humiliated by anyone including fellow countrymen.” – (Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, Fifth Edition, New Africa Press, 2010, pp. 501 – 502).
The white man who was deported from Tanganyika soon after independence when he insulted the black mayor of the nation's capital Dar es Salaam at Palm Beach Hotel was Felix Arensen, the hotel's owner and manager. As Professor Paul Bjerk states in his book Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and The Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960 – 1964:
“The deportation of Felix Arensen, a Swiss hotel manager, was the first in a series of punitive expulsions of Europeans that came as the TANU executive committee met in the first weeks of 1962.
They evinced a bitter debate between racial moderates and extremists in the party. Nyerere spoke in support of the deportations, placating the extremists, saying that even if immediate economic change was not possible, Africans had a right to respect from other races and that the government’s patience on this matter was exhausted.
Arensen had failed to recognize Amri Abedi as the new mayor of Dar es Salaam and ejected him from the hotel....
The following day, three more foreign motel owners were served with deportation notices for refusing lodging to Jacob Namfua, a former TFL (Tanganyika Federation of Labour) official recently become parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Finance (in the early seventies, he was appointed by President Nyerere as Minister of Information and Broadcasting).
Given the bitter strikes in the sisal industry, the political change had only heightened the sense of antagonism between white business owners and African workers—and their youthful and newly empowered representatives.
The next day, another Swiss sisal plantation engineer was expelled for pinning a TANU pin on his dog.
(Leaders of the ruling party TANU and government officials) began compiling a list of eighty-seven whites and Asians to be expelled....
Even moderate members of the TANU government like Paul Bomani and Rashidi Kawawa (who became vice president) issued warnings that 'anybody who cannot adjust himself to this (racial equality) should pack up and go because this Government will not tolerate the behavior of those who live between two worlds.'.” – (Paul Bjerk, Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and The Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960 – 1964, Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2015, p. 75).
More whites and some Asians, but mostly whites, were expelled from Tanganyika in the following days, weeks and months for insulting black people and for disrespecting leaders of the newly independent country which was predominantly black.
It was also at the Palm Beach Hotel where Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) stayed when he went to Tanzania in November 1967; he was interviewed by the Sunday News and The Nationalist, Dar es Salaam, 5 – 6 November.
He gave a fiery speech at the University of Dar es Salaam in early 1968 denouncing racism which he himself would have experienced at the Palm Beach Hotel had he gone there before or soon after independence, as did the first African mayor of Dar es Salaam, Sheikh Amri Abeid, who assumed the post not long after Tanganyika attained sovereign status.
Professor Terence Ranger (1929 – 2015), a renowned British historian who specialised in African history and who taught at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now the University of Zimbabwe) in Salisbury (renamed Harare in 1982) from 1957 until 1963 when he was deported in March by the white minority regime for supporting Africans in their quest for racial equality – he went to teach at the University of Dar es Salaam after he was deported – recalled the day Stokely Carmichael spoke at Tanzania's leading academic institution. As he stated in his book, Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism, 1957 – 67:
“Early in 1968 Stokely Carmichael [Trinidadian-American civil rights activist] visited the College to give a lecture under the auspices of the Student Revolutionary Front. As the frogs croaked loudly in the pool outside, Stokely held his audience spellbound inside. A master orator, he could do more with a whisper than anyone else with a shout.
He had three messages. The first was that African students were the true proletariat and that they, guns in hand, must spearhead the revolution.
The second was that the major liberation movements could not be trusted. He attacked particularly the so-called 'authentic' movements, recognized as such by Soviet Russia – ZAPU, FRELIMO, and the MPLA.
He offered to chair a debate between their representatives and spokesmen of the rival parties, ZANU included. (Wisely none of them took up the challenge). Giovanni Arrighi, now teaching in Dar and a strong supporter of ZAPU, was incandescent with rage, hissing to me that Stokely must be an agent of the CIA.
The third message was that it was necessary, but hard, to hate the whites. It was easy to hate Asians, he said, but whites were so much admired and so dominant that one had to work really hard to hate them.
At one stage he was interrupted while students came up and mopped his brow with a large handkerchief.
A history student sitting next to me was shouting 'I do hate the whites, I do hate the whites,' pausing to whisper to me, 'I don't mean you, Professor Ranger.'
Stokely's then wife, Miriam Makeba, sang 'Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika,' a moment of true emotion.
It was the only meeting I have ever been to at which it was impossible for me to raise a question or to make an objection.
The next day I visited the Refugee School, where the teachers thought their students would be interested to hear about 1896 (when blacks fought white settlers in Zimbabwe and lost). I took Revolt with me.
It turned out that Stokely had been there the day before. He had told the students that he was pleased they were passing exams but they must not take this white knowledge seriously. They must always be suspicious of whatever whites told them, and be most suspicious when a white told them something they liked to hear. They must always ask themselves what the motive was. So I encountered a very critical audience.
The first questioner told me that he had understood what I had said but that what he wanted to know was the function of it. Fortunately for me, he gave an example by adding:
'I think you have told us about 1896 because the Africans were defeated in the end and you want to discourage us.'
I determined not to knuckle under and fought back, grasping a convenient hammer which was lying on the desk. I asked whether Nyerere talked of Maji Maji because it had been defeated in the end and he wanted to discourage Tanzanians.
When they refused to believe that some Africans served on the white side in 1896, I showed them photos in the book (Revolt). 'But who took the photos?' they asked.
Would that all audiences were so critical!
A very different repudiation of the book came when I arrived at UCLA in 1969. As I entered the elevator in the Bunche building, Donald Abraham wheeled himself out. 'I hold you personally responsible for the death of spirit mediums in Mozambique,' he said in passing.
Nor were the academic reviews all positive. Robert Rotberg wrote a particularly disobliging one for African Historical Studies.” – (Terence Ranger, Writing Revolt: An Engagement with African Nationalism, 1957 – 67, Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: James Currey; Harare, Zimbabwe: Weaver Press, 2013, pp. 178 – 170).
Stokely Carmichael's message had universal appeal in terms of liberation – the struggle against colonialism and racism – especially in the context of southern Africa where white minority regimes were in control during that period, with Tanzania being the headquarters of all the African liberation movements.
It was also a message that resonated with his audience at the University of Dar es Salaam and at the school for young refugees (Kurasini International Education Centre on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam) from southern Africa in a country where incidents of racism were nothing new, blacks being the main victims during colonial times and even after independence at the hands of other non-blacks as well, not just whites.
My home region, the Southern Highlands Province, was one of the areas of Tanganyika which had a significant number of white settlers, mostly British, during the colonial period and in the early years of independence.
Incidents of racial discrimination in the province were not uncommon, including some involving my father in the town of Tukuyu, as I have explained in my book Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties. I have also, in the same book, written about other incidents when I was also a victim of racism; incidents which I have also written about in my other work, Tanzania under Mwalimu Nyerere: Reflections on an African Statesman.
It was also in the town of Tukuyu, the capital of my home district of Rungwe where the first meeting of the leaders of the white settlers met in October 1925 to discuss formation of a giant federation covering East and Central Africa – Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia – to consolidate imperial rule.
The conference was called by Lord Delamere, the leader of the British settlers in Kenya. I wrote about that in my books, Africa and the West and Africa After Independence: Realities of Nationhood.
The purpose of the federation was to consolidate white domination of that vast region at the expense of blacks. White settlers wanted to create another South Africa but on a much bigger scale.
It would have been a giant apartheid state denying the indigenous people equal rights and was vigorously opposed by African nationalists in all those countries during that period, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, when the white settlers still kept the dream alive, hoping they would never relinquish power to blacks.
Opposition to colonial rule continued through the years and reached its peak in the 1950s in my home country, Tanganyika.
Some of the prominent leaders in the struggle for independence came from my home region, the Southern Highlands Province. One of them, John Mwakangale, my father's childhood friend and classmate since primary school, represented the Southern Highlands Province in the colonial legislature in the fifties. The colonial legislature, known by its acronym LEGCO (Legislative Council), was dominated by white settlers and led by the British governor of Tanganyika.
Mwakangale was one of the most militant leaders in Tanganyika; some considered him to be the most extreme on matters of race relations and as an uncompromising champion of the rights for black people.
He was also described as the most “anti-white” and “anti-British” member of the government and very defensive of the interests of African workers.
Humphrey Taylor, a British who served as a District Officer (D.O.) of Njombe District in the Southern Highlands Province of Tanganyika from 1959 to 1962, wrote the following about John Mwakangale when he was a cabinet member serving as minister of labour under Prime Minister Nyerere:
“Soon after Tanganyika became independent, and near the end of my time as a District Officer in Njombe, I received a call from the British manager of the Commonwealth Development Corporation’s wattle plantation and factory a few miles from the District Office. The factory took the bark that was stripped from the wattle trees and used it to make tannin.
The workers there were on strike for higher pay, in part because they expected to earn more now that the country was no longer a British colony.
The manager called me because he was afraid that a large crowd of strikers near the factory might attack and damage it. He asked for police protection.
I arrived a little while later with ten or fifteen African policemen. I cannot remember if they were armed with anything other than truncheons. It is possible that they also brought rifles.
Anyway, everything passed off peacefully without a serious incident. The police and I stood for a couple of hours between the strikers and the factory. The strikers then dispersed and went away. There was no violence of any kind.
However the local union leader sent a fiery telegram to the Minister of Labour, John Mwakangale in Dar es Salaam, in which he wrote that there was a dangerous crisis with provocative action by the British colonial District Officer and the police and that there was a 'danger of the spilling of blood.'
Mwakangale was believed to be the most aggressively anti-white or anti- British member of the government.
He telegrammed back to say he was coming to Njombe the next day and he sent us a very sharp message criticizing my action and asking to meet with us as soon as he arrived.
At the start of the meeting he was very aggressive and hostile, but as he listened to the manager, the police and to me, he understood what had, and had not, happened. At the end of the meeting we went off and had some beers together.
A little while later, I was in Dar es Salaam to catch the plane on my way home at the end of my brief colonial career. As I was walking on a street there I saw a small group of African cabinet ministers, including Mwakangale, walking towards me on the other side of the street.
When he saw me, he dashed across the road, welcomed me enthusiastically, took me by the hand, and brought me across to meet his cabinet colleagues. He told me how sorry he was to hear that I was leaving Tanganyika.” – (Humphrey Taylor, “Danger of Spilling Blood.”).
Professor John Iliffe who described John Mwakangale as a “vehement nationalist” in his book A Modern History of Tanganyika had his assessment underscored by some of the remarks Mwakangale himself made in parliament. As Professor Paul Bjerk stated in his book Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania (pp.72 – 73):
“In October 1961, racialist sentiments sprang up even among his (Nyerere's) own party members when a proposal was brought forward to delay citizenship for non-Africans for five years after independence.
Christopher (Kasanga) Tumbo urged for a distinction between 'native' and 'immigrant races.' A TANU member from Mbeya, J. B. Mwakangale, went so far as to call for the resignation of non-African ministers after independence. 'We have no proof of their loyalty. They are bluffing and cheating us,' Mwakangale alleged.
In response, Nyerere threatened that he and his ministers would resign if the assembly did not support TANU's policy.
Nyerere denounced the hypocrisy of a policy favoring Africans in a country that was just about to emerge from a racially prejudiced colonial state.
Visibly angry, he argued that once racial bias was introduced to Tanganyikan politics its logic would take a life of its own, leading to widespread ethnic animosity:
A day will come when we will say all people were created equal except the Masai, except the Wagogo, except the Waha, except the polygamists, except the Muslims, etc...
You know what happens when people begin to get drunk with power and glorify their race, the Hitlers, that is what they do. You know where they lead the human race, the Verwoerds of South Africa, that is what they do....
I am going to repeat, and repeat very firmly, that this Government has rejected, and rejected completely any ideas that citizenship with the duties and rights of citizenship of this country, are going to based on anything except loyalty to this country.'” – (Paul Bjerk, Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2015, pp. 72 – 73).
Professor Henry Bienen, in his book, Tanzania: Party Transformation and Economic Development, stated that citizenship on non-racial basis and equality for all in the new nation of Tanganyika that was soon to achieve independence “provoked anti-Commonwealth and racialistic sentiments among TANU members in the National Assembly.
One MP (John Mwakangale), who was to become both a regional commissioner and a parliamentary secretary, said:
'I think 75 per cent of the non-African population still regard an African in Tanganyika as an inferior human being. Why is it so? Is it because the white population has been dominating us, both economically and politically, and their neighbours, the Asians, have been economically dominating us, we Africans...Do you think the individual African forming the vast majority of the population will agree to have equal rights with the Europeans and Asians? My answer is no...
All foreigners who are living in Tanganyika now and have transferred their money to their home countries or to other countries should within this period of five years bring their money back. I repeat...they must bring it back. From now on those foreigners who are rich...should contribute at least 15 per cent of their money to us, the Tanganyika National Fund.'
Other MPs expressed similar sentiments...National Assembly members Tumbo, Msindai, Mtaki and Wambura expressed similar opinions. Msindai was to become an area commissioner in 1962. Mtaki and Wambura became regional commissioners and are now junior ministers...
This peroration was cut by the speaker after Mr. Mwakangale claimed:
'They are bluffing us, cheating us, doing all sorts of things showing that they are our friends---but I know...'
Mr. Nyerere rose in reply to say:
'There cannot be a bigger difference between the speakers [for others took a similar line] and this Government here. Discrimination against human beings because of their color is exactly what we have been fighting against....'
Earlier in October 1961, many of the men who were later to speak up in the National Assembly attacked the government's and Nyerere's position in the NEC (National Executive Committee, supreme body of authority in TANU – Tanganyika African National Union). They persisted with these attacks in another NEC meeting of January 1962, during which Nyerere made up his mind to resign. He was to say in January that he first considered resigning in October 1961, after the National Assembly debates.
By then (January 1962), the pressure from middle-level leaders – regional/district secretaries and chairmen, MPs, MNE, administrative secretaries in National Headquarters, and trade union leaders – had become very great.
When the Citizenship Bill was presented to the National Assembly in October 1961, Nyerere said he would resign unless he carried the House with him.
Under this threat, the Bill was carried overwhelmingly, but dissidence was not ended within TANU over racial issues which fed on economic imbalances.
Throughout the last two months of 1961 unrest persisted, and Asians were periodically threatened in various parts of Tanganyika.” – Henry Bienen,, Tanzania: Party Transformation and Economic Development, Princeton, New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press, 1967, pp. 162 – 163).
When Nelson Mandela arrived in the town of Mbeya in the second week of January 1962 where he was to be received by John Mwakangale on behalf of the government of newly independent Tanganyika, it was a visit of historic significance which highlighted the major role Tanganyika, later Tanzania, was to play in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and against white minority rule in other countries in the region. And it left an indelible mark on him.
After meeting Mwakangale, Mandela flew to Dar es Salaam the next day where he met Julius Nyerere.
Nyerere was the first head of govermment of an independent African country Mandela met.
In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, he recalled his meeting with John Mwakangale in the town of Mbeya – the first leader he met in the country – and how, for the first time in his life, he felt free and proud to be in an independent African country:
"Early the next morning we left (Bechuanaland, now Botswana) for Mbeya, a town near the Northern Rhodesian border....(In Mbeya) we booked in a local hotel and found a crowd of blacks and whites sitting on the veranda making polite conversation.
Never before had I been in a public place or hotel where there was no color bar.
We were waiting for Mr. John Mwakangale of the Tanganyika African National Union, a member of Parliament and unbeknown to us he had already called looking for us.
An African guest approached the white receptionist. 'Madam, did a Mr. Mwakangale inquire after these two gentlemen?' he asked, pointing to us. 'I am sorry, sir,' she replied. 'He did but I forgot to tell them.' 'Please be careful, madam,' he said in a polite but firm tone. 'These men are our guests and we would like them to receive proper attention.'
I then truly realized that I was in a country ruled by Africans. For the first time in my life, I was a free man. Though I was a fugitive and wanted in my own land, I felt the burden of oppression lifting from my shoulders. Everywhere I went in Tanganyika my skin color was automatically accepted rather than instantly reviled. I was being judged for the first time not by the color of my skin by the measure of my mind and character. Although I was often homesick during my travels, I nevertheless felt as though I were truly home for the first time....
We arrived in Dar es Salaam the next day and I met with Julius Nyerere, the newly independent country's first president. We talked at his house, which was not at all grand, and I recall that he drove himself in a simple car, a little Austin. This impressed me, for it suggested that he was a man of the people. Class, Nyerere always insisted, was alien to Africa; socialism indigenous.” – (Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, Little, Brown and Co., New York, 1994, p. 538).
The struggle against apartheid in South Africa echoed the sentiments of the people of Tanganyika who were also struggling to end colonial rule which was also based on racial inequality just like apartheid. It was, in fact, a form of apartheid even though our British colonial rulers in Tanganyika did not acknowledge that or give it a name, as British journalist Trevor Grundy who was my colleague at the Daily News in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, stated.
It was not only a form of racial injustice under which I grew up in colonial Tanganyika; it played a pivotal role in my life on how I was able to deal with racism in the United States when I went there as a student. It prepared me for that.
It also became the focus of some of my writings about colonial and post-colonial Africa.
Racial inequalities under colonial rule and after independence
When I was in Tanzania, I went to school and lived in a city which exemplified racial inequalities since colonial times. It was racially segregated, not much different from segregated cities in the United States. That was Dar es Salaam, the largest city in the country and during that period the capital of Tanzania.
The school I attended in Dar es Salaam, Tambaza High School, was predominantly Asian. It was in an upper middle-class area of Upanga, designated – like the city centre – as a residential area for Asians. The head of the school during that period, Bori Lira, was the school's first black African headmaster. And I was among the first black African students to integrate the school.
The area was also home to a number of diplomats including the Zambian ambassador whose residence was next to our hostel; the Cuban ambassador whose residence was only few yards away from the Zambian ambassador's; and a Congolese diplomat whose house was across the street not more than twenty yards from our hostel.
We used to see some of his family members playing and dancing to Congolese music on their porch now and then.
Next to his was the residence of Bert Shankland, British, and veteran of the East African Safari Rally and winner twice, in 1966 and 1967, of this gruelling race. It was known to be the toughest and most dangerous rally in the world.
The competitors in the rally raced through three East African countries starting from Kenya's capital Nairobi going through Uganda, Tanzania and back to Nairobi. The rallies sometimes started in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and in Kampala, Uganda, but mostly in Nairobi.
We used to see Bert Shankland many times in the evening sitting on his porch drinking some beer when we were on the terrace – the rooftop of of our school hostel – getting some fresh air.
On the other side of our hostel was the residence of a Chinese diplomat not more than twenty yards away.
The Upanga area had historically been for Asians. Segregation was reinforced by the policies pursued by the colonial rulers to segregate members of different races but without officially pursuing the policy of segregation.
As a previously segregated school exclusively for students of Asian origin, mainly Indian and Pakistani, the school I attended in Upanga clearly symbolised the segregated nature of the city itself and of the vital role the Asian community played in the economic life of Dar es Salaam, given their strategic location in the city centre as their home and hub of the nation's metropolis.
The students at the school were mostly Tanzanians of Indian and Pakistani origin even ten years after independence. Once known as H.H. The Aga Khan High School, the government changed its name to Tambaza after independence – to symbolise the dawn of a new era – when the new leaders of the country decided to integrate all schools including Christian ones to enable Muslims and other non-Christians to enroll as students. School integration was mandatory nationwide.
As one of the first African students to integrate the school, I stayed at H.H. The Aga Khan Hostel which was also overwhelmingly Asian. It was located only a few yards away from the school and I was one of the few black students who stayed there. Others included President Nyerere's son Andrew, his first-born, whose room was next to mine on the floor upstairs.
Yet, we were not impressed by racial integration at our school. We hardly mingled with the other Tanzanian students of Asian origin – except when we ate at the same tables in the dining room, “forced” to sit together because of logistical problems; if you didn't, where were you going to sit and when were you going to eat?
So, we had to sit together but hardly spoke to each other. We did not even look at each other. We just ate.
It was not a hostile environment but clearly not one in which we intermingled or socialised together across the colour line. We were that far apart, socially, yet so close physically.
There was one Asian student, about 14 years old, and one of my classmates, also Asian, who mingled with us. Even they were different from us in one fundamental respect besides race. They always spoke to us in English. They never spoke to us in our national language Kiswahili also known as Swahili. Many Indians, although born and brought up in Tanzania, didn't know Kiswahili well. They spoke their own languages, Hindi and Gujarati, and were not really interested in learning Swahili. But they liked and learned English.
I didn't know and don't remember any other Indian student or students who were friendly with blacks, besides those two, although we stayed together at the hostel and were together in the same building and on the same premises everyday.
After we finished school and left – the “Indian” school that once was – we went to our own areas, black and separate from non-blacks.
It was segregation but also that was just the way it was supposed to be, as a way of life, different people living in their own areas without any animosity.
Even though segregation in Tanganyika since colonial times was not given official sanction by being codified into law, practice gave it a semblance of legality – it was routinely practiced – as did official policy which made sure members of different races lived separately.
That was the case during both German and British colonial rule.
That was also the case even after independence in the sixties, but only as a matter of practice and tradition not as a matter of policy sanctioned by the government as was the case during colonial rule. And that is still the case today.
Segregation in Tanganyika was similar to racial segregation in the northern part of the United States in one fundamental respect although in all other areas it was just like in the South – in the southern states – in terms of practice.
While it was codified into law in the southern states, hence de jure segregation,, it was de facto in the northern part of the United States but with the same results, putting blacks at a disadvantage in terms of housing, employment, access to resources and other areas of life where they were denied equal rights.
That was also the case in colonial Tanganyika.
There was no other city or place in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, where racial segregation became so deeply entrenched as it did in Dar es Salaam.
The American city where I lived from the early to the mid-seventies that was closest to Dar es Salaam in terms of racial composition and segregation was Detroit. It was at least 90 per cent black like Dar es Salaam. It was also segregated like Dar, as Dar es Salaam is popularly known.
I felt at home when I moved to Detroit. It reminded me so much of Dar es Salaam. There were black people everywhere just like Dar, insulating me from racism I knew I was bound to encounter in the United States just like any other blacks do. Being surrounded by so many blacks reduced the chances of running into racists – not as often as would be the case in a city that is overwhelmingly white – although they were also there in what was supposed to be a “black” city.
I remember visiting Detroit in the late seventies with a Nigerian student who used to live in Grand Rapids during the same time I did, and how surprised he was when he saw so many blacks in Detroit.
He had never been to Detroit before and said, “Wow, it's just like Lagos,” which was the largest city and former capital of Nigeria; it was Nigeria's capital until 1975.
The inner city of Detroit was black, almost entirely black.
Whites lived mostly in the suburbs although they were also scattered in different parts of the city.
Southwest Detroit was mostly Hispanic, a racial minority group like blacks in a predominantly white society.
The Hispanic community as an integral part of Detroit – a predominantly black city – reminded me of the Asian community in Dar, also a predominantly black city, although without the economic clout Tanzanians of Asian origin have in Dar es Salaam and other parts of the country. Hispanics in Detroit were as “poor” as blacks.
There was also an ethnic enclave of whites mostly of Polish origin within the city of Detroit who constituted a city within a city known as Hamtramck not far from where I lived. In its early days, Polish was the main language spoken in Hamtramck.
There is another city, Highland Park, surrounded by Detroit. But it is overwhelmingly black like the rest of Detroit.
This demographic pattern of Detroit is reminiscent of Dar es Salaam.
Dar es Salaam is still overwhelmingly black African even in the suburbs, although Oyster Bay, also known as Coco beach, has historically been home to whites, mostly British, and expatriates who are also mostly white.
But it also has a large number of blacks including government officials especially since independence. Some of them were my relatives, my mother's first cousin Lugano Mwankemwa (her maiden name) and her husband Brown Ngwilulupi and their children. The American ambassador was their neighbour.
Still, Dar es Salaam is a segregated city although not in the same way cities in the American South were when segregation was sanctioned by law.
There may be a misconception among many Americans, including black Americans, about the experience Africans have had with racism in their home countries. There is a belief among some of them that because blacks from Africa come from countries which are “all black” or overwhelmingly black, they have not experienced racism.
That is a misconception, and a myth, as I have demonstrated in my case which is also the experience of many other blacks in my home country and elsewhere across the continent.
It may be a shock to some of them when they come to the United States and face racism because they are not used to it as much as they are to tribalism; also because they think the United States has conquered racism and Americans are so friendly that they will just embrace them, all the way, regardless of racial differences.
Yes, it may be a shock to at least a few of them but not to someone like me. When I faced racism in the United States, I said to myself, “I expected it. I grew up under segregation, I went to segregated schools, and lived in segregated areas in my home country.”
What I did not experience – not just in its virulent form – was tribalism, but not segregation especially in Dar es Salaam.
A number of scholars and other researchers have also observed this phenomenon – the segregated nature of Dar es Salaam – since colonial times. And it is still a segregated city, although the people who live there seem to accept this historical fact as a fact of life even today in an era of what may be called “voluntary” segregation. But it is more than that.
It is true many, if not most, people like to live in their own areas and even with their “own” people – or “their own kind.” But it is also a fact that they are locked in place by history as if they are frozen in time in terms of residential choice and designation. As Professor Sarah L. Smiley, an American, stated in her study and published as a paper in 2009 entitled, “The City of Three Colors: Segregation in Colonial Dar es Salaam, 1891 – 1961”:
“My Dar es Salaam was one with little interaction between races and one where residents have strong ideas about where people belong. As a white American living in the traditionally Asian City Center, I was told by many people that I was out of place. The Dar es Salaam I experienced was Mji wa Rangi Tatu - the city of three colors.
To me these three colors are distinct, both in color and in geography, and represent three races in the city: whites, Asians, and Africans. That these colors are separate is a direct legacy of seventy years of segregation, first implemented by the German colonial government and later continued by the British colonial government.
Yet these three colors were never equal in terms of population; Dar es Salaam is, and always was, a majority African city. The city's African population was 90 percent in 1894 and 63 percent in 1957. During that same period, the city's European population was never more than four percent.
To call colonial Dar es Salaam a racially segregated city is not groundbreaking, since many scholars of the city have already done so. De Blij commented on the de jure racial segregation of Dar es Salaam among European, Asian and Arab, and African areas, and Leslie surveyed the city's many suburbs designed exclusively for the African population. Anthony and Mascarenhas both suggested that race served as the primary factor in Dar es Salaam's segregation, above class, ethnicity, religion, or occupation....
Building ordinances were subtle backdoor policies to segregate the city without an explicit focus on race. They divided Dar es Salaam into zones based solely on the types of buildings allowed in each zone. Zone 1 was for buildings of a European type, Zone 2 was for residential or commercial buildings, and Zone 3 was for native style buildings. These zones were distinct entities but had an important spatial component. Zone 1 occupied the city's premium land along the coast and was situated as far as possible from Zone 3 while Zone 2 served as a buffer between these areas.
Although these ordinances applied only to physical structures, they ultimately dictated the racial composition of these areas. in fact these areas acquired colloquial Swahili names; Zone 1 became known as Uzunguni (the place of Europeans), Zone 2 as Uhindini (the place of Indians), and Zone 3 as Uswahilini (the place of Africans)....
The British government maintained and strengthened racial segregation in Dar es Salaam in the absence of any official policy of segregation. This segregation did more than dictate the residential patterns of urban residents; the city was the site of social segregation as the government privileged the minority European population at the expense of the majority African population....
The end result of over one hundred years of racial segregation is Mji wa Rangi Tatu, a city with little interaction between races but clear notions about spatial belonging.” n – (Sarah L. Smiley, “The City of Three Colors: Segregation in Colonial Dar es Salaam, 1891 – 1961,” Historical Geography, Volume 37, 2009, pp. 178 – 179, 180).
The hierarchy of residential areas coincided with racial identity and served political purposes as well.
The colonial rulers used Tanganyikans of Asian origin as a shock absorber – a buffer between Africans and Europeans to shield themselves from Africans.
Some of the anger, caused by racial injustice, which should have been directed at the British colonial rulers was instead misdirected against Tanganyikan Asians by Africans. It was, nonetheless, a well-structured racial hierarchy to the detriment of Africans more than anybody else.
Smiley goes on to state:
“German rule in German East Africa officially began in 1887, and the government enacted some early forms of segregation before implementing its first building ordinance in 1891. During those four years the government seized eastern portions of the city from Africans and expelled them farther west....After 1912 the German government began to purchase land for a dedicaated African settlement, suggesting that it envisioned more strict segregation for the future....
The era of German colonial rule was interrupted by, and ultimately ended by, World War I. At the conclusion of the war, the Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of its colonial possessions. The League of Nations Covenant mandated Tanganyika, formerly German East Africa, to Great Britain....The Mandate explicitly prohibited segregation and the unequal treatment of races....
Not only did the British government maintain and eventually expand the segregation implemented by the German administration, it repeatedly prioritized the needs of the European minority at the expense of the African majority....in fact a 1932 economic report suggested that too much money was spent on the European administration in a place where the needs of Africans were to come first....
Inequalities were especially evident in education. Before the end of World War II, Great Britain increased spending on education in Tanganyika Territory without providing education for Africans, an omission considered 'one of the least fortunate chapters in the history of the country under mandate.' After the war Britain began to spend more on African education, but spending levels remained disparate.
A 1955 grant supposedly allotted funding equally between European, Asian, and African education. The vast population differences – 21,000 Europeans, 80,000 Asians, and 8 million Africans – meant that African education received much less per person.
These examples on education spending clearly show that the League of Nations did not prevent racial segregation or discrimination in Tanganyika in spite of the larger goal of the Mandate.” – (Ibid., pp. 180, 181, 183).
This deliberate policy of systematic exclusion, segregation and discrimination which had its origin in the colonial administrations of both rulers of Tanganyika – German and British – had a lasting impact that endures today decades after the country won independence. As Smiley points out concerning segregation in Dar es Salaam along racial lines, a policy that was implemented in other urban areas of colonial Tanganyika only in varying degrees but with the same objective in mind, to keep races apart, with whites having the most privileged status, it was impossible to separate residential designation from racial identity. Residential areas in Zone 1, of prime land, were designated “European,” even if not explicitly so in semantic terms; Zone 3, “African.”
The policy also led to racial friction and antagonism between Africans and Asians in Zone 3 which was referred to – and designated – as the “African area” but which was also open to non-Africans since the British colonial rulers claimed the designation had nothing to do with race – the area had simply evolved into being “African” in terms of residence but was never officially intended to be so, they claimed. As Smiley states:
“It is impossible for these (residential) zones to be simultaneously racially homogeneous and not about race at all....
One effect...was the intrusion of Asians into Zone 3; since the change permitted any type of construction in this area, some Asians took advantage of cheaper housing costs and increased business opportunities in this area. After World War II, the Tanganyika African Government Servants Association complained that Asians occupied all of the well-ventilated and hygienic homes in Kariakoo and were therefore contributing to the housing shortage and poor housing conditions of most of the city's African residents....The government was unwilling to stop this movement of Asians...since there was 'no policy of segregation of race'....
(Yet) conditions in Zone 3 remained poor (for racial reasons since the area still was mostly African in spite of the presence of some Asians - this comment added, not by Smiley). Zone 3 remained the only portion of the city that permitted construction of African style homes, and the government seriously underfunded this zone throughout colonial rule....
The government recognized that an official policy of racial segregation would violate the League of Nations Mandate but it clearly expressed interest in implementing such a policy and discovered ways to circumvent the Mandate. The desire to segregate Dar es Salaam was not expressed only by low-level officials. Even the governor of Tanganyika Territory, Horace Byatt, found segregation appealing:
So far as segregation is concerned it is pretty clear to me that in this Territory we cannot adopt the principle of racial segregation as such, for that would lead us into a position...where we should be in conflict with the terms of the Treaty and the Mandate. There is a universal agreement as to the wisdom and necessity of segregation....We can, I believe, ensure proper segregation in actual practice by means of Building and Township Regulations. For example, though an Asiatic may buy a plot in the European residential quarter, we can require him to build on it a house of a type which would not suit his methods of life in that we should prohibit the existence of the Asiatic conception of a latrine....
Certainly, as this quotation suggests, racial difference was a primary factor in why the British government segregated Dar es Salaam. Effectively the government achieved its goal by basing its building ordinance on racist assumptions. It assumed that only a European would want a flush toilet and that Africans were incapable of maintaining any structure other than a hut. Although these sanitation preferences could be linked to class, the government used racial categories when discussing these issues, suggesting its interests were in racial segregation rather than economic segregation.” – (Ibid., pp. 183, 184).
Also, it was Africans who constituted the backbone of the economy. Yet they got virtually nothing in return.
They paid the largest amount in taxes but saw nothing in terms of provision of services in their areas.
In the 1940s, there wasn't even a water-borne sewage system in the African residential area of Dar es Salaam. Yet in 1942, more than 72 per cent of the city's residents were African.
Residential segregation also reinforced social segregation. The British implemented this informal policy far more than the Germans did for historical reasons; they ruled Tanganyika longer than the Germans did and therefore had far more time and resources at their disposal to enforce it. As Smiley further states:
“The British administration had nearly forty years to strengthen and expand the segregation begun by the Germans. It did so through deliberate actions that kept Europeans, Asians and and Africans physically and socially separate; by differentiating among the three zones in terms of housing and amenities, the government ensured that Dar es Salaam remained a city of three colors....In the absence of an official racial segregation policy, the British government was extremely successful in dividing Dar es Salaam (along racial lines)....
This trend of providing few benefits to Africans continued throughout British rule. In 1953 (eight years before independence) the majority of Africans in the Magomeni area did not have a bathroom or latrine. More so, this area had over 10,000 residents and only one public water point....(And) it was normal...for the city's Asians and Africans to live without electricity....The Colonial Development and Welfare Act did bring improved infrastructure to the city but unfortunately not all residents benefited equally from this policy. Europeans still received the best treatment while Africans often lived without basic amenities. Even when African areas did receive services, their scope and quality were often inferior to services in Zone 1 (for Europeans)....
On my trip to Rangi Tatu (also an African market area) I saw firsthand the racial divisions in Dar es salaam. I met one man who complained that many white researchers have passed through Mbagala asking residents about the quality of their lives, but many years later they are still without water and electricity. Why then should he talk to me? What would I do to benefit him? His response was not totally unexpected. He lives in one of Dar es Salaam's poorest neighborhoods, in an area that has been discriminated against since colonial rule.
Even with policies to increase development for Africans, Zone 3 areas still bear the ill-effects of too many years of neglect. After more than forty years of independence in Dar es Salaam, the legacies of colonial racial segregation and inequality are still very much evident....
The three zone urban plan implemented first by the German government and later expanded by the British government created stark divisions within the city.
What is especially interesting about these divisions is that they occurred without any direct policy of racial segregation. The colonial governments succeeded in segregating Dar es Salaam in the absence of an official state-sanctioned policy and without ever directly addressing the issue of race....The British adopted a seemingly innocuous building ordinance in the hope of securing the 'same advantages' as racial segregation....
The German and British uses of building ordinances certainly created a city of three colors. These three colors were not equal, with Africans comprising the overwhelming majority of Dar es Salaam's population. In spite of this dominance, the British government still privileged the European minority giving them premium residential plots, better amenities, and more funding....The British government was alarmed when native style huts encroached on Oyster Bay's European suburb but acted quickly to maintain the area's unofficial racial segregation....
In 1952 officials refused to let Europeans live in homes without electricity (which was normal for Africans)....
In light of these inequalities, it is no wonder that Dar es Salaam became such a divided city....To call Dar es Salaam Mji wa Rangi Tatu (the city of three colours) is not a compliment on the city's diversity or cosmopolitanism; it is a recognition of its history of racial segregation and discrimination.” – (Ibid., pp. 186, 190, 191, 192, 193).
Almost 60 years after independence, Dar es Salaam remains essentially a racially segregated city. This segregation spans the cultural and socio-economic spectrum with little prospect for fundamental change.
I experienced that when I worked as a news reporter and lived in Dar es Salaam. I lived in the black areas of Tandika, Temeke and Ilala, products of decades of racial segregation and reflective of the systematic racialism instituted by the colonial rulers and fortified by other non-blacks – Tanzanians of Asian origin and Arabs – who didn't want to integrate with blacks.
That is one of the most prominent features of the city's identity even if some of the city's residents don't acknowledge colour consciousness as a fact of life. It is ruthlessly public in residential patterns in spite of the racial integration that has taken place in some areas through the years in the post-colonial era.
The years I spent under segregation when I was growing up in different parts of Tanganyika shaped my thinking and perspective on race relations and on the impact of colonial rule on the colonised when I became a writer of non-fiction books about colonial and post-colonial Africa.
There was also racial discrimination in employment during colonial rule when I was growing up in the fifties. My father was a victim of such discrimination when he worked for the colonial government and other British employers, as I have stated in my autobiographical writings.
The struggle for independence in Tanganyika in the 1950s, my formative years, was partly fuelled by such racial injustices which, years later, became the focus of some of my writings.
I have written about that in my book Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties and other works including Life under British Colonial Rule: Recollections of an African in which I describe some incidents of racial injustices.
One such incident involved my father when a white supervisor where he worked told him he could not have lunch in the office they shared or even put it on the table. But the supervisor could eat there.
One day, the supervisor told him to take his lunch off the table and never put it there again. That was the first time my father put it there.
The white supervisor probably thought that if he allowed my father to put his food on the table and eat in the office with him, it would have meant they were equal not only in terms of social status but as human beings; which was unthinkable for the white supervisor and many whites who thought they were better than blacks because they were members of a superior race.
For a black person to think he was equal to whites, let alone a white supervisor, was anathema to most whites. Just trying to be equal with them, let alone believing that you are equal, was bad enough.
I remember very well when my father came home in the evening after work in the town of Tukuyu on that day in 1959. He was very bitter about what happened and told my mother about it in front of us – including my younger brothers and sisters – how insulted he was.
Another racial incident had to do with me when, as a six-year-old walking to school with other boys, I was severely wounded after being chased and bitten by a dog owned by a white couple who lived in a house we went by everyday, on a public road, on our way to and from school. I'll never forget that day.
Decades later, I stated in my autobiographical writings, Life under British Colonial Rule: Recollections of an African published in 2018, that I still had a highly visible scar on my right knee where I was bitten by the dog. It was a large dog and it could have killed me. It looked like a Dalmatian, with the same kind of spots but black and brownish, probably mixed breed.
The couple had two dogs, including a German shepherd, which used to chase us. They knew we were just children and went by their house and saw us on our way to and from school everyday but did not tie the dogs or keep them on leashes.
The house, about one mile form my home, was on a tea plantation at Kyimbila. The husband was the manager of Kyimbila Tea Estate.
That was in 1956 when I was in Standard One in primary school in Rungwe District in the Southern Highlands Province, as I have stated in my books Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties, My Life as an African, Life under British Colonial Rule and Tanzania under Mwalimu Nyerere: Reflections on an African Statesman.
After being bitten by the dog, I went on to school where I attended class without getting any help – there was no medical assistance at the primary school, not even a First Aid kit – until I returned home in the evening and my mother put some iodine on it.
I continued to go to school in the following days.
Nothing could be done to the dog owners during those days. It was colonial rule, blacks did not have the same rights whites had and “knew their place” in terms of social status as colonial subjects not as equal citizens in a racially divided society which was vertically structured not only to keep whites on top of other races, especially blacks, but also virtually above the law.
When I was bitten by the dog, the attack was seared in my memory but, as a six-year-old, I did not see it in terms of racism until I became a teenager.
Years later, I stated in some of my autobiographical works that had we been white children, the white couple would probably not have allowed the dogs to roam freely knowing they could attack and even kill us.
The colonial rulers and many white settlers had total disregard for the well-being of Africans as I myself experienced when I was growing up in colonial Tanganyika and almost lost my life when I was attacked by a dog owned by a white couple who couldn't care less about the well-being and safety of black children, or any other blacks, passing by their house even though we walked on a public road, not on their own private property. As I stated in Life under British Colonial Rule:
“There is no question that justice was colour-conscious during colonial rule. That was one of the tragedies of being colonised; our status defined by the colour of our skin.
Colour is immaterial but it carries a lot of weight.” – (Godfrey Mwakikagile, Life under British Colonial Rule, New Africa Press, 2018, p. 108; G. Mwakikagile, Black Conservatives in the United States, 2006, p. 96).
The racial injustices we suffered in colonial Tanganyika, including attacks by dogs deliberately unleashed by whites who did not like or care about blacks, found similar expression in the United States – not just in the South – where blacks have also been victims of racism throughout the nation's history. The parallels are almost exact in some cases, residential segregation being one of the best examples, and the most glaring.
Similarities between colonial Tanganyika and the United States
There are many similarities. Even the attack I suffered
when I was six years old has similarities to the experiences of many blacks in the United States where some whites who don't like black people unleash their dogs to chase and attack them.
I even knew a young white woman in the early 1980s – she was in her early 20s – in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who told me:
“I have a brother in Fremont who has trained his dogs to attack nothing but coloured folks.”
Fremont, mostly white, is about 47 miles north of Grand Rapids.
She also told me:
“Black people are not welcome on Mackinac.”
I told her I already knew that.
Located in Lake Huron, Mackinac is an island and tourist attraction in northern Michigan that connects the Upper Peninsula and the Lower Peninsula of the state of Michigan. The two peninsulas constitute the state.
For years, the Upper Peninsula has been known to be hostile territory for blacks. I have heard that from blacks through the years.
I even knew an African American woman in Grand Rapids whose family members barely escaped when they visited Mackinac Island – simply known as Mackinac – and had to flee for their lives.
They were told by some whites that niggers weren't welcome up there. They got back in their car and were chased for miles on their way back to Grand Rapids. The hostile whites tried to run them off the road.
She also told me one of her co-workers in the 1980s, a white man, told her if he were to take her to Mackinac or anywhere in northern Michigan, he would have to carry a gun because they don't like black people up there.
One of my black roommates in Grand Rapids in 1977 – a few of us rented a house together in the ghetto – went to school in the Upper Peninsula (UP) before I met him. He was a graduate of Northern Michigan University in Marquette, the largest city in the Upper Peninsula.
He said when he was a student there, he was, together with the other black students, routinely targeted by some white students who fired pellet shots at them from BB guns (pellet guns), hitting them in their legs when they walked on campus in the evening. The school authorities did nothing to address the matter.
He also said the Upper Peninsula was not a safe place for blacks.
It may have changed, somewhat, through the years and become a little friendly to black people. But in all the years I lived in Grand Rapids, I never had any intention of going up there to prove it had changed; nor did I hear any black or anybody else say it had, if at all.
Blacks at another school in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan Technological University in Houghton, have also complained about being victims of racism on campus and in the area through the years.
That was also the case even as recently as 2021, as the experience of one black student, Wesley McGowan, at Michigan Technological University (Michigan Tech) showed.
His experience was symptomatic of a bigger problem and served as an example of the collective experience of other blacks on campus and in the Upper Peninsula as a whole; an experience that was attributed by some whites in the UP to something that sounded racist: white people in the Upper Peninsula were not used to seeing blacks except a few.
According to a report, “Michigan Tech Condemned Racism. Then It Got Ugly at Upper Peninsula University,” on Bridge Michigan, 9 February 2021:
“Michigan Technological University is a highly rated university — and has one of the least diverse student populations in the state. It has struggled in recent months to address racism....
Michigan Technological University student Wesley McGowan says he’s endured all manner of racism at the school and surrounding community. 'I feel unsafe at this university'....
Wesley McGowan doesn’t have to think hard to recall examples of racism he’s experienced at Michigan Technological University, where he is a Black student at one of the whitest universities in the state.
As a freshman, McGowan was the only African American in a world culture class where the professor played 'derogatory' videos depicting Black people with cartoonishly large lips and noses and by white actors in 'blackface,' he said.
Then there was the janitor who confronted him in Fischer Hall, where he was trying to do school work, and 'acted like I broke into the building.' And the guy in downtown Houghton, the predominately white Upper Peninsula city where the university is located, who yelled the N-world from a truck that was waving a 'big old Confederate flag,' McGowan recalled....
Students and staff of color...[have] long complained about systemic racism at and around Michigan Tech....
'I’m waking up every morning to find motivation to continue to be at Michigan Tech, because I feel like once again, I’m not valued at this university,' said McGowan, who received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from MTU. He’s now a doctoral student and intern at the university’s Center for Diversity and Inclusion. 'I feel unsafe at this university'....
McGowan [has also complained about] discrimination by professors and university officials....
Engineering Professor Jeffrey Burl...who last month denied seeing any discrimination against people of color — or women — in his 28 years at the university...[and Materials Professor Jaroslaw Drelich]...have denounced racism but suggested they'd seen little of it at Michigan Tech or the surrounding community, contradicting claims by students, faculty and staff of color.
But in an interview with Bridge, Burl acknowledged there are simply fewer people of color in the region than other parts of the country, limiting local exposure to non-white races.”
Whites in the Upper Peninsula are just not used to seeing black people.
So what? Is that why they don't like blacks? Not all whites but probably many of them.
That's why they don't want them up there, and that's why they don't even want to know them, is the inevitable conclusion when black people say they are victims of racism in the Upper Peninsula; some of it virulent.
The Upper Peninsula was also identified as one of the most racist places in the United States in an article, “The Most Racist Places in America, According to Google,” published in The Washington Post, 28 April 2015.
So, what the young white woman in Grand Rapids told me about Mackinac Island and northern Michigan in general was nothing new to me. And it was nothing new to many other blacks.
And she seemed to enjoy that when she talked about blacks not being welcome up there.
Even her use of the term “coloured folks” or “coloureds,” which she used interchangeably now and then in my conversations with her, had racial overtones. The term is no longer used except by a few people including some blacks born in the 1920s and 1930s. Her use of the term clearly showed how she felt about blacks.
Considering her age, she was used to hearing the term “blacks” or “black people” more than any other – besides “nigger” or “niggers” – to describe or identify us. She even used the term “blacks” or “black people” herself in conversations.
She had a condescending attitude towards blacks and deliberately used the term “coloured folks” to disparage black people and set them apart from the rest of society as if they were members of a peculiar species – as they indeed were and still are, according to racists.
As an African who experienced racism in colonial Tanganyika and even after independence, to the surprise of some blacks in the United States who think Africans who come to America are not used to racism because they come from black countries, I am in a good position to respond accordingly not just to them but also to white racists who think they upset blacks when they tell them they are not accepted by whites and even in some places where they think they are. My attitude is: “That is nothing new to me. I am not surprised at all.”
That is the same attitude I had when I became a teenager and had a better understanding of racism than I did when I was younger and when I was bitten by a dog owned by a white couple.
As a teenager, I was able to put the attack in a better perspective and felt that was just the kind of treatment we blacks should expect from whites and even from other non-blacks who felt they were better than we were. We knew we did not have the same rights they had because of what we were – black people. It was just a matter of common sense even for a teenager to know that.
Our humanity as Africans, and our lives, meant absolutely nothing to many whites, demonstrated by the injustices and indignities we suffered under colonial rule.
African children, even if not the primary target, sometimes witnessed their parents and other adults being insulted and humiliated by their colonial masters. It happened in Kenya, and it happened in Tanganyika, my home country as well as others, even when the countries were approaching independence; the fifties being one of the most critical periods in the history of colonial rule in Africa.
School children who grew up in the fifties were among the victims. The problem was compounded by inequities in the provision of funds and facilities for education. Meagre resources were allocated to education for African children in sharp contrast with the amount spent on schools for European and Asian children. The school I attended was no exception. As I have stated in my book, Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties:
“It was in the area of education where the colonial authorities instituted some of the most rigid structures of racial separation in the country.
They sanctioned inequality in the allocation of funds and provision of facilities including teachers which ensured that the children of the white settlers would get the best education and enjoy a privileged life style at the expense of Africans and, to a smaller degree, Asians whose status was no better than that of the Africans as colonial subjects; although they were treated better than Africans in many cases.
Arabs had their own Koranic schools and were not really an integral part of the mainstream in terms of formal education in the Western intellectual tradition.
But the bottom line was that even if the Asians – as well as the Arabs – were treated better than the Africans, they were still colonial subjects, therefore not equal to whites. And provision of separate educational facilities and funds affected their lives as well; although even in this case they were favoured by the colonial government when compared with Africans. As David Nettelbeck states in “Educational Separatism and the 1950s” in his book, A History of Arusha School:
'Because of the Government's lack of resources and unwillingness to take a strong initiative in educational provision, and in pursuance of the G.I.A. Policy, there grew up three racially distinct systems of African, Asian and European education with each of the three subdivided into state controlled, state aided, and wholly private schools.
In the African sector for example in 1937, there were 9,500 pupils in Government schools, 19,500 in aided schools and 100,000 in private schools. These latter were often sub-standard bush schools, and catechetical centres or Koranic schools along the coast. It was not until 1955 that the Government required these kinds of schools to be registered.
In the same year, there were 985 places in Government schools for Indian children and another 3,318 in grant aided schools. The Indian community were quick to take advantage of the G.I.A. system and fulfil the requirements thus only 320 of their children were that year in private schools.
For the European community in the 1930s, the Government made direct provision in three ways. Arusha School, primarily for boarders, opened in 1934; a correspondence course was based in Dar es Salaam; and there was also a junior primary school in Dar es Salaam. The enrolment figures in 1937 show 59 children in the latter two, and 60 pupils at Arusha School.
There were in addition 704 grant-aided places for European children, a significant proportion of these being in national community schools for the Dutch, German and Greek children. Another 15 places were in a private school. The above figures are taken from the enrolment statistics 1931 - 1948 in Appendix G.
There is another way of looking at these statistics and that is to see the percentage of children being educated from each community. Listowell states that in 1933, 51% of the European children, 49% of the Asian and 2% of the African were at school.
By 1945 7.5%, of the African children attended school though few got beyond the fourth primary grade and none could attempt the entrance exam for tertiary study at Makerere in Uganda. By 1959, 40% of African children attended at least the first four years of primary education, and in 1961, 55% of the age group entered the first primary grade.
The present Government of Nyerere aims at universal primary education by 1980. (The comparative cost per head of population has been referred to above and is detailed in Appendix J.)
In 1930 an Education Tax was introduced with the primary object of affording security to the Government for the repayment of loans made to non- African communities. In 1932 the Indian and European communities were taxed for their education on a poll Tax basis and, in addition, fees were charged at their schools. Nevertheless the Government was making a far more generous per capita provision for European and Indian children than it was for African children.
The table in Appendix J shows the total expenditure for each community and the per capita cost from 1931 - 1937. Also the table in Appendix K shows that in 1955/56, 33.7% of the money spent by the Government on European education was collected in fees, 15.4% came from the European Education Tax and 49.1% from Central Revenue. In 1959 the central revenue provided for European Education an amount equivalent to 1% of the total territorial expenditure.
In 1956, £3,618,555 held by the Custodian of Enemy Property from funds collected from confiscated properties during the Second World War was distributed equally between the Tanganyika Higher Education Trust Fund for establishing tertiary education facilities, St Michael's and St George's School, a lavish secondary school for European children at Iringa, Indian education, and African education.
This 4 way split seem superficially fair but as President Nyerere has pointed out, the allocation on a per capita basis was equivalent to shs- 720/- to each European, shs. 200/- to each Asian and shs. 2/- to each African.
In 1948 and 1949, the three existing education systems described above were formalized by two ordinances, the Non-Native Education Ordinance and the Non-Native Education Tax Ordinance. This legislation brought into being an Indian Education Authority and a European Education Authority, each composed of representatives of the communities they were to serve.
They were responsible for the development and general over-sight of the systems, and for managing the education funds according to the budget approved by the Legislative Council.
There was also an Advisory Committee for Other (non-native) Education, which included Goan, Mauritian, Seychellois, Anglo-Indian, and Ceylonese children.
What began in 1948 as a very minor offshoot of basic Government responsibility for the development of the country with only 8,000 Asian and 300 European children, had become by 1961 a major concern catering for 28,000 Asian and 2,500 European children.'
The three educational systems established along racial lines for Europeans, Indians and Africans – in descending order in terms of quality – were formalized in the 1940s and 1950s. And they mirrored the racial hierarchy in colonial Tanganyika instituted by the British colonial rulers. They were abolished in January 1962, soon after the country won independence on 9 December 1961, and all schools in Tanganyika were opened to students of all races.”– (Godfrey Mwakikagile, Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: New Africa Press, 2010, pp. 38 – 40).
The colonial authorities tried to justify such racial inequalities, hence discrimination, on economic grounds and even for logistical reasons – why members of different races could not attend the same schools – contending that it would have been impossible to provide education to all African children who wanted to attend school. Yet they could not explain the disparity in the allocation of resources and why it mirrored and reflected racial categories and identities and in a hierarchical order; or why they could not have even a few schools which accepted students of all races on equal basis.
There is no question that there was racial discrimination regardless of how the British colonial rulers tried to rationalise racial inequalities.
And unfortunately for us, black African students, the competition for education was so intense that only a handful got the chance to go beyond primary school, and even fewer to secondary school, let alone high school in Standard 13 (Form V) and Standard 14 (Form VI), after completing standard 12 (Form VI), the equivalent of the 12th grade under the American educational system. I was one of the lucky few who went all the way to high school and completed Form VI.
Michael Longford who served as a colonial administrative officer in Tukuyu, in my home district of Rungwe, and in the other parts of Tanganyika in the fifties as the country was gradually making progress towards independence attempted to provide the context in which racial inequalities in the provision of education and segregation in different settings existed and the impact it had on Africans. As he stated in his book, The Flags Changed at Midnight: Tanganyika's Progress Towards Independence:
“Segregated clubs were not the only aspect of social life where racial discrimination existed during the period of British rule. Some expatriates in both the public and private sector wanted to preserve their privileged way of life for as long as possible, and regarded any moves to promote equality of opportunity for Africans as a threat to themselves.
However, the reasons for what often looked like racism were not always selfish. Economic and cultural factors also played a part....
Education was provided in racially segregated schools. This seems wrong to people who oppose discrimination. However, those who made the policy believed that children learn better in their own mother tongue. Putting an English-speaking or a Gujarati-speaking child into a class which is being taught in Swahili would not have been in the best interests of any of the children.
Schools for non-native children were funded in part from school fees and Non-Native Education Tax, but a casual observer would notice only that they had better premises and facilities than schools for African children.
The academic standards in the best secondary schools for African children were generally regarded as being at least as good as those in non-native schools, but the competition for places in those schools was intense.
At the end of their fourth year of primary schooling, African pupils took an examination, and only a very small minority were successful enough to be offered places in middle schools.
At the end of their eighth and tenth years of schooling, African pupils took further competitive examinations, and a similar selection process took place at each stage.
Only the most hard-working and intelligent African children had the chance to complete primary, middle and secondary schooling.
It caused much bitterness among ambitious young Africans that they were not given the opportunity to continue with their education for as long as they wanted, while non-native children did not have the same problem.
However, the numbers of African children were so much larger than the numbers of non-African children that the economy could not possibly have afforded the cost of providing for every African child the quality of schooling that was available only to the brightest.
The argument of expediency was also sometimes put forward as a justification for the existence of two separate education systems.
Expatriates had skills which were essential to the economic development of Tanganyika, but were still rare in the indigenous population. It was sometimes asserted that expatriates with such skills would be unwilling to work in Tanganyika at all unless their children had access to schools that compared with the standard of schools in their parents' countries of origin. I never heard any firm evidence to prove or disprove this claim.
There were several other aspects of social policy which appeared at first glance to involve legalised racial discrimination. Several such laws had nevertheless been enacted from praise-worthy motives. The 'Credit to Natives (Restriction) Ordinance,' for example, had been enacted in 1923.
This law provided, subject to a few minor exceptions, that a non-native was not able to sue an African for debt in a civil court. It was designed to prevent the kind of situation which still exists now in some Asian countries, that peasant farmers who become indebted to rich merchants are then exploited, either by having to pay interest at exorbitant rates, or even worse, by being forced to pay off their debt by selling their young children into bonded labour.
The effect of this law was that indebtedness was not a serious problem in Tanganyika. However, as the people whom it sought to protect became better able to look after their own affairs, the law was increasingly criticised for being paternalistic and discriminatory.” – (Michael Longford, The Flags Changed at Midnight: Tanganyika's Progress Towards Independence, op. cit., pp. 39 – 40).
What is not acknowledged is the role the colonial government played in the allocation of resources to schools in a discriminatory way, on racial basis, and how African children could have had more and better opportunities to acquire education had the natural resources of the country, including taxes paid by Africans, been used to achieve this goal.
What did the colonial government do with the resources of the country? Where did they go, and for whose benefit?
It could have used the resources to help the indigenous people as well.
That is exactly what happened after the end of colonial rule when the predominantly black African government assumed control and expanded opportunities for education and provision of other services across the country – including education for adults teaching them how to read and write. It achieved all that in only 24 years since independence under the leadership of Julius Nyerere. It used the nation's resources wisely and fairly to help the people without discrimination. As he stated in an interview:
“We took over a country with 85 per cent of its adults illiterate. The British ruled us for 43 years. When they left, there were two trained engineers and 12 doctors. When I stepped down, there was 91 per cent literacy and nearly every child was in school. We trained thousands of engineers, doctors and teachers.” – (Julius Nyerere, quoted in Sunday Times, London, October 3, 1999; R.W. Johnson, “Nyerere: A Flawed Hero,” ibid., p. 73. See also, “Farewell to the Father of Tanzania,” in the Mail &Guardian, Johannesburg, October 15, 1999; “Julius Nyerere of Tanzania Dies; Preached African Socialism to the World,” in The New York Times, October 15, 1999, p. B10; “Former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere Dies at 77; African leader Led Independence Movement and Worked to Unify Nation, Continent,” in The Washington Post, October 15, 1999, p. B-06; “Julius Nyerere: Former President of Tanzania Led Country to Independence,” in the Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1999, p. 30. Also quoted by Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, New Africa Press, Third Edition, 2010, p. 76).
The colonial government could have done much more in the fifties if it considered the well-being of Africans to be paramount. But it was colonial rule and colonial rulers considered their interests to be paramount at the expense of the colonised.
Although Tanganyika was still under colonial rule during that period, there is no question that the fifties were also the dawn of a new era in the history of the country.
It was a decade that preceded independence and a transitional period which symbolised the identity and partly shaped the thinking of those who grew up in those years as a product of both eras, colonial and post-colonial. They also served as a bridge between the two.
I was born during colonial rule. I lived under colonial rule before I started going to school. I attended primary school under colonial rule. And I entered middle school still under colonial rule in the same year our country won independence on December 9th.
Therefore, partly as a product of colonial rule, my identity as a colonial subject was an integral part of my upbringing and played a critical role in the formation and evolution of my identity into what I came to be, years later, as an African and as a child of two worlds: colonial and post-colonial.
As I have stated in my works Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties and Life under British Colonial Rule among others, it was in the same year I was bitten by a dog that Princess Margaret visited Mbeya and Sao Hill in my home region, the Southern Highlands Province, as well as other parts of the country, in October 1956; a visit that symbolised British imperial rule over Tanganyika but also at a time when the nationalist movement was gaining momentum in the struggle for independence.
The party that led the country to independence, Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), had been formed just two years before, in July 1954, and within months succeeded in mobilising massive support across the country in its quest to end colonial rule. Independence was inevitable.
A few months after Princess Margaret visited Tanganyika, the Gold Coast became the first black African country to emerge from colonial rule as the new nation of Ghana in March 1957, blazing the trail for the African independence movement; while Tanganyika blazed the trail in East Africa four years later.
I have written about other incidents of racial injustices and other subjects to show how life was in colonial Tanganyika in the fifties from the perspective of colonial subjects who hardly had any rights in their own country ruled and dominated by whites. Africans were lowest in the racial hierarchy, with Asians and Arabs ranked next to whites.
I grew up in a country where during the first twelve years of my life, I was not a full citizen but a mere colonial subject of our British rulers.
The similarities in race relations in colonial Tanganyika and in the United States enabled me to easily navigate the treacherous waters of relations between blacks and whites in the United States when I came to this country.
My experience with racism in my home country enabled me to avoid falling into pitfalls in my dealings with Americans. I avoided offending them on racial matters. I knew how to deal with them because of the experience I had where I came from and how I lived there. I knew how I was supposed to interact with them in a country where I ended up living most of my life although I did not know that would be the case when I left Africa and came to America.
Not only did colonial Tanganyika help to shape my perspective on race relations; it helped to determine my identity when colonial rule was coming to an end; so did post-colonial Tanganyika – and Tanzania – when our country had been independent for only a few years before I came to the United States when I was 23 years old.
My country had been independent for almost eleven years when I left. And it has continued to have an influence on my life as if I never left; so has the United States but not in the same way it would have had I been born here.
Part Two
My life with African Americans
MY INTEREST in Black America goes back to my teens when I was in secondary school in Tanzania in the sixties. Even the first American school where I sought admission when I was in secondary school was a black academic institution, Lincoln University, in Pennsylvania.
Inspiration to go to the United States
and my first encounter with a Black American
I decided to apply for admission there after I read Kwame Nkrumah's autobiography in 1966. Nkrumah himself attended Lincoln University. That is how I first came to know about the school after I read his autobiography, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah first published in 1957. And I partly credit him for inspiring me to pursue further education in the United States.
Had I not read his autobiography, I probably would not have sought admission to Lincoln University. I did not succeed in getting admitted into the school because I did not have the money to pay for my education. But from them on, I kept on pursuing my dream of going to school in the United States until I finally succeeded in doing so.
My first contact, or encounter, with an African American was in 1965. I was 15 years old attending Songea Secondary School in Ruvuma Region on the Tanzanian-Mozambican border. The other administrative region bordering Mozambique is Mtwara, east of Ruvuma. And River Ruvuma is the boundary between the two countries.
I also remember the bombings by the Portuguese in those two regions, especially Mtwara Region, during the Mozambican struggle for independence in the sixties and early seventies.
Our country provided sanctuary to the Mozambican freedom fighters (FRELIMO) and refugees, and thus incurred the wrath of the Portuguese. Fortunately, our school and many other parts of southern Tanzania escaped the bombings mainly because of the defence provided by our armed forces.
One of the army officers who was with the soldiers of the Tanzanian army, the Tanzania People's Defence Forces (TPDF), was my first cousin Owen Mwambapa.
Some of the soldiers were stationed not far from our school, within walking distance about a quarter of mile, and I went to see him a number of times.
He rose through the ranks and later became a brigadier-general and head of the Tanzania Military Academy, an army officers' training school whose alumni include officers from many African countries – Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia South Africa, Seychelles and Lesotho. Tanzanian alumni include Jakaya Kikwete who became the fourth president of Tanzania.
The soldiers who were near our school were not permanently stationed there but had been sent and camped in the area because of the problems we had with the Portuguese and their armed forces across the border in Mozambique.
They later returned to their permanent bases some of which were in the border regions of Ruvuma and Mtwara, providing effective defence against attacks by the Portuguese.
I was in Standard 9, what Americans call grade 9, at Songea Secondary School in 1965 when I first “met” a black American for the first time. It was not a direct personal meeting but a group encounter, together with other students. But I had met other Americans before. They were my teachers in middle school and at Songea Secondary School and all were white.
I had never met an African American, or black American, back then until I went to Songea Secondary School in 1965.
He came to our school with other Peace Corp teachers who taught at other schools in Tanzania. They came to visit their counterparts at our school.
We had a number of Peace Corp teachers at Songea Secondary School but none of them was black. We also had quite a few teachers from Britain.
Others came from India, and the rest were Tanzanians, all black.
But the majority of the teachers were white, mostly from Britain, a colonial legacy since Tanzania was once a British colony.
The American Peace Corp teachers who came to visit their counterparts at our school were all white except one, the black American. And that's what we called him: black American.
During those days, Black Americans hardly called themselves African Americans as many of them do nowadays. They called themselves Afro-Americans or just black Americans. Some of them, especially the older ones, called themselves Negroes and even coloureds.
There are, of course, those who don't like the term “African American.” For example, I remember reading a letter to the editor of the black conservative journal National Minority Politics, renamed Headway, published in Houston, Texas, in which the writer said “Whenever I see the term 'African American' used in a newspaper or magazine, I drop it right there.” That was in 1997.
Headway was not a very popular publication among blacks because of its conservative philosophy and went out of business in less than five years.
Black conservative radio talk show host Larry Elder also doesn't like the term “African American.” He calls it “silly terminology,” as he said in the late 1990s in an interview with The Washington Times, a conservative newspaper, and blames Jesse Jackson for imposing this “new” identity on black Americans.
Anyway, the black American, or African American, Peace Corp teacher who came to our school became the focus of our attention because he was black, like us, and American.
We identified with him and sympathised with blacks in the United States because of the racial discrimination they were going through in the land of their birth and the only country they knew as home. As John Alfred Williams, a black writer from Mississippi, said, “This is my country too,” which is also the title of his non-fiction book published in 1965, the same year I saw a black American for the first time in my life.
Williams' passion for racial justice and identification with Africa is clearly evident in his works. And he never downplayed racism. As he put it in some of his writings, it takes a lot of courage for a black person to drive out there on a highway, let alone across the United States.
A victim of blatant racism himself, he was once awarded a grant to the American Academy in Rome in 1961 because of his excellent novel, Night Song, but the grant was rescinded because he was black; also because of rumours that he was getting ready to marry a white woman, which he did.
Many of his works revolve around one theme: what it means to be black in America.
He taught, into the 1990s, at a number of colleges and universities including Boston University, the University of California-Santa Barbara, the University of Hawaii, the City University of New York, and Rutgers University from where he retired in 1994 as professor of English.
But he was never accorded full recognition as a writer, let alone as one of the finest black novelists of his generation, because of racism, until years later. The author of 21 fiction and non-fiction books, he won the American Book Award in 1998 for Safari West, an outstanding collection of his poems.
His book, This is My Country Too, was definitely one of those works that did not win him accolades, let alone endearment, among many whites who believe black people are not entitled to equal rights and should “go back to Africa,” a common expression among them and which I have heard now and then through the years.
Williams' identification with Africa was, among other things, demonstrated by his non-fiction book, Africa: Her History, Lands, and People, published in 1969; and by his classic best seller, The Man Who Cried I Am, a novel published in 1967, which won him international acclaim despite his “pariah” status in his own country, the United States, where he was ignored by many literary critics and other fellow Americans simply because he was black.
In the book, Williams explores the exploitation of blacks in a predominantly white society in a plot in which the protagonist, Max Reddick, exposes a sinister plot by Western countries to prevent the unification of Africa, and an even more diabolical scheme code-named “King Alfred,” a genocidal plan to end the race problem chillingly similar to Hitler's “Final Solution” that entailed extermination of the Jews and members of other “inferior” races.
Now, here is a black man who, in spite of all the racial persecution he was going through right there in the United States, was still bold enough to tell the truth about it, just like millions of other African Americans did and still do.
Yet, another black man, also born in the United States but now far away with us in Africa, could not even admit what was obvious to everybody – including us – that racism was a fact of life in the citadel of democracy where he was born and brought up. As a black Peace Corp teacher in Africa, it was obvious he had some interest in the continent and in the well-being of fellow blacks. And we approached him with open hearts.
We wanted to hear what he had to say about racial problems in the United States. We already knew about Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and pretty much kept up with what was going on in the United States and in other countries.
When Dr. King was assassinated on 4 April 1968, our headmaster, Mr. Sanga, called an emergency meeting of all the teachers and students to break the news. We went back to our classroooms but the only thing we had on our minds on that day was King's assassination. I was 18 years old and in Standard 12 (Form IV), my last year at Songea Secondary School.
We hardly missed important news. We read newspapers and we listened to the radio including BBC in both English and Kiswahili. And we knew some history, including the history of the United States even if not in detail but enough to talk about the civil rights struggle and other issues.
All the students at our school were black except two of Indian origin. We thought the black American Peace Corp teacher would feel pretty much comfortable with us as fellow blacks. And he was relaxed, smiling a lot during our conversation. He didn't talk much but he didn't seem to be uncomfortable either.
But in spite of all the enthusiasm on our part, anxiously waiting to hear what he had to say, we got nothing from him except denials, flat denials, about racism in the United States.
It was an informal gathering, only a few of us probably not more than ten or fifteen, standing outside that evening. The white teachers who came with him did not in any way interfere with us. Some were talking to another group of students.
It was a frustrating experience trying to get something out of him. We knew he wasn't telling the truth.
Yet, our interest in him was genuine since we identified with him as a fellow black who came from a country where some of our people had been taken as slaves and were still being oppressed for no reason other than that they were black, and of African origin, like us. That's how we saw it.
I remember he was tall, dark, and slim, and probably in his twenties as many Peace Corp teachers were, fresh out of college.
But, whatever the case, nothing worked. And for whatever reason, he saw it differently, not in terms of racial identification with us – he knew we were black just like he was, simple common sense, even if he didn't like it, which I seriously doubt; he saw it differently in terms of racism in the American context and obviously in terms of how his country, the United States, was viewed abroad especially in Africa, the black man's homeland.
He was concerned about the American image. He did not want it to be tarnished, I don't know by whom, since we had nothing to do with that; in fact, America had already tarnished her image by practising and condoning racism especially against blacks.
This reminds of what the American Secretary of State Dean Rusk said about Malcolm X when Malcolm X went to Africa. He said Malcolm X was causing trouble for the Untied States in Africa, telling Africans bad things about America, making the country look bad, and that it was mistreating his people.
Malcolm X didn't lie to us about the United States and the mistreatment of black people, the children of Africa, in America. I was in Africa when he came and he even visited my home country, Tanzania, and met Tanzanian leaders including President Julius Nyerere.
He even addressed the African heads of states at the conference of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Cairo, Egypt, in July 1964. It was President Nyerere who asked his fellow African heads of states at the OAU summit to let Malcolm X speak and present his case on the mistreatment of black people in America.
The black American Peace Corp teacher who visited our school – Songea Secondary School in southern Tanzania – in 1965 obviously felt the same way Dean Rusk did, had he said “bad things” about the United States, that yes, there was racism in America, and yes, black people were not treated as equal citizens, thus tarnishing the image of his country.
We were not trying to drag the name of his country in the mud. He didn't say that, but that's how some of us saw it. He was also very conscious of the fact that all his colleagues were white and he did not want to step on their toes, although many whites in the United States were stepping not just on the toes but on the necks of black people, deriving comfort and satisfaction from their suffering as they saw them groaning in pain.
And that was back in 1965, the same year Watts exploded; also the same year in which Malcolm X was assassinated. He had just been assassinated a few months earlier, in February, before the black Peace Corp teacher and his colleagues came to our school. And it's probably an encounter he never forgot for a long time.
We knew racism was a serious problem in the United States. We knew blacks did not have equal rights as much as we knew black people in South Africa did not have equal rights. Even Malcolm X equated the two when he spoke in Africa.
There was apartheid in the southern states of the United States. And the whole world knew that. Even the Soviet Union tried to capitalise on that, exposing the hypocrisy of the United States as a democratic country when at the same it denied blacks equal rights as citizens and as human beings, rights white people including white foreigners took for granted just because they were white.
Racism tarnished the image of the United States worldwide. It was a major problem back then in the sixties just as it is today in spite of the progress the country has made to overcome it.
Yet, for some inexplicable reason, this black Peace Corp teacher pretended that it was not, if it was one at all. In fact, I remember him flatly denying it, and smiling when he denied that.
There probably wasn't any among us who did not notice right away that he was not being truthful and cooperative in answering our questions.
Most of us were teenagers; the oldest were probably in their early twenties since some students started school late and were therefore a little older than the rest of us.
We still knew better; we knew he was being deliberately evasive, maybe not to offend his counterparts who were white and within earshot, although some of them were talking to other students and probably were not even paying attention to what was going on in our group with the black American teacher.
I remember one student, Raymond Mshamu, from Mtwara Region, whose family once lived in my home district when his father was headmaster of Ndembela Middle School about two miles from Tukuyu, the administrative capital of Rungwe District on the Tanzanian-Malawian border and about 300 miles from Songea Secondary School.
Raymond spoke Nyakyusa, my tribal language, he learned when he and his parents lived in Tukuyu. He was fluent in the language in only a short time. He obviously had a flair for languages and could have been a linguist.
His family were members of a different tribe – ethnic group – from Mtwara Region, and his facility with language when he learned Nyakyusa demonstrated a capacity and an ability to interact with people of other tribes so common among Tanzanians; the kind of brotherhood that was vigorously promoted by the government of President Julius Nyerere who was our leader from 1961 to 1985, although he remained the most influential figure in the country even after he stepped down from the presidency.
In general, people of different tribes and races in Tanzania live together peacefully and the government under Nyerere had a policy of assigning people of different tribes to work in districts and regions other than their own in order to break down tribal barriers. And it worked. The same applied to students, and we liked it; an attitude that was also reflected amongst us when we identified with black people in the United States, prompting us to ask the black American Peace Corp teacher questions about racism in the United States.
Since we accepted each other in spite of our tribal differences, it was obvious that we would equally accept blacks in the United States as an integral part of us.
People who don't accept members of other tribes in their own country are certainly not going to accept people of other tribes in other countries including detribalized Africans such as African Americans.
We were different because we were not tribalist just like the overwhelming majority of Tanzanians. Tribalism is not a problem in Tanzania, probably the only African country that has conquered that, as black American journalist, Keith Richburg, also acknowledged in in his book Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. I have identified him as a “black American journalist” because he does not want to be called “African American.”
I don't know how the black Peace Corp teacher saw us, but we saw him as one of us.
I remember Raymond Mshamu asking him, over and over again, questions about racism in the United States. He told him we hear and read about racism in America, and we hear and read about Dr. Martin Luther King leading the civil rights movement fighting for racial equality. Still, we got nowhere with him, despite being pestered with all sorts of questions on the subject, repeatedly, especially by Raymond. The fellow just smiled. It was a disarming smile, but not quite. Raymond didn't give up.
He took the lead because of the type of person he was: aggressive, unrelenting, and very outspoken. He was also older, four years ahead of me and others in school; older than some of us in that group. He was in his last and senior year, Standard 12, in 1965, when I was in my first in the four-year secondary school which was also a boarding school; the equivalent of an American high school. Our high school goes up to Standard 14 (Form VI), and only a few students make it that far because of the highly competitive elimination exams every four years. Once you fail, you are out.
It was a frustrating experience, to say the least, with this black Peace Corp teacher. But nothing dampened my interest, or that of the other students, in black America and the United States in general, especially as a country that was also built by our African ancestors who were taken to “the land of the free and the home of the brave” in chains, as slaves, and where their descendants are still not treated as equal citizens more than 155 years after the end of slavery.
It was not until after I went to high school (Standard 13 and Standard 14, usually known as Form V and Form VI) that I came into the presence of another African American. There were, of course, a number of black Americans living and working in Tanzania, including some well-known ones such as Bob Moses and Charlie Cobb who had been active in the American civil rights movement in the South and in other parts of the United States.
Tanzania was one of the African countries which attracted a very large number of African Americans because of President Nyerere's formidable credentials as a staunch Pan-Africanist who accepted black Americans and other blacks in the diaspora as fellow Africans; also because of his relentless support for the African liberation movements; and his pursuit of socialist policies in an attempt to break the stranglehold of Western countries on our economies and socio-political well-being.
All this was very appealing to a large number of African Americans, including militants such as the Black Panthers and others, as much as Ghana was under Nkrumah until his ouster in February 1966 in a military coup engineered and masterminded by the CIA.
After my encounter with the black Peace Corp teacher at Songea Secondary School in 1965, the next African American whose presence I was aware of, was in 1969 at our high school Tambaza in the nation's capital Dar es Salaam. He was a student there with us and his parents or relatives had been attracted to Tanzania by President Nyerere's policies and leadership just like many other African Americans had been.
We lived in the same student hostel for Tambaza High School students only a few yards from the school and from the beach on the Indian Ocean. But I never interacted with him on personal basis. He was my junior, a secondary school student, while I was in high school (Form V and Form VI), and he had his own friends who were not in my circle.
Formerly known as H.H. The Aga Khan High School almost exclusively for Tanzanian students of Indian and Pakistani origin, Tambaza was one of the best schools in the country and most of the students at the hostel were of Asian origin. The school was also fully integrated when I was there, mostly by black African students and those of Asian descent. There were also a few Arab students.
The black African students also came from many different tribes across the country. And students in my class were among the first to integrate the school, a mandatory policy pursued by the government after we won independence in 1961, as is still the case today.
The African American student also added diversity to the student body, as a foreigner, although he was black like some of us.
I went to Tambaza High School in 1969 after completing my four-year secondary school education at Songea. I was one of the very few students in the country who qualified to go to high school and the only one who went to Tambaza from Songea.
A handful of others from my school, not more than 10 altogether out of about 40 students, went to other high schools.
It was also when I was at Tambaza that I again seriously considered pursuing further education in the United States, as I did when I was at Songea Secondary School. I just didn't know how I was going to do it. But I was determined to achieve my goal.
It was not until after I became a reporter at Tanzania's main newspaper, the Daily News, formerly the Standard, that I got the opportunity to pursue my dream. Again, as in my interest in Lincoln University earlier when I was at Songea Secondary School and even at Tambaza High School where I still had the same interest, in the same school, Lincoln, inspired by Kwame Nkrumah, black America became my main focus in pursuit of my goal. Eventually, African Americans played a critical role in helping me achieve it.
Coincidentally, another student, Frank Chiteji, from Ruvuma Region where I attended secondary school, was also attracted to Lincoln University and finally went there. And by another coincidence, he ended up staying in the same room Kwame Nkrumah did when he was a student there in the thirties. Nkrumah first went to Lincoln University in 1935; Chiteji about thirty years later in the sixties.
Yet, by another coincidence, Frank Chiteji also attended another school in the same state I did, Michigan. He earned a PhD in history from Michigan State University and became a professor. He taught at Ohio State University and later was a professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania for many years until his retirement. He returned to Tanzania and became a professor at St. Augustine University.
When he was still in the United States, I found out he was teaching at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. I tried to catch up with him in 1983 when I was on my way from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Greensboro, North Carolina.
I went to the campus of Ohio State University and asked some students if they knew him. Some of them said they did and tried to help me find him but couldn't. So, I was unable to see him and proceeded with my journey to Greensboro.
When I first met him at Michigan State University in 1978, he recalled with pride the years he spent at Lincoln University, and told me he stayed in the same room Kwame Nkrumah did.
I met him when I went to visit Issa Kaboko Musoke, a former colleague of mine at the Daily News in Dar es Salaam where he and I worked as reporters in the early seventies. He was Chiteji's roommate at Michigan State University. They stayed off campus.
So, that was another coincidence: two former reporters, Musoke and I, from the same newspaper in Tanzania, ended up going to school in the same state around the same time.
Musoke earned a PhD, in sociology from Michigan State University and returned to Tanzania where he became a professor at the University of Dar es Salaam and at the Muslim University of Morogoro. He also taught at the University of Botswana. And like Chiteji and I, he was also an admirer of Nkrumah.
I remember the day I visited them in 1978, I had a debate with Musoke on the merits of Nkrumah's argument for immediate continental unification and his contention that Nyerere's approach towards African unity – by first trying to form an East African federation – was “balkanisation on a grand scale” as Nkrumah put it. I supported Nyerere's approach. As Nyerere said in an interview with the New Internationalist in December 1998:
“Kwame Nkrumah and I were committed to the idea of unity. African leaders and heads of state did not take Kwame seriously. However, I did. I did not believe in these small little nations. Still today I do not believe in them. I tell our people to look at the European Union, at these people who ruled us who are now uniting.
Kwame and I met in 1963 and discussed African Unity. We differed on how to achieve a United States of Africa. But we both agreed on a United States of Africa as necessary. Kwame went to Lincoln University, a black college in the US. He perceived things from the perspective of US history, where 13 colonies that revolted against the British formed a union. That is what he thought the OAU (Organisation of African Unity) should do.
I tried to get East Africa to unite before independence. When we failed in this way, I was wary about Kwame's continental approach. We corresponded profusely on this. Kwame said my idea of 'regionalization' was only balkanization on a larger scale. Later, African historians will have to study our correspondence on this issue of uniting Africa.”
As he stated at the OAU summit in Cairo in July 1964 in response to Nkrumah's criticism of his step-by-step approach to continental unification by first forming regional federations:
“No good mason would complain that his first brick did not go far enough.”
Nyerere has been vindicated by history, as African countries in different parts of the continent have taken a regional approach towards integration and eventual unification.
In East Africa, we have the East African Community (EAC) whose leaders are seriously considering forming a federation, probably to be preceded by a confederation.
In West Africa, there is ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States which is also a political entity and an instrument for peace and security in the region. West African leaders are also working towards creating a common currency, a common market, and eventually a federation.
In southern Africa, there is SADC, the Southern African Development Community, the richest and strongest of the African regional organisations mainly because of South Africa's membership and economic might. It also wants to establish a common market, form a regional parliament and create other institutions to achieve maximum regional integration.
It is a subject I have addressed in one of my books, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era. An entire chapter is devoted to this subject: Nyerere's versus Nkrumah's approach towards continental unification.
Dr. Nkrumah galvanised many Africans into action with his inspiring rhetoric and Pan-African militancy, especially on the subject of African unity. There is no doubt that he also inspired many African students to follow in his footsteps to attend school in the United States even if they ended up elsewhere besides Lincoln University where he went.
But his ties to Lincoln University, and those of other African students who went to school there and other black colleges and universities, clearly show that black America has always been in the consciousness of many Africans on the continent because of the common heritage we share with black Americans as an African people in spite of centuries of physical separation since the slave trade; and in spite of some misunderstandings between us which continue to put a strain on our relations, a subject I have addressed in some of my books and about which I have some knowledge because of the many years I lived with African Americans in the United States....
Sponsored by African American
The night before I left (New York) for Detroit, one African leader came to visit Weidi Mwasakafyuka, the relative I was staying with. He was a Tanzanian.
I knew him and some of his relatives in Tanzania, including one from my home village of Mpumbuli, Gervas Mwambije, who was my classmate in primary school and who was a cousin of Mark Mwandosya, whom I also knew and who became a cabinet member and later a presidential candidate, also a close relative of this leader.
His name was George Magombe, Executive Secretary of the Liberation Committee of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) responsible for providing financial and military support to the African liberation movements fighting to end white minority rule on the continent. The headquarters of the OAU Liberation Committee was Dar es Salaam and he was in New York during that time.
He thought I was a student at one of the colleges and universities in New York City. I told him I was not but I would be leaving the next day to go to school in Detroit. He wished me the best and even gave me some pocket money.
I also still had some money left from my travelling allowance which I was given by my employer, the Daily News, just before I left for the Untied States.
I flew to Detroit where my new life in the United States began. But my trip to Detroit had a surprise for me and even for my sponsors, the Pan-African Congress (PAC).
After I boarded the plane in New York for the flight to Detroit, a young lady came aboard and was assigned a seat right next to me. It was such a coincidence.
She came from Africa. I also came from Africa. She came to the United States to go to school. I also came to the United States to go to school. She was young. I was young, having turned 23 on 4 October 1972.
I never asked her how old she was but I believed she was a little younger than I was. She was headed to Michigan. I also was headed to Michigan.
Her name was Yormie Amegashie from Liberia.
She asked me where I was headed. I said Detroit. I asked her where she was going. She said Lansing which, as I learnt later, was about 90 miles from Detroit; it was also Malcolm X's hometown.
She told me her sister was a nurse in Lansing, the state capital, and was going to pick her up from Detroit airport. Unfortunately, when we got to Detroit, her sister was not there. But fortunately, the Pan-African Congress member who had been sent to pick me up was there. His name was Kali and recognised me right away soon after I got off the plane. Tragically, he died of cancer in the late seventies after I moved from Detroit to Grand Rapids. He was only 28 years old.
Before I left New York, I told the director of the scholarship programme at the Pan-African Congress in Detroit how I would be dressed: in a dashiki.
When I arrived in Detroit, Kali was able to identify me by my attire and came straight to me at the airport and introduced himself. By another coincidence, Yormie also was in African attire.
After she told me her sister was not at the airport, I told her not to worry. I told her I would ask the Pan-African Congress member who came to pick me up if he would agree to take her with us. He did, and told me and her there was no problem. He said Pan-African Congress members would also take care of her until her sister came to pick her up. And off we went.
It was one of the best ways the Pan-African Congress members demonstrated their hospitality and desire to embrace us, and others, as members of the same African family in a Pan-African context.
When we got to the Pan-African Congress house, one of the members of the organisation, Akosua Ahadi, offered to take in Yormie right away. She was a teacher and lived alone. Ahadi means “promise” in Kiswahili.
A few years later, Akosua ended up moving to Liberia where Yormie came from; another coincidence.
Yormie stayed with her for about two weeks or so and was very grateful to the Pan-African Congress members for what they had done to help her until her sister came to pick her up.
She finally ended up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she attended college and wrote me when I was still in Detroit to tell me she was getting married. She also said she would always be grateful to the Pan-African Congress members and would always consider them to be a part of her family. We all wished her the best. And I hope she survived the civil war in Liberia if she returned home and was there when the country dissolved in anarchy.
That was Pan-Africanism at its best in a personal way. Here was an organisation whose members had gone out of the way to sponsor African students when they didn't have to; took in other African students, including Yormie, who were in need. And there I was, myself, as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the generosity of this Pan-African family based in Detroit but whose roots stretched all the way back to Africa, from where African Americans were uprooted and forcibly transplanted on American soil.
It was an organisation that had a lasting impact on my life and on the lives of other African students sponsored by the same organisation.
Some of them became national leaders when they went back to Africa after completing their studies in the United States. They were Kojo Yankah from Ghana, one of the first two students to be sponsored by the Pan-African Congress-USA; Kwabena Dompre, also from Ghana, who became a high-ranking official in the government of President Hilla Limann; and Amadou Taal from the Gambia, who held a number of cabinet-level posts under President Dawda Jawara and was Gambia's chief economist.
In 2018, Amadou Taal was appointed by Gambia's president, Adama Barrow, to serve as his country's ambassador to Nigeria and to more than 10 other African countries including Ghana and Angola and as Gambia's ambassador to the Economic Community of West African States ECOWAS) based in Nigeria's capital Abuja.
He was the only former student among those who were helped by the Pan-African Congress I was in touch with through the years in the United States and in The Gambia. He also came to visit me in Grand Rapids not long before he went back to The Gambia.
One of the first two students to be sponsored, together with Kojo Yankah, was Olu Williams from Sierra Leone who went on to get a PhD in agricultural economics from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
I did not know his fate after he returned to Sierra Leone and hoped that he survived the civil war which nearly destroyed his home country in the 1990s. I didn't even know if he was in Sierra Leone during the war until I learnt later what happened to him.
I was in touch with one Sierra Leonean, Mona Kadija Kabba, a close relative of President Ahmed Tejan Kabba, who happened to know Olu Williams. When we first got in touch, I told her I knew one Sierra Leonean from my student days in Detroit, Olu Williams, who was sponsored by the same organisation which sponsored me and asked her if she knew him and if he was in Siera Leone and survived the war. She told me that she knew Olu Williams well. But something tragic happened to him. As she stated in her letter to me dated 7 October 2005:
“I did know Olu Williams and in fact used to call him uncle, 'cause, as you know in Africa, if someone is close to your family, you call them Uncle or Aunt even though they may not be related to you.
He used to work on Consultancies with my Dad; on projects such as this one in particular they did for UNDP in 1995 with a colleague of theirs called Dustan Spencer. His wife is a very good friend of my mum. Unfortunately and sad to say, he died in 2000 and his five-year anniversary has just passed this September, if I’m counting correctly. He did survive the war but was seriously ill by 1998 and 1999.”
Kadija Kabba got her master's degree in international studies from Norway in 2005 and we remained in touch and had plans on working together on some projects relating to conflict resolution and other issues about Africa. She later became a lawyer in Sierra Leone.
One of the students I mentioned earlier, Amadou Taal, was not sponsored by the Pan-African Congress but was helped by the organisation when we went to school together at Wayne State University and even before then when he was a student at Wabash College in Indiana.
He stayed with us at the Pan-African Congress house during summer when he was not in school at Wabash College, as did another Gambian student, Muhammad (also known as Momodou) Sohna, who also attended Wabash College during the same time. Both stayed with us when they enrolled as graduate students at Wayne State University. Muhammad later became a professor in the United States.
They all achieved their goals with the help of the Pan-African Congress-USA. And we all lived as students in the same house owned by the Pan-African Congress (PAC).
Those were some of the best days of our lives, interacting with our brethren, African Americans. It was a truly Pan-African organisation. As Amadou Taal, in remembering those days, said in a letter to me from The Gambia in May 2003:
“Although many of us stayed at the PAC house, which we all enjoyed, we were not all part of the sponsorship programme. This does not, in any way, minimise the contributions of the Pan-African Congress to education of African students from the continent. Indeed, we all appreciated their noble objectives and meaningful efforts in bringing together Africans from different countries to stay and interact under one roof and to share our experiences with our brothers and sisters from the diaspora.
The PAC days were a real experience which have contributed in no small measure to our perception of Africa within the context of this globalising world.”
The Pan-African Congress-USA was founded in Detroit in 1969 by a group of middle-class black Americans who were very much an integral part of the mainstream, unlike many Black Panther Party members drawn from the periphery. But it was only two leaders who launched the initiative.
The leaders of the Pan-African Congress included Edward Vaughn who years later served as a state representative representing a Detroit constituency in the Michigan State Legislature in Lansing; a position he held since the early 1990s. His constituency was black in a city that was also overwhelmingly black.
In 2003, Detroit was the seventh largest city in the United States and was about 90 per cent black. In 2020, Detroit's metropolitan area was the fourteenth-largest in the country.
When I lived in Detroit in the seventies, it was the fifth largest city – after New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles in descending order – and was about 80 per cent black. Earlier, by the 1940s, it was the fourth-largest in the United States.
Even today, Detroit still is about 80 per cent black.
The city that shaped my perception of America and reinforced that perception and validated the reality of the United States as a racially divided society is that same city that almost 50 years later provides a critical lens into the stubborn nature of racism and of the United States as a divided society; the city itself being probably the best example of this disturbing phenomenon. As Joe Jurado stated in “Study Finds That Detroit is the Most Segregated City in the Country,” in The Root, 21 June 2021:
“One of the lines that the unseasoned among us like to repeat is that systemic racism doesn’t exist. While I would love to live in that world, the truth is the ongoing effects of systemic racism are easy to see if you’re actually paying attention. While one would hope that segregation is a thing of the past, that’s far from the case, as a recent study has found that Detroit is the most segregated city in the country.
According to WXYZ (a Detroit television station), the University of California Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute released a report on Monday June 21st) titled 'The Roots of Structural Racism,' that examined 209 American cities, and found that segregation actually increased across 169 of them between 1990 and 2019.
Detroit ranks as the most segregated city with a population of 200,000 or more, coming in at 84 percent on the divergence index.
And just what’s the divergence index, you ask? Well, according to the institute, it’s a scale that 'compares the relative proportions of racial groups (or any other groups) at smaller and larger geographies, looking for the degree of ‘divergence’ between two geographies.'
The report looks at factors such as poverty rates, property values, life expectancy, and rent prices when comparing highly segregated white neighborhoods, highly segregated Black and brown communities, and integrated communities.
In news nobody saw coming, highly segregated white communities fared far better than highly segregated Black and brown neighborhoods. Black and brown people who were raised in highly segregated white neighborhoods have earned higher incomes than those from predominantly Black and brown communities.
'Although the American public has much greater awareness of the reality of systemic racial inequality, too few people understand that racial residential segregation lies at the heart of this inequality,' Stephen Menendian, the lead author on the project, said. 'This is evidenced by how residential segregation determines access to schools, healthy neighborhoods, jobs, and surveillance by police.'
An interactive map created in conjunction with the project allows users to see the segregation levels of each city examined in the report, as well as learn about the factors that contributed to it.
In Michigan, none of the cities or counties examined are racially integrated. 'Detroit’s Black population today stands at about 78 percent, the highest proportion of any city in the United States. In contrast, the metro area, including Detroit, is only 23 percent Black, and 68 percent white, making Detroit the most segregated city in the United States,' the map explains.
“We believe that this is one of the most sophisticated and powerful tools for understanding the nature and extent of racial residential segregation in the United States. Users can go as deep as they want using our tool to understand this problem,' Samir Gambhir, report co-author and head of the institute’s Equity Metrics program, said of the map.
Hialeah City, Fla, ranks behind Detroit as the country’s second most segregated city, with Newark, N.J., Chicago and Milwaukee rounding out the top five.”
That is the city that prepared me for life in America. And it has played a critical role in the history of black America for decades; leaders of the Pan-African Congress-USA and its members, including Ed Vaughn, being some of its most active players before, during and after they sponsored African students, including me, to study in Detroit.
Ed Vaughn, as he was popularly known, also served as assistant to Detroit's first black mayor, Coleman Young. Vaughn himself ran for mayor of Detroit in the 1990s.
The director of the Pan-African Congress scholarship programme, Malikia Wada Lumumba, was a professor of psychology. Ed Vaughn himself was also a college professor and owner of what was said to be the oldest black bookshop – Americans say “bookstore” – in the United States, also one of the largest; some sources say it was the largest.
Other leaders of the organisation were also mainstream Americans including teachers, engineers, government employees, and journalists; even an editorial writer at the conservative Detroit News, one of the nation's largest and most influential newspapers, although she herself was not a conservative but a liberal and civil rights activist.
Her name was Yoliswa, simply known as Yola. She was married Kwadwo Akpan, one of the leaders of the Pan-African Congress-USA. They later divorced.
Kwadwo, as he was simply known, moved to Ghana with his second wife in the early 1990s and died in Lome, Togo, in May 2008. He was buried in Akosombo in the Volta Region in eastern Ghana where African Americans established a settlement called Fihankra. He was also anointed traditional chief of the settlement when he lived there. He was 63 years old when he died.
The Pan-African Congress-USA, although black nationalist in its ideological orientation, was very much an integral part of the mainstream.
The authorities knew about the organisation and I, as a foreign student, did not in any way feel that it was risky for me to be sponsored by this black nationalist group. In fact, several members of the Pan-African Congress-USA attended the Sixth Pan-African Congress held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1974, under the leadership of President Nyerere; a participation which demonstrated the mainstream nature of the organisation even in the Pan-African context.
The conference was held in Nkrumah Hall at the University of Dar es Salaam and was the first to be held on African soil.
The last such conference, the Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester, England, in 1945, was attended by future African leaders including Kamuzu Banda, besides Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta.
Nkrumah Hall was named in honour of President Kwame Nkrumah who, together with Jomo Kenyatta, was also one of the organisers and secretaries of the Fifth Pan-African Congress.
There is also a college in Tanzania named after Dr. Nkrumah: Nkrumah Teachers' Training College in Zanzibar.
The director of the scholarship programme at the Pan-African Congress-USA, Malikia Wada Lumumba, also attended the Sixth Pan-African Congress and even met Ben Mkapa, my former editor and future president of Tanzania, at the Daily News and told him I was one of their students. I wrote Mkapa a letter which I gave to her to give it to him.
She also met some of my relatives in Dar es Salaam including Brown Ngwilulupi and his wife, my mother's first cousin. She took a picture with her and gave it to me after she returned to the United States. I still have it and the other pictures she took in Dar.
As a mainstream organisation, the Pan-African Congress-USA also invited African diplomats and other leaders to address its members. The organisation had a conference hall in Detroit.
Some of those who came and spoke at our meetings on different occasions included the Tanzanian ambassador to the United States, Paul Bomani, whom I knew in Tanzania when he was a cabinet member under President Nyerere. He was also one of the main leaders of the independence struggle and played a major role in mobilising support for the nationalist movement. I knew him when I was a reporter at the Daily News.
Others who came were Hamza Aziz and Martin Kivumbi, senior diplomats at our embassy in Washington, D.C., and Guinean permanent representative to the United Nations, Madame Jeanne Martin Cissé.
In 1972, Madame Cissé became the first woman to serve as President of the United Nations Security Council. She died on 21 February 2017.
Hamza Aziz, who was Tanzania's Inspector-General of Police (IGP) before he became Tanzania's deputy ambassador to the United States in the early seventies, died in Dar es Salaam in February 2004.
One of the most memorable events about those visits involved Madame Jeanne Martin Cissé. She came to Detroit in early 1973, not longer after I had moved from New York to Detroit, and had been in the United States for less than six months from the time I left Tanzania in November 1972. She was accompanied by Mrs. Betty Fitzgerald Sanga whom I met in New York in November 1972.
Madame Cissé came to the Pan-African Congress-USA (PAC-USA) house where I was staying with the other students sponsored by the PAC. The director of the PAC scholarship programme, Malikia Wada Lumumba, formerly Rosemary Jones, brought her and Mrs. Sanga to the house to meet me and the other students and show them the house where African students sponsored by the organisation stayed.
The house was owned by the Pan-African Congress-USA. It also served as the main office for the organisation and as a residence for us.
I was the only student in the house at that time and Madame Cissé and I had our picture taken together in my room by Mrs. Sanga.
Madame Cissé was invited by the Pan-African Congress (PAC) to be the main speaker at one of the organisation's forums held every Sunday at their PAC hall. All the meetings dealt with Pan-Africanism and other subjects about Africa and the African disapora in a global context.
When they came to the PAC house, Malikia Wada Lumumba brought them to my room upstairs. She introduced me to Ambassador Cissé and to Mrs. Sanga, who already knew me, and they stayed for sometime, talking to me.
They were standing and I invited them to sit down wherever they could and AmbassadorCissé sat on my bed with me. Mrs. Sanga had a camera and she took a picture of me and the ambassador. She gave me the picture.
Mrs. Sanga, an African-American married to a Tanzanian, was a professor at City College in Harlem, New York, and was very active in pan-African politics. I met her for the first time in New York City when I was staying there. She spoke fluent Kiswahili. She also taught the language at City College, among other subjects.
She had known Madame Cissé for quite some time. She also knew the PAC leaders in Detroit. And I still have the picture I took with Madame Cissé at the Pan-African Congress house in Detroit almost 50 years ago. It is one of the items I treasure most mainly because of its historical significance. I was 23 years old when the picture was taken and I was new in the United States.
It was also the first picture I had taken in the country. Madame Cissé was also one of the most influential ambassadors in UN history, together with Tanzania's permanent representative to the UN, Salim Ahmed Salim, whom I also met in New York in 1972 when I stayed there for about two months with the late Weidi Mwasakafyuka, a diplomat at our mission to the UN who later served as Tanzania's ambassador to France and Nigeria, among other posts.
Ambassador Cisse was very glad to know that I came from Tanzania. In her speech to Pan-African Congress members where she was the main speaker, she thanked the organisation for sponsoring a student from what she described as the progress country of Tanzania which was in the vanguard of the African revolution.
Tanzania and Guinea had excellent relations. President Sékou Touré of Guinea was a very close friend of President Nyerere of Tanzania whose eldest son, Andrew, was a schoolmate of mine in Dar es Salaam where we also stayed in the same student hostel. The hostel, known as H.H. The Aga Khan Hostel. was mainly for students of Tambaza High School.
Years later, I got in touch with Andrew when I was writing a book about his father and post-colonial Africa, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, and he provided me with some very useful information for my project.
When I stayed in New York City for about two months from November to December, 1972, I interacted with a number of African Americans in the black nationalist movement. They included Les Campbell and his group in Brooklyn some of whose members spoke Kiswahili. I visited them in Brooklyn many times when I was staying in Manhattan.
Les Campbell and his colleagues also took me to a gathering at Temple No. 7 in Harlem once headed by Malcolm X. I had been to Harlem a number of times before and continued to visit this bustling black “city” when I stayed in New York.
I remember what my professor of economics at Aquinas College only a few years later, Kenneth Marin, said in an economics class in 1976, about Harlem in comparison with African countries. He said if Harlem were a country, it would be richer than most African countries.; it had far higher income than most of them did.
He also said the city of Kalamazoo, which is about 50 miles from Grand Rapids, had higher revenue and a bigger budget than Tanzania and many other African countries did; Yet, it was not even one of the largest cities in the United States then. And it still isn't today.
And he knew what he was talking about since he once served as an economic advisor to the government of Tanzania on capital mobilisation and utilisation.
I also happened to have stayed in a city, New York, which provided what was probably the sharpest and biggest contrast with African countries in terms of wealth. It was a glaring contrast.
I also attended a conference in Manhattan organised by the Congress of African People (CAP) where Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones and the leader of this organisation, was the main speaker. Guests included African diplomats, among them officials of the Tanzania Mission to the UN. I also got the chance to meet him.
I was also invited to City College in Harlem by Mrs. Sanga.
She was married to a Tanzanian, Dr. Tuntemeke Sanga (not our headmaster I mentioned earlier), who years later became a Member of Parliament (MP) in Tanzania.
That is how he identified himself – Tuntemeke Sanga – and that is how he was known in Tanzania; his whole name was longer than that.
Unbeknownst to me, when I was in New York City, Mrs. Sanga already had ties with the Pan African Congress leaders in Detroit who were to sponsor me later on. But I didn't know then that I would be getting a scholarship from them. I had not even written them when I visited her at City College.
I was her student for one day when she invited me to sit in her class. I sat with the rest of the students throughout her history lecture.
She was a dynamic teacher. I used to talk to her on the phone, now and then, before and after she invited me to her school.
Her marriage to Tuntemeke Sanga in the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar in September 1964 – the country did not change its name and become Tanzania until 29 October the same year – was quite an event and was even covered by The New York Times. According to a report, “For the Bride, Two Lambs, a Cow, a Goat...; Pittsburgh Girl Tells of Her Wedding in an African Village,” in The New York Times, 1 November 1964:
“Properly educated at fashionable girls' schools and armed with a bachelor's degree from Hunter College and a master's from Teachers College at Columbia University, Betty Ann Fitzgerald has become a bride. The wedding presents included a cow, several bulls, two lambs,a goat and some chickens.
Mrs. Harry B. Fitzgerald of 623 West 145th Street received a letter last week from her only child describing the Sept. 20 wedding in Bulonga, Njombe, which is 95 miles from Mbeya, which is 250 miles from Dodoma, which is 100 miles from Kilosa, which is 160 miles from Dar es Salaam, capital of the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar on Africa's east coast.
When Betty Ann, the greatgranddaughter of American slaves, married Messaka Nnunwa Sanga Tuntemeke, grandson of an African chief, 'the people were very happy – particularly the elders of the village...some of the old people danced gracefully...school children sang beautifully...and threw flowers in our path.'
'All the dancing and celebration was outside,' the new Mrs. Sanga wrote. 'AR uncle roasted lamb and it was delicious. I thought of Dad. We drank locally brewed beer made of millet. We continued feasting for several days. You never saw such big bowls of rice in your life.'
'Tuntemeke built my house in the village,' she continued. And the bridegroom, who was educated at Gustavus Adolphus College, St, Peter, Minn., the University of Chicago and Princeton, 'made the bricks himself.'
But, the bride wrote, 'there is no electricity here so we haven't a heater.'
The father of the bride is a police magistrate and Democratic leader of the Fifth Ward in Pittsburgh. He comes to New York on weekends. Mrs. Fitzgerald, a home economist, explained yesterday that the Fitzgeralds have two homes because in 1952 they could not enroll Betty Ann in a private school in Pittsburgh.
It was during her one year in the progressive Walden School that Betty Ann became interested in Africa. She was in the seventh grade.
'African art had an emotional impact on her,' her mother said, 'We wanted her to do what she wanted to do, but we didn't intend for her to go this far.'
The couple met in 1960, when Mr. Sanga, who was speaking in Pittsburgh, heard of the young woman with the intense interest in Africa. He called the Fitzgerald home, was invited to dinner and that was the end of it. Betty Ann went to Africa last April and the couple was married last month.
Mrs. Fitzgerald is planning to travel to Africa for her daughter's 26th birthday on Jan. 22. The bride, obviously anxious that her mother please her new in-laws, has included some suggestions in her letter.
Besides telling her mother to buy a copy of Teach Yourself Swahili, which she has, Mrs. Sanga wrote: 'To greet an elder incorrectly is considered very bad — close to insulting God. You will have to eat African food with your fingers and properly.' Properly is underlined.
She concluded the paragraph with: 'For me and Tunte it'll be a great day when you share life with us here. It even defies history.' Betty Ann signed it with her new African name, 'Amye.'”
She eventually returned to the United States. And I ended up attending school in one of the most politically active cities in the United States in terms of black activism.
Detroit has a long history of political activism and is a well-known black activist centre since the days of Marcus Garvey and even before then.
The Nation of Islam led by Elijah Muhammed, later by Louis Farrakhan, was founded in Detroit in the 1930s. And the Nation of Islam's Temple Number One is still in Detroit; while Chicago, the group's headquarters, has Temple Number Two.
Malcolm X, who came from Lansing, Michigan, not far from Detroit, spent a lot of time in Detroit and was even nicknamed “Detroit Red.”
His friend, the internationally acclaimed black actor Red Foxx, was nicknamed “Chicago Red.”
Other black nationalist groups were also founded in Detroit. They include the Republic of New Afrika, Black Christian Nationalism popularly known as the Shrine of Black Madonna, and the Pan-African Congress-USA.
There has been a lot of misconception and distortion of what the Pan-African Congress-USA was all about.
It was a black nationalist organisation in the Pan-African sense. And it sponsored or supported a number of African students to attend college in the United States, besides its involvement in political activism in pursuit of Pan-African objectives on the African continent and in the diaspora.
The students came from Ghana, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Nigeria and The Gambia.
I was the fourth student to be sponsored after Kojo Yankah from Ghana, Olu Williams from Sierra Leone, and Kwabena Dompre from Ghana.
The fifth student to be sponsored, Deogratias Michael Masakilija, also came from Tanzania. He was my fellow reporter at the Daily News in Dar es Salaam. Before I left for the United States, he asked me to help him get a scholarship and I succeeded in doing so. My sponsors in Detroit agreed to help him.
The sixth student sponsored by the Pan-African Congress-USA was Nmecha Nelson Nmecha from Nigeria.
Amadou S.O. Taal and Muhammad Sohna, from The Gambia, also stayed at the Pan-African Congress (PAC) house during summer when they were students art Wabash College in Indiana. But they were not sponsored by the PAC to go to school there.
They later enrolled as students at Wayne State University and continued to stay at the PAC house with us. They were also my schoolmates at Wayne State but were not sponsored by the Pan-African Congress to attend school there.
There was David Nunoo from Ghana who was a student in Detroit. He stayed at the PAC house with us. But he was not sponsored by the PAC to attend school in Detroit.
There was “Alhaji” Opoku, also from Ghana, who was also a student in Detroit. He stayed with us the PAC house but was not sponsored by the Pan-African Congress.
And there was Amechi from Nigeria who was a student in Detroit but was not sponsored by the Pan-African Congress-USA. He stayed at the PAC house.
When I went to stay there, he had already moved out. But I got the chance to meet him.
Tragically, he was shot dead, reportedly by his roommate, an African American, in Detroit.
He was killed in 1973 when I was staying at the PAC house together with Kwabena Dompre, David Nunoo, Amadou Taal, and Muhammad Sohna. We were the only students at the house during that time.
Amechi was very close to Nunoo. After he was killed, Nunoo asked me to go with him to Amechi's residence, together with a college administrator who knew both of them, but I didn't go inside.
I also witnessed Nunoo's wedding. He asked me to be a witness to his official wedding in Toledo, Ohio, in 1974.
After I moved to Grand Rapids, I saw him again in Detroit during my visits to the Motor City.
The last time I heard about him was when Amadou Taal wrote me from The Gambia in 2008. He said he saw and talked to David Nunoo at the airport in Dakar, Senegal.
Amadou and I were reminiscing on our days in Detroit including our colleagues at the PAC house and the rest of the Pan-African Congress members.
I also sent Amadou, in August 2008, an article by Paul Lee on the death of Kwadwo Akpan – who passed away on 30 May the same year – of which he was not aware.
Equally tragic was the death of David Nunoo in Detroit in April 2009.
He left behind a wife, Adenika Nunoo, an African American formerly known as Dorothy Dothard before she adopted her African name, whom I knew before they got married.
She was a roommate of an African American female student whom I also knew. I met both at the same time when they came to a meeting of the Pan-African Congress at the PAC hall. Both were members of the Republic of New Afrika and took African names when they joined the black nationalist group.
It was a productive connection. That's how David met Adenika.. One day, he gave me a lift to their residence and that's how he met his future wife when I introduced them to each other.
Adenika was also my schoolmate at Wayne State University. Her roommate was a student at Highland Park Community College and she visited me a few times at the PAC house. I also went to their residence a number of times visiting them.
One of the leaders of the Pan-African Congress-USA also stayed with us at the PAC house. His name was Osei Yaw Akoto, formerly Harold McKelton.
Together with Ed Vaughn, Kali who picked me up from the airport when I first arrived in Detroit from New York towards the end of December 1972, and a few others, Osei Yaw – as he was commonly known – was one of the most dynamic, most effective, and most articulate speakers the organisation ever had. He died in Detroit on 13 October 2004.
Ed Vaughn also came perilously close to losing his life in November 2007 when he suffered severe burns after his car exploded into flames in a car accident in his home state of Alabama. He was president of the Alabama NAACP. According to a report in the Dothan Eagle:, 6 December 2007:
“Ed Vaughn, president of the Alabama NAACP, suffered severe burns when he was involved in a five-vehicle crash on Interstate 10 near U.S. 90 in Mobile. He is currently being treated at South Alabama Medical Center in Mobile.
'He is doing well and looking well. Things are progressing,' said Jimmie Gardner, president of the Mobile County NAACP. Gardner said Vaughn could remain hospitalized up to two more weeks.
Gardner said Vaughn, 73, suffered burns over more than 50 percent of his body. Doctors have been performing skin grafts since the Nov. 16 accident to try to repair the damage. Doctors are also guarding against infection.
Vaughn and two others, 61-year-old Nettie Pearl Bryant and 48-year-old Janice Jones Blackmon, were returning to Dothan from an NAACP event in Mobile when the accident occurred.
Gardner said Vaughn’s vehicle burst into flames. Instead of fleeing, he and others risked their lives to remove Bryant and Blackmon from the vehicle.
'He was able to get out, and that’s when he started assisting others to get out,' Gardner told the Dothan Eagle in a story published Nov. 20. 'That is a miracle that they were all able to get out of that fire alive.'
Vaughn, who was raised in Dothan, moved away after high school, served eight years in the Michigan State Legislature, and 10 years as the assistant to the mayor of Detroit.
Vaughn returned to Dothan in 2001. He serves on the Dothan Historic Preservation Commission. He also established the NBCAR Historic District and a museum of African American history in Dothan.”
He survived the ordeal, a horrendous tragedy that could have robbed the black nationalist and Pan-African movement one of its most articulate exponents who had been active in the black liberation struggle for decades and continued to be active after he recovered from the injuries he suffered in the inferno.
Another leader of the Pan-African Congress-USA, Kwame Atta, died in Detroit on 20 November 2005.
All the people who stayed at the Pan-African Congress house, students and non-students alike, stayed there free.
A representative of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) of South Africa who came from the organisation's main office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and whom I knew when I was a news reporter there, also stayed at the PAC house with us when he came to Detroit. He was invited by the PAC-USA to speak at the organisation's forum as the main speaker.
Two other black South Africans also stayed with us, at different times, for a few weeks when they visited Detroit. They were also guests of the PAC-USA. One of them was Ndikho Xaba, a musician, who shared a room with me at the PAC house.
He had a car and one day in 1973, he asked me to go with him to Athens, Ohio, to visit his relative, Lindiwe (Pettiford) Mabuza, who was a professor at Ohio University in that university town.
We stayed at her house and all three of us stayed awake all night, talking, on the first day Ndikho and I arrived there.
Professor Mabuza even tried to get me into school there, on a scholarship, but was unsuccessful.
After the end of apartheid, she became South Africa's ambassador to Germany, the Philippines and Brunei and high commissioner (ambassador) to Malaysia and the United Kingdom under presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.
On our way back to Detroit from Athens, we picked up a student on the highway who said he was a student going to Ohio State University in Columbus. I was suspicious of the hitchhiker – not because he was white – but Ndikho said we should give him a ride anyway. We did and let him out after we got to Columbus and continued with our journey to Detroit.
Ndikho, as we called him and how he liked to be known, died in South Africa in June 2019. As Gwen Ansell stated in her report, “Farewell to Ndikho Xaba – A Little Known Genius of South African Music,” The Conversation, 20 June 2019:
“It’s the late 1990s at the Windybrow Theatre in Johannesburg. I’m with an American-born friend whose jazz tastes were shaped by the Chicago free music scene of the 1970s. On to the stage walks a slight, goateed figure in a blue African shirt, who proceeds to draw astounding music from… a water-cooler. My friend responded:
'Damn! Why didn’t I know this guy before?'
Too many people didn’t know Ndikho Douglas Xaba – multi-instrumentalist, instrument-maker, composer, actor, teacher and revolutionary. Hopefully, it isn’t too late for them to learn about the legacy and contribution of this musician’s musician. Xaba died peacefully on June 11 aged 85.
Xaba’s journey took him across South Africa – from the streets of Pietermaritzburg in the province of KwaZulu-Natal to Queenstown in the Eastern Cape and the musical ferment of Johannesburg’s Dorkay House – all the way to Broadway, the jazz lofts of San Francisco, Chicago and New York, the training camps of the African National Congress in exile in Tanzania, the streets of post-liberation Soweto and, finally, back home again.
His music spanned a similarly broad canvas, for he drew no artificial boundaries between styles or genres.
He was as comfortable imagining fearless cosmic explorations – he shared a stage with avant garde musician Sun Ra – as with crafting instantly catchy hits such as Emavungweni, first covered by Hugh Masekela on the 1966 album Grrr.
Covert ANC operative
Xaba was born in Pietermaritzburg in 1934, the youngest of six sons of a Methodist minister, James George Howard Xaba, who was a covert ANC operative and founder of the Natal African Teachers Union. His mother, Emily Selina Dingaan Xaba, was a schoolteacher as well as an organist and choir leader. But, as Francis Gooding’s excellent biographical notes on the Matsuli Music Ndikho and The Natives album explain, his family hoped their son would study towards a profession. They did not encourage him in music, so he picked up a penny-whistle. He often subsequently described himself as 'proudly self-taught.'
Later he, and at least one brother, were active in the ANC. Their activities led to a great deal of ducking and diving, until finally the police’s Special Branch interrogated him. For his family’s sake, it was clear he must move.
And so Xaba left for Johannesburg where he picked up sporadic music-related work. He commuted to Durban at times and in 1960 was part of the production of author Alan Paton’s Umkhumbane, with music by Todd Matshikiza.
Increasingly, not only police-state oppression but also the rigid cultural categories of apartheid and the denial of black originality and excellence became intolerable. His ticket out came with a role in another Paton play, Sponono, with music by Gideon uMgibe Nxumalo and an all-black cast. In 1964, the play was invited for a short Broadway run. When it ended, Xaba stayed. It was the beginning of 34 years of exile.
In America, Xaba hooked up again with Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela and others. Their musical campaigning, he recalled, had a clear agenda:
'One: we are black. Two: we have been colonised. Three: we were enslaved. Four: we were victims of imperialism. We are victims of racism collectively – so how can you divorce yourselves?'
He had no illusions about racism in America. On arriving at Kennedy Airport on a snowy day, and being forced to pose for photographs in scanty Zulu attire he said:
'… our African-American brothers who worked in the airport didn’t want anything to do with us. Because to them, here was Tarzan – live! … but after we had changed into our suits those same people are like 'Hey, my brother! How ya doin’ man?'
Xaba created a powerful sonic evocation of those days in the track 'It’s Cold in New York' on his Sunsets album.
But Xaba found a great deal in common with the underground free jazz scene across the US, and its discourse of post-civil rights African-American liberation. After New York, where he taught himself piano, he worked in San Francisco where he met his wife, poet and activist Nomusa Xaba while giving Zulu lessons.
The band he formed, Ndikho and the Natives, played solidarity concerts and community events, mixing far-out improvisation, re-enactments of anticolonial history, solid, funky groove, spoken word and more in a single performance.
Xaba’s late 1960s/early 70s work was part of the countrywide radical cultural and political movement best known through the 1966-founded Art Ensemble of Chicago. Xaba is the only South African exile whose creativity in this context went on record; his music is compelling, surprising and unique. And it was influential.
Teacher
Xaba continued teaching for the rest of his life. He established musical instrument-making facilities and created a music curriculum for the ANC’s refugee school in Dakawa, Tanzania. On his return to South Africa from exile in 1994, he held music and instrument-making classes at his Soweto home, before moving back to Durban.
He began to perform increasingly rarely in South Africa. He had little enthusiasm for an unimaginative and often reactionary commercial music scene. He retained the power to make a conventional music scene – and society – uneasy. His music could bowl you over with its inventiveness and the breadth and erudition of its cultural references.
His life enacted the rejection of boundaries, including the bourgeois boundary between aesthetics and politics. He lived and played what he believed, uncompromisingly, and he imagined beyond any category towards a world where all peoples were family, and where oppression could and would be overcome.”
Although Ndikho was a member of the African National Congress ANC), he found solidarity with the Pan-African Congress-USA which had ideological affinity with South Africa's Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), a rival of the ANC. Yet there was no contradiction on his part or on the part of the PAC in Detroit in embracing him because they were all involved in a common struggle to free black people – all children of Africa including those in the diaspora – from racial subjugation.
That was the spirit of the Pan-African Congress-USA members and their solidarity with their brethren from the African continent.
Another South African affiliated with the Pan-African Congress-USA was Gladstone Mxolisi Ntlabati, simply known as Mxolisi Ntlabati. He was a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and Nelson Mandela's second cousin.
He was a Methodist minister and served at a church in Detroit. He also taught at Wayne State University and was a known political activist who fled South Africa in the early sixties. He got a scholarship to attend Harvard University and testified before the US Congress on the atrocities of apartheid in his home country.
He returned to South Africa in 1978 and died there in the following year. His death was blamed on the brutal treatment he suffered at the hands of the authorities under the apartheid regime. He was also the author of The Ethical Justification for Violent Revolution in South Africa.
Robert Zebulun Larson stated the following about Ntlabati in his PhD thesis, “The Transnational and Local Dimensions of the U.S. Anti-Apartheid Movement,” Ohio State University, 2019:
“Gladstone Ntlabati, a South African Methodist minister, was an active preacher in the United States particularly in Atlanta.
Ntlabati worked as an informal ANC rep by dedicating himself to cross-country speaking tours.
Even expatriate South Africans in American churches who did not devote themselves fully to anti-apartheid activism still played a role in familiarizing parishioners with South Africa....
Gladstone Mxolisi Ntlabati is one of the forgotten activists of the anti-apartheid movement in North America. His absence in the historiography is in no small part because he left the United States while the movement was still underway, and after returning to South Africa he died in 1979 allegedly at the hands of agents of the state.
Nelson Mandela’s second cousin, Ntlabati was recruited by Mandela to join the ANC Youth League while in a boarding school in South Africa.
Ntlabati became a Methodist minister and frequently encouraged young black South Africans to oppose the apartheid government. He distinguished himself by a willingness to be politically active when there was considerable pressure to create distance between the churches and the liberation movements.
Ntlabati was harassed by the South African security forces, but he had the fortune of having financial scholarships to study in the United States.
In 1962, he was arrested along with Mandela and several others for allegedly carrying out bombings in the country, but he was released on bail to tend to his congregation. Once the trial ended, Mxolisi fled the country, with his wife Nonzi (Nonzwakazi) arriving a year later.
The Ntlabatis felt that the United States was equally as racist as South Africa and quickly became activists in their new country.
Mxolisi made a name for himself as the official representative of the ANC in the United States.
The ANC paid relatively little attention to the United States compared to the Eastern Bloc.
Ntlabati worked with the UN Special Committee on Apartheid to identify South African students who needed financial support. By fundraising for the International Defense and Aid Fund (IDAF), he became such a regular speaker at churches and college campuses that by 1968, George Houser claimed that he had spoken more than any other African he knew in the United States.
Houser hoped Ntlabati might lead an office in Atlanta that would be a branch of ACOA. Instead, Ntlabati became the executive director of the Chief Albert Luthuli Memorial Fund in Atlanta in 1969, which was devoted to fundraising and holding public educational forums.
It brought together activists and South African exiles for conferences as well to organize with the American civil rights community, including one such weeklong conference at Shaw University in North Carolina in 1969.
Ntlabati taught at Atlanta University in 1969 and 1970, and then he went to Andover Newton Theological Seminary in 1971 and 1972. By 1972, Ntlabati was an instructor at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Intellectually, Ntlabati represented a new kind of activist. Whereas earlier figures such as Z.K. Matthews had embraced pacifism and encouraged an end to apartheid to prevent a violent conflict, Ntlabati instead stressed the fact that violent struggle was the only way to effect meaningful change in southern Africa.
Within a few years, the WCC endorsed the liberation movements in southern Africa and began directly funding them as well.
Ntlabati also pulled no rhetorical punches in describing the United States. When he gave a speech in North Carolina, he said 'In the past decade the blacks of this country have not been liberated, the conditions of their slavery have not been improved. The war in Vietnam was merely part of centuries of territorial expansion by the United States and a latest act in its aggression against colored peoples.'
This particular rhetoric became increasingly appealing in the United States in the wake of Vietnam, and as Americans considered the effects of American foreign policy in other parts of the world. Moreover, it suggested links between the conduct of U.S. foreign policy and racism.
Ntlabati is also emblematic of the general style of diplomacy carried out by the African National Congress in the West.
In the 1960s, South Africa’s close alignment with the United States and Britain meant there was little chance of gaining support from either of those countries.
Substantial aid in the form of money flowed from the Eastern Bloc under the Soviet Union or the Scandinavian countries, recently decolonized states tended to be the most sympathetic diplomatically, and the United Nations was the chief venue for early harassment of the South African government.
Nevertheless, by 1962 the ANC leadership recognized that they needed some kind of presence outside of friendly countries, and they began establishing mission offices and representatives in North America. These missions were intended to help counteract the diplomacy of the South African government, educate people about the realities of apartheid, and build global solidarity by targeting specific groups such as labor unions with propaganda that would be relevant to them specifically.
These missions tended to be small in scope, however, again in part because the prospects for fundraising or direct support in North America were relatively slight. The ANC lacked the resources for many diplomatic missions, at least in the early years of the struggle.
As American activists frequently discovered, the presence of groups in New York or Washington, D.C. did little for people living in the South, the Midwest, or the west coast. Individual members of the ANC were encouraged to form their own chapters and to build awareness of the cause, and the spread of exiled and expatriate South Africans across the United States meant that those with ANC ties became quasi-representatives.
Once Gladstone Ntlabati went back to South Africa, he found himself initially sent to the Transkei Bantustan, where he was eventually banished because of his political agitation.
He was then sent to the Ciskei Bantustan, where he worked as a high school vice-principal and his activities led to him being rearrested several times.
After leading students in a prayer vigil for a hunger strike on Robben Island, he was imprisoned for several months and tortured.
Upon his release, the strain of the hunger strike in prison as well as repeated beatings led to a fatal heart attack in 1979.” – (Robert Zebulun Larson stated in his PhD thesis, “The Transnational and Local Dimensions of the U.S. Anti-Apartheid Movement,” Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 2019, pp. 18, 71 – 75).
Ntlabati's ties to the Pan-African Congress-USA in Detroit and its leaders was demonstrated by the high regard in which he was held by the organisation.
He was even invited to be the main speaker at one of the organisation's major meetings; an honour – for non-members – that was also extended to African diplomats including Tanzania's ambassador to the United States, Paul Bomani. The PAC later invited two other Tanzanian diplomats to speak at its forums: Deputy Ambassador Hamza Aziz and senior diplomat Martin Kivumbi.
Ntlabati also attended some of the PAC meetings and was there when Ambassador Bomani spoke.
When PAC members sang Tanzania's national anthem on that day, “Mungu Ibariki Afrika” (God Bless Africa) in Swahili, Ntlabati sang along with them, “Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika,” in Xhosa, which is the same song composed – in 1897 – by Enoch Sontonga, a Xhosa who was a Methodist mission school teacher and lay preacher. The same song is also the national anthem of Zambia.
Other speakers at the PAC forums included influential figures in the civil rights movement in the United States.
Ntlabati was also a great admirer of President Nyerere and Tanzania as a whole because of the support our country provided to the freedom fighters in South Africa and even named one of his children, Ujamaa, which means “familyhood” in Swahili, a term that was also used to describe the country's policy of African socialism advocated by Nyerere.
Ntlabati's home in Detroit also became a haven for his fellow South Africans visiting Detroit; among them Hugh Masekela whom I got the chance to meet in 1974 when Ntlabati invited some of us to his house.
He had a party and I got the chance to talk to some South Africans on the liberation struggle against apartheid and the role Tanzania was playing in supporting the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress of South Africa and other liberation movements in the countries of southern Africa.
I remember talking to one of the ladies, who was a highly respected member of the group and who was probably identified by some of the South Africans there as Mrs. Z.K.Matthews, wife of prominent academic and anti-apartheid activist, or someone close to her, about the liberation campaigns being waged by the ANC and the PAC.
She was adamant in her position, as were the rest of the South Africans I talked to on that day, that the true liberation organisation in South Africa was the African National Congress (ANC), not the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). They were emphatic in their dismissal of the South African PAC as a major and legitimate liberation organisation; a dismissal I assumed was partly for reasons of partisan loyalty as members of the ANC, although they were also later vindicated when the ANC emerged as – in fact had always been – the most influential liberation movement in the history of South Africa.
And they all were very grateful to Tanzania for her support of the liberation struggle against apartheid.
The same people – almost all of them – also attended a party given by another South African living in Detroit which I also attended, as did some members of the Pan-African Congress-USA including Kwado Akpan, one of the organisation's leaders.
Her name was Thembi, wife of prominent Jazz musician Pharaoh Sanders who also played and toured with John Coltrane, an internationally renowned Jazz musician.
Her husband named one of his albums Thembi. It was his seventh album and was released in 1971, about two years before I met her and her husband for the first time in Detroit in 1973.
Thembi and her husband had a house – a mansion – less than a quarter of mile from the PAC house. She had links to the Pan-African Congress because of her ties to some of us. We often walked to their residence.
She and her husband had a son, Nunki, whom she brought to the PAC house once or twice for me to take care of him when she had to attend classes at Wayne State University. She and I were students at Wayne State during the same period but at different times which enabled me to keep their son.
I even typed some of her papers, which she wrote for her class, and liked using the typewriter, a habit I acquired from my work as a news reporter and which served me well when I started wring books.
Their residence was also for some time home to some African students, Emmanuel Sendezera and John Muhanji, when they attended Wayne State University during the same time I did. They were doctoral candidates in physics.
The son of South African author Es'kia Mphahlele, formerly Ezekiel Mphahlele, was also a guest of Thembi for quite sometime in 1973 before Muhanji and Sendezera went to stay there.
I met him for the first time at Thembi's residence and invited him to the PAC house where he visited a number of times.
The house was also a venue for meetings of the Pan-African Congress and sometimes for meetings with other black organisations such as the Republic of New Afrika and the Shrine of Black Madonna to coordinate efforts on various activities including participation in marches on African Liberation Day.
The marches took place every year in some of the major cities across the United States, including Detroit, in support of the liberation struggle against white minority rule on the African continent.
The Pan-African Congress also had a preschool for children at the PAC house.
The children attended school everyday and were taught various subjects, including basic Swahili, by two female PAC members.
One of the children who attended those classes was the son of a Nigerian professor who taught chemistry at Wayne State University. He wanted his son to have a solid grounding in Pan-African thought and ideals.
Contrary to what some people have claimed, the Pan-African Congress-USA was not a part of the Black Panther Party.
Even one of my relatives, James Mwakisyala who was a prominent journalist in Tanzania, automatically assumed I was sponsored by the Black Panther Party. He became an “authoritative” source of information about me and my sponsors for an American journalist who wanted to interview me on the matter.
The American journalist wondered why I didn't think it was risky – at the hands of the American authorities – to be sponsored by the Black Panthers to attend school in the United States; an organisation that was at odds with the American government.
It was a valid question. The authorities – local, state and federal – had virtually declared war on the Black Panthers and saw them as the enemy within who had to be destroyed at any cost.
The prominence of the Black Panther Party as the most vocal and most militant black organisation in the United States, and the attention it won internationally, probably contributed to that perception and misconception of the Pan-African Congress-USA being the Black Panther Party since it was inconceivable there could be another black organisation with that kind of reputation.
Therefore, any black nationalist group that could take chances to sponsor African students would have to be – and could be none other than – the Black Panther Party; a conflation of the two – the Black Panther Party and the Pan-African Congress-USA – by Mwakisyala which earned him “credentials” as an authority on the matter. Unfortunately, his assumption did not correspond to reality.
I explained that to the American journalist who interviewed me on the matter and on other subjects. The interview was published in its entirety in my book Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era.
The Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale when they were students at Merritt College in that city.
It was founded for self-defence, especially against police brutality so common in black communities across the United States even today because of racism. As Huey P. Newton said in an interview on American television, CBS, in the 1980s with Charlie Rose, the Oakland Police Department in those days liked to recruit racist whites from Georgia. He said they bragged about that saying they were recruited “because we know how to handle niggers.”
Huey P. Newton was shot dead in the same city in August 1989.
Although the Black Panther Party and the Pan-African Congress-USA were different organisations, they shared many goals in pursuit of racial justice even if in different contexts and using different tactics and strategies.
But that does not mean, as some people have speculated, that the Pan-African Congress-USA or any of these groups were a part of the Black Panther Party which was hounded into extinction by the FBI in the seventies.
A number of black nationalist leaders including Stokely Carmichael – renamed Kwame Ture – were invited to Detroit by the Pan-African Congress-USA and addressed members of this organisation. Still, that does not mean the PAC was affiliated with the Black Panthers, although they agreed on a number of issues, as they did with Dr. Martin Luther King.
And a number of PAC leaders knew Malcolm X who had strong ties to Detroit; in fact, his wife came from Detroit, although he himself grew up in Lansing, about 90 miles from Detroit, and spent a lot of time in Detroit. Some of his family members including his elder brothers Wilfred and Philbert also lived in Detroit.
Yet, in spite of all those ties, the Pan-African-Congress-USA was composed of members who came from the mainstream of society. They were working class and middle class.
Stokely Carmichael's coming to Detroit at the invitation of the Pan-African Congress meant nothing in terms of the organisation's ideological orientation as an extension of the Black Panther Party (BPP) or any other group. It was an independent organisation with its own identity, goals and philosophy.
Stokely Carmichael also worked with Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure for years when he moved to Africa in 1967.
He also worked with other mainstream leaders as well, besides Dr. Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement, as he did with organisations such as the Pan-African Congress-USA and even with the Black Panther Party of which he once served as prime minister before leaving the party over policy differences.
He also went to Tanzania, as did Malcolm X and other black American civil rights leaders including Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, Robert Franklin Williams, Angela Davis, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier and members of the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam. He was also one of the black leaders from the United States who met with President Nyerere.
And here's some trivia about the two leaders, Carmichael and Malcolm X, in relation to Tanzania: Carmichael liked to stay at the Palm Beach Hotel when he was in Dar es Salaam, which was only a few yards away from our high school, Tambaza, and from H.H. The Aga Khan Hostel in Upanga where we stayed.
Malcolm X's favourite restaurant in Dar es Salaam was New Zahir on Mosque Street and Jamhuri Street. It was also Che Guevara's favourite restaurant when he stayed in Dar es Salaam for about five months where he wrote his famous book, the Congo diaries, after the failure of his Congo mission.
Also, when Malcolm X visited Tanzania for two weeks in October 1964, he was invited by President Nyerere to his residence in Msasani on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam. As Andrew Nyerere told me when I was working on the second edition of Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era:
“When he came to Msasani, he gave Mwalimu the record of 'Message to the Grassroots,' a speech by Malcolm X.”
The visit was facilitated by Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, simply known as Babu, a highly influential cabinet member under Nyerere who was a close friend of Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka.
Malcolm X spoke with President Nyerere for two hours at Nyerere's residence on 13 October 1964. Babu was also there. Andrew Nyerere told me he remembered the visit.
My life in Detroit
My life in Detroit was another turning point in my journey in this world. It had been one long journey from Tanzania. But it had been a short one in my life of 23 years when I first arrived there.
I just hoped that I still had many more years to live in this short journey of ours on earth as mere mortals.
Detroit had a lot to offer in the quest for racial justice and in terms of Pan-Africanism.
Probably more than any other city in the United States with a predominantly black population, Detroit was a hotbed of political activism that has not been duplicated anywhere else in the country.
Even Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a black-to-Africa movement which was the biggest black organisation in American history since the 1920s, was very strong in Detroit. I even met some of the older members of this organisation in the early and mid-1970s when they spoke at the meetings of the Pan-African Congress. The Black Panther Party also had a strong presence in Detroit.
Malcolm X's wife Betty Shabaaz also came from Detroit.
Some members of the Pan-African Congress-USA who knew Malcolm X included Kwame Atta who visited Africa a number of times and later moved to Liberia with his family. He also lived in Ghana before going to Liberia.
Other PAC members also visited Africa, including Ed Vaughn who met President Nyerere of Tanzania and Idi Amin of Uganda.
He said President Nyerere laughed when he heard they had the same name “Mwalimu” and even joked about it.
I also remember, at a party one night in Detroit, when Ed Vaughn showed some of us a very important identity document he was given by the Ugandan government on the recommendation of President Idi Amin. I even remember how it looked like. It had a red hard cover.
Ed Vaughn was highly influential in Detroit even before he became a state representative in the Michigan State Legislature in Lansing, the state capital.
He even took me and another student to a reception at Manoogian Mansion, the official residence of the Mayor of Detroit, to celebrate the election of Coleman Young as the city's first black mayor. I got the chance to meet the newly-elected mayor on that day. That was in November 1974.
I remember that day very well. I even remember what Ed Vaughn said to me when we were in his car on the way to the mayor's residence. He was smiling and said the kind of eye glasses I had on gave me the appearance of an older person, and a mature scholar, not of a young college student. They were the same glasses I wore in Tanzania when I was a news reporter.
A number of people attended the reception at the mayor's residence, including a white professor from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor whom I talked to for sometime.
The conversation was about renowned Kenyan professor, Ali Mazrui, who was his colleague at the University of Michigan.
I brought up the subject on Mazrui's writings. I read some of them including his articles in the scholarly Transition magazine published in Kampala, Uganda, and his first book, Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition, for the first time in 1969 when I was at Tambaza High School in Form V or Standard 13, what Americans would call the 13th grade, which they don't have in their school system.
It was a lively conversation. I remember the professor saying Mazrui was brilliant and “very clever.”
It was an assessment similar to what Owusu Sadaukai, president of Malcolm X Liberation University in Greensboro, North Carolina, said one day about him to his students in a class I attended when I was there for a short time in November 1972. He warned his students to be careful when they read Professor Mazrui's works. He said about him: “He's very tricky.”
It was quite a coincidence that I heard almost exactly the same thing about Mazrui from the professor I met at Mayor Young's residence almost exactly one year later.
Those are some of my memories of Detroit from a personal perspective during those days.
Before I moved to Detroit, I went to Washington, D.C., in December 1972 to visit some of my friends from Trinidad. They were political activists.
Also present was another political activist, Kimathi Mohammed, who spoke at one of the meetings we had. That was the first time I met him.
He came from Lansing, Michigan, where he worked with the Marcus Garvey Institute. But he was born in Savannah, Georgia, and was brought up down there.
It was quite a coincidence that I met someone who came from the same state where I would be going in the same month to attend school there.
I remember one of the Trinidadian activists, Anthony Ferguson, saying I was going to Detroit which was a centre of black nationalism. Others at the meeting, including Kimathi himself and Valerie Andrew who together with Ferguson was a student at Howard University, agreed with him.
After I moved to Detroit, I saw Kimathi again. I went to visit him in Lansing and he came to visit me at the Pan-African Congress house in Detroit.
Sadly, I found out he died many years ago. I forgot exactly when but I saw his picture online and a report about his death. He died sometime in the 1990s or after 2000.
I tried to find the report again about his death when I was writing this book, to know exactly when he died, but couldn't. I remember when I read the article about his death many years ago, he was eulogised as a staunch Marxist and revolutionary thinker; which he was.
One of my instructors in an Afro-American history class at Wayne County Community College in Detroit in 1973 was Modibo Kadalie. The main book he chose for the class was Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History by Robert L. Allen first published in 1969. It was one of the most important works in the field, especially on the turbulent sixties, and has stood the test of time. It is a probing analysis of Black America as a nation within a nation, virtually colonised by the white power structure.
Modibo Kadalie knew Kimathi Mohammed well. He also met C.L.R. James and even invited him to his house and attended some of his lectures.
Both he and Kimathi came from Savannah, Georgia. As he stated about Kimathi:
“Kimathi Mohammed, a Michigan-based activist who was a native of Savannah, Georgia, deserves to be recognized as among the most original political theorists of the Black Power movement in the United States.... In contrast to many political thinkers of the Civil Rights and Black Power era, Mohammed's work emphasized the self-organization of ordinary African Americans and their liberating, self-directed activism.
Mohammed placed forward his critique of would-be Black vanguards at a time when most prominent Black Power activists – even the socialist advocates among them – were beginning to embrace electoral politics and systems of patronage which would ultimately suppress any independent Black political power.” – (Modibo Kadalie, foreword to Kimathi Mohammed, Organization and Spontaneity: The Theory of the Vanguard Party and Its Application to the Black Movement in the US Today, A K Pr Distribution, 2013).
Kadalie also stated the following in an interview with Professor Matthew Quest when recording an oral history for the Southern Labor History Archive at Georgia State University on 12 November 2010:
“I would go up to Lansing (from Detroit) – I just got in my car. I knew some people who knew him (Kimathi Mohammed), and I knew where to find him. And he was supposed to come down to the study group....
I really wanted to know. And I'm not sure that I knew that he was from Savannah, yet. So I go up there and meet him, you know, and we started talking, and he knew me and I knew of him, and so we started talking. You know, I just asked him, 'Man where you from?' He said, 'Oh well, I'm from Savannah,' and I said, 'Yeah?' And he knew where Riceboro was, where I grew up....
Yeah. So we got to be real good friends after that, man. He was political. He was a really intense young man, and he had a cadre, a circle around him, and they were not party hacks or nothing, they were just – they were trying to figure out what was going on.
And I met Maina wa Kinyatti...a historian of the Mau Mau...was close with Kimathi, was a grad student at Michigan State at that time (Kimathi was also a student there)....
They were very, very close. And Kimathi was going through a similar thing that we were going through: the question of what is the role of student activism with community activism. So what he had basically done is taken that wing of the student activist and moved out into the Lansing community and set up the Marcus Garvey Institute.
QUEST (interviewer): Now, Kimathi is also very much influenced by C.L.R., becomes close with C.L.R., probably closer with C.L.R. than you personally....And so Kimathi develops a certain – he's developing similar ideas to you about – one would argue, influenced by C.L.R., about the idea of self-organization of the workers as being more significant than any progressive leaders that might emerge.
KADALIE: Kimathi was trying to work out what is the role of the spontaneous mass movement to organization, which really was the question of the time to those people who were really interested in organization. The vanguardist thing was that the spontaneous organization is insignificant and what they needed is just a sign that they needed to have a party. But with Kimathi – Kimathi seemed to be seriously engaged in this question. He seemed to be seriously engaged, doing the reading necessary.” (Modibo Kadalie Oral History Interview with Professor Matthew Quest, Voices of Labor History Project, Georgia State University Library, 12 November 2010).
It is clear from their ideological orientation as Marxists that they constructed an analytical framework and formulated their ideas in the context of class struggle transcending race. Yet, race is equally important, even more so, when black people are victims of racial injustices and have to unite on the basis of race to fight racism and pursue common objectives.
Unity on the basis of class across racial lines has not served black people well in many cases because of racism. Poor whites and white workers are some of the most racist people who use race as a weapon against blacks to pursue and protect their own interests. They do not even think of uniting with poor blacks to pursue common goals they share as poor people regardless of race. White workers in labour unions are a good example of such racial animosity against blacks.
In South Africa, for example, white workers were some of the most racist people during apartheid. They did not see themselves as allies of poor black workers with whom they could unite to fight for a common cause. They saw themselves as allies of rich whites and those in power purely on the basis of race because they were fellow whites.
Yet, neither race nor class by itself is enough to serve as an analytical tool to address problems people of all races or problems black face because of racism.
Even without a synthesis of the two – as a theoretical synthesis of race and class – to get a race-class synthesis as an analytical tool, they can be used to complement each other without ignoring either one.
I remember when I was in Washington, D.C., in December 1972, Kimathi Mohammed spoke at a meeting of the Caribbean association on the subject of organising and mobilising workers to fight for their rights and pursue their goals. We were asked to comment on his lecture or make some suggestions on what was the best course of action in pursuit of the goals he talked about.
I told Kimathi that his analysis was excellent but he relied too much on Lenin's works from which he quoted and paraphrased extensively.
I felt that it was important for the people themselves to formulate their own solutions to the problems they face without relying on “experts” or “thinkers” who have to think and find solutions for them.
They don't even have to know anything about Lenin, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Joseph Schumpeter or read their works to find solutions to their problems because they are the ones who know what kind of problems they face, why they face those problems, and under what circumstances which no expert can tell them how to solve them; let alone people like Marx and Lenin who knew nothing about those problems and circumstances.
They can even theorise themselves. Even Kimathi in his works through the years emphasised the imperative need for the people – workers and others – to rely on themselves.
But I am also not a Marxist and have never been one like Kimathi Mohammed and Modibo Kadalie. Yet, both had fascinating ideas when I met them – one, Kimathi just as a friend, and the other, Modibo Kadalie as one of my college instructors – and will always cherish what I learned from them.
I hope they also learned a thing or two from our conversations, as Kadalie implied one day soon after class when he asked me: “How come you know so much?”
I used to participate in class discussions, in a collaborative exchange and cross-fertilisation of ideas, about the anti-colonial struggle and the liberation movements in Africa and about civil rights in the United States.
I told him I was a news reporter in Tanzania before I came to the United States and even corresponded with some individuals and groups in the US involved in the campaign for racial equality. He then said, “Oh, now I see why.”
In all those struggles, race – not class, if at all – was paramount. And as a black person myself and victim of racism, race has been the focus of some of my works including my reflections on race relations in the African and American contexts.
And as blacks themselves – victims as well – Kadalie and Kimathi were also fully aware of the relevance of race as a focal point in the struggle for racial justice even if their analysis sometimes, if not very often, focused on class analysis as the primary tool in the quest for human equality.
When you are oppressed on the basis of race, you must organise on the basis of race to fight for racial justice, as you seek allies across the colour line.
Kadalie and Kimathi were themselves involved in the black liberation struggle and did not dismiss it as irrelevant to the struggle for human equality transcending race.
Kadalie also worked with the Pan-African Congress-USA in Detroit, including its leaders Ed Vaughn and others, and even mentioned the organisation and Ed Vaughn (mistyped as Ed Bond) in the interview with Professor Matthew Quest.
This was an organisation that was dedicated to the liberation of its people – Africans at home and Africans abroad including those in the diaspora – and was exclusively black in membership.
There was no contradiction in Kadalie's collaboration with the Pan-African Congress (PAC) or in the organisation's collaboration with black people like Kadalie who were equally committed to the liberation of their people from white domination.
Even the adoption of African names by Modibo Kadalie, formerly known as Edward Cooper, and by Kimathi Mohammed whose former name was Stanley McClinton, attests to their credentials as black nationalists. “Kimathi” was the surname of renowned Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi.
Kadalie told us in class one day in 1973 that he got his last name from Clements Kadalie, the first black trade union leader in apartheid South Africa – he originally came from Nyasaland, renamed Malawi – whom he greatly admired because of his superb skills as an uncompromising and excellent organiser of black workers fighting for their rights. He was also the founder of the largest trade union in Africa.
And he got his first name, Modibo, from Modibo Keita, the first president of Mali who was an ardent Pan-Africanist and Marxist-Leninist.
President Modibo Keita was also a member of a secret group of leaders in the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), known as “The Group of Six,” who secretly worked together on urgent matters of African unity and liberation excluding other leaders.
The group's members were Modibo Keita, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Ahmed Ben Bella, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ahmed Sékou Touré. Keita was chosen as chairman out of respect for him as the oldest member of the group.
In an interview with Jorge G. Castañeda, author of Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, in Geneva, Switzerland, in November 1995, Ben Bella told Castañeda that the six leaders worked secretly together and “conspired among ourselves” on how to address different issues critical to the well-being of Africa, including the Congo crisis. As he put it about the turmoil in Congo-Leopoldville in which Patrice Lumumba was assassinated, “We arrived in the Congo too late,” in pointed reference to the six leaders on what they could have done to help the Congolese leader and his supporters.
Modibo Kadalie was also a great admirer of those leaders. They were considered by their supporters and admirers to be “progressive leaders” who led “progressive countries” on the frontline in the struggle for African liberation and unity.
Kadalie, who later became a professor at Fayetteville State University and other schools, also acknowledged that Kimathi Mohammed had a profound impact on him in terms of political influence and development; so did C.L.R. James, a prominent Marxist and Pan-Africanist from Trinidad who lived in the United States for many years, especially in New York and Washington D.C., and who was a mentor to Kwame Nkrumah as much as George Padmore, another prominent Pan-Africanist and James' childhood friend also from Trinidad, was.
Padmore died a citizen of Ghana and was buried in the capital Accra; so did Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois who also was buried in Accra.
Modibo Kadalie was also a great admirer of Walter Rodney, author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and talked about him in class. I told him I met Rodney in Tanzania when he was teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam; in fact, at his house on campus where I also met his wife Pat.
That is also where he wrote his book, published by the Tanzania Publishing House (TPH) in 1972.
Kadalie met Rodney a number of times in Detroit and Lansing, Michigan. As he stated in the interview with Professor Matthew Quest, “Walter came by on several different occasions.”
My colleague at the Daily News from 1971 to 1972, Kenyan journalist Philip Ochieng who was a friend of President Barack Obama's father – they came from the same area and were members of the Luo ethnic group – edited Rodney's book. As he stated in an interview years later in 2013:
“Walter Rodney was my friend and I even edited his seminal work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Dar es Salaam was the world headquarters of intellectual debate those days.” – (Philip Ochieng, in an interview with the Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya, 6 July 2013).
He also said after Nyerere was no longer president, “Tanzania seemed to lose that international leadership role which once made Dar es Salaam the moral and intellectual capital of the world.”
Philip Ochieng died on 27 April 2021. He was 83 years old.
I remember him as a great writer and political analyst. And he was a Marxist. He stated in some of his writings years later that he admired Friedrich Engels even more in some respects. He had ideological foes who did not agree with him on many fundamental issues although he had supporters as well. But he was independent-minded, fearless and relentless in his criticism of leaders, governments and institutions when he thought they were wrong.
Years later, after he was back in Kenya, President Mwai Kibaki awarded him the Order of the Burning Spear (OBS) for the columns he wrote in the Sunday Nation which earned him from the president and other people a reputation as an objective commentator. The award is given for exemplary service.
He was a columnist when we worked together at the Daily News in Dar es Salaam. He sometimes edited a few news stories but rarely.
I remember when I wrote some stories identifying people in racial terms, only when I thought I had to, he differed with me and replaced the terms “whites” or “white people” with race-neutral terms.
I did not agree with him and felt I had used the terms in their appropriate contexts when I wrote that “whites” or “white people” were oppressing and exploiting “blacks” or “black people” in apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia (renamed Zimbabwe), Namibia, Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau (Portuguese Guinea).
You can't talk about racism without mentioning the races involved. I don't see any other way of identifying them.
Even when I wrote “white imperialists” or “white racists” – they do exist just like black racists do – he contended that we were not against some people because of their racial or national identity; we were against a system of oppression and exploitation.
He probably would have disagreed with his friend Walter Rodney who, in some of his writings, did identify people in racial terms and used “white people,” “whites,” 'blacks,” “black people” even in some of his most influential works including The Groundings With My Brothers; for example, when he stated that poverty always has a way of finding black people, although he attributed that to imperialism and the international capitalist system.
He also stated, in the same book, that after white mercenaries brutalised and killed countless people in Congo-Leopoldville during the turbulent sixties, they fled to Burundi but white power said not a single hair on any of those mercenaries was going to be touched – by Africans or anybody else.
Yet, Ochieng himself sometimes used strong nationalist language, and in racial terms, as he did in 2017 and probably now and then through the years since we were together in the early 1970s at the Daily News in Dar, when he stated in his article about President Robert Mugabe, “The Mugabe We All Adored in Dar Turned Out an Embarrassment,” Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya, 25 November 2017:
“Under Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Dar es Salaam served as the external headquarters of practically every one of the nationalist movements fighting to bring down Europe's racially conceited tyrannies all over our continent - all the way from the borders of Egypt in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south, including Kenya.
That was how I first met Robert (Bob) Mugabe, a great nationalist, at that time considered as the most redoubtable of all of Southern Africa's campaigners for indigenous self-rule.
For, in the Tanzanian capital, Robert Mugabe was seen then as the topmost and most cherished among Africa's nationalist leaders fighting to bring down European tyranny all over our vast continent, especially in that Southern African colony, and throughout the world....
Of all the nationalists fighting to bring down Britain's colonial high-handedness and arrogance, Robert Mugabe was at one time one of Africa's most cherished darlings.
When I worked in Dar es Salaam, I often met and deeply admired the person whom fellow nationalists in exile called 'Dear Bob.'
Time was indeed when I wholeheartedly recommended 'Bob' as the chief spokesman for our continent and for humanity's downtrodden classes all over the world, including even in that same Western Europe which had, for the nonce, assumed the role of model of what was alleged to be 'democracy'....
When I first met face to face and interviewed what was then our 'dear Bob' in an hotel room in Dar es Salaam at some point in the early 1970s, he proved overwhelmingly charming, courteous, captivating in manner, overpowering in intellect and overwhelmingly knowledgeable of history and the modern human world.
Of all the nationalists seeking to defeat Caucasian racist tyranny and conceit in Africa, especially in Namibia and Southern Rhodesia, Robert Mugabe remained what William Shakespeare – the great bard of England's own intellectual and cultural celebration – would have embraced in poetry and drama as 'the nonpareil.'
Being a Marxist and critical of the capitalist West, his criticism was sometimes misguided. I remember one afternoon when we were in our editorial office at the Daily News, he rose from his chair and was on his way to the sub-editors' room when he picked up the end of my necktie – I was standing at that time – and half-jokingly said, “You're tied to the West.”
To him, wearing a necktie was subservience to the West I should have been ashamed of, especially as an African, from a continent dominated and exploited by the West.
I wore a necktie everyday.
He wore a dashiki or a short-sleeved shirt everyday, alternating between the two.
Years later, after he returned to Kenya, he himself started wearing suits and neckties and even served as editor-in-chief of the state-owned Kenya Times, a paper that supported the ruling party KANU (Kenya African National Union) and President Daniel arap Moi who was pro-Western an staunchly capitalist in a capitalist country that was also unabashedly pro-British. He was in direct contact with Moi. They talked to each other.
That was in the early 1980s, not long after Moi succeeded Jomo Kenyatta as president, and only a few years after Philip Ochieng (in Kenya fondly known as PO) left socialist Tanzania he admired so much – himself as a socialist – under the leadership of President Nyerere.
After he returned to his home country, he navigated the treacherous waters of Kenyan politics and survived. When he was at the helm of the Kenya Times as editor-in-chief, a position he would not have obtained without Moi's blessings, he incurred the wrath of the president himself – and of the ruling KANU – because of his criticism which, in the eyes of the government, was tantamount to treason. Yet, he remained undaunted, principled and fearless. As Martin Masai, who later became a prominent journalist in Kenya, stated in his article, “How Philip Ochieng’ Saved Me From Moi”:
“What stood out for me when working under PO was his great courage to face Moi when KANU was drunk with power. PO stood for the critical values of journalism and was willing to take the bullet and save his reporters as long as they complied with ethical and professional standards.
Much as he was accused of defending KANU, PO objected to the actions of party functionaries and published stories critical to their actions. The loudest of his criticisms being his dismissal of MPs, the majority of them from KANU, as having brains the size of a pinhead.
During that time, PO published a daily roll-call of MPs to whip them to attend parliamentary sessions that were faced with endless quorum hitches. No other editor in Kenya has exhibited such courage in my 38 years as a journalist.
Whether in a suit or informal, PO was always dressed sharply and wore strong designer perfumes whose fragrance wafted through the corridors of the Kingsway House offices as soon as he entered the building.
Without an iota of doubt, I can say that without PO, even when we were not friends or peers, my career and those of many others would not be worth anything. PO defended the length and breadth of journalism at a time when doing so was treasonable.” – (“How Philip Ochieng’ Saved Me From Moi,” (Debunk Media, 4 May 2021).
He also had his own frailties as we all do as mere mortals. He was anti-racist but faced criticism for what was perceived by some people to be an insult to the black race in terms of his social life which had serious racial implications. A senior staff member on our editorial staff, Reginald Muhango, once bluntly asked: “Why just white women?”
Yet, his Kenyan children – at least the ones shown in his family video when they welcomed their sister from the United States – were black; so was his American daughter he had with a black American woman when he was a student in the United States in the early sixties; one of the beneficiaries of the 1959 Tom Mboya airlift of young Kenyans to go to school in the Untied States, also among them Obama senior, father of President Barack Obama, and a friend of Ochieng.
At the Daily News in Dar es Salaam, we all – news reporters – worked in the same room. Ochieng's table was just across from mine. Next to him was Jenerali Ulimwengu who replaced Ochieng as the paper's columnist and wrote a column under the same title Ochieng used, The Way I See It.
We had lively conversations everyday.
Ochieng resigned in 1973. He left Tanzania in the same year and returned to Kenya. He denied claims that he was expelled from Tanzania. He said he left of his own accord and explained why. As he stated in his article, “It's A Far Cry Ever Since Nyerere Days,” in the Daily Nation, Nairobi, Kenya, 3 July 2005:
“When I worked for the Standard Tanzania (now Daily News) over 30 years ago, I stepped on very many toes. In a Friday column, I didn't spare even Julius Nyerere.
Yet nobody victimised me for not having a work permit. At least three factors protected voices like mine: The man, the system he had created and the regional climate. For Mwalimu was a rara avis among Africa's post-colonial leaders – intelligent, well-bred, honest, simple, humble, self-respecting, respectful of other people's opinions, noted for the logic with which he replied to critics.
Mwalimu was among the extremely few who could pass the leadership test that he himself had set in Azimio – the 1967 Arusha Declaration which required the strictest accountability. The one thing you can say for Ujamaa – the 'socialism and self-reliance' which Azimio ushered in – was that it led to the fiercest and freest debate that this continent has ever seen.
For 10 years after Arusha, the University of Dar es Salaam was a Mecca for thinkers and liberation movements from all over the world. I had a tête-à-tête with Samora Machel, Janet Mondlane, Hernando Guebuza, Amilcar Cabral, Robert Mugabe, Thabo Mbeki, Albert René, Sam Nujoma, Lopo do Nascimento, Agostinho Neto, Yoweri Museveni, Yasser Arafat.
I mingled with Breyten Breytenbach, Gora Ebrahim, John Saul, Paulo Freire, Cheik Anta Diop, Giovani Arrighi, Lionel Cliffe, Richard Gott, Walter Rodney, Marga Holness, Alice Miller, Clive Thomas, Angela Davis.
I peeked directly into the minds of Abdulrahman Babu, Ngombale Mwiru, Issa Shivji, Annar Cassam, Salim Salim, Mahmoud Mamdani, Dan Nabudere, Grant Kamenju, Adhu Awiti.
Conducted mainly through our newspaper, opinions ran from the farthest right to others that were so left that they bordered on the right – but all expressed with no fear of state victimisation. This was the protective canopy in which a Kenyan could wax as critical as I did with such impunity. It does not contradict the fact that Tanzanians had a very low opinion of Kenyans. They told ribald jokes about our philistinism, lack of refinement, greed, consumer crudity, absence of taste, gracelessness in service areas, ethnic parochialism.
The Way I See it
Yet there was a counter-force in the euphoric 'East Africanism' awakened by Uhuru and whetted by our founding fathers' vow to set up a shirikisho (federation) in the immediate future. While it lasted – and Arusha being the seat of that East African Community which symbolised the federation – Kenyans and Ugandans could work in Tanzania without let or hindrance.
Among our targets of criticism was the growing corruption in the very institutions that had just been 'nationalised' in accordance with Azimio. But the story that such potentates of Ujamaa property as Amon Nsekela and George Kahama had prevailed on Mwalimu to detain and then deport me is apocryphal. I left entirely of my own volition.
By 1973, any discerning person could sense a general right-wing swing and growing intolerance, especially of criticism by 'foreigners.' I resigned because our own managing editor – a squat young man called Benjamin Mkapa – had become visibly hostile. In other institutions, foreigners were leaving en masse for similar reasons.
I mention Ben Mkapa because he has been in the thick of Tanzania's parochialisation since then – from editor through high commissioner (ambassador) and foreign minister to president. The EAC collapsed in 1977, mainly because of subversion by Kenya, prodded by Britain, the country whose colonially stolen property was most threatened by Tanzania's 'communism.'
With Mwalimu's death, the country that once was Africa's most honest, broadest-minded and most committed to regional and continental causes has become increasingly inward-looking and socially rotten. The intolerance was recently expressed with crudity when the president tried to strip Jenerali Ulimwengu – a colleague of ours in the Daily News – of his citizenship just because Jenerali had become a fierce critic of Mkapa.
The country that was once Africa's most conscious against imperialism is humbly on its knees grovelling towards an Anglo-Saxon neo-colonisation design being implemented through a South African proxy. Thus a kaburu (Boer) banker will get a work permit in a day, while a Kenyan has been Waiting For Godot. We have come a long way since I wrote The Way I see It.”
After Ochieng left Tanzania and was by then in Kenya, he stated in one of his articles that he “bequeathed” the column, “The Way I See It,” to Jenerali ulimwengu.
Jenerali Ulimwengu, his “protégé” – he rose on his own merit – went on to become one of the most prominent journalists and political analysts in Tanzania and East Africa as a whole and worked closely with President Nyerere through the years after I left for the United States.
He was stripped of his citizenship when our former editor Benjamin Mkapa was president but regained it during the same period after what had been described as a politically motivated move to silence him because of his criticism of Mkapa and the government.
That was during the era of multi-party democracy when the people were supposed to have more freedom – of expression, assembly and so on – than they did under one party rule which lasted from 1965 to 1995.
It never would have happened under Nyerere, strip people of their citizenship because they were critical of the government, a hostile act which gave some credibility to the argument that Tanzania lost her moral stature after Nyerere left office.
He did exactly the opposite, extending citizenship to tens of thousands of refugees from neighbouring countries – and beyond – in a true spirit of Pan-African solidarity. That is why he once said, it was a shame for Africans to be refugees in Africa, that is in their own homeland, and urged other African countries to open their borders and welcome fellow Africans fleeing from wars and persecution in their home countries.
Even some of his detractors still invoke his name, claiming they are following in his footsteps and emulating him, in order to portray themselves as exemplary leaders in the tradition of the founding father of the nation.
It is also true true that there was a time when Dar es Salaam was an intellectual mecca for people of all ideological stripes, especially those on the left, from all over the world when Nyerere was president, a status the country lost after he stepped down.
One of them was Walter Rodney, a staunch Marxist, who first went to Tanzania in 1966 to teach at the University of Dar es Salaam. He left in 1967 but went back in 1969 and continued to teach there until 1974 during a period when Dar es Salaam was a hotbed of political activism and a haven for revolutionary thinkers, with the country as a whole being the leading supporter of the liberation movements fighting to end white minority rule in the countries of southern Africa.
That was the environment in which Walter Rodney was intellectually nurtured when he lived and taught in Tanzania.
His first choice was Ghana after he earned his doctorate from the University of London but changed his mind and decided to go to Tanzania, instead, after Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup engineered by the CIA and masterminded by the CIA station chief in Accra, Howard T. Bane, who soon afterwards was awarded a medal for distinguished service in overthrowing Nkrumah, a subject I have addressed in my book, Western Involvement in Nkrumah's Downfall.
He was quickly promoted and given a senior position at the CIA and the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the agency's highest award, for his role in overthrowing Nkrumah.
It was an achievement that was well-received by American officials, President Lyndon B. Johnson among them, and was even celebrated in some quarters including the CIA and the State Department. As Robert P. Smith, who once served as United States ambassador to Ghana and was working at the State Department when Nkrumah was overthrown, stated when he explained how Secretary of State Dean Rusk reacted to the news about Nkrumah's downfall:
“I also remember, the morning of the coup, I got the call about 2 a.m. here at the house and went into the Department and immediately set up a little task force in the Operations Center.
Later in the same morning, about 8 or 8.30, Secretary Rusk wandered down the hall and came in and said, 'I've seen the early reports, but I just want to hear it firsthand. What's going on in Ghana?'
When I related how Nkrumah had landed in Peking and had been informed by his Chinese hosts of what had happened in Ghana, Dean Rusk broke into an ear-splitting grin. I've never seen him look so happy.” – (Robert P. Smith, interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy, The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST), Foreign Affairs Oral Project, 28 February 1989, p. 14).
Nkrumah was a highly respected figure in the African-American community, his stature as a Pan-Africanist icon enhanced by the belief that it was the United States government, through its agency the CIA, which was behind his ouster in a military coup. His downfall was partly attributed to his bitter criticism of the United States in his book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. As Robert Smith stated:
“Nkrumah dropped the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, in that he published a new book called Neo-Colonialism (The Last State of Imperialism)...which was simply outrageous. It accused the United States of every sin imaginable to man. We were blamed for everything in the world.
The book was so bad that I remember the then Assistant Secretary (of state for African affairs), G. Mennen Williams, called me up and gave me that book and said, 'Bob, I know this is bad. I don't know how bad. I want you to take it home tonight and read it. You're not going to get any sleep and I apologize for that, but on my desk, by eight o'clock tomorrow morning, I've got to have a written summary of this because I have called the Ghanaian ambassador in at ten o'clock tomorrow morning. We're going to protest this book.'
There had already been advance publicity so we knew it was bad, but we hadn't had our hands on a copy. And it was everything we feared it would be. It was awful.
And the next morning – of course, he had me in on this meeting as the note taker – a lovely, old man, Michael Ribiero, was the Ghanaian ambassador. Hated Nkrumah privately, but was a good soldier trying to put the best face on this, a career officer in their foreign service and very respected here and in Ghana.
Governor Williams, of course, was a relatively mild-mannered man. I had never heard Soapy Williams raise his voice until that conversation. Neither have I ever heard an ambassador get a tongue lashing like Ribiero got from Assistant Secretary Williams that morning.
He, unfortunately, tried a couple times to interrupt the governor when he was making a point. He had my notes in front of him. And at one point, when Ribiero interrupted him, he said, 'Just a minute, Mr. Ambassador, don't interrupt me. I'm not through.' And he continued to go on.
He was raising his voice. He was shaking his finger in the ambassador's face. And it was a very painful, hour-long interview. To put it mildly, he protested vigorously the contents and publication of this book.
I think the publication of that book might also have contributed in a material way to his overthrow shortly thereafter.” – (Ambassador Robert P. Smith, interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy, 28 February 1989, The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST), Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, pp. 12 – 15).
Had Nkrumah not been overthrown, Walter Rodney would not only have gone to Ghana to teach at the University of Ghana; it is very much possible the world would never have heard of the book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa because no such book would have been written by him. He could have written an entirely different book and with an entirely different title.
It is also possible he could have written a book on the same subject, developed from the same central thesis of the underdevelopment of Africa by the imperial powers – resulting from the conquest, colonisation and exploitation of the continent – with an entirely different title.
But it is also possible he could have written a book with the same title but in a different analytical context, drawing from the colonial experience of the Gold Coast (renamed Ghana) and domination of the country by Western powers – similar to Tanganyika's, later Tanzania's – but still different in some fundamental respects because of some differences in the historical experiences on the two countries.
Nkrumah's ouster by the United States and other Western powers including France, Germany and Britain – as well as Canada – had some racial implications because, as president, he was the embodiment of racial pride and the aspirations of black people worldwide. No other African leader spoke forcefully about the destiny of black people in a global context the way he did. And he led Ghana to become the first black African country to win independence, an achievement that resonated among black people beyond the continent and gave hope to those in Africa and in the diaspora that they also would be free one day.
He also, like Nyerere and Sekou Toure, embraced all blacks worldwide – people of African descent in the Americas and elsewhere in the diaspora – as fellow Africans. He went further and said they all belonged to what he described as “the African nation.”
There was anger among many blacks in the United States and elsewhere for the role the American government played in his ouster as much it did in the assassination of Lumumba.
Racism was clearly seen as a factor in the elimination of these black African leaders and in the domination of the continent for the benefit of white nations in the West including the United States.
And the support of apartheid South Africa and other white minority rulers in the countries of southern Africa and Portuguese Guinea (Guinea-Bissau) by white nations in the West – especially the United States, Britain, France and Germany – made race relations worse. As President Nyerere stated in his article, “Rhodesia in the Context of Southern Africa,” in Foreign Affairs:
“The West has demonstrated its intentions....There has been a refusal even to challenge South African and Portuguese support for Smith by making sanctions mandatory upon all members of the United Nations. And there have been repeated statements by the responsible authority (Britain) that force will not be used except in case of a break-down in law and order – which apparently does not cover the illegal seizure of power! What happens if the economic sanctions fail to bring down the Smith regime is left vague.
The domination of a white minority over blacks is acceptable to the West....It is time...for Britain and the United States of America to make clear whether they really believe in the principles they claim to espouse, or whether their policies are governed by considerations of the privileges of their kith and kin.” – (Julius K. Nyerere, “Rhodesia in the Context of Southern Africa,” Foreign Affairs, New York, April 1966, reprinted in J.K. Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism/Uhuru na Ujamaa: A Selection from Writings and Speeches 1965 – 1967, Dar es Salaam, London: Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 143, 154 – 155, and 156; and in Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: New Africa Press, 2010, pp. 140 – 141).
The Sixth Pan-African Congress held in Dar es Salaam in 1974 – coincidentally, Walter Rodney's last year in Tanzania – under the chairmanship of President Nyerere was, among other things, focused precisely on such domination and exploitation of Africa by Western powers, including the United States, and on the redemption of black people as an integral part of the non-white world dominated and exploited by the members of the developed world of white nations, especially those in the West. Racism, with black people as the primary victims, is an inescapable factor in such an analysis.
It was a historic conference, the first to be held on the African continent, and set the tone for future Pan-African congresses in the tradition of the Fifth Pan-African Congress, the most important one which paved the way for the independence movement that swept across the continent since the 1950s which were also my formative years in colonial Tanganyika.
Walter Rodney was also in Dar es Salaam when the Sixth Pan-African Congress was held. But he was in the hospital most of the time during that period.
One of the organisers of the conference in Dar es Salaam in 1974 was C.L. R. James who also played an important role during the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, in 1945 which was called by his childhood friend George Padmore who was living in England during that time.
C.L.R. James also met with President Nyerere before, during, and after the conference in Dar es Salaam and talked with him for along time, as he himself stated in some of his writings.
He was living in Washington, D.C., when I went there in 1972. But I did not get the chance to meet him. The Trinidadians I went to visit, together with one Tanzanian, Emmanuel Muganda, who came to see me when I was there, knew C.L. R. James and went to his residence at various times. And they probably would have made some arrangements for me to meet him had I asked them to do so before I returned to New York.
They addressed him as “Mzee,” an honorifc in Swahili used as a title of respect for older men or elders and even for younger ones when they are held in high respect and are considered to be wise. The most well-known person on whom the title was conferred was Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, the founding father and first president of Kenya.
Kimathi Mohammed even collaborated with C.L. R. James on some works. Both were great writers and political analysts.
The people I visited in Washington during that time were committed Pan-Africanists. I found out they had even celebrated Tanzania's independence at their office of the Caribbean association not long before before I arrived there from New York.
Our first meeting in Washington, D.C. and what Kimathi Mohammed said when I was with him there together with our friends and political activists from Trinidad left a memorable impression on me. For me, it partly set the tone and the stage, even if not the tempo, of what I would be getting into in a short time in Detroit, a hotbed of revolutionary activities among blacks.
So, when I moved to Detroit, I stepped right into the middle of what had historically been the centre of a maelstrom – of black activism – in a “black” city in a predominantly white country.
The most admired leader – at least in the American context – amongst us in the Pan-African Congress-USA was Malcolm X. His picture was on the wall of the PAC Hall together with those of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Patrice Lumumba, and Mwalimu Julius Nyerere – Ed Vaughn's namesake who also was called Mwalimu.
Malcolm X's brother Wilfred was also, like their parents, a strong Garveyite throughout his life in Detroit. As Paul Lee, a Detroit black writer and historian, stated in his article in The Michigan Citizen, Highland Park, February 10, 2002:
“Some elder Detroit black nationalists recall the visit of a Black Star steamship in August 1964. Malcolm X's eldest brother, the late Wilfred Little Shabazz, himself a son of Garveyites, told the author of his pride at meeting the ship's captain and posing for photographs, one of which appeared in Now, a black nationalist magazine published by Detroit attorney Milton Henry.”
Milton Henry, who took the African name of Gaidi Obadele, and his brother Richard Henry, renamed Imari Obadele, were some of the main founders of the Republic of New Afrika in Detroit in 1968; so was Robert F. Williams, Queen Mother Moore and Betty Shabazz, widow of Malcolm X and others.
They knew Malcolm X whose father, Earl Little, was a Baptist preacher in Lansing, Michigan, and a follower of Marcus Garvey.
After Malcolm X was assassinated, the Obadele brothers and other black nationalists formed the Malcolm X Society in Detroit to honour him and implement his ideas. Together with the Republic of New Afrika, the Malcolm X Society also demanded reparations for the labour extracted from African slaves and their descendants in the United States.
In fact, it was the members of the Malcolm X Society who called a meeting in Detroit which led to the establishment of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) in March 1968. Therefore the RNA was a product of the Malcolm X Society which was Garveyist in orientation.
Robert F. Williams, the black militant civil rights leader from North Carolina who was then in exile in China, was named president of the Republic of New Afrika. Milton Henry – Gaidi Obadele – became first vice president, and Betty Shabazz was named second vice president. Imari Obadele became minister of information in this Garveyist organisation.
Years earlier, Malcolm X's father was one of the strongest supporters of the Back-to-Africa movement advocated by Marcus Garvey. He was killed in September 1931 in Lansing because of his outspokenness against racial injustices. It is believed that members of the Black Legion, a white racist group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, killed him.
But nothing could kill the spirit that Malcolm X had in pursuit of freedom for African Americans and remained committed to Marcus Garvey who believed that black people should go back to Africa, the only place on earth where they could be free.
The Black Star Steamship Line was launched by Marcus Garvey to promote trade among black people worldwide, especially between those in the Americas and Africa, and to finally transport African Americans and other blacks back to Africa to settle permanently in fulfillment of his dream of “Back-to-Africa” and “Africa for Africans.”
Unfortunately, it is a goal he never realised.
But Detroit remained an activist centre in the Marcus Garvey tradition even after Garvey died destitute in London in 1940.
The Pan-African Congress-USA was one of those organisations which considered themselves to be the true heirs of Marcus Garvey.
And like all the other black civil rights and political groups and organisations fighting for racial justice and equality, the Pan-African Congress-USA was targeted by the government for destruction.
War had virtually been declared on Black America by the federal government in a vicious campaign of suppression, repression and destruction spearheaded by the FBI under its programme known as COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) launched in 1956.
Its activities were covert and illegal. Even the civil rights movement, a broad coalition of individuals, groups and organisations of people of all races fighting for racial equality by peaceful means led by Dr. Martin Luther King, was targeted; King himself being the prime target for destruction under the direction of the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, who wanted him dead.
I remember in his speech one Sunday afternoon at the Pan-African Congress hall in Detroit, on Joy Road and Indiana Street, Ed Vaughn said that as an organisation, they knew there were some people, inside the Pan-African Congress, who pretended to be genuine members but were working for “the man.” Then in a defiant tone, he went on to say emphatically: “Go and tell the man, we're on the move. Nothing is going to stop us.”
There was no question that the Pan-African Congress-USA was infiltrated by the FBI just as other black civil rights and nationalist groups were.
I did not have the slightest idea of who that person was or could be, or who those people were, working for the FBI in an attempt to disrupt and destroy the organisation from within. Almost 50 years later, I still can't even begin to speculate on who that person was or who those people were, if there was more than one FBI informer in the organisation.
Yet, I did not have slightest doubt that the Pan-African Congress-USA was infiltrated by the FBI when Ed Vaughn said that.
Even before then, had someone asked me did I believe or think the government was spying on the Pan-African Congress-USA, and had informers within, posing as true members of the organisation, I would have answered, “Yes, I do. I don't have any doubts at all.”
In fact, the FBI may even have played a role in the organisation's eventual demise through its nefarious campaign of disruption of the activities of black civil rights and political groups, the PAC being one of the most prominent and most vocal in the city of Detroit.
We had the same history in Africa during the struggle for independence and against white minority rule.
In Tanganyika, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), which was more than just a political party but a national movement led by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere campaigning for independence, was infiltrated by the Special Branch of the British colonial government.
During the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, African nationalist groups, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and others, were infiltrated by the apartheid regime's security service BOSS.
During the treason trial of Nelson Mandela and his colleagues – known as the Rivonia Trial in Johannesburg – the accused had a rude awakening when they saw one of the people who testified against them. He had always pretended to be their true compatriot and a faithful member of the African National Congress (ANC), and one of the most committed. They found out he had been spying on them all the time for the government.
His name was Bruno Mtolo. Other ANC members, although not prominent like Mtolo, also testified against the accused who wanted to end white supremacy and achieve racial equality in South Africa; a country where race relations were as bad as they in the segregated American South and some other parts of the United States, and even worse in some cases:
“The first prosecution witness would not be, as earlier promised by (Percy) Yutar (the prosecutor), Bob Hepple. Bob Hepple had fled the country. From the safety of Kenya, Hepple told reporters that he never had any intention of testifying against the defendants, whose aims he shared.
The star witness for the prosecution was Bruno Mtolo (known in court as 'Mr. X'), a former Umkhonto we Sizwe saboteur.
Mtolo told the court that, on orders from the National High Command, he had blown up a municipal office, a power pylon, and an electricity line.
He testified that Mandela had given his Natal region MK comrades a pep-talk about their underground missions.
He described the workings of bombs, grenades, land mines, and other weapons used by MK saboteurs.
Mtolo also testified that he believed that the ANC and MK had become instruments of the Communist Party.
He explained that financial and family reasons led him to abandon Umkhonto we Sizwe:
Mtolo: They kept promising that I would be paid, and they were still making promises long after I had given all hope of ever getting anything from them. They didn’t care about me nor about the others, the recruits who were arrested.
Yutar: Who did not care about them?
Mtolo: The High Command.
Mtolo's betrayal confused Mandela and the other defendants. In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela wrote he was especially upset with Mtolo's willingness to implicate underground activists who were not charged in the case. Mandela considered this 'inexcusable.'” – (Douglas O. Linder, “The Nelson Mandela (Rivonia) Trial: An Account, 2010”).
There are traitors everywhere.
So, it was no surprise to hear that the Pan-African Congress-USA which sponsored me and other students from Africa to go to school in Detroit was infiltrated by the FBI.
The list goes and on.
But nothing stopped black political activists in Detroit and elsewhere across the nation from doing what they were supposed to do, and what they knew was their sacred duty, which was to fight for the freedom of their people.
I asked Amadou Taal when he was back in The Gambia if he knew anything about the fate of the Pan-African Congress-USA – if the organisation was still active as much as it was in the seventies when we were together in Detroit or if it still even existed, although I assumed it did.
He said PAC members went their separate ways, gradually, and the organisation no longer existed.
He also said he was in touch with Sekou – as Sekou was popularly known and the only name he went by – a very active member of the PAC, and Kwame Kenyatta who even visited him in The Gambia.
Kwame Kenyatta remained very active in the struggle for racial justice and even served as a member of the Detroit City Council and of the Detroit School Board. He also served on the Wayne County Commission.
He was also involved in political activism in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where he lived for sometime and was one of the black community leaders in that city.
I once saw him on television, WOOD-TV 8, Grand Rapids, when he was in Benton Harbor talking about the struggle for racial equality in which he was involved, as he had always been throughout his adult life; in fact even before then when he was a teenager and active in the Pan-African Congress-USA.
He also moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and was active in political activities down there, working closely with the city's mayor, Chokwe Lumumba, a lawyer and former vice president of the Republic of New Afrika, who also left Detroit and relocated to Jackson.
I also saw Kwame Kenyatta being interviewed on a national television programme, Nightline, by Ted Koppel, when he was a member of the Detroit City Council.
He died on 22 May 2019.
He never wavered in his commitment to the well-being of his people and remained Afrocentric in his thinking until his last days.
He was also a true embodiment of the principles, ideals, ideology and philosophy espoused and articulated by the Pan-African Congress-USA as an organisation committed to the freedom, security and prosperity of African people on the African continent and in the diaspora who collectively constitute the African world.
The Pan-African Congress-USA may have been shunted into oblivion but its demise did not dampen or extinguish the spirit that animated its former members as committed Pan-Africanists. Many of them continued to be active in the struggle for racial justice and for the redemption of black people.
One of the reasons black nationalist groups, and black activism, thrived in Detroit was the predominance of the black population.
When I lived there in the seventies, it was mostly black and the fifth largest city in the United States; it slipped to seventh in the nineties while at the same time the percentage of the black population rose, making it almost 90 percent black, although numerically it lost many people through the years.
It was also in Detroit where I forged the strongest ties with Black America; ties which started when I was still in Tanzania in the early seventies and corresponded with people like Nathan Hare, editor of the Black Scholar published in Sausalito, California, and who later became a professor at Howard University; editors of The Black World; Owusu Sadaukai (Howard Fuller), president of Malcolm X Liberation University, and later professor of education at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Les Campbell (Jitu Weusi, Swahili meaning Black Man), a black activist and head of a black nationalist group in Brooklyn which had ties to the Congress of African People (CAP) based in Newark, New Jersey, led by renowned poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones, and other civil rights groups; Kimathi Mohammed of the Marcus Garvey Institute in Lansing, Michigan; and others including those in academia.
One was a professor at Tufts University who encouraged me to go to school there. That was when I was still in Tanzania working as a news reporter at the Daily News.
I even talked to him when I came to the United States and was staying in New York . But I never got the chance to go to Tufts and ended up elsewhere, instead, in Detroit.
Because of the ideological orientation of the Pan-African Congress-USA, its members were also taught African history.
A significant number of them also wanted to learn Kiswahili which they considered to be a truly Pan-African language that was non-tribal and did not belong to any particular group. It belonged to all blacks and all tribes. And it developed naturally instead of being artificially constructed.
Many ethnic groups contributed to its creation, evolution and growth. It is the only major African language that is not identified with any particular ethnic group. It transcends tribalism and ethnic identities; hence its appeal to a large number of Africans and those of African descent in the diaspora.
And by logical extension, Kiswahili, or Swahili, belongs to West Africans as much as it does to East Africans and can even be “traced” to West Africa as its “origin” because the people in East Africa and in the countries of southern Africa migrated from West Africa about 2,000 years ago, especially from the Plateau region of Nigeria and from Cameroon.
They are all the same people historically and genetically.
It may be far-fetched, stretching into such a distant past shrouded in uncertainties but the connection is valid, given the historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence as well as cultural similarities linking the two regions of our continent.
Even further than that is the assertion that West Africans migrated from the Great Lakes region of East Africa about 5,000 years ago, according to some studies citing genetic (DNA) evidence.
Whatever the case, Kiswahili has won acceptance in many parts of Africa probably more than any other African language because of its unique identity as a non-tribal Pan-African language.
I played a role in spreading Kiswahili in Detroit by teaching members of the Pan-African Congress what later became one of the official languages of the African Union (AU).
It became one of the AU's official languages in August 2004 and was the only African language to gain that status. The other official languages are English, French, Portuguese and Arabic, all foreign, although the status of Arabic is highly contested.
Some people claim it is also an African language. The claim may have some legitimacy because tens of millions of Arabs – more than 200 million – live in Africa and have lived in Africa for more than a thousand years and are therefore African just like any other Africans.
In fact more Arabs live in Africa – especially North Africa – than they do anywhere else in the world including the Middle East, their original homeland. Also, at least 65 per cent of all land occupied by Arabs is in Africa.
All that makes them African as much as black Africans are; and so is their language, Arabic, African as much as Yoruba, Xhosa, Swahili, Gikuyu and other black African languages are, and as much as Afrikaans is, its legitimacy enhanced by its status as a language that was created and evolved o African soil in South Africa.
Therefore, there seems to be no reason why Arabic should not qualify as an African language or, at least, as a language of dual identity: Arab and African.
Yet, the majority of the Arabs in North Africa – probably in other African countries as well – identify themselves with the Middle East more than they do with Black Africa.
Many of them, if not the majority, don't even want to be called African, although that does mean they are not African, at least geographically, since their countries, in North Africa, are in Africa, and are therefore an integral part of Africa. Still, the majority of the Arabs in North Africa identify themselves only as Arab.
It is equally true that Arab countries in North Africa identify themselves as as integral part of the Middle East historically, culturally and spiritually. So is their language, Arabic.
Swahili's status and legitimacy as an African language is not contested the way Arabic is, although it also has Arabic influence.
President Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique became the first leader to address the African Union in Kiswahili. He said he did so to promote African identity and languages.
He learned the language when he lived in Tanzania for many years as the main representative of FRELIMO in Dar es Salaam, and as head of FRELIMO's office, during the struggle for Mozambican independence. I met him many times when I was a news reporter. I used to go to FRELIMO's office on Nkrumah Street to get updates on the liberation struggle in Mozambique and how the fighting was going on. But we did not speak to each other in Kiswahili. We always spoke in English.
On the other side of the same street, just a few yards from FRELIMO's office, was the office of the African national Congress (ANC) of South Africa where I also used to go to get some information on the progress of their struggle against apartheid.
Many freedom fighters from southern Africa lived in Tanzania for many years, some of them for decades, and learned Swahili. Even today, there are many people in the countries of southern Africa, including national leaders, who speak fluent Swahili. They include cabinet members, diplomats, members of parliament, and officers in the South African, Mozambican, Zimbabwean, Angolan and Namibian armies.
One of the leaders in the countries of southern Africa who spoke perfect Kiswahili, besides Chissano, was Filipe Nyusi who also became president of Mozambique. He went to Tanzania as a child and attended primary school in Tunduru in Ruvuma Region bordering Mozambique where learned Swahili at a very early age. He also went to another school in Nachingwea in Mtwara Region, which also borders Mozambique, when he was 14 years old after he joined the liberation movement, FRELIMO. His parents were members of FRELIMO and took him to Tanzania where the liberation movement was based.
Another African leader who knew Kiswahili very well was Kanyama Chiume, Malawi's minister of foreign affairs under President Kamuzu Banda, who fled into exile in Tanzania after he and some of his fellow cabinet members including Henry Chipembere, Yatuta Chisiza, Orton Chirwa, Willie Chokani, Augustine Bwanausi, Rose Chibambo and John Msonthi, fell out with Dr. Banda.
Chiume spent his childhood in Tanganyika and went to school with some of the people who later became national leaders of Tanganyika, later Tanzania, including Rashidi Kawawa who became prime minister and vice president, Oscar Kambona who became minister of foreign affairs, my relative-in-law Brown Ngwilulupi and others including Job Lusinde and Amon Nsekela. Chiume lived in Tanganyika, later Tanzania, for more than 30 years and spoke perfect Swahili.
I remember when he came to the office of the Daily News one day in 1972 and was talking to a few of us outside the building, speaking Swahili like a native speaker. Among those outside the buildidng on that day were news reporters Reginald Mhango, Chinduti Knox Chirwa, and Ulli Mwambulukutu. Chiume, in a joyous mood, cheerfully suggested that we go for a drink later on or on some other day.
He was then working as a journalist, mainly as a feature writer, at The Nationalist, a daily newspaper owned by the ruling party TANU, whose managing editor was Benjamin Mkapa before he became editor of the Daily News.
Chiume spoke Swahili since childhood when he moved to Tanganyika to live with uncle who worked as a civil servant in the British colonial government in Morogoro in what was then the Coast Province.
No-one could tell he was not a native speaker of Swahili. He had through command of the language. His diction, as a “native” speaker, was also perfect.
Kiswahili is a language that has continent appeal, and even global appeal. It is also taught in schools in South Africa and Namibia. There is great interest in the language in other countries in southern Africa.
The Pan-African Congress members in Detroit asked me to teach them Kiswahili which was the most popular language taught in the United States.
The Swahili lessons were free. Even I myself wanted it to be that way. And how could I ask the very same people who had sponsored me to pay me for teaching them Kiswahili? They paid for my education and living expenses including food. So, why not do something in return as a token of appreciation?
We had classes every week at the PAC hall on Joy Road and Indiana.
But my primary interest in teaching them Kiswahili was to promote unity among the children of Africa, those at home and those abroad, by encouraging them to embrace a language that transcended ethnic loyalties and rivalries which have caused so much pain and misery across Africa through for years simply because many people of different tribes don't like each other or think that they are better than others.
The desire to unite Africans, including those in the diaspora, was also clearly evident in what the Pan-African Congress-USA did by sponsoring African students.
PAC leaders did not even insist that the students they were going to help had to be only their students, for whom they paid expenses. They were willing to help anybody who needed some help.
That is why they helped even the ones they did not sponsor: two students from The Gambia, Amadou Taal and Muhammad Sohna, by giving them free accommodation when they were on summer vacation from Wabash College in Indiana and when they attended Wayne State University in Detroit. While Amadou Taal became a high government official after he returned to The Gambia, his compatriot, Muhammad (Mamadou) Sohna, became a professor in the United States.
Years later, in 2018, Amadou Taal was appointed Gambia's ambassador to Nigeria and to the Economic Community of West African States ECOWAS). He was also accredited to several other African countries including Ghana and Angola.
Some refugees and freedom fighters from South Africa also stayed briefly at the Pan-African Congress house where all the students lived.
The Pan-African Congress-USA also had an affinity with the Pan-Africanist Congress of South Africa. That is why they invited one of leaders of the South African organisation whom I knew in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, when I was a news reporter.
The two groups shared a common philosophy which emphasised the significance of race and racial solidarity to the exclusion of other factors in the struggle for freedom and justice. Neither favoured nor promoted racial integration, a philosophy that was fundamentally at odds with the beliefs of some of the students and other people who supported both organisations in their relentless struggle against racial oppression and exploitation.
The Pan-African Congress-USA also forged links with African countries at the official level.
One of the main subjects discussed at the PAC meetings was the liberation struggle in Africa. Tanzanian diplomats who were invited by the organisation to speak at its forums were in a unique position to address the subject because Tanzania was the headquarters of all the African liberation movements in Africa and one of the frontline states in the liberation wars in southern Africa.
Other frontline states were Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, and Botswana. Tanzania's president, Julius Nyerere, was the chairman of the frontline states.
The Pan-African Congress-USA also supported the liberation struggle in southern Africa and Guinea-Bissau which was ruled by the Portuguese. Some of its leaders, together with other African Americans, went to Africa on a fact-finding mission in some of the countries where the freedom fighters were waging guerrilla war against the colonial forces.
One of them, Kwadwo Akpan, went to Angola in 1974 and filmed a documentary on the atrocities perpetrated by the Portuguese against innocent civilians which was shown at Wayne State University. Among those who attended was black US Congressman Charles Diggs from Detroit who also had been to Africa a number of times. One of the countries he visited was Tanzania where he met President Nyerere.
Mrs. Rosa Parks, Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, was also in the audience and I got the chance to meet her for the first time.
She and her husband moved from Alabama to Detroit in 1957 and had been living there since then. They fled Alabama after many threats by the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups and individuals because of what Rosa Parks did to fuel the civil rights movement when she refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man in December 1955.
I remember the documentary about Angola well. It provoked an angry reaction from the audience.
One of the victims in the documentary was an elderly man with a very large wound on his head; a victim of bombings by the Portuguese colonial forces.
That ghastly image was seared in my memory and in the memories of others including a veteran and fiery journalist and editorial writer at the black newspaper Michigan Chronicle, Nadine Brown, who could hardly contain her anger after seeing the film.
The documentary galvanised the audience which included Wayne State University students, mostly black, and members of the general public, into a force that helped support the struggle for freedom in the countries of southern Africa still under white minority rule.
It was that kind of involvement in the African liberation struggle and in the redemption and unification of Africa in general which gave the Pan-African Congress-USA a very high profile among many African Americans in Detroit and elsewhere in spite of the fact that it was not a very large organisation and had been formed only recently in 1969.
But it remained very active and, together with the Republic of New Afrika, organised very successful marches and rallies in May every year on African Liberation Day to support the liberation struggle in Africa. The people of Detroit responded positively and in large numbers. They marched with us and attended the rallies.
Hundreds and hundreds of them participated in the marches. The authorities were informed in advance and the roads, with the participation of the Detroit police and other agencies, were cleared of all traffic on the day of the march throughout the entire route taken by the marchers.
Those were the seventies when the liberation wars in southern Africa were most intense. And the racial solidarity demonstrated in those marches and other events was very encouraging to all those involved in the struggle, as were the contributions made.
When I was a student at Wayne State University, the liberation struggle in southern Africa was one of the main subjects discussed by African and African American students.
In 1975 at the suggestion of Muhammad Sohna, a few of us decided to form an organisation of African students on campus. It was named the Organisation of African Students. A significant number of African students and some African American students attended the first meeting and Sohna was elected president. I was elected vice-president. Sohna relinquished his post not long after that and I was elected to succeed him as the organisation's president.
We also had a newsletter, Ngurumo, which in Kiswahili means “thunder,” as a forum for discussion and dissemination of information about the organisation and its activities.
Some students voted for the name because it reminded them of Nkrumah. It sounded like his name, and its meaning, thunder, was best personified by none other than Nkrumah in the minds of many of them.
Others said they chose the name because of the significance of Kiswahili as a Pan-African, non-tribal language not identified with any African tribe or ethnic group.
Although our student organisation was new, we tried to reach out within Pan-African circles to promote Pan-African ideals and unity among Africans. We also invited speakers.
One of them was the Kenyan ambassador to the United States who spoke to a large audience of African students and African Americans – including non-students – at Wayne State University in 1975.
There were about 200 African students attending Wayne State University during that time. Most of them came from West Africa, especially Nigeria, Ghana, and Liberia. I also remember one student who came from Guinea.
There was also one student from Uganda, a nun, in a post-graduate studies programme.
There were four students from Kenya: John Muhanji, Raphael Munavu and his wife Salome, and Fred Oyoko who studied architecture.
Ralphael Munavu returned to Kenya where he became a professor of chemistry at the University of Nairobi. He also served as chancellor of Moi University, founding chancellor of Laikipia University, and as chairman of the Kenya National Academy of Sciences among other posts appointed by presidents Daniel arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki, respectively.
John Muhanji was one of only two black PhD students in the physics department at Wayne State University. The other one was Emmanuel Sendezera from Malawi who later became a professor of physics in South Africa and Malawi. He returned to the United States years later.
Like Raphael Munavu and his wife Salome, John Muhanji also went back to Kenya. Salome worked at the University of Nairobi from 1976 until her retirement in 2013 as the University Librarian. She studied library science at Wayne State University and earned a master's degree.She also taught Swahili at Wayne State.
Her husband Raphael earned a master's degree in chemistry from Wayne State and a PhD from the University of Detroit.
Salome died of cardiac arrest in Nairobi, Kenya, on 1 June 2021. According to her obituary:
“Salome Ndinda Munavu (12 June 1951 – 1 June 2021)...passed on peacefully on June 1, 2021. Salome served at the University of Nairobi Library from 1976, and retired as the University Librarian in 2013.
Salome was the loving wife and best friend of Prof. Raphael M. Munavu, of the University of Nairobi, for over 47 years. She was the daughter of the late Kitanga Mukola and Ruth Nduume (Kangundo). She was the sister of Mbuvi Kitanga (US), the late Munanga Kitanga, Dr. Mumbua Mullei and Mutuku Kitanga. Salome was sister-in-law to Koki Makau, Mutuku Munavu, Boniface Munavu, Agatha Mutiso and to the late Makau Munavu. She was sister-in-law to Dr. Andrew Mullei, Mutete Mutuku and Margaret Mbuvi (US), and half-sister to many.
Salome was the caring, loving, and adored Mother of Sundiata Munavu (US), Mutua Munavu (US) and Mutemi Munavu (Ethiopia). She was the beloved Mother-in-law to Erin (US), Cheyanne (US), and Evalyne (Ethiopia). She was the doting grandmother of Alexa and Adrianna; Ethan and Frankie; Sally and Mua.
The burial will be held on June 12, 2021, in Mbilini village, Kangundo sub-county, Machakos county.
Final arrangements for the celebration of her life and her final journey are taking place at her homes in Westlands, Nairobi and in Kangundo, Machakos.
The cortège will leave Chiromo Mortuary on Saturday June 12, 2021 at 08.00 a.m. for Holy Mass, followed by interment at her home in Kangundo starting from 11.00 a.m.” – (Obituary, Salome Ndinda Munavu, Life in Legacy, Kenya, 8 June 2021).
Kenyan Vice President William Ruto attended Salome Munavu's burial and was the main speaker at the funeral. He was a student of Raphael Munavu at the University of Nairobi. A number of other Kenyan leaders also attended the funeral.
I learned about Salome's death when I was doing some research on the Internet about her and her husband, Raphael Munavu. I had just written about them in this book and wanted to see if there was any additional information I would be able to use to complement my work. I also wrote about them in one of my books, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, published many years ago.
Raphael, Salome and I were together in the early seventies. We were among the very few students from East Africa who attended Wayne State University during that time.
The Munavus were a great couple, very friendly, compassionate and humble. They invited me to their home with an open heart. I still remember their house on Dubois Street on Detroit's east side.
I remember Raphael Munavu picked me up from the Pan-African Congress house a number of times just to go riding in the city. He also took me to their house. He had a car, a cream-coloured Volkswagen.
We talked about many subjects including academics, African students including the large number of West African students in colleges and universities contrasted with those from East Africa and other parts of the continent. We talked about politics in Kenya and Tanzania and about our leaders. We also talked about the liberation struggle in the countries of southern Africa still under white minority rule.
We even talked about Mau Mau and Kenyatta's role – if any – in it. We also talked about Dedan Kimathi, acknowledged as the leader of Mau Mau.
We talked about many things. There was no shortage of subjects we were able to talk about.
His wife Salome was simply “dada” to me, which in Swahili means “sister.”
I remember what she said to me one day. I was walking on campus and ran into her. She was on her way to the library where she sometimes worked and we stopped to talk for about a minute or so. That was in 1974.
It was during winter and she wondered why I was not wearing a winter coat or a thick sweater. I had a light coat on. I said it wasn't very cold for me on that day. She simply smiled and said I could get sick because of the cold weather. I also just smiled and said I would be just fine.
She was not talkative but was always very friendly and had a radiant smile like her husband,. Her husband and I called each other “Mzee” as a nickname and term of endearment.
One of the memorable events in my interactions with the Munavus took place at their house. They had a party and they invited me. Raphael came to pick me up from the Pan-African Congress house where I was staying.
I had been to other parties before but this one was special. Very few people were there. We were all very relaxed, talking and eating, and some people dancing, as if we were a close-knit family. It was a family atmosphere which is rare at other parties attended by many people.
That was many years ago in the early seventies when we were together in Detroit. We never got the chance to see each other again.
Then came the death of Salome, plunging her husband, Raphael, into unfathomable grief.
Another student from Kenya whom I interacted with on regular basis was John Muhanji. We were together many times. He was also an excellent soccer player and was once a member of one of Kenya' best football – soccer – clubs before he went to the United States for further studies.
The last time I saw Muhanji was in the summer of 1978 when he came to visit me in Grand Rapids. He came with his black American girlfriend. I had been staying in the Baxter neighbourhood for only a few months after moving there from another black area in the city in January the same year. The Baxter community became my home for the next six years.
Muhanji was also the last Wayne State University student I saw when he came to visit me in 1978. Earlier in the same year, another former schoolmate of mine at Wayne State, Amadou Taal, came to visit me when I was living in another part of Grand Rapids, also an overwhelmingly black area, bordering the predominantly white neighbourhood of Eastown.
I remember very well what Amadou said to me one day when we were staying together at the Pan-African Congress house in Detroit. That was in 1975. He said years were going by fast – there was no time to waste – and he would be going back home soon after he finished his studies at Wayne State. He did and returned to The Gambia.
There were only three of us from Tanzania attending Wayne State University. The other two, Mark Kiluma and Claude Mayowera, were post-graduate students and both taught Kiswahili at Wayne State. Kiluma later left Wayne State and moved to Chicago. Only Mayowera and I remained as the only Tanzanian students at Wayne State.
Mayowera returned to Tanzania and served as a priest in the Mahenge Diocese. He died in 1996.
Kiluma died in Chicago, Illinois, on 10 March 2004. He was, together with Mayowera and another Tanzanian, Fortunatus Lukanima, a Catholic priest.
Lukanima was a student at the University of Detroit during that period and later at the University of Michigan. He did his post-graduate studies at both schools. He returned to Tanzania where he served as a bishop – Jesuit priest – in Arusha.
He died on 12 March 2014 at Bugando Referral Hospital in Mwanza, Tanzania, where he was being treated for cancer. He was buried on 15 March at Kagunguli parish in the diocese of Bunda on Ukerewe Island in Lake Victoria.
I last spoke to him in 1977 when he called me back after missing my call. I had been in Grand Rapids for about one year and a half after moving from Detroit. I spoke with him twice that summer.
The second call, on a different occasion, had to do with the death of a Tanzanian student in Grand Rapids. Her name was Admirabilis Haule. She was a student at Michigan State University in Lansing and Lukanima was aware of her death when he called me. She had health problems and came to Grand Rapids to stay with some Catholic sisters. She was a Catholic herself.
I met her for the first time at a hospital in Grand Rapids when a Sierra Leonean couple, Edward Francis Taylor-Cline – simply known as Edward Taylor-Cline – and his wife Lailah, took me there to see her. She had been admitted into the hospital as an in-patient. They met her before and told her they knew a Tanzanian student in Grand Rapids. I was the only one they knew and I did not know of any other or any Tanzanian in the city during that time.
She was later released from the hospital and went to stay with the Catholic sisters who had invited her to stay with them. I also went there to visit her.
Shortly thereafter, she committed suicide by jumping into the Grand River, in downtown Grand Rapids, and drowned. Some of the people who were on the river bank in the afternoon when she jumped into the water tried to save her but failed to do so.
I wrote a story about her death and sent it to the Daily News, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where I worked before, and it was published in the paper.
That was the last time I talked to Lukanima.
The Sierra Leonean couple continued to live in Grand Rapids and lived in the city for many years. The husband, Edward, was my schoolmate at Aquinas College, the only Sierra Leonean at the school during that time. His wife also enrolled as a student at Aquinas sometime later.
Years later, Edward Taylor-Cline moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he died on 4 September 2011.
My life as a student in Grand Rapids was very different from the way it was in Detroit. Aquinas College was small. It had no more than 2,000 students. Wayne State had more than 25,000 students, more than 12 times the number of students at Aquinas.
Aquinas had only a handful of black students. Wayne State had one of the largest numbers of black students among all universities in the United States and in a city that was predominantly black.
There was no black students union at Aquinas. There were two at Wayne State: one for African students and the other one for black American students.
There were no Swahili classes offered at Aquinas College, although I later taught Swahili at South Middle School in Grand Rapids after I left Aquinas.
Wayne State University had a well-established Swahili programme and the language was recognised as one of the major languages in the world.
The head of the linguistics department – the Swahili programme was under his jurisdiction – at Wayne State University was Professor Christensen, a Catholic priest who lived in Tanganyika for 25 years. He lived in Morogoro in what was then the Coast Province.
When I told him I lived in Morogoro with my parents and siblings in the early 1950s, he said he was also there during those years. He was there even before I was born.
It was five of us in my family: our parents, my sister Maria, the second-born after me, and Lawrence, the third, who was born in Morogoro on 29 September 1952.
At Wayne State, we tried as black African students to forge links with the older and larger Black Students Union of African Americans but did not have a functional relationship. Our relationship was more symbolic than functional because neither side tried hard to establish strong ties between the two. But as individuals, African and African American students got along very well on and off-campus.
I remember one particular meeting to which we were invited by members of the Black Students Union in 1975. They were discussing how the students should respond to the anti-busing violence in Boston, Massachusetts, where black students were being attacked by white racist opponents of school busing to integrate schools in that city.
Some of the students wanted white students to be involved; others were opposed to that. The trend was towards integration but there were some who did not trust whites to be genuine allies in their struggle for justice and racial equality.
I was one of the students who went to Boston that summer in 1975 to oppose violence and support school busing in the quest for racial integration. A mass rally condemning racial violence being perpetrated against black students in that city was the climax of that historic event.
A coalition of student groups and political activists on campus organised the trip to Boston. We left Wayne State for Boston on buses. It was a free ride.
The convoy was organised by both black and white students and was fully integrated.
We were a part of a large gathering of students from all over the United States who participated in workshops on race and other subjects held at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. Many other people who were not students also went to Boston for the event.
I remember the buses which kept on coming into the city from all parts of the country after we arrived there. Students and members of the general public were all on board. I witnessed stiff resistance to school busing in a city that was considered to be one of the most liberal and racially tolerant in the entire country.
After the buses with passengers from all parts of the country arrived, a mass rally was held in the city.
It was a rainbow coalition and, despite the large number of African Americans from all walks of life and from all over the United States who were at the rally, a strong presence of white supporters of integration was also very noticeable and added to the significance of the event as a defining moment in the history of race relations in Boston.
The rally was addressed by Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP. Although he was not an orator like Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his speech was very inspiring and gave hope to those who believed in racial equality and integration that they would “overcome some day.”
That was the hope and the dream. Unfortunately, it still remains a dream and a distant goal even today, despite the progress that has been made across the United States through the decades since the civil rights movement in pursuit of racial equality. As the NAACP New York office stated in one of its statements:
“The NAACP was officially founded in 1910....Ninety-four years later, the work is not yet done. The face of racism changes continuously.”
That is not Louis Farrakhan talking.
Crossroads
Although true racial integration remains elusive in the lives of African Africans, many of them, maybe even the majority, see it as the only way forward in pursuit of their goals in a predominantly white society. Then there are those who see it as a noble but an unattainable ideal, therefore a waste of time and energy trying to achieve it. And there are those who simply don't believe in it.
In my relations with African Americans for more than four decades, I have met all three types, and more.
They include those who support integration but don't trust whites, not necessarily as individuals but as a race in general because of historical experience through the centuries beginning with the conquest of Africa and subsequent enslavement of millions of her people shipped to the Americas, with millions more lost at sea.
I have seen a lot of anger and bitterness, but also hope and optimism among many African Americans. I have also seen despair. But it is despair tempered with hope and faith in the American dream in the world's richest, most powerful, and most successful country in the history of mankind in terms of material civilisation.
Yet, material civilisation is not the pinnacle of success in man's life if it is not inspired by noble ideals including compassion for the weak and helpless; and if it does not value man's spiritual qualities as the very essence of the meaning of life. As Kwame Nkrumah said in his speech on the motion for Ghana's independence which he delivered before the Gold Coast Legislative Assembly on 10 July 1953:
“In our daily lives, we may lack those material comforts regarded as essential by the standards of the modern world; but we have the gifts of laughter and joy, a love of music, a lack of malice, an absence of the desire for vengeance for our wrongs, all things of intrinsic worth in a world sick of injustice, revenge, fear and want....
We feel that there is much the world can learn from those of us who belong to what we might term the pre-technological societies. These are values which we must not sacrifice unheedingly in pursuit of material progress....
We have to work hard to evolve new patterns, new social customs, new attitudes to life, so that while we seek the material, cultural and economic advancement of our country, while we raise their standards of life, we shall not sacrifice their fundamental happiness. That...has been the greatest tragedy of Western society since the Industrial Revolution.”
Still, many African Americans, just like many Africans and other people, value material things more than they value anything else. Yet, they don't represent all of their people or what is best among them.
Most Africans who come to the United States do so to improve their lives and pursue the American dream. Even African students in the United States go to school in order to get good jobs after they return to their countries or stay in America. They want material things. They want security. They want happiness.
There is nothing wrong with that if they don't compromise the principles they cherish as a people and as human beings with conscience.
But sometimes there is a conflict of visions and perceptions between the two groups.
I have talked to a number of Africans who say black people in the United States don't take advantage of the opportunities they have to succeed in life. Maybe that is because we have so little in our countries in terms of opportunity and development to reach the pinnacle of success.
I have also talked to African Americans who say when Africans come to the United States, they are treated better by whites and are favoured by whites and think “they are better than us.”
There are, of course, those who have little regard for each other: African Americans who look down on Africans because they come from a poor and backward continent, and Africans who see American blacks as arrogant. In fact, a number of African Americans, especially black conservatives as well as others who are not even ideologically inclined, don't want to have anything to with Africa.
It goes on and on.
Yet, in spite of all that, in all my years living and working with African Americans, I have noticed that the majority of them – the ones I have dealt with – see us as a part of them, the same black race, the same people, because they don't have the same kind of problem we have in Africa: tribalism.
Civil wars and other conflicts in many African countries since independence have been fuelled by ethnic rivalries in the struggle for power and resources simply because many Africans don't see themselves as one people like African Americans do. And many African leaders and other unscrupulous politicians and the elite exploit and capitalise on that to promote their own interests and win power or perpetuate themselves in office and favour members of their own tribes.
In a number of African countries, even the struggle for independence was carried on along tribal lines by tribal political parties; for example, the Northern People's Congress of Northern Nigeria dominated by the Hausa-Fulani; the Action Group of Western Nigeria dominated by the Yoruba; the Kabaka Yekka of the Baganda in Buganda kingdom in Uganda; the Inkatha Freedom Party of the Zulu in South Africa; the African National Congress in Zambia led by Harry Nkumbula which was strongest among the Ila and the Tonga, southern tribes; the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) in the Gold Coast led by Dr. J.B. Danquah which was strongest among the Ashanti although he himself was not an Ashanti; the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) which was dominated by the Mende, a southern tribe and one of the two largest together with the Temne in the north.
Those are just a few examples of ethnic and regional loyalties and rivalries which have caused a lot of problems, including civil wars, across Africa through the decades.
Fortunately, African Americans have been spared this agony, although in a tragic way. That is because they were enslaved and their tribal identities were destroyed during slavery. Yet, out of all that emerged one people, one “tribe.”
In Africa, we remain divided along tribal or ethnic lines. That is one of the main reasons why some Africans don't identify with African Americans.
They don't see them as members of “their” tribe or ethnic group – even though they don't have any proof that they are not. Every African American has relatives in Africa who belong to one tribe or another.
If they don't accept people of other tribes even in their own countries, they are not going to accept black people in the United States – or anywhere else – as a part of them.
Fortunately, many Africans in the United States, at least the ones I have known, don't feel that way anymore than many African Americans do. And many African Americans are very interested in Africa probably more than Africans are interested in Black America. They ask questions about Africa more than Africans do about Black America.
But it was probably my life with the Pan-African Congress members in Detroit during my student days that best exemplifies what can be done and achieved in terms of building, maintaining, and strengthening relations between Africans and African Americans who remain one people as children of Africa in spite of centuries of physical separation since slavery.
It was the highest expression of Pan-African solidarity overflowing continental boundaries.
It is this spirit of Pan-Africanism that continues to animate many of our people on both sides of the Atlantic. And it is the essence of our very being as a people who share a common identity and heritage deeply rooted in Africa.
Nothing can destroy that. Nothing.
Part Three
From Detroit to Grand Rapids
I FIRST came to Grand Rapids in the winter of 1976. In fact, I remember exactly when. I arrived from Detroit on a Greyhound bus in the evening, on Monday, January 12th. It was a cold day, with temperatures hovering around the mid-twenties Fahrenheit.
I came to go to school. I had been admitted into Aquinas College, a small private school near the affluent neighbourhood of East Grand Rapids, home of the 38th president of the United States, Gerald Ford, who had served as vice president under Richard Nixon and assumed the presidency after Nixon resigned following the Watergate scandal.
The school had only a small number of foreign students, not more than 10 from Africa when I was there; they were mostly Nigerians. There was one student from Sierra Leone. And I was the only student from Tanzania, the second one to attend the school.
Aquinas-Tanzania connection
The first student from Tanzania who went to Aquinas was Enos Bukuku, in the sixties.
He studied economics and years later became an economic adviser to President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, among other high-ranking positions he held in the country and in the East African Community (EAC) where he served as deputy secretary-general of this economic bloc. He also taught economics at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's leading academic institution.
One thing Bukuku and I had common, besides being fellow countrymen, was that we had the same teacher, Kenneth Marin, who taught economics, the same subject he and I studied under him although at different times. Bukuku had preceded me as a student at Aquinas by ten years or so.
I met him a few times at the Ministry of Treasury in Dar es Salaam when he worked with my first cousin, Bello Mwambapa, a son of one of my mother's elder brothers, Amos Mwambapa, when I was a news reporter. Bello was then a student at the University of Dar es Salaam studying economics.
I did not know then I would be going to the same school Bukuku did and we never even talked about it. I didn't even know during that time I would be going to school in the United States and end up at Aquinas College one day where he was also once a student.
I remember Professor Marin talking about Bukuku in class one day. He said he was very good student and was a member of the Tanzanian delegation that went to the People's Republic of China to negotiate with the Chinese government for financial assistance to build the Tanzania-Zambia Railway also known as TAZARA.
Before I went to Aquinas College, Kenneth Marin had worked in the capital Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as an economist for the government. He served as an adviser on capital mobilisation and utilisation from 1968 to the early 1970s.
His children were pupils at the International School of Tanganyika during the same time I was a student at Tambaza High School. Both were on the same street, United Nations Road, and on the same side, only a few yards apart separated by a fence. The International School of Tanganyika had a fence built around it. It was an elite school for the children of diplomats and expatriates from many countries working in Dar es Salaam.
Professor Marin's children, two sons and a daughter, were also students at Aquinas College during the same time I was there and I got the chance to meet them. Their sister said she did not want to come back to the United States after their father's contract to work in Tanzania ended.
Professor Marin also worked with one of my relatives-in-law, Brown Ngwilulupi, who was married to my mother's first cousin. When he worked with Marin, Ngwilulupi was secretary general of the Cooperative Union of Tanganyika, the largest farmer's union in the country.
After Marin returned to the United States from Tanzania, he went to teach economics at Aquinas, which was also his alma mater, in his hometown of Grand Rapids. He started teaching economics at Aquinas College in 1953 and was the chairman of the economics department for many years.
He also once worked under President Lyndon B. Johnson who appointed him as a member of the White House Consumer Advisory Council where he served on Wage and Price Control during the mid-sixties.
In 1966, Professor Marin was a member of a U.S. State Department evaluation team that was assigned to review various performances in the economic and political arena in six South American countries. I remember when he taught economics at Aquinas College, he had great interest in Third World countries and was a great admirer of President Nyerere.
He died on 1 September 2007 in Chelsea, Michigan, when I was still living in Grand Rapids.
I also remember him because of the subject I studied under him. It is a subject that became the focus of some of my writings years later.
I had already taken some economics classes when I was a student in Detroit. And I pursued the same interest when I moved to Grand Rapids.
Although I am not an economist by training, I had an interest in the subject when I was in school – as I still do – because of its relevance to the destiny of my continent, Africa, which is the main focus of my writings, especially the post-colonial era. In fact, the first book I wrote, which was published in June 1999, was entitled Economic Development in Africa.
I used Tanzania as a case study for the book but the work is continental in scope.
My life in the black community of Grand Rapids
Aquinas College played a role in opening the door for me to enter the black community in Grand Rapids.
Had I not gone to school there, I would not have known anything about the black community in Grand Rapids because I would not have come here. I would have stayed in Detroit and could even have gone elsewhere. I could even have gone back to Tanzania instead of just staying in Detroit or moving to another part of the United States.
My days at Aquinas were exciting. I was able to interact with students from various backgrounds although as a minority student in a predominantly white school, my interactions were mostly with black students from the United States and Africa.
Most of the black American students came from Detroit, a connection that reinforced my ties with them since I had also lived in Detroit when I was a student.
In those days, black Americans were not called “African Americans” and did not identify themselves that way. Among public figures, it was Malcolm X who used the term, saying “We are African Americans,” “We are Africans,” in some of his speeches in the early sixties.
After my student days at Aquinas, I continued to live in Grand Rapids where I further interacted with members of the black community. I became an integral part of that community when I went to live in the inner city.
An important part of the black community in Grand Rapids were my fellow Africans I went to school with at Aquinas and others attending school elsewhere in the city. There were also some African immigrants who lived in the city.
But the most critical part of my life in Grand Rapids was my identity as a member of the black community concentrated in the inner city where I lived for fifteen years. I also lived in the ghetto in Detroit. I was there for three years from the end of December 1972 to the early part of January 1976.
It was in that part of Grand Rapids, the ghetto, where some of the most important conversations I had with Americans took place. And they almost invariably had to do with Africa and with relations between Africans and African Americans.
In fact, it was my interactions with blacks in Grand Rapids and in Detroit which played a major role in inspiring me to write my book, Relations Between Africans and African Americans: Misconceptions, Myths and Realities.
My life in Grand Rapids, although somewhat confined to the ghetto, spanned the social and political spectrum. I met people from all walks of life, and of all races, which enabled me to get a glimpse into different parts of the American society and learn a lot from them.
Some of the material I have included in this book comes from my recollections of some of the conversations I had with Americans, mostly black, on a broad range of subjects through the years.
The conversations are intended to provide a context of the subjects discussed and a general picture of what the people said and how they felt on many issues when talking to a foreigner like me, especially from Africa, a continent which is perceived in different ways by different people, usually in a negative way, unlike other continents.
I was also in Grand Rapids on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 riots which rocked many parts of the country. It is a subject I have addressed in another book, On the Banks of a River.
Before I moved to Grand Rapids from Detroit, I really didn't know about the riot which had taken place in the city in the sixties.
But I knew about the riot in Detroit. I lived very close to the epicentre of that seismic explosion which rocked what was then the fifth-largest city in the United States, as it still was when I lived there and even many years after that before it went into decline and lost many people.
Long associated with black nationalist politics and the civil rights movement, Detroit was perceived in some quarters to be a city that was “hostile” to whites and somehow solidified that reputation when it got its first black mayor, Coleman Young, who was accused by some whites of being a racist because he talked so much about helping blacks achieve racial equality.
Sharply contrasted with that was Grand Rapids. It was a city where black people were not accepted by whites or in white areas and were supposed to live only where they belonged, the ghetto, in a predominantly white city.
Detroit's reputation as a centre of black activism and black pride was further reinforced by the prominence of some black nationalists and activists who came from there or who were somehow connected to the city, one of the most prominent being Malcolm X who spent some of his early days in Detroit where he stayed with his elder brother Wilfred Little, the first-born in the family.
Born on 12 February 1920, Wilfred died in Detroit on 19 May 1998. He was 78.
Then there was, in Detroit, the Pan-African Congress-USA which was ideologically affiliated with the Pan-Africanist Congress of South Africa founded by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, one of the main leaders of the liberation struggle in apartheid South Africa who was also very close to Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress.
There was also the Republic of New Africa, the Shrine of Black Madonna, the Nation of Islam and other black groups and organisations in Detroit.
There were no such black groups or organisations, of comparable stature, in Grand Rapids or just one that came even close to that in terms of stature, activism and Pan-African solidarity.
When I talked to some blacks in Grand Rapids, they said they did not have such groups or organisations the way black people did in Detroit and in other cities with large black populations and with a history of political agitation, mobilising blacks in large numbers into a potent force for fundamental change.
That was one of the major differences I noticed between life in the black communities in Detroit and Grand Rapids.
A lot of that has to do with the size of the black population in Grand Rapids – it is relatively small – and not with lack of enthusiasm or political consciousness among the black residents of the city where there has resistance to racism for as long as black people have lived in the city just as there is among their brethren in other parts of the country.
But there is no question that there is dignity in numbers. Grand Rapids is not Detroit or Atlanta. Benton Harbor or Battle Creek is not Chicago. There is a big difference between the population of black people in Chicago and those in Battle Creek, Benton Harbor, Kalamazoo, and Muskegon just as there is a big difference between the population of blacks in Grand Rapids and those in Detroit or Atlanta.
That also partly explains why there are no black political groups or organisations in Grand Rapids comparable to those in Detroit and other cities which have large black populations.
I knew three black men in Grand Rapids who said they were members of the Republic of New Afrika. Two of them were brothers and the other one was their cousin. But there was no office of the Republic of New Afrika in Grand Rapids.
There were some Black Muslims, members of the Nation of Islam, but their number was small unlike those in Detroit or Chicago.
Yet numbers don't always determine the fate or destiny of a people. A few people can constitute a critical mass that can set everything in motion in the same way revolutions change and determine history. Revolutions can be sparked by the ideas of one person.
The history of the Pan-African Congress is instructive in that context and in terms of how even one person or only a few people can be the driving force behind a major initiative to bring about fundamental change.
Initially, the Pan-African Congress-USA was not formed by many people. It was founded by two African American friends, Edward Vaughn and Arthur Smith, popularly known as Smitty, who changed his name to Kwame Atta in remembrance of his African heritage as a descendant of Africans taken to America in chains to work as slaves.
Arthur Smith was a close friend of Malcolm X. His name is even on the cover of one of the albums of Malcolm X's speeches.
I remember he once told us at the PAC forum that just before Malcolm X was assassinated, he visited Detroit and asked him to take care of his family after he was gone. He knew he did not have long to live.
Arthur Smith and Ed Vaughn worked together at the Detroit main post office downtown when they formed the Pan-African Congress-USA in 1969.
Ed Vaughn also taught at colleges in Detroit when he was one of the leaders of the organisation. He later served as an executive assistant to Mayor Coleman Young.
And he himself was elected to the Michigan State Legislature representing a constituency of Detroit. He later became president of the NAACP in his home state of Alabama.
Malcolm X's connection to Grand Rapids
Before I moved to Grand Rapids, I remember Ed Vaughn and Kwame Atta – as well as other members of the Pan-African Congress-USA – saying Malcolm X had relatives and family members in Grand Rapids.
I later found out that Malcolm X's mother, Louise Helen Norton Little, was buried on the same street where I lived for many years. She died in Grand Rapids on 18 December 1989. She was 95.
Malcolm X' eldest sister, Hilda Florice Little, who was the second-born after Wilfred, died at Blodgett Hospital in Grand Rapids on 5 April 2015. Born on 22 October 1921, she was 93. She was also the last surviving member of her family. According to her obituary:
“She was preceded in death by her parents; her brothers Wilfred Little, Philbert Little, Shabazz 'Malcolm X,' Reginald Little, Wesley Little and Robert Little; and her sister Yvonne Woodward.”
Malcolm X's younger brother, Reginald Little (Reginald X), died in Grand Rapids on 12 July 2001. He was born on 23 August 1927.
Another younger brother, Wesley John Little, died in Grand Rapids 22 December 2009. He was 78. He was born on 27 May 1931 in Lansing, Michigan, a few months before their father, Earl Little, a Baptist minister and black political activist, was killed by racists on 28 September.
Malcolm X's younger sister, Yvonne (Evonne) Inez Little Jones-Woodward, died in Grand Rapids on 21 July 2003. Born on 11 August 1929, she was almost 73 when she died. She was also a civil rights activist like her brothers Malcolm X and Wilfred.. According to a report in The Grand Rapids Press:
“Yvonne Woodward, sister of the late black activist Malcolm X, died Monday of complications from lung cancer, relatives said. Ms. Woodward, who took up the mantle of speaking out against racism later in her life, was 73....
Ms. Woodward, like her seven siblings, spent a lifetime overcoming tragedy, beginning with the death of her father, the Rev. Earl Little. Later, her mother was put in the state mental facility in Kalamazoo. The eight children were split apart and sent to various foster families in the Lansing area.
'It had a big impact on her life,' said her son, Steve Jones, 50...
In 1948, she became the first black telephone operator in Grand Rapids...for Michigan Bell Co. She previously was the first black operator in Lansing....
'She knew if she didn't do the right thing, it would take years for them to take a chance to hire another black operator,' Jones said. 'In Grand Rapids, the operators took a vote to see if the girls were willing to have a 'Negro' work with them. The vote was unanimous except one vote ... and my mother found out who she was and won her over.'
Another brother, Reginald Little, died in Grand Rapids in 2001.
Two siblings remain: Wesley Little, 75, of Detroit, and Hilda Little, 80, of Woodland Park...in Newaygo County, Michigan.
Ms. Woodward also is survived by her three children, Deborah Jones, 52, of Grand Rapids, Steve Jones, of Woodland Park, and Shawn Durr, 37, of Grand Rapids...
In a speaking event at East Grand Rapids High School eight years ago, she spoke about how her parents instilled the crusading spirit that later emerged in her brother, Malcolm X.” – (Steven Harmon, “Sister of Malcolm X dies at 73,” The Grand Rapids Press, Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 23, 2003).
Another brother, Philbert Norton Little who was born on 4 May 1923 and was the immediate elder sibling of Malcolm X, died on 15 February 1994 in Detroit. He was 70.
Malcolm X was born on 19 May 1925 and was assassinated on 21 February 1965 in New York City. He was 39 and the youngest to die among his siblings.
Their half-brother, Robert Langdon Little who had a different father, died at a hospital in Lansing, Michigan, on 23 November 1999. He was 61.
He was born on 31 August 1938 in Lansing. Their mother was sent to a mental hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1939. She was confined there for 25 years. Her children, including Malcolm X, helped her get released in 1963.
Malcolm X said when he first visited her at the hospital in 1953, she did not even recognise him. He was then assistant minister at the Muslim Temple Number One in Detroit where the Nation of Islam was founded in 1930.
Their youngest sibling, Robert, was the first person in the family to go to college.
He earned a master's degree in social work and criminal justice from Michigan State University in East Lansing in 1963. He said it was his brother Malcolm X who encouraged him to finish his education and was his best role model. Malcolm X was 13 years older than he was.
There was also an elder sister, Ella Mae Little, who helped raise Malcolm X in Boston, Massachusetts, where he went to live with her after he left Lansing, Michigan. She had a different mother and was the eldest of Earl Little's children. She was born on 11 February 1914 and died in Boston on 3 August 1996. She was 82.
Malcolm X's ties to Grand Rapids is something probably most people in the black community – let alone in the white community – did not know about.
I asked a black member of a Seventh-Day Adventist church in Grand Rapids, which is predominantly black, if she knew or ever heard of a church member named Louise Helen Little. I assumed Malcolm X's mother, who was a Seventh-Day Adventist, was a member of the black church, not only because she was black but mainly because she had been, like her husband, a political and social activist for years, was proud of her African heritage and even taught her children about Africa just like her husband did.
She said she never heard of Louise Helen Little but believed she was a member of the church. When I asked her, she said her mother, who had by then passed away and had been a member of the church since the early sixties, probably knew her – if Louise Little was or had indeed ever been a member of the black Seventh-Day Adventist church in Grand Rapids.
In all the years I lived in Grand Rapids, I never heard anyone say Malcolm X had many relatives in the city – except once when one African American who was my roommate for a few months in 1986 said Malcolm X had relatives in Grand Rapids and used to visit some of them at a house on a street that was right next to where I lived when I rented from a black landlady in the inner city.
That was the area where I lived the longest in the black community of Grand Rapids. I lived in other parts of the inner city, all of them black, but not as long as I did in the Baxter neighbourhood.
Baxter Neighbourhood
Known as the “Baxter Neighborhood,” it is also called the “Baxter Community.”
It was and still is in the heartland of the ghetto and was almost all-black, one of the blackest areas in Grand Rapids when I lived there.
It is located between Eastown and Heritage Hill, some of the most well-known neighbourhoods in Grand Rapids because of their distinctive characteristics; the former sometimes known as the Greenwich Village of Grand Rapids because of its liberal orientation, and the latter know for its architectural splendour as a historic district of national significance.
Eastown is still overwhelmingly white but with a significant black population; so is Heritage Hill although not as white as Eastown.
Almost every style of American architecture is found in Heritage Hill which is also the city's oldest residential district.
The nerve centre of the Baxter neighbourhood was the “Baxter Community Center,” and it still is, located just a few yards from where I lived. It was also a platform for social and political activists.
Some of the people who spoke there, when I lived in that area, were former Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver and Yolanda King, daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, who was an activist in her own right.
Founded in 1969, the community centre's history is inextricably linked with the history of race relations in Grand Rapids and in the United States as a whole. As Stacey Ladenburger stated in “Planting Seeds and Singing Songs: In Celebration of 40 Years of Faithful Service”:
“In the late 1960s, a time of profound civil strife, ever-widening urban decay and pervasive racial inequality, several members of Eastern Avenue Christian Reformed Church and the surrounding community recognized a shared desire to tangibly respond to the social injustice and unmet needs in their neighborhood. At that time, housing covenants encouraged by the federal government kept black and white populations separate.
Tensions gripped the public school system, kept alive by a predominantly white school board claiming to represent a multi-ethnic city and division between the West and Southeast sides.
Dennis Hoekstra, an education professor at Calvin College, noted the needs of the community and wanted to bring people and institutions together in response, particularly the Grand Rapids Public School Board, local churches, the police force and neighborhood residents.
Baxter thus began as Eastern Avenue Community Center, an infant organization housed in the small office space located above Bierling Bakery on Eastern Avenue. Providentially, the local Baxter Christian School had just recently closed, leaving its building unoccupied.
Leaders from the fledgling Community Center on Eastern met with the Grand Rapids Christian School Board and arranged to rent the building at a rate of one dollar a month for the first year.
In the summer of 1969, Baxter Community Center was officially established in its current location in the heart of the Baxter neighborhood.”
Almost 40 years after I moved out of there, the neighbourhood was still predominantly black, although gentrification has had a profound impact on the community through the years. Some whites and people of other races have gradually moved into the area.
Blacks are being forces out because they can't afford rent. Investors buy property in the ghetto raising rent.
It is a trend that is expected to continue, making the inner city less and less black – and no longer the ghetto it once was as a homeland for blacks.
It is a nationwide phenomenon with dire consequences for blacks, not because of integration but because of gentrification.
Gentrification is a euphemism for racism. It is also war against the poor of all races.
Part Four
Beyond Black and White
MY LIFE in Grand Rapids was never a whirlwind of social interactions across the colour line. I interacted with both worlds, black and white, but mainly with blacks as a member of the black community in which I lived for many years....
Black and unequal
Black people in the United States have been some of the hardest-working people in the nation's history. They laid the foundation of America. And they have made an enormous contribution to the development and industrialisation of the United States.
Black people in the United States have been some of the hardest-working people in the nation's history. They laid the foundation of America. And they have made an enormous contribution to the development and industrialisation of the United States.
Had it not been for the labour of African slaves, there would be no United States today as the richest and most powerful country in the history of mankind; it would not even have survived as a nation, a reality many whites don't want to face let alone acknowledge. As Professor Harold Cruse who taught at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor for decades stated in his book, published at the peak of the civil rights movement, Rebellion or Revolution?:
“America lies to itself that it was always, from the beginning, a democratic nation when its very constitution sanctioned and upheld chattel slavery. Moreover, America conveniently forgets that the first capitalist 'free enterprise' banks and stock markets in the land were made possible by accumulated capital accrued from the unpaid labor of Negro slaves. But it would be too much to expect contemporary America to go back over its own history and reassess all these racial facts.” – (Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution?, New York: William Morrow, 1968, pp. 240 – 241).
Bailey Wyat, a former slave and illiterate, put it poignantly when arguing for redistribution of land to former slaves not long after the Emancipation Proclamation:
“We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands has been sold over and over again to purchase the land....And then didn’t we clear the land, and raise the crops?....And then didn’t them large cities in the North grow up on the cotton, on the sugars, on the rice that we made?....I say they has grown rich and my people is poor.” – (Bailey Wyat, a former slave, quoted by Hugh Pearson, “The Birth of the New South,” in The Wall Street Journal, 24 June 1996, in Godfrey Mwakikagile, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, Pretoria, South Africa: New Africa Press, 2010, p. 45).
Whatever benefits and rights African immigrants and other nonwhites enjoy in the United States have been the result of the relentless struggle by American blacks and the enormous sacrifices they have made through the years to achieve racial equality.
It is a struggle that also has cost countless lives of black people for centuries; their pain and suffering immortalised in heart-rending Negro spirituals such as this one by Mahalia Jackson, “Nobody Know the Trouble I've Seen,” which she sang in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington when Dr. Martin Luther King gave his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream,” on 28 August 1963:
I been 'buked and I been scorned/
Trying to make this journey all alone/
I'm gonna tell my Lord/
When I get home/
Just how long you've been treating me wrong.
The refusal by many whites – as well as many other non-blacks in the United States – to accept black people as equal human beings and fellow citizens entitled to the same rights they are entitled to, has even led some of them to remember with nostalgia the days when blacks lived under slavery. They are proud of their ancestors who enslaved blacks instead of condemning them and being ashamed of what they did.
That kind of attitude drew a furious response from one black professor of law at Georgetown University in an exchange with a white woman who said she was proud of her ancestors in the Antebellum South which was during the era of slavery. Professor Paul Butler told her he had no respect for her ancestors:
“A Georgetown University law professor’s choice of words for a white woman who said her confederate ancestors should be honored, has resurfaced. And it comes at a time when Black folks across social media engage in discussion about being 'loving and forgiving' of oppression and white supremacy.
When Professor Paul Butler appeared on a NPR radio program 'The Diane Rehm Show' back in 2015, a call came in from a woman who spoke of her ancestors fighting for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
'I’m not somebody who thinks the battle flag should stay there, but I certainly honor my ancestors,' the caller stated.
Butler fired back at the caller:
'I have no respect for your ancestors. As far as your ancestors are concerned, I shouldn’t be a law professor at Georgetown, I should be a slave. That’s why they fought that war. I don’t understand what it means to be proud of a legacy of terrorism and violence.
Last week at this time, I was in Israel. The idea that a German would say, 'You know, that thing we did called the Holocaust, that was wrong, but I respect the courage of my Nazi ancestors.' That wouldn’t happen.
The reason people can say what you said in the United States is because, again, black life just doesn’t matter to a lot of people.'
Later, during an appearance on MSNBC’s 'All In With Chris Hayes,' Butler spoke about the call:
'You know some people agree with me on the merit, but they said it was rude to say that I don’t respect that woman’s ancestors. So let me get this right, a white person says to a black person, 'I honor the people who wanted your ancestors to be slaves,' that’s fine.
A black person says, 'I don’t honor those people,' that’s rude. That’s white privilege all over again. And it goes to a larger issue, that when black people talk to white people about white supremacy, we’re supposed to be loving and forgiving.
The problem is love and forgiveness are not productive in American politics. That’s not how social change is achieved.” – (“Georgetown Law Professor Tells White Woman: 'I have No Respect for Your Ancestors,'” Blackamericaweb.com, 11 November 2019).
It was those blacks, African slaves and their descendants, who laid the foundation of the United States and who built this country. Yet some immigrants, including a number of black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, say black people in the United States are lazy, they don't want to work or they don't work hard enough – all they do is blame the white man for all their problems.
And where do these black immigrants end up when they come to the United States? Mostly in the inner cities, in the ghetto, to live with fellow blacks, black Americans, for obvious reasons, the people who helped pave the way for them to succeed in America when they waged heroic struggles to achieve racial equality which has helped other non-whites, including African, Afro-Caribbean and even Asian immigrants, get opportunities for jobs and education in the United States.
Had it not been for African Americans fighting for their rights, African immigrants and others would not have been able to get the opportunities they get when they come to the United States: opportunities for jobs, education, housing and so on.
They paved the way for them in a way many black immigrants will never be able to understand and appreciate the sacrifices made by American blacks on their behalf as well, not just for themselves because they were born and brought in the United States, are American citizens and are entitled to equal rights....
I am no stranger to racism, except that I came from a country where racial inequalities and discrimination had official sanction during colonial rule as was the case in the United States, especially in the South during the era of segregation, when such injustices against blacks were sanctioned by law.
There are incidents of racism in which I was involved and which are symptomatic of a larger problem in terms of relations between blacks and whites – incidents of raw-naked racism and others of “milder” forms of racism which may not seem to be racially offensive when contrasted with overt prejudice and hostility.
I will give some examples which were an integral part of my experience in terms of race relations as a black man in the United States.
In early 1974, during winter, I was with one of my roommates, David Nunoo, a fellow African student from Ghana, in Warren, a city which is a part of Detroit's metropolitan area, where at a meat shop, we were denied service.
A white man refused to sell us some meat and told us we had to wait until June to see if, even then, it would be available to us. Yet, all the white customers who came in were served and sold some meat right away, and right in front of us.
In the spring of 1976, returning to Grand Rapids (Aquinas College) from Detroit, one of my schoolmates and I passed through Ann Arbor and stopped at a petrol station to buy some petrol for his car. As my schoolmate was filling the tank, I went inside and asked the manager if I could have the key to the restroom. He said “No. you can't have the key,” shaking his head from side to side and looking at me straight face.
A young white man walked in at the same time and heard what the manager said to me. I walked out, getting ready to go into the car so that I could try to use the restroom elsewhere.
The young white man, who was a teenager, came out and said to me, “Come on, I'll let you use the restroom after I am done.” I waited until he came out. I went in to use the restroom. He waited outside until I was done.
After I came out, I thanked him and gave him the key to take it back to the manager who, considering his attitude towards me, probably had a habit of using racial insults against blacks.
There are many others of his ilk. And there are friendly ones, yet with the same attitude towards blacks.
What happened to me at the petrol station in Ann Arbor reminded me of life in colonial Tanganyika when we had separate toilets labelled “Africans,” “Europeans,” and “Asians.”
Had there been, at the petrol station, a toilet labelled “Negroes,” as was the case in the segregated South in the United States, I would have used it – without hesitation and without even thinking about going into one labelled “Whites” or “Whites Only.” I would have known to do the “right” thing.
But there was none labelled “Negroes” because of racial integration.
Therefore, I had the right to use the only one that was available to members of all races even though the petrol station manager didn't want me to use it because I was black, or just a “nigger.”
He was angry when I asked for the key and, with that kind of attitude, he probably was the type of person who would call a black person “nigger”; and probably did that day, called me a “nigger,” but not in front of me.
In 1976 again, as summer was approaching, two white male students and I were working on campus, Aquinas College, when we saw some insects including some spiders. I was staying on campus during that time.
As I took some precaution to avoid contact with the insects, one of the students laughed and said to me: “You come from Africa and you are scared of insects?”
There we were, right on American soil, with some insects, in a country where there are also all kinds of insects and even different kinds of animals. Yet, to that white student, it was only in Africa where there are insects, and it was only Africans who were not afraid of insects and animals. The wild kingdom was the exclusive domain of Africa and Africans.
It was the same racial stereotype about black people living in the jungle on a continent where the people rub shoulders and share space with animals and insects as if they were family members.
It was also this same student who tried to teach me how to drive during that time. I will never know what went on in his mind. Did he really believe I would be able to learn how to drive since I came from the jungle far removed from civilisation and in an environment where living with wild animals, not civilised human beings, was second nature to us?
Did he see me as just another “nigger” like the ones he is used to seeing all the time in the United States – whether they are born and brought up in the United States or in Africa or any other part of the world including the Caribbean?
He may not have thought or felt that way at all. But the condescending and patronising attitude many whites, including liberals, have towards blacks means it is highly probable even some of the ones you think see blacks as equal to them don't mean it at all. For those who were born and brought up in Africa, it is even worse.
As an African, the perception that Africa still is a jungle, and a cesspool of iniquity, crippled by poverty and mangled by disease, is painful. But it is something I expect to hear from some whites. Even those who don't say that probably feel the same way.
That is almost exactly what was said to me by a white man when I stayed with him and his family for about three days in the spring of 1974.
I was a student at Wayne State University and went to stay with the family in Bay City, Michigan, under an international students programme – every school has its own, some of them don't have any – intended to help foreign students learn about the American way of life and how Americans live.
It was a family of three: husband, wife, and daughter. Their daughter was about 12 years old.
We were at a dinner table, eating, when the husband said to their daughter: “He comes from Africa but he's different. He's civilised.”
The message was clear. The child, probably having heard stories about “savage” Africans running around in the jungle with nothing on except their natural dress, may have been relieved and enlightened when she learned from her father that even in the Dark Continent, there were some Africans who were civilised; on a continent where the people, with a dark skin, also live in darkness because of the darkness in their minds.
That may have been quite a revelation and a relief to her, whereas in the past she probably would have been scared of “savage”Africans – scared stiff – especially if they were in the same room with her.
Obviously, her father, having said what he said about me, assured her she was safe even in my presence because I was civilised unlike many of my fellow Africans on the continent who were not.
Civilised African!
I was proof of that. For, there I was, all the way from the jungle, going to school in America, land of the civilised, and in the same classroom with some of the brightest civlised America has ever produced.
Yet, to the father, that was a perfectly innocent remark when he introduced me to their child saying, “he's civilised.”
Even some whites who socialise with blacks and have black friends or so-called friends who are black, sometimes use the term “nigger,” casually, to address or describe black people including their friends.
The assumption that calling black friends “niggers” is no more than an expression of genuine camaraderie – even if they don't reciprocate those feelings when they are called “niggers” – and the term “nigger” is no more than a casual remark and a term of endearment exposes their true feelings about blacks.
They know what the term “nigger” means. They know that no self-respecting black person likes to be called a “nigger” – there is nothing casual or friendly about it. At a deeper level, it shows how racism has permeated, distorted and corrupted the minds of even some of the most enlightened whites.
I remember one white student, among a few others, who used to come to the house in which I lived with other students in Grand Rapids, casually using the term “nigger” one day in the summer of 1977.
The other students I lived with, all black, went to the same school he did. Some of them were his classmates. There was only one roommate among us, also black, who was not a student.
Three of us, including the white student, were sitting on the porch one afternoon when I got up to go and get or do something in the house. As I was walking into the house, I heard him talking to the other student, who was an African American, telling him so-and-so “is a good nigger.” He mentioned my name, in a low tone, but I heard him.
When I came out of the house, he had already left. The black student said to me, so-and-so “said you are a good nigger.” I said I heard him.
To that young white man, it was a compliment to call me “a good nigger.” To me, as black man, it was an insult. It was no more a compliment calling me a “nigger” than it would have been had he called me “boy” as some whites still do to address and insult full-grown black men.
Yet he was one of the most friendly with blacks and came to our house many times. He came every week, two to three times, and even called us “brothers” – “hey, brother” and so on.
After I moved out in the same year and rented a house with a few other students on a different street not far from my previous residence, he came to visit me.
We didn't even know each other very well. I met him for the first time when he came to visit his fellow students at my previous residence and we had known each other for only a few months. But he wanted to stay in touch with me.
When he went to Europe in the summer of 1977, he even wrote me from there. When I received a letter from one of the West European countries where he spent the summer, I did not have the slightest idea who wrote me after I saw the name of the country – postmarked – where the letter came from. I did not know anyone in that country and I had not given my new address to anybody. Then I found out the letter came from him, after I opened it, and he was looking forward to seeing me again when he returned to Grand Rapids. He knew my address.
His use of the term “nigger” as if it were a compliment or just another word meaning “a black person” years later reminded me of what Mark Fuhrman, the white police officer who investigated O. J. Simpson for the murder of his wife, said when he tried to explain what the term “nigger” meant. He was on the Oprah Winfrey Show one day and she asked him if he didn't think calling a black person “a nigger” was an insult. He said, no, it was not an insult – “nigger” simply meant “a black person.”
He had used the term “nigger” many times in his career as a police officer and was emphatic in his response during the interview stating explicitly that to him calling a black person a “nigger” was the same as calling him or her “black” or “a black person.”
It is not a term that requires nuanced understanding. The context itself, of troubling race relations in the United States, is enough to show that the term means exactly what it means. Its use has no justification, none whatsoever, regardless of the context in which it is used, when whites and other non-blacks, use it to identify or describe black people.
Even calling blacks “Negroes” can be an insult. I have had that experience.
I was involved in a racial incident which had to do with a car accident. That was in 1977.
An African American student and I were involved in the accident. He was the same student who was with me in the same year, 1977, when I was involved in a racial incident with a white student who was also his classmate and who called me “a good nigger.”
He was driving when he hit a car driven by a young white woman. There was another woman in the car with her. She was also white. Both seemed to be in their twenties like us.
After only a few minutes, two police officers, both white, came to the scene of the accident. The two white women were already out of their car. We also got out of ours.
One of the police officers asked what happened. The woman who was driving pointed her finger at us and said:
“It is these two Negroes who caused the accident.”
The other woman agreed with her. Both were very loud and very angry.
It was the use of the term “Negroes” – at a time when it was no longer used to identify black people as much as it used to be in the past – and the way the driver pointed at us, shaking her finger, which exposed her racist attitude towards us.
The other woman was just as bad, agreeing with everything the driver was saying. And she was just as talkative.
The term “Negro” had been replaced by “black” to describe and identify black people even before then and the two white women knew it was not used for that purpose anymore – not on television, not on the radio, not in the newspapers, not in conversation. They could not have missed that.
The driver of the car was being deliberately provocative and insulting when she called us “Negroes,” and with an emphasis, “It is these two Negroes” who were responsible for what happened.
Any white person who calls a black person “Negro,” and with such anger, also probably uses the term “nigger” and may even see the use of the term “Negro” as being equivalent to calling a black person a “nigger” only in mild form, even though the two terms are not synonymous.
The harsh reality is that black people, who are American citizens and are as American as any other American and have been American since and even before there was America as a nation, are not recognised by many whites as Americans or as full citizens. And they are not second-class citizens even if they are treated that way by some whites or by society in general.
Many blacks are painfully aware of that, a recognition of this painful and cruel rejection by some of their fellow countrymen, which prompts some of them to say, “We're just here,” meaning they are not recognised or fully accepted as equal citizens. I have heard the expression used a number of times by some blacks, especially by black men, whom I have known for years; a painful reminder that they are strangers in their own homeland.
The resurgence of racism in its overt and virulent form under Donald Trump who was an embodiment of white supremacy – he himself expressed overtly racist views during his presidency – was a clear demonstration of the stubborn refusal by many whites to accept black people as fellow Americans who were not only entitled to equal rights but to respect as equal human beings.
The malignancy of racism is manifested in many ways – such as brutal mistreatment of blacks, including murder – with black people being the primary target more than members of any other racial or ethnic group; in recent times best exemplified by the horrific death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 25 May 2020 at the hands of a racist police officer, Derek Chauvin, who brutally and slowly squeezed life out of him when he dug his knee into Floyd's neck, pressing hard for 9 minutes and 29 seconds – for almost 10 minutes – as his victim pleaded with him and desperately begged for his life, repeatedly, saying, “Please, please, please, I can't breathe, please....I can't breathe.”
He pleaded, “I can't breathe,” 27 times, gasping for air, as life was being squeezed out of him slowly and painfully.
A 17-year-old black girl, Darnella Frazier, videotaped the brutal execution on her cell phone....
Blacks and intelligence: My personal experience
My experience in America as a black man has been an integral part of the black American experience in contemporary times and during the past several decades since the early seventies, my early years in the United States. It is an experience that has been good and bad, including encounters with racism, some of which have tested my patience.
One such incident took place in 1978. I knew a white man who had a habit of calling black people “niggers” at a place where one of my African American friends worked. I even heard him call me “nigger” one day, as did another white man who worked with him there. He heard him calling us “niggers” and said his co-worker did have a habit of calling black people “niggers.”
I was 28 years old. He said he was 35. At his age, he belonged to a generation of whites who usually did not use old terms such as “Negro” and “coloured” to describe black Americans; also in an era when even the majority of Americans of all ages, and all races, no longer used those terms.
One day, calling my name, he said to me: “I watched this movie last night; it was full of coloured folks – all of them dumb!”
The implication was obvious. He knew I knew exactly what he meant.
Since when have we, blacks, been considered to be intelligent like other people or as intelligent as anybody else?
The language he used was highly offensive to me as a black man. Besides implying all blacks without exception – not just those in the movie he claimed he saw, if he did at all – were stupid, he also deliberately used the term “coloured folks” to disparage black people.
Racial stereotypes abound. And they reinforce some of the most racist beliefs white people have about blacks. Some of those stereotypes have to do with sports. I was a victim of that in 1978.
A young white man who was in his late twenties and close to my age asked me one Friday evening: “Let's play basketball this weekend.”
I told him, “I don't play basketball.”
He couldn't believe what I said. “You are black, and you don't play basketball? Don't make laugh.”
He felt out laughing. He thought it was funny to hear a black man say he doesn't play basketball. He just didn't believe me.
Prevalent among many whites is the belief that blacks excel in sports – basketball, boxing, sprinting – for biological or anatomical reasons. It is a part of their nature. They are just made that way. They are nimble and agile. They run very fast and jump very high like monkeys. They are naturally stronger than whites – their brute strength enabling them to win almost all boxing matches, and so on, attributed to their beastly nature, not just training.
It is a subject that has been addressed eloquently by Professor Harry Edwards, an African American, at the University of California-Berkeley, through the years.
There are more stereotypes about blacks: They also can sing and dance very well.
But they cannot do anything cerebral because of their low mental calibre. It's not their fault. They are born that way. They are not well-endowed like whites whose mental faculties are beyond question in terms of excellence.
Even black professors are not considered to be as good as their white counterparts just because they are black. And they are denied tenure, not because they are not qualified but because they are black.
It is a nationwide problem in all academic institutions across the United States which have black faculty members.
Compounding the problem is the larger society which sanctions such behaviour and conduct and validates racial stereotypes about black people.
Black professors, including some of the most distinguished in their fields, who have made legitimate complaints about racism have sometimes been viciously attacked, vilified and threatened by their colleagues – and even by some white students – in order to silence them.
One of these tragic cases involved George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, a highly acclaimed scholar in his field who also earned a number of awards – including highest honours – in his field for academic excellence.
Yet some of his white colleagues and students did not acknowledge him as a reputable scholar and insulted him in a vicious way, belittling him, in spite of his accomplishments. As he stated in an article, “The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America”:
“'Dear Nigger Professor.'
That was the beginning of a message that was sent to me. There is nothing to be cherished here, despite the salutation.
Years ago, Malcolm X asked, 'What does a white man call a black man with a Ph.D.?' He answered: 'A nigger with a Ph.D.'
The message came in response to an op-ed I published in The New York Times in December 2015.
I’d spent much of that year conducting a series of interviews with philosophers about race. I wanted to hold a disagreeable mirror up to white readers and ask that they take a long, hard look without fleeing.
My article, 'Dear White America,' took the form of a letter asking readers to accept the truth of what it means to be white in a society created for white people. I asked them to tarry with the ways in which they perpetuate a racist society, the ways in which they are racist. In return, I asked for understanding and even love — love in the sense that James Baldwin used the term: 'Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.'
Instead, I received hundreds of emails, phone messages, and letters, an overwhelming number of which were filled with racist vitriol.
My university did its important and necessary part — top administrators assured me that my academic freedom was protected. Yet my predicament was not easy. Campus police had to monitor my office. Departmental instructions were clear: No one was to provide any strangers with my office hours. I needed police presence at my invited talks at other universities. It all felt surreal — and dangerous.
This is what it’s like to be the target of racist hatred:
'Another uppity Nigger. Calling a Nigger a professor is like calling White Black and Wet Dry.'
'Even the most sophisticated nigger will revert back to their jungle bunny behavior when excited.'
'You can dress a Nigger up in a suit and tie and they’ll still be Niggers.'
'This belief that niggers even reason is blatant pseudo-intellectualism.'
For these writers, 'nigger professor' is an oxymoron. A nigger is a nigger, incapable of reason. Kant, Hegel, and Jefferson each made similar claims about black people being bereft of rationality. Perhaps I’m just parroting (as Hume said of black people) what I’ve already heard. I’m just a nigger who dared to reason, only to discover that reason is white.
'The concept of there being an intellectual Negro is a joke.'
Perhaps this person had spoken to the woman who left the following on my university answering machine:
'Dear professor, I am a white American citizen. You are the one who is the racist against white people, evidently. A professor — I bet you got it [your PhD] through a mail order.'
On a white racist website, one writer has apparently seen through my game:
'This coon is a philosopher in the same way Martin King was a PHD and the same way that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are ‘Reverends’: Just another jive assed nigger with a new way to pimp.'
Some of my students of color have asked me, 'Why talk about race with white people when at the end of the day everything remains the same — that is, their racism continues?' 'Why teach courses on race and whiteness?' 'Do you really think that such courses will make a difference?'
I find these questions haunting; they nag at my conscience.
Indeed, there are times when I ask myself, 'Why do I do this?' After all, I don’t write about whiteness because it is a new fad in philosophy. And I’m certainly not a masochist. There is no pleasure to be had in being the object of hatred. I’m sure that a few of my black colleagues and colleagues of color think that I’ve lost my sanity. Perhaps they think that I’ve asked for all of this and that had I remained silent I would have been fine.
The reality, of course, is that they too are seen as niggers. Silence will not help.” – (George Yancy, “The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America,” Blog of the APA (American Philosophical Association), 22 May 2018; originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education).
Besides more insults being heaped on him, his quest for racial reconciliation which took him through the minefields of hate also took terrifying turn:
“In 2015, I was invited to be a plenary speaker at a well-established philosophy conference. I was excited. After all, I was there to deliver my talk within the company of kindred philosophical spirits, those who knew something about feminism, disability, aesthetics, and race. There was one other black philosopher in attendance, though he was older, taller, heavier, and very gray. All the other attendees were white.
The day after I gave my talk, the other black philosopher told me that several attendees had, with no apparent hesitation, complimented him on my talk: 'That was a very important talk that you gave yesterday.' 'Wow, great talk!' 'Inspiring.'
No less than seven congratulatory gestures were made.
Had there been only one or two, perhaps it could have been brushed off. But seven times?
This was the manifestation of an all-too-familiar mode of being white — a habit of perception that sees black people as all the same, through a fixed imago. This was white racism. My colleague, the black philosopher who had not given the talk, somehow 'became' me, and I him.
In that sophisticated and philosophically progressive white space, I could hear a strange and profoundly irritating echo of the little white child whom Frantz Fanon encountered on a train: 'Look, a Negro!'
There was a familiar sense of being fixed, static. The two of us became one black man; any black man; every black man. We were flattened, rendered one-dimensional, indistinct and repeatable.
'Hey Georgie boy. You’re the fucking racist, asshole. You wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for affirmative action. Somebody needs to put a boot up your ass and knock your fucking head off your shoulders you stupid fucking goddamn racist son of a bitch. You fucking race baiting son of bitches. Man, you’re just asking to get your fucking asses kicked. You need your fucking asses kicked. You stupid motherfucker. Quit fucking race baiting, asshole.'
It is probably true that I would not have my job were it not for affirmative action. Many white women wouldn’t have jobs either! And of course, white men have benefited from white supremacy for years.
But affirmative action is not white supremacy in reverse; it is not antiwhite, but pro-justice. It was created so that with my Ph.D., which I earned with distinction, I would actually be able to teach at a university. Affirmative action, in the case of black people, is a response to systemic racist disadvantages. It’s important to get that history right — not twisted.
I felt particularly sickened by the letters — there were quite a few — sent to me through regular postal mail, handwritten and signed. These are even more disturbing than emails, given the level of industry expended (writing, printing, stamping, mailing).
The opening of one such letter read, 'I’m a racist? How dare you call me that! You are a racist and, hey, since blacks call each other ‘nigga’ I’m taking the liberty of doing the same. Either the word is offensive and taboo or it isn’t.'
I’m not buying it. I once had two white male students attempt to argue that they should be allowed to use the word (with the “-er”) whenever they wanted, and that it is discriminatory to say that they can’t.
Any response at all felt too generous. I have often heard white people express the feeling of being somehow left out from black spaces, which are necessary for black sanity precisely because of white racism.
It is as if white people are driven by a colonial desire to possess everything. Du Bois asked, 'But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?' He answered, 'Whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!'
These two white students spoke with arrogance and the desire for total white ownership. It was not so much that they were deprived of historical knowledge, as that rather, this knowledge meant nothing when it came to their sense of loss of power....
One might think that being called a nigger so many times might decrease its impact. It doesn’t.
'All black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics,' according to bell hooks, 'live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness.'
The many responses of white people to 'Dear White America' were just that — 21st-century white terror.
That terror can come in many forms. Perhaps a black man screams 'I can’t breathe!' 11 times, but no one cares (Eric Garner). Or perhaps, after he has been shot by 'accident,' he musters enough strength to say aloud that he’s losing his breath (Eric Harris), only to hear a white police officer respond, 'Fuck your breath!'
Perhaps his spine gets severed (Freddie Gray). Perhaps he is a teenager and is shot 16 times (Laquan McDonald). Pulling out a wallet can lead to getting shot at 41 times and hit with 19 bullets (Amadou Diallo). Perhaps an innocent 7-year-old black child (Aiyana Stanley-Jones) is killed by police during a raid. Just as was true for Emmett Till 63 years ago, there is no place that one can call safe in America for black bodies....
On November 11, 2017, I received a letter in my university mailbox. It was handwritten on both sides in black ink on a sheet of paper torn from a yellow legal pad. There was no return address. Every time I’ve touched it, as I must do now for purposes of transcribing it word-for-word, I wash my hands afterward.
'Dear Mr. Yancy, I am writing to you to voice my displeasure with what you said about WHITE PEOPLE.
You claim that all White people are Racists! Really now? You, sir are one to talk!!
You sound just like the following Racists.
Here is a list of who I mean. They’re Al Sharpton, Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Spike Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Cosby, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, Movie Director John Singleton, Shannon Sharpe, Scottie Pippen (former NBA player), Rappers Ice Cube, Chuck D., Flavor Flav, DMX, and Snoop Dogg; former MLB players Carl Everett, Ray Durham and Hall of Famer Hank Aaron!
When I read what you said about White people, I was like this guy is a total lowlife Racist piece of shit! It’s so true!
You are an asshole! You deserve to be punished with several fists to your face! You’re nothing but a troublemaker! You need to really 'Get a life!' I’ve had enough of your Racist talk! You’d better watch what you say and to whom you say it! You may just end up in the hospital with several injuries or maybe on a cold slab in the local morgue!
I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve gotten several Death Threats! You’re inviting trouble when you accuse the entire White Race of being Racists! You’ve got a big mouth that needs to be slammed shut permanently!
I’m not going to give you the opportunity to find out who I am. Good luck with that!
By the way, this letter I’m sending you is certainly not a Death Threat! I could’ve done that, but that’s not me! I’m tired of your Racist kind!'
Please tarry with these words. My life has just been threatened. The writer belies their intention by denying that the letter is a death threat.
The writer does communicate something quite revealing, though.
They imply that they could be someone I see every day, someone I walk by, greet, or even teach. All the smiles, the eye contact, and the social spaces of interaction — and yet there I am, just a 'nigger' to you.”
The belief that black people are inferior to members of others races, especially to whites, persists for one reason. Its stubborn persistence can only be attributed to racism which is so prevalent among many whites, not just those in the United States but around the world. There is no other reason.
Professor George Yancy's ordeal is just one of the more glaring examples of the hatred that is directed against blacks by many whites across the nation everyday. Still, his case is one of the most tragic in academia where some of his white colleagues came out in their true colours to terrorise him in a diabolical scheme to intimidate him into submission but failed to achieve their goal. They could not silence him, although his traumatic experience showed how cruel his tormentors were and validated the harsh reality of what it means to be black in America.
Yet, quite often, such nefarious attempts – in a concerted effort of organised terror against blacks – accomplish exactly the opposite. And they are sometimes neutralised.
Individuals who are targeted survive the ordeal, come out stronger, and get sympathy from many people who rally to their defence, encouraging them to continue with their struggle – fighting racism or trying to achieve whatever they want to achieve even when they face virtually insurmountable obstacles. The odds may be against them but there is always a glimmer of hope they are going to succeed or, at the very least, survive.
George Yancy's identity as a black man became an unacceptable challenge to white power, and a liability to him, when he stood up and spoke the truth before a white audience of fellow scholars who were supposed to have a better understanding of the history of racism in the United States and what black people have gone through for centuries in the land of the free.
He was an embodiment of the struggle of millions of blacks facing the same problem and fighting the same war they have fought for centuries since the founding of this nation; in a country they built and whose foundation they laid from the beginning when they worked under the whip as slaves, yet where they are, even centuries later, still denied acceptance as equal citizens.
The belief that black people are inferior to members of others races, especially to whites, persists for one reason. Its stubborn persistence can only be attributed to racism which is so prevalent among many whites, not just those in the United States but around the world. There is no other reason.
This belief persists for a reason. Its stubborn persistence can only be attributed to racism which is so prevalent among many whites, not just those in the United States but around the world. There is no other reason.
Another white man, also talking to me, made equally stereotypical remarks about blacks in 1980. He was old enough to be my father. He said he was 52. I was 30.
One day, I was listening to soul music on a black radio station, WKWM (simply known as KWM), based in Grand Rapids.
He heard the music and asked me, “What's that?” I said, “soul music.” He laughed and said, “Sounds like they're trying to make a jailbreak.”
It was a typical racist remark and attitude.
The attitude was: Black people commit “all that crime,” they've been locked up and they're now trying to break out of jail in order to escape – so that they can go on and commit more crime as they usually do. That's how black people – “niggers” – are. What else is new?
He also invoked another racial stereotype: Black people “are loud” and made fun of soul music as well because it was “black music.”
Had it been rock-and-roll, which is played mostly by whites although its origin can be traced to African American music among others, he probably would not have made fun of that.
It was also in the same year, 1980, that I had another memorable experience with racism. I was at an office of a company in Grand Rapids when an older white man who was also the supervisor asked me:
“Do you know what a computer is?”
I answered, “Yes.” That's all I said to him. I think he got the message.
I had the same experience with a doctor in 1986 at one of the major hospitals in Grand Rapids. She was probably in her thirties, close to my age, and told me she was waiting for results on my diagnosis and was using a computer to get the results. Then she said to me, “I don't know if you know what a computer is.”
I said I did. I also told her I graduated from Wayne State University. The way she looked at me, I got the impression that she didn't believe me at all when I said I graduated from college. How could she? I was black.
It was because I was black that one white man did not think I even had simple common sense to do what I was getting ready to do and he had to come to my rescue, uninvited, to show me how to do it.
I was at the main post office in Grand Rapids in 1988 when I had an encounter with a white man who was probably in his late seventies or eighties.
I was getting ready to use a copy machine to make some copies when he approached me. He had been standing only a few feet away from where I was and was starting to walk away when he saw me at the copy machine. He turned around and came towards me after he saw I had some papers in my hand and concluded – and rightly so – I was getting ready to make some copies.
I was looking at the copier getting ready to put some coins in the slot when he came over and told me, pointing at the slot, “You put it in there,” assuming I didn't know where to put in the money. I had not asked for any help from anybody. He didn't even wait to see what I was going to do and automatically assumed I didn't know how to use a copy machine simply because I was black.
I did not say anything to him and simply put some coins in the slot, pressed the button (it was too late for him to instruct me how to do that), and made the copies I wanted to make and walked away.
He sounded as if he had a foreign accent, not American. But he could have been American-born and brought up in the United States. Americans from different parts of the country have different accents – his wasn't Southern which is very distinct and easily recognisable.
He could have had an American accent I was not familiar with – from Appalachia, the Ozarks or some other part of the United States. He clearly did not have a Midwestern accent. I would have known; that's the accent of Midwesterners including those who were born or brought up in Michigan which is one of the states in a region known as the Midwest.
Whatever the case, it would have made no difference, none at all, even if he came from another country. He was white. I was black. That was the difference. Many whites from other countries are just as racist towards blacks.
It is slights like that which cumulatively have an impact on black people and which are as effective as using crude language calling them “niggers.”
Every adjective that has been used to describe people in a negative way, every epithet that has been thrown at them, has been used to dehumanise blacks, not just as individuals but collectively as a people, more than it has against anybody else; not against whites, not against Asians, not against any other people – except blacks in the most dehumanising way.
We are faces at the bottom of the well, as Professor Derrick Bell put it, with whites deriving satisfaction from our condition and predicament when they look down on us – and at us at the bottom.
There are other people who feel the same way about us. I remember an episode on Cheaters, an American television show featuring cases of infidelity, in which a Hispanic woman, angry at a black man who left her, spewed racist filth, berating him: “You left me (or are trying to leave me) for a black bitch on top of that?”
She had the audacity to say all that to a black man and even hurled a double insult when she said “on top of that?” Leaving me is bad enough, but for “a black bitch on top of that?”
That is exactly what she meant, and on a national television show of all places, without mincing words.
She felt very insulted when she was dumped and replaced by a black woman. It was more than she could take – and she exploded in an outburst of anger with unconstrained fury.
But it is good she did that and was honest about how she felt instead of trying to hide her prejudice and bilious rage against black people. What she said was an insult to both, black men and black women, not just to black women.
Her view of blacks was emblematic of the perceptions many people of other races have about us.
We are seen as worthless, the scum of the earth, good for nothing, except as objects of ridicule and contempt inflating the ego of those who think they are better than we are.
Visible yet invisible
To many whites, blacks constitute a population of human beings who should not even exist.
Yes, they exist. But they don't deserve to be noticed because they are nothing. They are nonentities. Banish them from your mind. You don't have to worry about their well-being.
It is impossible to know how many whites feel that way but given the prevalence of racism whose very nature and definition is the total disregard of the humanity of others, there are probably many of them. White supremacists alone constitute a significant number. There are many others who feel the same way white supremacists do even if they don't call themselves white supremacists.
One good example is the massive support Donald Trump got when he ran for president in spite of his blatantly racist views. He won the election the first time. He almost won again even though he continued to spew racist filth when he was in office. Still, more than 74 million people voted for him for a second term. He somewhat came close to winning the election again, although he lost by more than 7 million votes.
The electoral map shows he made an impressive performance, wining 26 states out of 50, and almost 47 per cent of the popular vote against Joe Biden's of a little more than 51 per cent.
Had he responded well to the corona virus pandemic and shown empathy with the victims and the nation as a whole facing this horrendous tragedy, he probably would won a second term. Biden defeated him, it's true, but Trump also defeated himself. His attitude cost him a second term.
He didn't even hide his racist views. Yet he performed spectacularly in both presidential elections.
Millions of people who voted for him were racist – why vote for a racist if you are not a racist yourself?
There are many others who didn't vote for him but who shared his views on blacks as worthless human beings.
To all those people, blacks are nothing – they don't even “exist.” Their presence does not even have to be acknowledged.
Some whites don't even answer blacks when they greet them. It is as if they don't see them.
Visible yet invisible.
Contempt for blacks, including total disregard of their dignity as equal human beings, takes many forms, including simply ignoring their presence even during verbal exchanges.
It may be at a multiracial gathering in an informal setting where the presence of blacks is no more than a salve for the conscience of some whites who feel guilty of mistreating black people for centuries.
They have planned the event, and have invited blacks, for no other reason than that; roughly equivalent to how many whites felt when they voted for Barack Obama to become the first black president in American history.
Many of them voted for him for different reasons. But there were also those who voted for him to atone for their sins against black people – historical and contemporary.
Some of them have supposedly undergone a spiritual rebirth or conversion after mistreating blacks for so long. Yet, the transformation some of them have undergone is more apparent than real.
Even verbal exchanges between individuals can be humiliating. Some whites talk to black people, full-grown blacks, as if they are talking to children. They even treat and regard them as children because they have no respect for black people; the level of their intelligence – of full-grown black men and women – being equated to that of white children. Or they simply ignore them as if they don't even exist.
I have had that kind of experience. I was a student at Wayne State University in the early seventies and was at a gathering of some whites – taken there by a member of my host family in Bay City, Michigan, who was the husband and father – where another foreign student from China was also invited. He was also a guest of one of the families in the area as part of an international exchange programme.
During conversations, I was almost completely ignored by them. All the whites who were there, about six to eight of them, were old enough to be our parents. They hardly looked at me. Their focus was on the Oriental student. The conversations were also among themselves but they showed great interest in the Oriental student, asking him questions about his education, what he was studying, where he came from, and so on.
I remember very well only one lady asked me: “What are you studying?” That was the end of it except for occasional chats with the member of my host family who took me there. He was also the one who introduced me to them. Yet no one asked me about my country or about Africa. And I knew why. As a black man, my presence meant absolutely nothing to them. I was nothing to them, and invisible.
My dignity was not wounded. I was dignified enough not to be offended by people who did not want to talk to me simply because I was black. And they didn't have to.
That is why any black person who respects himself should not want to integrate with people who don't want to integrate with him.
Their moral bankruptcy is their badge of honour. No dignified black man, or any person of conscience, should want to wear it.
I have been subjected to other racial indignities through the years, some of which are similar to what happened to me in Bay City 47 years ago during spring break in March 1974, a vacation period for students in college and other schools in the United States and other countries.
In the late 1990s, a white man who was a friend of the son of an African American woman I knew deliberately ignored me when I called his name. I wanted to ask him just one simple question about something. He simply ignored me and looked the other way when he heard me call his name. He ignored me as if I did not even exist.
Yet there I was, almost right in front of him, only a few feet away from where he was sitting. He was in their house. Yet he did not have the decency to behave in a civil manner and acknowledge my presence. He had crude manners and was very rude.
After he left, I told them what happened. They were equally offended. Fortunately, he never went back to visit them and I never saw him again. We later found out he died in 2010.
In the early 2000s, a white wife of a Mexican I knew ignored me when I greeted her in the presence of her husband. She just stared at me, without uttering a word, and simply ignored my greeting. Her facial expression also showed she was angry with me just for greeting her.
It was during the same period when another white man, who was in the house of my African American friend, also ignored me when I greeted him. It was only the two of us during that moment. He just glanced at me and did not acknowledge my greeting. He heard me. He had no hearing problem. I knew him. My African American friend was also offended by his behaviour.
A racial insult to one black person is an insult to all blacks. Race is indivisible; so is humanity.
Cumulatively, such insults demonstrate the scope and persistence of racism. It is a major problem between individuals as much as it is at the institutional level. And it has compromised the nation's ideals and character.
When you multiply the number of these incidents of racism with the number of black people who experience basically the same thing, you realise racism still is a major problem in every city, every township, every village and every state across the nation.
It happens everyday to millions of blacks, one incident or another in which a black person is insulted or humiliated. And the total number of white racists is not negligible; it's probably millions of them in a country with a population of more than 300 million, the vast majority of whom are white.
As a black person, sometimes you are victimised without even knowing that you have been a victim of racism. You may find out later you couldn't get somethings done, not because they just couldn't be done then even by a white person; or you were denied employment or housing not because no vacancy was available; or you face other problems not because other people including whites also face the same problems; you went through all that – couldn't get things done, couldn't get a job or a house to rent or buy – because you were black and for no other reason.
All blacks have faced this problem, sometimes even unknowingly helping their victimisers to victimise them and even end up defending them: “The apartment just wasn't ready for rent or to be rented.” “The company is not hiring anymore – there are even some blacks who work there, I saw them, therefore it had nothing to with racism when I wasn't hired” – only to find out later some whites were hired soon after you left.
There is not a single black person who has not been a victim of racism. It pervades society.
It is an integral part of life, of the black experience in the American context, and may sometimes be overlooked and even ignored by the victims because they know that is just the way things are, just the way life is, yet without condoning such injustices.
Black Africans and Black Americans: Common identity and common destiny in America
Africans who come to the United States, I being one of them, suffer the same racial injustices other blacks do although some of them delude themselves into believing that whites like them better than they do American blacks; an attitude, and sheer naiveté, which has led to strained relations between some of them. It's not many of them, who think that way, but they do exist.
Racists don't care about them anymore than they do our brethren, African Americans.
You came from Africa, so what? You're just another nigger to them.
They don't even want you here anymore than they do American-born blacks and wish you had never come to the United States and should have stayed over there, in the “jungle,” rubbing shoulders with animals.
I remember one white man, an authority figure on campus – in a high position – and old enough to be my father, who was extremely rude to me in Detroit in 1974 when he learned I had been awarded a merit scholarship because I did well in school at Wayne State University. It was just for one term. He was angry, very angry, because I had been given such assistance and said to me: “You did not come here in chains like your ancestors!”
Quoted verbatim.
It was clear he meant I had no business being here – I should not have come to the United States and should have stayed in Africa....
I have had other memorable experiences with racism in the United States.
In the summer of 1983 when an African immigrant and I were on our way from Grand Rapids to Greensboro, North Carolina, coincidentally, the first American city I went to when I first came to the United States in 1972, we stopped to get some rest on the highway somewhere in Virginia. It was in the evening before sunset and had our car parked beside the road.
As we stood out there, we saw a car going in the opposite direction on another road. Whites were in the car. They seemed to be young – in their teens or twenties, maybe even in their thirties – but they could have been older.
When they saw us, we couldn't tell how many were in the car, they slowed down and yelled at us and kept on saying something, yelling, in an angry tone. We couldn't tell exactly what they were saying but it sounded like a drawn-out racial slur “niggers,” shouted at us by different occupants of the car.
Whatever they said, it was probably highly offensive directed against us because we were black. There seemed to be no other reason. Why did they yell at us? And so loudly?
In 1980, a fellow African and I went to look for an apartment in the predominantly white suburb of Kentwood which is an integral part of the Grand Rapids metropolitan area. Before going there, my colleague called the manager of the apartment building; in fact, he called from my telephone in my apartment in the inner city of Grand Rapids, the ghetto, and he was the one who was looking for a place to rent.
The manager, a female, told him the apartment was available for rent and he could go and see it. But when we went there, as soon as she saw us, she said, “The apartment has been rented.”
That was just within half an hour or so after we called and were assured the apartment was available for rent. Obviously it was but not to blacks.
Sometime later, in the same year, we went to look for an apartment in a building that was very close to a predominantly black area in Grand Rapids. It was on the borderline of the inner city in an area known as Heritage Hill which is a historic district with some old mansions and expensive houses owned or rented mostly by whites in a predominantly white city which was once very conservative and a Republican stronghold.
I went in and knocked on the door of the building manager's apartment. A white lady, old enough to be my mother, opened the door.
As soon as she saw me, she asked, “Paper boy?” Reminiscent of the racial insult many whites routinely used in the past, and even today although less frequently, calling full-grown black men, “boys” – “hey, boy,” “shut up, boy,” “sit down, boy,” “pick that up, boy,””be careful, boy,” “what's your name, boy?,” “did you hear me, boy?” and so on.
In fact, I have had that experience of being called a “boy.”
In 1988, a non-white Hispanic man – he was Puerto Rican – and I were driving from Detroit to Grand Rapids. We stopped at a rest area on the highway to use the restroom. When we were inside, four white men walked in, also to use the restroom. One of them who was about my age or younger said to us, “Hey, be careful where you park your car, boys.” He called us “boys” two more times, once saying “you boys.”
The Hispanic man I was with was the one who was driving. And he did nothing wrong. He parked his car at the rest area the way any car was supposed to be parked.
The white was being extremely provocative as if he wanted to start a fight. The other whites who were with him were just smiling and kept on smiling. They obviously shared his sentiments.
There we were, two full-grown men, being called “boys” by a white man who obviously had no respect for black people and other nonwhites – none whatsoever. He saw us as beneath him just because he was white and we were not.
I was 38 years old. The Hispanic man was about 65, old enough to be my father and the white man's father; still, that made no difference to him.
That white man would never have called us “boys” had we been white – the Hispanic driver didn't even do anything wrong when he parked his car at the rest area; even if he did, it would have been unthinkable for the white man to call him – a 65-year-old man or someone old enough to be his father – a “boy” had he been white.
The use of the term “boy” is clearly a demonstration of racial animus and an emphatic expression and assertion that full-grown black men are not on equal footing with whites, including white children, who are also supposed to be addressed as “Miss” or “Mister”by full-grown black mane and full-grown black women. But it is supposed to be acceptable if they call full-grown black men or full-grown black women “boy” or “girl” the way some of their parents and other whites do.
Many black men have been called “boy” at work and are still being called “boy.” They have been called “boy” in the streets, they have been called “boy” by their white “friends,” they have been called “boy” by other people – whites and even some non-blacks – and they are still being called “boy” now and then, here and there. Yet they are expected to accept that.
It is a highly offensive and hostile term equivalent to “nigger” because of its racial connotation asserting that black men – and by logical extension all blacks, men, women and children – are beneath whites, hence inferior to them in every conceivable way.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, can justify the use of the term “boy” to describe full-grown black men and even other full-grown nonwhite men the way it was used to describe me and the Hispanic man – who was neither black nor white – I was with on that day at a rest stop on a Michigan highway in 1988.
Black women are not spared this kind of indignity and humiliation black men are subjected to and which they have to endure at the hands of some whites who call them “boys.” I knew one such victim in Grand Rapids.
She went to see a white doctor who condescendingly called her “girl.” That was in 1988, the same year in which I was insulted and called a “boy.”
She was 42 years old. She had an appointment with the doctor and when she went to see him, he said to her, loudly, “Sit down, girl!” “Sit down!” He yelled at her for nothing.
She found the doctor on her own and her mother, who was driving, took her to see him. Her mother was waiting in another room and also heard the doctor humiliate her daughter.
Just seeing a black person in his office infuriated him. It triggered something in him and had bilious rage flowing, vented at the black woman.
She had a lawsuit during that time and wanted some medical records to validate her claim for monetary compensation and have her medical bills paid.
Unfortunately, the doctor she found was not the right one because she was not the right patient for him simply because she was not white.
The medical report he wrote about her condition did not even help her with her lawsuit. It was a bad report.
She still won her case, eventually, using medical reports from other doctors who supported her claim that her medical condition was very bad because of what happened to her.
She suffered permanent physical impairment in two car accidents about five months apart.
The racist doctor who yelled at her – “sit down, girl!” – didn't see it that way.
He said there was nothing wrong with her and she could go back to work within three days.
Other doctors said she was seriously injured and could not go back to work at all.
More than 30 years later, she was still in the same condition: physically impaired. He condition also got worse through the years.
When she told her lawyer who was representing her in the lawsuit about what happened when he went to see the doctor, he said he knew the doctor. He was a white lawyer and said he had a number of black clients who had seen the same doctor before.
He said whenever a black person went to see that doctor, there were always complaints about him because of the way he mistreated black patients. He had no respect for black people and was known for his racist behaviour and making derogatory remarks that were clearly racist.
This also provides the context in which the white apartment building manager called me “paper boy” in 1980.
Black people are still not accorded respect by many whites as equal human beings.
The apartment building manager probably already knew the person – the boy – who delivered the newspaper, The Grand Rapids Press, to the building everyday.
I was 30 years old when she called me “boy.”
I knew what the term “paper boy” meant. It is usually young boys who deliver the paper, even though older ones, especially teenagers – and even those in their twenties and thirties – also do and are called “paper boys” as well.
But even if she mistook me for a teenager, which I don't believe she did, considering my maturity and how I communicated with her as a full-grown man, it was her response to my enquiry about an apartment that said it all.
I asked her, “Do you have an apartment for rent?” She responded: “Only when someone dies.” Which wasn't true.
People had been moving in and out of the building through the years, alive, and there were times when apartments were available for rent there.
The Fair Housing Act prohibiting discrimination in housing passed in 1968 following the riots which rocked the nation when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, meant absolutely nothing to the white manager and others who had managed the apartment building before her. And it meant nothing to other landlords as well across the nation; it still doesn't to many of them.
That was not the end of my experience with racial discrimination. I faced more in the following years. But when I looked for a place to rent in the ghetto, I had no problem finding one because that is where black people were supposed to live in a segregated area. That is where they belonged. That was their homeland, far away from their original homeland, Africa.
It was also when I lived in the inner city of Grand Rapids that I heard on a national news broadcast, CBS Evening News, about an aircraft hijacking that had taken place in Tanzania.
I was shocked when I found out it involved one of my cousins, Oscar Mwamwaja, who was my father's first cousin. My paternal grandmother was an elder sister of Oscar's father.
Oscar was one of Tanzania's first commercial airline pilots. He was a co-pilot of an Air Tanzania plane that was hijacked on 26 February 1982 and forced to fly from Tanzania to Britain. He was shot during the flight but survived his injuries.
I was living in a house owned by a black lady who was old enough to be my mother. I lived upstairs and she lived downstairs. I had no problems with her. But racial problems were waiting for me elsewhere.
In 1989, an African American and I were twice denied places to rent because we were black.
One was in Grandville, a suburb of Grand Rapids and overwhelmingly white, where we wanted to rent a house.
We talked to the owner on the telephone and he told us we could go and see the house. He said he would be there to show it to us. And he was, when we arrived. But he told us the house was not available for rent right then. That was not what he told us earlier. Once he saw us, black, that was the end of it.
Some whites who knew him confirmed to us that he was a racist and did not want to rent to blacks.
One white man, who was also a landlord, told my African American friend a few years before then that white landlords really didn't want to rent to blacks. But they sometimes rented to them because they they had to; they were forced to do so under the law. He said he knew many of them and heard what they said. That is also what he heard many times when he was with fellow whites including landlords.
Our experience in Grandville was not an isolated incident. It was the same experience we had in Eastown, an enclave in Grand Rapids, which had a reputation of being very liberal in a conservative city and still does.
It is also known as the Greenwich Village of Grand Rapids and is very close to an affluent area, East Grand Rapids, which is also overwhelmingly white. East Grand Rapids was also the home of former United States President Gerald Ford and is a part of the Grand Rapids metropolitan area.
Eastown was also very close to a predominantly black area where I stayed between 1976 and 1977.
There was an advertisement in the newspaper, The Grand Rapids Press, stating the apartment we wanted to look at in Eastown was available for rent. That was in 1989.
We went there and were shown the apartment. But the person who showed it to us, a young white man close to my age, gave all kinds of excuses – in terms of additional expenses, including higher rent, maintenance costs and so on – to make sure we would be discouraged from saying to him, “Yes, we will take it.” We did not and left.
It was in the same area of Eastown when one day, ten years before – in 1979 – I witnessed a racial incident in which one of my former roommates, an African American, was involved. We were roommates from the summer of 1976 until the end of 1977.
We went to a bar, the Intersection, one evening, to have some beer; it was during summer.
The bar was near the intersection of Lake Drive SE (Southeast) and Wealthy Street SE right on the edge of the affluent suburb of East Grand Rapids which is considered to be a separate city although it is within the Grand Rapids metropolitan area.
We were sitting at the counter and drinking some beer when a young white man walked in. There were other whites at the counter but no other blacks except us.
The young white man – he seemed to be about my age, in the late twenties – who had just walked in stood next to my friend, with his hands on the counter, and ordered some beer. It was around 5 PM and he seemed to have just come from work. He was dressed like someone who worked in an office and wore a necktie.
My friend tried to start a conversation with him and the young white man looked at him straight face and told him: “I don't like blacks.”
My friend, aware of the racial stereotypes about blacks being branded as “bad people” in every conceivable way tried – in a disgusting way, as I saw it – to impress the young white man by telling him, “All of us are not the same.”
I thought that was really, really disgusting, literally begging the young white man to accept us, black people.
The young white man was not impressed and rebuffed him. He gave him a curt response: “It makes no difference to me. I still don't like blacks. I don't.”
We did not stay long at the bar and left after we finished drinking our beer.
I was very familiar with the bar from the time when I was a student at Aquinas College three years earlier in 1976. It was a watering hole for Aquinas College students, black and white. We used to go there now and then to drink some beer.
It was also in the same year when I was a student at Aquinas College, in the summer of 1976, when another racial incident took place at the same bar.
I went to the bar one afternoon with a young white man – we were about the same age – who worked at Aquinas College. He was not a student. We worked together on campus just as I did with a few of my fellow students.
When we walked into the bar, there was an older white man, old enough to be our father, sitting alone at a table and drinking some beer. The young white man I was with knew him and went straight to the table for us to join him. We sat down and ordered some beer.
When he heard I came from Africa, he started talking about white people in South Africa and how they had developed the country, implying “unlike blacks.”
He went further and said white people in South Africa treated blacks very well and there was nothing wrong with apartheid – it was good for all South Africans, members of each racial group to live and develop in their own area separate from the rest because they were so different from each other. He was very defensive of apartheid. I took the opposite view when we were conversing.
Not long after that, there was a conference on apartheid South Africa at Aquinas College. And there he was, the same white man who defended apartheid at the bar, attending the meeting. I remember he stood up and spoke briefly again defending apartheid. He drew murmurs from the audience, almost all-white.
The main speaker was a Catholic priest who was also a professor at Aquinas College. He vehemently condemned apartheid and even spoke very highly of other African countries which were helping black people and other non-whites in South Africa to fight apartheid.
He went on to say Africa was one like the United States and white South Africans had no right trying to separate their country – even if not physically – from the rest of the continent.
Also on the opposite side, besides the older white man whom I first met at the bar in Eastown and who also briefly spoke at the conference defending apartheid, was a white student attending Aquinas College. He also strongly defended apartheid and drew furious responses from some members of the audience and from the Catholic priest-professor who was the main speaker.
I remember he even cited Aristotle and the Bible in defence of his arguments to justify slavery and apartheid. He was very clear about his position: black people were not equal to whites, should not live with whites, and were meant to be servants and slaves – no more than hewers of wood and drawers of water for whites.
The rest of the participants, including Catholic nuns who also taught at Aquinas College – one of them was my professor in a philosophy class – vehemently condemned apartheid.
I also remember talking to one nun who like President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania very much. She said: “He's our friend.” Exact words. I though one of the reasons she said that was because he was a fellow Catholic; that's why said “our.”
The conference was even covered by one local television station, WZZM 13. I also ended up on television.
I saw the cameraman focusing on where I was sitting, with whites, and didn't know I was going to be on television until later when I was watching the news that evening.
One of my students at South Middle School – simply known as South Middle and formerly known as South High School – where I taught Swahili also watched the news and was excited about it. She said she saw me on television and was glad to see one of her teachers on there. I told her it was good she watched the news and saw what happened at Aquinas on that day because it was a very important conference on racism in South Africa.
I was just one of the people who attended the conference and did not make any significant contribution to the discussion. I just happened to be one of the few blacks who attended the meeting at a predominantly white school. And that explains why the television cameraman focused on where I was sitting “in a sea” of whites who were there to take part in a conference on the plight of black people and other non-whites in apartheid South Africa.
What was important to me about the news broadcast on the conference at Aquinas College was the involvement of Americans of all races in the campaign against the racist policies of the South African regime, giving me encouragement that there was widespread condemnation of the abominable and abhorrent institution of apartheid and its diabolical policies and there would be a day when the walls of the citadel of white supremacy on the African continent would come tumbling down. And they did.
That was one of my most memorable experiences of my student days at Aquinas College. And it fuelled my optimism, especially as an African, that apartheid would end one day, as it indeed did, less than twenty years later in 1994.
But there is still racism in South Africa almost 30 years after apartheid ended just as there is still racism in the United States more than 50 years after the civil rights movement.
Grand Rapids is no exception in spite of the fact that the city has become somewhat liberal through the years – more liberal than it was when I first moved there from Detroit in 1976, although some people, especially blacks in the inner city, dispute that. They say Grand Rapids still is a conservative city.
People sharply differ on that, which is one of the subjects I have addressed in my book, On the Banks of a River, about life in the city Grand Rapids.
Even at the conference on apartheid at Aquinas College, there may have been some participants who were sympathetic to the apartheid regime for racial reasons besides the two who were vocal in their support of white domination of nonwhites in South Africa. But the prevailing sentiment at the conference was that apartheid was wrong.
It was a sentiment that was echoed across the nation.
Even Aquinas College students who mingled at the bar in Eastown – coincidentally, in an area known as a liberal oasis – expressed liberal views in general.
I also stayed in the Eastown area twice, at different times in 1976 and 1977, for a combined period of about one year and a half. The area where I lived was almost all-black.
A few years after I left Aquinas College, I was at the same bar in Eastown, still popular with Aquinas College students, when another racial incident took place, although outside the bar. It was in the summer of 1981.
An African American friend of mine and I went to the bar one afternoon. When we came out of the bar and were getting ready to go into his car, a white man across the street saw us and shouted: “Hey, you niggers got some weed?”
He was getting ready to go into a bar across the street from the one we had just left.
We did not say anything to him. We just ignored him and went into the car and left.
Apart from using a highly offensive racial insult against us, that white man – who seemed to be our age, maybe only a few years apart – demonstrated the utter callousness many whites have towards blacks even on highly sensitive matters which have to do with race.
He also reinforced a racial stereotype about black people as drug users. Simply because we were black, he automatically assumed we smoked and sold marijuana, as many whites believe blacks, especially young black men, do.
The racial insult did not surprise me. I knew there were many whites who felt that way about blacks.
I had other unpleasant experiences with racism when I moved from the southeast side to the northeast side of Grand Rapids. I lived there the longest, much longer than I did in the inner city on the southeast side.
Beyond black and white: Other racial encounters
My experience with racism and involvement in racial incidents has almost exclusively been with whites, given the demographic composition of the United States as an overwhelmingly white nation.
Before then, my experience with racism had also been with whites in my home country Tanganyika when it was under British colonial rule. As colonial subjects, we did not have any rights whites were bound to respect.
Other non-blacks, Asians and Arabs in colonial Tanganyika, also did not respect us although they were colonial subjects themselves but higher in the racial hierarchy which legitimised and reinforced their status as a people who were “superior” to us, blacks, constituting the vast majority of the population at the bottom. They felt the same way even after we won independence from Britain; so did whites.
Then I came to the United States, a multiracial society also structured as a racial hierarchy.
That has been my history in terms of racial encounters most of which took place in Grand Rapids, a city in which I lived the longest when I was in the United States.
But I had other racial encounters with other people who were not white and who had the same attitude white racists have towards blacks: condescending, insulting, and outright rude.
I moved to the northeast side of Grand Rapids from the Heritage Hill Historic District which is described as one of the largest urban historic districts in the country with homes dating from 1848 and designed in more than 60 architectural styles.
I lived in the Heritage Hill area for a little more than two years from July 1990 to August 1992.
My encounter with racism took place at another residence very close to the one where I first lived when I moved to the northeast side.
In January 1993, an African American and I found an apartment in an integrated middle-class neighbourhood in that part of Grand Rapids. The neighbourhood is in Midtown, near downtown. The area is also a commercial district. The place where we lived was about one mile from downtown.
Although integrated, the northeast side was still predominantly white, as the city itself was and still is. I lived in that area for many years.
Even after all those years, the area was still mostly white; the ghetto, the inner city, still predominantly black and poor, a product of structural racism.
Two days after we moved into the apartment, three white men came to our door in broad daylight. Two of them kicked the door hard and yelled, “We don't want no niggers here.” Then they ran away.
They didn't care it was daytime and other tenants saw and heard them. They did not even live in the same apartment building we did. They lived in another building right next door but on the same premises. Both were owned by the same landlord.
Another racial incident took place on the same premises two years later.
A young black couple, African American, rented an apartment in the same building in which we lived. They did not stay long and when they moved out, the landlord complained about them and said the apartment was dirty. He said that to some white tenants, men and women, and to one racially mixed woman who was also one of the tenants, when they were standing in front of the building one afternoon.
The racially mixed woman, in response to the landlord, said: “That's how black people are.” And they all laughed when she said that. The landlord also laughed.
The laughter said it all. It was a sweeping indictment against all blacks as “dirty,” “irresponsible”people.
It was also an endorsement of a racial stereotype about blacks so common among many whites and even among other people who are not black, such as the woman I just mentioned who seemed to be of white, Hispanic and Native American ancestry. The stereotype is: “Black people are not clean. They are dirty. They are irresponsible. And that's just the way they are.”
Not long after that, we wanted to move and tried to rent an apartment in the same area.
The apartment was very close to where we lived and it would have been very easy for us to move to our new residence.
We called the owner of the apartment building and told him one of us would be there in a few minutes to look at it. It was within walking distance, only about five minutes.
He told us he was already there and would show it to us. He said he lived in the same building and was waiting to show the apartment to prospective tenants.
A very close relative of my African American friend who was staying with us during that time went to look at the apartment on our behalf.
When he got there, he looked through the window upstairs and saw someone. It was the landlord since he said he was already there to show the apartment to prospective tenants. The landlord also saw him.
When my friend's relative knocked on the door, he got no response; he knocked again, and again, and still got no response.
The landlord saw it was a black man at the door who said he wanted to look at the apartment and that was the end of it. He did not even go downstairs to talk to him. He stayed upstairs and my friend's relative saw him up there when he was leaving.
My friend's relative started walking back to where we lived and stopped for a moment. When he looked back, he saw some whites going to the same apartment house he had just left. He even heard them knocking on the door. The landlord opened the door for them right away.
There was no doubt in his mind, and in ours, that they were prospective tenants and the landlord let them in because he wanted to rent the apartment only to whites.
That was in the mid-1990s, long after the civil rights movement had transformed America into a better society in terms of rights for black people.
Yet, laws against racial discrimination in housing and public facilities meant absolutely nothing to the landlord even decades after they were passed.
That is what an African American woman I knew experienced in Grand Rapids in the sixties. American blacks were simply known as “black Americans” or “Afro-Americans” during those days.
One day in the late sixties,, the African American woman went to look at an apartment in the Eastown area. She went with her aunt, her mother's younger sister, and her aunt's husband who looked white; he was partly black, about one-eighth, but looked white because he was mostly white. He was the one who was driving.
When they got there, the African American woman went to the apartment house and knocked on the door. When the white landlord saw her, he told her the apartment had just been rented. She did not believe him. She went back to the car and told her aunt and her uncle what happened. They also did not believe the landlord. They knew why she had been told the apartment was rented.
Her uncle drove away with them in the car and parked his car a few yards away from the house, just around the corner, where the white landlord couldn't see them.
He then went back to the apartment house. When he knocked on the door, the white landlord opened the door. He asked the landlord if the apartment was still available for rent. The landlord said, “Yes.”
Thirty years later, it was the same problem, with many white landlords refusing to rent to black people in areas where they felt blacks were not supposed to live.
That was also still the case with many other landlords, not just white ones, except blacks. Many of them – white and other non-black landlords – even say they don't rent to blacks because black people destroy their property, they are dirty and irresponsible and don't want to pay rent like whites and other tenants do.
It is a racial stereotype against blacks and it's nothing new. Black people expect it to be used against them anytime and it is many times.
The woman who made the remark, “That's how black people are,” at the apartment building where we lived, not only reinforced racial stereotypes about blacks; she also showed that it is not just whites who feel that way about black people – there are many people like her who are not white and who are not black who feel the same way and who are just as racist.
She provided empirical evidence and was a specimen of such non-blacks – who include Asians, Hispanics, and even Native Americans among others – who derive pleasure and satisfaction from insulting and demeaning black people in the erroneous belief that by doing so proves they are better than blacks and may even win acceptance by whites as their equals. They think they impress whites when they make such derogatory remarks about blacks.
It is not unusual for such people to spew racist filth even in front of blacks, just like some whites do, and are comfortable, especially among themselves, using the term “nigger” or “niggers” to describe blacks even if publicly they say they are liberal and accept blacks people as equals.
Such hypocrisy among white liberals still goes on even today; so do racial injustices across the spectrum more than half a century after the civil rights movement which brought about fundamental change in the American society.
Although racism against blacks is almost always seen as a black-white problem, there is another aspect of the problem which is probably overlooked most of the time.
Whites – those who don't like or those who just don't want to associate with blacks not necessarily because they hate or dislike them, as some of them claim – are not the only people blacks have problems with. There are some people of other races or ethnic groups who don't like blacks just like some whites don't. Hispanics, including non-white Hispanics, are a good example of such people.
Even some non-white Hispanics who are black or who look just like black people are some of the most hostile towards African Americans. It's probably not many of them but they do exist. When some of them are asked what they are, or if some people think thy are black just like black Americans, they have been known to be very hostile in their response: “I'm no nigger.”
One African American I knew very well told me about a black Cuban who was a member of her church in Grand Rapids. At a social gathering organised by their church, some whites called him “black.” That was an insult to him. He became very angry and told them, “I'm no nigger.”
He looked just like any other black person.
There are many others who feel the same way. They are Afro-Latinos, racially distinct from other Latinos but sharing the same cultural identity....
Racial profiling: My encounters with the police
One of the biggest problems black people face, especially black men, is racial profiling by the police. That is when they single you out, stop you, search you, arrest you and even attack you and lock you up or do anything they want to do with you just because you are black.
Policemen who do that are mostly white. But others do the same thing. They include Hispanic and Asian police officers. They don't like blacks anymore than many white police officers do.
I was a victim of racial profiling by the police in Grand Rapids and in New York City sometime ago.
It is a problem inextricably linked with the nation's history and contemporary realities in terms of race relations.
Stereotypes abound, including the belief that young black men commit most of the crimes in the United States, a racial stereotype that has been used to justify racial profiling and even police brutality against blacks: young black men being stopped by the police at will for being crime suspects and very often manhandled by white police officers.
But just being black is enough to be stopped and harassed by the police regardless of age or gender although a disproportionately large number of young black men across the nation are routinely stopped and frisked by the police ostensibly to stop crime.
It is a highly contentious subject whose volatile nature has fuelled debate on relations between blacks – as well as Hispanics – and the police.
One day, in the summer of 1983, I was on my way to a friend's house in an area that is near downtown Grand Rapids. It was just before sunset and I was walking, enjoying the weather.
A police car was parked on the other side of the street. A white police officer sitting in the car saw me and said, loudly, “Hey, come here.”
As I approached the car and was only a few feet away from him, he asked me: “Is that a gun in your pocket?”
I said, “No, it's my hair pick.” It had a wooden handle shaped like the map of Africa.
“Let me see it,” he said.
I took it out of my front pocket and he looked at it. I was very careful not to point it at him and held it pointing downwards.
Fully aware of who and what I was as a black man, facing a white police officer, I did not want to give him any kind of excuse, not the slightest excuse – none whatsoever – for him to pull out his gun and shoot me. He could have said I pointed a gun at him and that was why he shot and killed me.
Next, he asked me, “Where are you going?”
I said, “To my friend's house.”
“Where does he live?”
I told him where my friend lived. He came from Trinidad but I did not mention that to the police officer.
He finally said, “OK,” and I left.
I was not offended because that was something I expected to happen to me as a black man. I knew whites are not randomly and routinely stopped and searched by police officers the way black people, especially young black men, are. And I knew it was wrong for the police officer to stop me simply because I was black.
My main concern, not fear, was what he was thinking when he called me. As a white policeman, seeing a black man walking on the street, he may have thought I was “just another black thug from the ghetto, up to no good. You know how these niggers are.”
I lived in the ghetto during that time even though the policeman did not know that. I never told him where I lived and he never asked me about that. But he probably assumed that was where I lived, in the ghetto, home to most blacks in Grand Rapids just like other blacks across the nation who also live in the inner city.
But even if I told him I did not live in the ghetto, and he believed me, it would have made absolutely no difference to him in terms of perception of what type of person I was: first and foremost, as a black man suspected of breaking the law, carrying a concealed weapon, a pistol in my pocket, without a permit. He may have seen me as a potential criminal or just a criminal. That is the first thing that is on the mind of many white police officers when they see and stop black men in the streets.
The perception is reinforced by the racial stereotype many whites have about blacks. They say we all look alike. They even probably believe we also think alike, think the same way as a monolithic whole, usually in a negative way.
They think many of us think about committing crime more than anything else, especially stealing and robbing people.
This perception and misconception, and denigration of black people, also applies to blacks who live outside the ghetto including those who live in integrated neighbourhoods and even in affluent areas.
Many whites say we are all the same in terms of mentality, conduct and way of life, a belief that validates in their minds the saying which is loaded with racist connotations: “You can take a Negro out of the ghetto but you can't take the ghetto out of the Negro.”
Therefore, to the white police officer who stopped me for no reason besides racial profiling, I was “just another nigger.” “That's how niggers are. Committing all that crime.”
That is the attitude of many white police officers and other whites. In fact, that's why he stopped me and asked me where was I going and if what I had in my pocket was a gun.
The list goes on and on – about the things they say about black people. Many other whites, not just white police officers, including those who have black friends and others who say they like black people, have the same attitude towards blacks.
Had I been a white man, just walking, the police officer would probably not even have kept on looking at me – let alone stop me and ask me to go to him. The colour of my skin triggered something in his mind right away which could have had lethal consequences for me.
To many white policemen, just looking at us, our black skin, infuriates them and has their adrenaline flowing, ready to pull the trigger – just at the sight of a black man – and do the unthinkable.
I was black, therefore suspected of doing or getting ready to do something wrong, including having a pistol in my pocket to try and rob someone.
Many young black men are prime suspects and are known to “carry guns.” Whites including police officers really believe that.
I knew there are things in life I have to be prepared to face as a black person in a predominantly white society without anger or animosity and simply go on with my life even if what I say may be misconstrued as condoning racism.
It is simply a fact of life and we have to live with it. And that includes racial profiling by the police, by white business owners and employees in stores and shops who constantly watch or follow black customers around, men and women, young and old, because they believe if you are black, you are going to steal something.
Racial profiling by the police in Grand Rapids, as in other parts of the country, has sparked outrage from blacks, Hispanics and even from some whites and has sometimes been the subject of discussion at public meetings and forums and even on television.
When you are black, you are expected to stay back and at the bottom....
I had another encounter with the police, similar to the one I just described, almost eleven years before then. That was in December 1972 in New York City. I was there for about two months.
I was at LaGuardia Airport getting ready to catch a plane on a flight to Washington. D.C., to visit some of my friends from Trinidad whom I mentioned earlier.
I was waiting in line getting ready to board the plane when a uniformed police officer asked me to step aside. He was white. He asked me who I was, where I was going, and where I lived. As he was asking me those questions, he was also busy frisking me, patting me up and down. He also checked my pockets. I showed him my Tanzanian passport with a valid visa.
I told him I was staying with a relative in Manhattan. I also gave him the address, 16th Floor, Sutton House, 415 East 52nd. I showed him a card my relative had given me which he said I should show to the authorities, including the police, in case I had some problems with them. He said: “Tell them to call me.” He also signed the card.
He said as long as I stayed with him, I was not supposed to be arrested because he was a diplomat – he worked at the Tanzania Mission to the UN – and any relative living or staying with him was also covered by and protected under diplomatic immunity.
I knew about diplomatic immunity but did not know the exact circumstances under which it is invoked – besides knowing that immediate family members of diplomats, spouses and children, are protected. I did not know their relatives were also protected if they lived or stayed with them.
The Tanzania Mission to the UN was on East 42nd within walking distance from where I stayed. I went there quite often to read Tanzanian newspapers, so far away from home.
I told the police officer who my relative was and where he worked. He looked at the card and and looked at me and let me go. He was very hostile towards me. I don't know what would have happened to me had he not found out I was staying with a relative who was a diplomat.
That may have helped me. But it also showed glaring inequalities in society, any society, when some people are treated better than others – tragic cases of social injustice. Had another African, or even a black American, been in the same situation, without any connection to some influential or powerful people, he could have been arrested and locked up on mere suspicion of being a terrorist or plane hijacker.
What the white policeman did to me was clearly a case of racial profiling. But something else also stood out about me.
I was in African attire, a dashiki and a Sékou Touré hat – that's what it was called and was worn by President Sékou Touré of Guinea and was very popular among some Africans during those days – an appearance that triggered something in the policeman's mind.
He obviously thought he was dealing with a black militant. That was also in the same year (earlier in July) when some Black Panther Party members were accused of hijacking a plane to Algeria and doing other things the government did not like.
Some Black Panther Party members and other black militants also wore dashikis and other African clothes including African hats.
After I was singled out, I was fully convinced it had to do with that. The police officer may have thought I was a Black Panther or some other kind of black militant getting ready to hijack the plane.
There were other blacks, men and women, in front of me and behind me, who were not asked to step aside to be frisked by the white policeman.
I remember one of them who was just a little farther behind me and how he looked at me when I was being frisked, patted up and down, by the police officer who asked me to put my hands up.
He probably knew why. He was black himself. I doubt he thought race was not a factor in my being pulled aside and frisked by the policeman. He may have thought the same way about my very un-American attire which gave me the appearance of a black militant.
The difference was that had a white man been dressed the same way, his African clothes would probably not have raised any suspicion in the white policeman's mind that he was a potential terrorist or an airplane hijacker.
Regardless of how one looks at it, there is no question that my identity as a black man played a major role in my being singled out, in addition to my attire which to the police officer was very un-American and very militant cast in the Black Panther mould.
My experience with the policeman in New York, and with another one in Grand Rapids almost eleven years later, was only a small part of the cumulative experience of black people – the daily slights and insults and countless acts of overt and covert as well as brutal racism – which I became even more familiar with through the years because of my identity as a black person myself and living my life as a black man in a multiracial society dominated by whites in all areas.
Across the spectrum: Persistence of racism
There are numerous cases of racism spanning the entire socio-political and economic spectrum. But some of them stand out more than others do because of their egregious nature.
Besides racial injustices under the judicial system including racial profiling and police bias against blacks, discrimination in housing is one of the most persistent problems blacks face across the nation. It is also one of the pillars of racism in the United States. And it is ruthlessly public.
Segregated housing, with landlords as its sentinels, had been a virtually impregnable edifice – fortress – because it was sanctioned by law in the South and was sustained by de facto segregation in the North. And it remains a major problem, maintained and sustained by tradition after it came under assault during the civil rights movement in the sixties and was gradually dismantled in many parts of the country but without being completely overcome, as the civil rights movement anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” continues to be sung in unison, although in muted form, by different groups and individuals in different parts of the country in pursuit of racial equality even though it is an unattainable ideal except in its imperfect form.
Discrimination in housing is so serious that it can even be dangerous for blacks to move into some areas which are considered to be “white.” It is a nationwide problem and Grand Rapids is no exception, although the city has reached a level of integration that was unheard of in the seventies and even in the eighties.
When I moved from Detroit to Grand Rapids in 1976, a fundamental change had taken place in the city only six years before in terms of housing. Blacks had been virtually confined to a certain area, the ghetto in the inner city, clearly demarcated by major streets as the boundaries between black and white areas. I lived in that area for many years.
As a black man, segregation played a major role in my choice of where I wanted and could live in the city. Even if I had arrived six years before, in 1970, I probably would have made the same decision and would have chosen to live in the inner city where I would have felt I would be more welcome and safer than I would be in white neighbourhoods:
“Segregation in the city of Grand Rapids is nothing new to long-time residents who faced years of redlining. It was not until 1970 that black residents were able to purchase homes outside of Hall Street on the south, Cherry Street on the north, Fuller on the east, and the river (Grand River) to the west....
Per the Home Owners' Loan Corporation maps from 1937, Black Americans in Grand Rapids lived in areas labeled as hazardous. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation is a corporation established in 1933 under the Home Owners' Loan Corporation Act passed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The purpose of this act was to help refinance home mortgages who were at risk or in foreclosure.
During this time, The Federal Housing Administration worked with the HOLC to help grade neighborhoods from green to red. The areas where Black Americans lived were consistently labeled as red. A 'green' grading was considered the best grading and was given primarily to white resident occupied neighborhoods....
Access to high grade housing and economic prosperity has been consistently denied to communities of color in the city. According to U.S. Census data, 26 percent of residents in Grand Rapids are living in poverty. Out of those unemployed in Kent County, residents of color make up 94 percent, according to the 2015 report from the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, 'The High Cost of Disparities.'” – (Michelle Jokisch Polo, “Grandville Avenue: A Neighborhood Confronted with a History of Redlining and Segregation,” On The Ground, Grand Rapids, Michigan, November 2017).
I lived in the black area described above for almost sixteen years before moving to a sparsely integrated neighborhood on the northeast side of the city where I also lived for many years....
The incidents of raw-naked racism I experienced, directly, through the years – as have many other blacks including those who were born and brought up in the United States – show that there are some whites who still don't want to accept blacks; it had nothing to do with my being foreign-born – it had to do with my blackness.
But what I experienced did not surprise me at all as a black man in a predominantly white society where there are still many racists, probably millions of them.
Many blacks have numerous incidents of racism to talk about including some in which black people have lost their lives.
So, it was nothing new to me; nothing shocking.
I had, after all, experienced racism in my home country, Tanganyika, as the country was known during British colonial rule and in the early part of independence, an experience which hardened me towards racial injustices and even had me accept racial segregation simply as a way of life that had to be accepted, tolerated or ignored, morally reprehensible as it was and because of its power dynamics....
I lived under segregation when I was growing up in Tanganyika, a form of apartheid reminiscent of South Africa under white minority rule.
As I explained earlier, we had separate facilities. Toilets were labelled “Africans,” “Asians,” and “Europeans.” Some hotels were only for “Europeans” and were labelled that way. Black people were not allowed to eat or drink there. It was unthinkable for most blacks even to attempt to go in there.
There were also separate schools for Europeans, Asians and Africans. Schools for Africans – black pupils and students – were the worst, poorly funded and with inadequate facilities.
The judicial system was also biased against blacks; it was intended to serve whites and protect their privileged status. We had no recourse to law against whites.
It was colonial rule. We were just colonial subjects and did not have the same rights whites had – if we had any at all – in a country that was owned by them as a colonial possession although it was ours.
Even the primary school I attended had poor facilities because it was a school for black children. It was a government school and deliberately poorly funded by the British colonial government.
I therefore grew up under a system whose foundation was segregation, deliberately intended to keep members of different races separate and unequal.
I even remember the toilets we used, still labelled “Africans” even after independence in the sixties, and how nasty and filthy they were. I vividly remember one at the main bus station in the town of Mbeya, the capital of the Southern Highlands Province, where I came from. I used it many times.
That was the only public toilet black people could use. It was still labelled “Africans” years after independence, a chilling reminder of an inglorious past.
I remember using the toilet during holidays when I was a student, going to and from Songea Secondary School, a boarding school in southern Tanzania I attended from 1965 to 1968.
I slept at the bus station, on the floor, with the other students as well as other passengers, all black. There were no chairs or benches. Whites and other non-whites did not sleep there – if they had to, there would have been better facilities for them including chairs since colonial times.
There was also, in the town of Mbeya, the Mbeya Club and Mbeya Hotel exclusively for whites before independence; Mbeya School only for white children, mostly of British settlers; and a residential area for whites only, again mostly British.
I also spent a part of my childhood in Mbeya from 1953 to 1955. My family and I moved from Kigoma in the Western Province to Morogoro in the Coast Province in 1952, and from Morogoro to Mbeya in 1953, a town in the Southern Highlands Province with a cool climate which reminded whites settlers of the temperate climate in Europe.
It was also a town of racial contrasts, with whites enjoying privileged status in all areas sharply contrasted with the way we lived as black people.
Those are some of the striking parallels between life in Tanganyika during British colonial rule and life for blacks in the United States, especially in the South, during the era of segregation....
My American experience has broadened and deepened my understanding of race relations between blacks and whites after living in a society that is predominantly white and in which blacks are on the periphery of the mainstream in terms of power dynamics over which they have no control because of their powerlessness and minority status.
It is this minority status and powerlessness which makes them vulnerable to the whims and caprice of even some of the weakest members of the white community but who consider themselves to be powerful because they are members of the larger society and identify themselves with those who are in power because they are fellow whites....
In many cases, just being black is enough to cost black people their lives. You are automatically sentenced to death at birth when you are black.
If you live a long life, or even for only a few years, it's because the death sentence has not been carried out, not because it has been reversed. It's still hanging over your head every minute and every second of your entire life. You could be executed anytime.
Tragically, in many cases, the people who impose the death sentence and carry it out – the police – are the very same people who are supposed to protect you and who know they're killing you just because you are black. They are the judge, jury and executioner.
Just stepping out of your house becomes a matter of life and death if you are black, fearing you may not return home alive if you have an encounter with the police even if you have done nothing wrong.
That is what it means to black. You are not just another human being if you are black.
Part Five
Reflections on Race Relations: A Personal Odyssey
MY LIFE is a convergence of many experiences I have had in two countries, on two continents, dominated by members of one race at the expense of others. In the first one, colonial Tanganyika, it was at the expense of the black majority; in the second one, the United States, at the expense of the black minority and other racial and ethnic groups but especially blacks who have been victimised and stigmatised since slavery.
I am an embodiment, and a reflection, of those experiences as an integral part of the collective human experience regardless of the different paths we may take as individuals and as groups as we traverse this vast expense of planet Earth in our short journey through life.
As an individual, I am a product of two worlds, Third and First in that order, because of my history. But I am also, more than anything else, a product of Africa, Tanganyika and later Tanzania in particular, as the country of my birth and upbringing.
My formative years were during British colonial rule. That was when I lived under segregation, a form of apartheid not very much different from the racial segregation practised in apartheid South Africa during those years and in the following decades.
But I am also a product of one of the most racially diverse countries in the world, the United States, where I have lived the longest.
The difference between the two, in terms of my experience, is that when I was growing up in Tanganyika in the 1950s, I was a victim of racial segregation and discrimination without knowing I was being victimised because of my racial identity. I was under 10 years of age. When I came to the United States, I already knew what racism meant. I was 23 years old.
My country won independence on 9 December 1961 when I was 12 years, two months and five days old. So, I was a victim of colonial domination for at least twelve years of my life and remember very well that whites, as well as Asians, lived far better than we did in terms of material comfort.
I remember when my maternal uncle Chonde Mwambapa took me on his bicycle to the town of Tukuyu to watch fireworks and celebrate when the Union Jack came down and our national flag went up at midnight at a football (soccer) field in the town of Tukuyu signalling the dawn of a new era as the independent country of Tanganyika.
But it was until when I became a teenager, especially in the late sixties, that I came to know what racism really meant and realised what I went through in the fifties as a colonial subject under our British rulers.
It was an awakening that sparked my interest in race relations and fuelled my enthusiasm in trying to understand why many people felt they were so different from members of other races and why they felt it was so important and necessary to be different from other people, and live separately, even if it meant trampling on the rights of others just to be different.
I also knew that in spite of all the differences we had, we also had so much in common as fellow human beings. In my case, because of my history and experience, the United States became the best laboratory for this experiment in race relations.
With all the problems it has and continues to have, and which it will undoubtedly continue to have, the United States is one of the most racially integrated countries in the world. Yet, it still faces major problems and challenges in terms of race relations, including segregation and stiff resistance to integration – any form of integration, however limited – by a significant segment of the white population.
Probably at the heart of all this is the unwillingness by many whites to accept black Americans as fellow Americans entitled to the same rights they are entitled to and which they take for granted simply because they are white – and are privileged across the spectrum for no other reason than that. In terms of privilege and all the rights that come with being American, they are the Americans, unlike blacks.
Black Americans are now officially known as “African Americans,” a term that entered the American lexicon when Jesse Jackson and some of his colleagues in the post-civil rights movement “introduced” it in 1989. Yet, they are as American as any other American in spite of the fact that many whites and even people of other races don't accept them as equal human beings.
A lot of that has to do with the “perceived” inferiority of black people – perception is reality – regardless of how accomplished many of them are. They are still “children” of Africa, tied to their motherland – “backward” and “primitive” – by an umbilical chord that cannot be severed and through which stereotypes continue to flow from the “dark continent” inhabited by people with dark skin which “proves” they also have “dark minds”; a crucible of identity which has also shaped the identity of Africa's offspring in the diaspora including America.
It is these stereotypes about Africa which continue to define, shape and sustain the negative image of her children in America and everywhere else round the globe.
Therefore, the refusal by many whites – even by other Americans who are not black – to accept black people as fellow human beings equal to them also has, frankly speaking, to do with just how black people look: black.
Even if they have just a little black African ancestry, they tell other people that they are “black.” However racially mixed they are, they are still automatically classified as “black,” and are even treated as black, as long as they identify themselves as black people.
That has also been used to justify segregation and as a rationale for excluding members of “the lesser breed,” blacks, from the rest of humanity.
Thus, in the United States, you find neighbourhoods and communities that are white or predominantly white where everybody else is welcome and accepted except blacks. Orientals and other Asians, Hispanics, Arabs, Native Americans and others can move in, except blacks.
But also in many cases, nobody is welcome in white areas except whites. Integration is out of the question. Segregation is the only accepted way of life to maintain racial purity and privilege. And it is mantra that has been invoked by many whites throughout American history.
In many parts of the United States, segregation is a thing of the past, an anachronism and a historical anomaly. But it is also still remembered by many whites, with nostalgia, when it was legal during those days, “the good old days,” when America was really America – for whites.
Segregation also is a clarion call, invoked by a significant number of whites as a defence mechanism against the black “plague” – the “influx” of black people into white neighbourhoods more than anything else – and as the only way to preserve their way of life.
Many whites deny that. Many of them, if not the majority, contend racism is a thing of the past. Yet, America still is a deeply divided nation along racial lines.
It did not become that way in 2017 when Donald Trump became president. He only emboldened racists to publicly air their views and articulate their position as champions of white supremacy. And he encouraged them, with his incendiary rhetoric and actions, to do so.
He also proved he had a large number of supporters, tens of millions of them, in all parts of the country. That is why he won almost half of the entire electorate when he sought a second term in 2020 although he lost to Joe Biden.
He won more than 74 million votes against Biden's more than 81 million; a difference of 7 million votes, true, yet quite an impressive feat by Trump, in spite of his blatantly racist views, showing that almost half of the entire country agreed with him, however crude he was in his manners and in the way he expressed those views.
He was so powerful that he was again acquitted of all charges when he was impeached for the second time, charged with inciting his supporters to attack the US Capitol, in a deadly riot, when lawmakers met to certify Biden's victory in the presidential election; such was the unconditional loyalty to Trump Republican senators had and showed amidst all the charges, and all the evidence, against him.
All that meant nothing, absolutely nothing, to them – except their loyalty to Trump. They sacrificed principle just to defend and protect Trump, not even their party as the embodiment of American conservatism.
Even after he lost the 2020 presidential election, he could not be dismissed as a spent force. He remained a potent force in the Republican party and in the conservative movement even if he was not a true conservative but a rabble-rousing nativist who flouted conservative principles throughout his term as president.
And he will for a long time directly or indirectly through his surrogates have a profound impact on the conservative movement with dire consequences for the future of the Republican party. His presidency may have marked the beginning of the end of the Republican party in the tradition of Ronald Reagan and other true conservatives such as Jack Kemp including political pundits George Will and William F. Buckley Jr.
Trump's dominant position as the most powerful leader in the Republican party could split the party into two factions, pro-Trump and anti-Trump, and even lead to formation of another conservative party by prominent Republicans disgusted with him or one by Trump himself and his supporters if they feel the Republican party has rejected them. That will be end of the Republican party as a potent force in national politics including presidential elections. Thanks to Trump.
His mantra was “Make America Great Again.” The message was clear: “Make America White Again,” ignoring the fact that it had been white all the time, since its founding, in terms of power.
Millions of whites had been defending their comfort zones, away from blacks and other nonwhites, long before Trump became president and even long before he was born. There was segregation then, there is still segregation today, however diminished it may be. But it still exists. And it is a blot on the conscience of America, a nation that preaches but does not always practise, “In God We Trust.” As Professor Robin D'Angelo, author of What Does it Mean to be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy, stated in her article, “Why It's So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism,” in the Huffington Post:
“I am white. I have spent years studying what it means to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet is deeply divided by race....
Most whites live, grow, play, learn, love, work and die primarily in racial segregation. Yet, our society does not teach us to see this as a loss.
Pause for a moment and consider the magnitude of this message: We lose nothing of value by not having cross-racial relationships. In fact, the whiter our schools and neighborhoods are, the more likely they are to be seen as 'good.' The implicit message is that there is no inherent value in the presence or perspectives of people of Color.
This is an example of the relentless messages of white superiority that circulate all around us, shaping our identities and perspectives....(and) worldviews.” – Robin D'Angelo, “Why It's So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism,” Huffington Post. See also Robin D'Angelo,“What Does it Mean to Be White?,” The Seattle Times, Seattle, Washington, 9 August 2014).
That is the comfort zone of whiteness in a multiracial – or multicoloured – society. The rest, demarcated physically and psychologically by the members of the dominant white race, are zones of discomfort inhabited by those who have to endure racial injustices, humiliation and disadvantages throughout their lives simply because of what they are: nonwhite.
America has never been a truly rainbow nation constituting a monolithic whole. Trump showed how “united” America was, with half of the country being on his side against the other America.
I lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for many years. The status of black people – in a city on the banks of the Grand River – was no different from that of other blacks in other parts of the country. Racial inequalities defined their position in society.
Flawed from the beginning as a racial hierarchy: Structural imbalance
The United States was supposedly founded on the twin ideals of liberty and equality. In reality, it was founded on slavery.
The institution of slavery led to the institutionalisation of a racial hierarchy whose racial inequalities continue to haunt the nation today as much as they have since its founding.
Its flawed foundation led to structural imbalance of a society with built-in racial biases and distorted by racism whose primary victims have been blacks throughout the nation's history.
Talk about racial inequalities in the United States; you are talking about black people more than anybody else. Talk about the most American of all Americans besides Native Americans; you are talking about African Americans and their African ancestors who, as slaves, laid the foundation of America as a country and as a nation.
As a racial minority, black people have throughout American history been on the periphery of the mainstream even if as an integral part of society. Racism has been the defining feature of their status and the prime factor for such marginalisation.
It has pushed to – and kept black people on – the margins of society, forcing them play only a marginal role in a country they helped to build in what is one of the most racially diverse societies in the history of mankind, yet whose fate is determined by the white majority across the spectrum: social, political and economic.
Blacks in Grand Rapids are no exception. As in other parts of the country, the city of Grand Rapids has a long history of racism including the existence of the most vicious racist group in American history, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Racism has also manifested itself in other crude ways at different times in the city's history:
“With the increase of negative sentiments, treatment and false stereotypes of black Americans came the further separation and segregation between the white working class and black citizens, as evidenced by the formation in the 1920s of the first Klu Klux Klan 'club' in Grand Rapids South High School, located at Hall Street and Jefferson Avenue.” – (Michelle Jokisch Polo, “Facing Racism: The Lasting Effects of Discrimination in GR's Southeast Community,” On The Ground, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2 February 2017).
When I moved from Detroit to Grand Rapids in January 1976, the city was not much different from what it had been for decades in terms of racism. It was a segregated city. And it was predominantly white as it still is.
Lines had literally been drawn decades earlier to keep blacks and whites separate. Racial boundaries may have been fluid in terms of interactions between blacks and whites, even though only on a limited scale, but in terms of where whites lived and where blacks lived, the boundaries were fixed and firm: demarcations of racial communities deliberately drawn to enforce and virtually legitimise residential segregation.
Such segregation may have been illegal – and it was after the Fair Housing Act also known as the Open Housing Act was enacted in 1968. But it was sanctioned by tradition.
Black people knew where they were supposed to live, the southeast side, and severe restrictions on mobility – opportunities for them to move and live in other areas – ensured they did.
Yet they built this country, their suffering and enormous contribution which made America, America, indelibly etched on the American landscape in all areas even if other Americans pretend they don't see it. As David L. Cohn put it in God Shakes Creation:
This land is first and foremost
his handiwork.
It was he who brought order
out of primeval wilderness...
Wherever one looks in this land,
whatever one sees that is the work of man,
was erected by the toiling
straining bodies of blacks.
Reprinted in Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, New York: Random House, 2010, p. 3.
Black people are still treated by many whites as strangers in their own land which wouldn't be what it is had they not built it the way they did.
Even as late as 1970, about six years before I arrived in Grand Rapids, black people could not cross the line – in terms of housing – and live in an area that was so close to their home district, the ghetto, in this city on the banks of the Grand River:
“Black Americans were prohibited from settling...south of the railroad tracks...until 1970.” – (Ibid.).
South High School, located only a few hundred yards away from the railway tracks which run through an area south of the school, produced some of the most prominent figures in the history of Grand Rapids. Among its alumni was Gerald Ford, a native of Grand Rapids, who became president of the United States.
The school was built in an area that was almost exclusively for whites. When they started moving out and blacks started moving in, gradually, the area was radically transformed in terms of demographics and racial composition and became a predominantly black neighbourhood. The black neighbourhood became an integral part of the ghetto.
It became harder and harder for blacks to find housing – renting an apartment or buying a house – as whites deliberately kept them out of their areas, especially when increasing numbers of black people gradually moved to Grand Rapids from other parts of the country, mostly from the southern states.
The inability of black people to find homes in other parts of the city – except in the ghetto – played a major role in prompting some blacks to establish their own residential area where blacks would be free from segregation. They founded a settlement, Auburn Hills, that still exists but as an integrated community.
It was established after stiff resistance by whites including city officials.
Located on the northeast side of the city, it became, through the years, one of the most integrated parts of Grand Rapids in a city that had resisted integration almost throughout its entire history.
Aunurn Hills was the first black settlement to be built in Grand Rapids in response to racism and residential segregation
The people who were responsible for its establishment were a product of the Great Migration of black people from the South to the North in search of better life.
Black people who settled in Grand Rapids in significant numbers had been a part of that migration in search of jobs in the North.
The Great Migration was also a move that enabled them to get away from the brutal racial oppression they suffered in the South where racists were blunt about their dislike for blacks unlike their northern counterparts; although when black people arrived in the North, they found out that the majority of the whites were just as racist and often just as brutal as their southern counterparts.
The Great Migration, also known as the Black Migration, took place between 1916 and 1970. Most blacks who migrated North and to the west came from the rural areas of the South. They came from all over the South – Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky. Some of them also came from towns and cities all over the South, not just from the rural areas.
Before 1910, the vast majority of blacks – more than 90 per cent – lived in the southern states.
There were 665 blacks in Grand Rapids in 1910, according to statistics provided by the federal government.
After the Great Migration, about 50 per cent of black Americans remained in the southern states.
The biggest migration took place in the 1940s and 1950s.
Altogether from 1916, at least six million blacks moved – or fled – North in what became one of the biggest migrations in recorded history, not just in American history. As Professor Nicholas Lemann states in his book, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America:
“The Great Migration was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements in history—perhaps the greatest not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation. In sheer numbers it outranks the migration of any other ethnic group—Italians or Irish or Jews or Poles—to [the United States]. For blacks, the migration meant leaving what had always been their economic and social base in America, and finding a new one.” – (Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, p. 6).
The first Great Northward Migration of blacks, also known as the Black Migration, occurred between 1916 and 1940 when about 1.6 million people moved from the rural South and a few urban areas to the northern cities.
The Second Great Migration took place between 1940 and 1970. At least 5 million blacks moved North, their movement accelerated by hard economic conditions – including loss of land they once owned – which devastated many of their communities and individual families. Among the blacks who fled the South in search of better opportunities and freedom up North and in the west were many skilled blacks from towns and cities in the southern states.
They left for other reasons as well. But they all agreed on one thing: It was time to leave the South. As Isabel Wilkerson states about the Great Migration in her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration:
“They fled as if under a spell or a high fever. 'They left as though they were fleeing some curse,' wrote the scholar Emmet J. Scott. 'They were willing to make almost any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket, and they left with the intention of staying.'
From the early years of the twentieth century to well past its middle age, nearly every black family in the American South, which meant nearly every black family in America, had a decision to make. There were sharecroppers losing at settlement. Typists wanting to work in an office. Yard boys scared that a single gesture near the planter's wife would leave them hanging from an oak tree.
They were all stuck in a caste system as hard and unyielding as the red Georgia clay, and they each had a decision before them. In this, they were not unlike anyone who ever longed to cross the Atlantic or the Rio Grande.” – ( Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, op. cit., p. 8).
She goes on to state:
“It was during the First World War that a silent pilgrimage took its first steps within the borders of this country.
The fever rose without warning or notice or much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach. It would not end until the 1970s and would set into motion changes in the North and South that no one, not even the people doing the leaving, could have imagined at the start of it or dreamed would take nearly a lifetime to play out.
Historians would come to call it the Great Migration. It would become perhaps the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century. It was vast. It was leaderless. It crept along so many thousands of currents over so long a stretch of time as to be difficult for the press truly to capture while it was underway.
Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America.
The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.
During this time, a good portion of all black Americans alive picked up and left the tobacco farms of Virginia, the rice plantations of South Carolina, cotton fields in east Texas and Mississippi, and the villages and backwoods of the remaining southern states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, and, by some measures, Oklahoma.
They set out for cities they had whispered of among themselves or had seen in a mail-order catalogue. Some came straight from the field with their King James Bibles and old twelve-string guitars. Still some were townspeople looking to be their fuller selves, tradesmen following their customers, pastors trailing their flocks.” – (Ibid., pp. 8 – 9).
She further states:
“They would cross into alien lands with fast, new ways of speaking and carrying oneself and with hard-to-figure rules and laws.
The New World held out higher wages but staggering rents that people had to calculate like a foreign currency. The places they went to were big, frightening, and already crowded – New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and smaller, equally foreign cities – Syracuse, Oakland, Milwaukee, Newark, Gary. Each turned into a 'receiving station and port of refuge,' wrote poet Carl Sandburg, then a Chicago newspaper reporter documenting the unfolding migration there.
The people did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island. They were already citizens. But where they came from, they were not treated as such. Their every step was controlled by the meticulous laws of Jim Crow, a nineteenth-century minstrel figure that would become shorthand for the violently enforced codes of the southern caste system.
The Jim Crow regime persisted from the 1880s to the 1960s, some eighty years, the average life span of a fairly healthy man. It afflicted the lives of at least four generations and would not die without bloodshed, as the people who left the South foresaw.
Over time, this mass relocation would come to dwarf the California Gold Rush of the 1850s with its one hundred thousand participants and the Dust Bowl migration of some three hundred thousand people from Oklahoma and Arkansas to California in the 1930s. But more remarkable, it was the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free.
'The story of the Great Migration is among the most dramatic and compelling in all chapters of American history,' the Mississippi historian Neil McMillen wrote toward the end of the twentieth century. 'So far reaching are its effects even now that we scarcely understand its meaning.'
Its imprint is everywhere in urban life. The configuration of the cities as we know them, the social geography of black and white neighborhoods, the spread of the housing projects as well as the rise of a well-scrubbed black middle class, along with the alternating waves of white flight and suburbanization – all of these grew, directly or indirectly, from the response of everyone touched by the Great Migration.
So, too, rose the language and music of urban America that sprang from the blues that came with the migrants and dominates our airwaves to this day. So, too, came the people who might not have existed, or become who they did, had there been no Great Migration. People as diverse as James Baldwin and Michelle Obama, Miles Davis and Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington, and anonymous teachers, store clerks, steelworkers, and physicians, were all products of the Great Migration. They were all children whose life chances were altered because a parent or grandparent had made the hard decision to leave.
The Great Migration would not end until the 1970s, when the South began finally to change – the whites-only signs came down, the all-white schools opened up, and everyone could vote. By then nearly half of all black Americans – some forty-seven percent – would be living outside the South, compared to ten percent when the Migration began....
By the time it was over, no northern or western city would be the same....
It was a 'folk movement of incalculable moment,' McMillen said.
And more than that, it was the first big step the nation's servant class ever took without asking.” – (Ibid., pp. 9 – 10, and 11).
One of their destinations was Grand Rapids in a region of the United States known as the Midwest. The Midwest is composed of states – including Michigan – in the northern central part of the country.
The Great Migration changed America. But it did not change the status of black people. It did not make them equal to whites in spite of the achievements of the civil rights movement.
Black people are still on the periphery of the mainstream in many areas of life – the underclass trapped in poverty being the best example – in terms of power, opportunities, social mobility and access to resources on an equitable basis because full racial equality is not a reality in a country where racism is a major problem; its persistence being attributed to the unwillingness of the majority of whites to see blacks people as equal to them.
The problem has been exacerbated by an ideological shift from the centre to the right.
During the past several decades since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 as president, the country has gradually shifted in a conservative direction, accelerated by the resurgence of white nationalism which culminated in the election of Donald Trump as president when he appealed to white sentiments and focused on white voters to mobilise support for his presidential quest.
Black people in Grand Rapids, a distinct minority, have remained very much on the periphery of the city's mainstream and in determining the city's destiny – even though they are an integral part of it – because of their minority status in a city where they are far outnumbered by whites; a numerical preponderance that tips scales in favour of whites practically in all areas of life.
When Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in his classic work The Souls of Black Folk almost 120 years ago that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colour line, he may not have anticipated racism would still be one of the major problems of the twentieth-first century, fuelled by the rise of white nationalism in its virulent form in Europe and its offshoot America with repercussions round the globe.
White nationalism also is disguised as a form of patriotism in response to high rates of immigration – the “influx” of nonwhites from the Third World into predominantly white countries, leading to erosion of white identity and standards of living.
Ironically, migration across continents as a global phenomenon has been accelerated by globalisation which is spearheaded and promoted by the white industrialised nations of the West including the United States – more than anybody else – for their own benefit, especially economic, as they seek cheap raw materials from Third World countries and markets in those countries for their manufactured goods. Third Worlders also migrate to the West and other countries – across “open borders” facilitated by globalisation – in search of greener pastures.
But it is a bilateral or reciprocal relationship white nationalists don't accept as they seek unilateral advantages for their own countries at the expense of Third Worlders.
Africans are a significant part of this migratory trend, demonstrated even in Grand Rapids by an increase in the number of immigrants from Africa through the years, especially since the nineties, coincidentally or not, the same decade when globalisation gained momentum after the collapse of communism which ushered in the dawn of a new era following the end of the Cold War.
The nineties were also some of the bloodiest years in the history of post-colonial Africa. Many countries across the continent descended into chaos, wracked by civil wars and other forms of strife, and earned the unenviable distinction as “failed states.”
The conflicts forced tens of thousands of Africans to seek refuge in the West, including the United States which drew the largest number of refugees from the embattled continent.
They also had a rude awakening when they faced racism wherever they sought asylum, including the United States, a country that has been hailed as “the melting pot” and the citadel of democracy, welcoming those yearning to be free.
Yet, in spite of all that, they were still better off in America than they were in Africa where life was hard and even intolerable for some of them because their countries had dissolved in anarchy.
They also found out that America was not paradise on Earth as many of them thought it was when they were still in Africa.
United yet divided as a nation
The United States still is a nation divided along racial lines. One of the most glaring manifestations of racial division in the country is segregation in housing.
More than 50 years after the Fair Housing Act was enacted in 1968, segregation in housing still is a major problem, especially for blacks more than any other racial group across the nation, in spite of the progress that has been made to achieve racial integration.
Even in terms of home ownership, blacks are at a great disadvantage. They own fewer homes, in terms of percentage, than any other racial or ethnic group in Grand Rapids and in other parts of the country. And they are hardest-hit by segregation.
There is an invisible racial hierarchy that is very real but whose existence is hardly acknowledged even by socio-political pundits of all ideological stripes. Black people are at the bottom of this hierarchy in terms of social mobility and acceptance by whites and members of other races. That partly explains why there is so much segregation against blacks. Even people of other races – a significant if not a large number of them – besides whites don't want to live or associate with blacks.
In terms of the larger society, which stipulates terms of how members of other races live and function as an integral part of the nation even if they are kept on the periphery, segregation is its very foundation.
Opposition to racial integration in housing has historically been in the form of organised resistance – not just opposition by individuals such as landlords and neighbours – and has even been in the form of public display of defiance of the ideals upon which the United States was founded; ideals which through the years have meant nothing or very little to black people when they are denied liberty and equality – for example, where to live – in the land of their birth.
Segregation is an intractable problem because it is a product of structural racism which perpetuates the advantages white people – including those opposed to racism – have over blacks and other nonwhites.
Whites have historical advantages over blacks. They also have cultural advantages – the dominant culture is Euro-American, hence white – as well as institutional advantages in a country where institutions are controlled and dominated by whites, enabling them to have advantages – social, political and economic – they would not have if the institutions were controlled by members of all races, not just by whites, on an equitable basis.
Structural racism is the most pervasive form of racism, and the most stubborn to eradicate, because of its all-encompassing nature.
Even whites who have the best intentions to help blacks and other nonwhites cannot do much without society as a whole, primarily the larger society which is white, addressing the problem of structural racism and the way society is structured and sustained along racial lines. It is a monumental task. But it can be done even if it entails and requires a complete overhaul of some structures which sustain structural racism.
It is structural racism – more than any other form of racism – which perpetuates racial inequalities in terms of power and opportunities and which reinforces racist beliefs as well as perceptions including racial stereotypes. It is also structural racism that reinforces the negative impact of white dominance and domination which is derived from the majority status of whites and the power they exercise in the American society.
Even whites who are committed to racial equality and are offended by the mistreatment of blacks and other nonwhites are beneficiaries of racism, including segregation.
Segregation, a product of structural racism, benefits all whites when they live in better neighbourhoods just because they are white and getter better services in those areas also simply because they are white.
The debilitating effects of structural racism have had a profound impact on the lives of black people not just in Grand Rapids but across the nation.
Even the interpersonal effects of racism can be traced to the structural nature of the American society built on and sustained by notions of white superiority which reinforces structural racism.
It is a tragedy that the ideology of white supremacy is gradually becoming mainstream, legitimised by some politicians and conservative political pundits in the media and even by some academic intellectuals on the ideological right. It is also seeping into the minds of some white boys and girls in schools and from all walks of life, absorbed from conservative media outlets including discussion forums on the Internet and propaganda material disseminated by white racist groups.
Sophisticated racists have discarded the hood and the Klan robe. They now wear suits and occupy white-collar positions in corporate offices across the board.
The neighbour next-door, friendly and going to church, could be one of them, steeped in white supremacist ideology.
Yet little is being done to combat this ideology of hate as the country keeps on drifting father and farther to the right of the ideological spectrum. There is no concerted effort by people of conscience to launch a counter-attack in order to neutralise this offensive.
Purveyors of white supremacy are more organised, on sustained basis, than their opponents are. And they are equally dangerous as individuals, including lone wolves, not just when they work together in groups.
Individual racism, inextricably linked with structural racism, also has historical and cultural roots in a society where black people have always been considered to be inferior to whites and therefore not good enough even to be near or around them – let alone live with them in the same community or neighbourhood.
That has been demonstrated through the centuries since the founding of the nation.
Even in recent years – in spite of all the progress the country has made in its quest for racial equality – there are still some whites who, because of their instinctive aversion to black people, publicly express their revulsion against racial equality by desperately trying to bar blacks from public places and even from the buildings in which they live or from predominantly white areas even when they are just passing through or simply walking in those areas.
It has happened in many parts of the country including Grand Rapids, decades after segregation was outlawed.
Even as recently as 2020, it was unacceptable – by some whites – for black people to live the way they wanted to live even when they did not break the law.
There have been many incidents – reported by the media and even televised– in which whites across the country have called the police on black people to have them arrested simply because they were doing things whites do all time without being considered to be criminals: simply walking on the street, having a picnic in the park, entering an apartment building where they live, and so on.
They want black people to stay in “their own areas,” live in “their own world”– only God knows where when they all share the same country – and preferably vanish from the face of the earth.
Even more than 50 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, an apostle of non-violence and a tireless champion of racial equality and integration yet who was vilified as a troublemaker, there seems to be stubborn resistance to integration among many whites because of their unwillingness to accept black people as their brothers and sisters. King preached the brotherhood of man. He was shot and killed because of that.
One of the “bloodiest” battlegrounds against racial integration has been schools because of their ability to bring children of all races together and enable them to become friends – brothers and sisters – when they are in class together, when they play together on the same playgrounds, and when they eat together at the same table. Many whites are terrified of that. They hate racial integration.
It is also the fear of blacks becoming their relatives – although millions of them are already related to black people even if they don't know that – not just the fear of integrating with people whom they consider to be inferior to them in all conceivable ways which makes many whites uncomfortable being around them more than members of any other race; their mere presence on American soil being viewed by a significant number of whites as a threat to their existence
Yet they say they believe in Christ, especially in a country where the vast majority of the people are Christian and whose motto is “In God We Trust.”
More than one hundred years ago, Dr. W.E. B. Du Bois captured the essence of this moral ambivalence and of the brotherhood of man, including the humanity of black people, when he wrote in 1904:
“I believe in God who made of one blood all races that dwell on earth. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying, through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and in the possibility of infinite development.
Especially do I believe in the Negro race; in the beauty of its genius, the sweetness of its soul, and its strength in that meekness which shall inherit this turbulent earth.
I believe in pride of race and lineage itself; in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves; in pride of race so chivalrous as neither to offer bastardy to the weak nor beg wedlock of the strong, knowing that men may be brothers in Christ, even though they be not brothers-in-law.” – W.E.B. Du Bois,”Credo,” 1904, reprinted in Jet, Chicago, Illinois, USA, Vol. 24, No. 21, 12 September 1963).
There is nothing of intrinsic value in skin colour itself, although it can be a symbol of pride as a badge of one's racial identity instead of being ashamed of it. Otherwise it is meaningless in terms of man's intrinsic worth.
Yet it has been misused throughout man's history at the expense of those who are “not our people” or those who are “not a part of us” because they are members of a different race. A leopard can't change its spots.
Skin colour is often used as a badge of honour, in a perverted way, by millions of people instead of being seen as a bond of brotherhood in celebration of diversity among men. And its negative impact on race relations continues to reverberate throughout the American society, best exemplified by opposition to full integration.
Still, stubborn resistance to racial integration and racial equality among many whites, not just in Grand Rapids but across the nation, is a problem that should also be accepted as simply a fact of life.
There will be always such people who will never accept blacks.
True integration is a myth. There is no such thing as full integration just as there is no pure democracy. That is just how life is in an imperfect world of imperfect beings who are driven by one primary instinct more than any other. And that is self-preservation which is also used to justify racial discrimination:
“We are fighting to preserve our racial heritage and identity. We are fighting for the survival of our race by excluding people of other races.”
Yet they can't explain how all that justifies denying black people and other nonwhites their rights to which they are equally entitled as human beings.
Still, something can be done to alleviate the problem: government intervention and vigorous law enforcement, especially of civil rights laws, complemented by education – in integrated forums – on the imperative need for racial harmony even if it does not lead to racial integration in all cases.
Also, a concerted effort should be made to establish communities where people of different races who willingly want to live together can do so. This will help to reduce racial conflict. And those who who don't want to integrate with people of other races should be left alone – as long as they don't violate the rights of others.
You cannot force people to accept other people just as you cannot force them to hate them. Yet people of all races can live together simply as neighbours without even associating with each other or as brothers and sisters without necessarily trying to become relatives-in-law, a prospect that terrifies racists even if some of them know they have a black ancestor descended from African slaves but won't admit that because it is a family secret.
It is possible there are some whites even in Grand Rapids who have black African ancestry but are too ashamed to admit that. But even if they did, that would not solve the race problem in Grand Rapids or anywhere else or even start a meaningful conversation on race relations. Grand Rapids would remain a divided city because of structural racism more than anything else.
Structural racism is not only embedded in society; it is the very foundation of society, undermining the twin ideals of liberty and equality which are supposed to be the pillars of the republic.
Solving the race problem, which is as old as the nation itself, requires community involvement on sustained basis. Individuals, interacting among themselves, can help but they must involve others in addressing the problem. Involvement of civic groups, churches, schools and others – and interaction between them – must be at the centre of the struggle against racism.
The struggle must be everywhere because racism is everywhere. Some people simply refuse to face this reality. Yet examples of racism, ruthlessly public, abound. As Professor Beverly Daniel Tatum states:
“After exhaustive media coverage of events such as the Rodney King beating, the Charles Stuart and Susan Smith cases (Stuart, a white man, falsely claimed a black man killed his pregnant wife), the O.J. Simpson trial, the appeal to racial prejudices in electoral politics, and the bitter debates about affirmative action and welfare reform, it seems hard to imagine that anyone would still be unaware of the reality of racism in our society. But in fact, in almost every audience I address, there is someone who will suggest that racism is a thing of the past.
There is always someone who hasn't noticed the stereotypical images of people of color in the media, who hasn't observed housing discrimination in their community, who hasn't read the newspaper articles about documented racial bias in lending practices among well-known banks, who isn't aware of the racial tracking pattern at the local school, who hasn't seen the reports of rising incidents of racially motivated hate crimes in America – in short, someone who hasn't been paying attention to issues of race. But if you are paying attention, the legacy of racism is not hard to see, and we are all affected by it.” – (Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race, Accessible Publishing Systems PTY, Ltd. 2010, pp. 3 – 4).
As James Baldwin, whom Tatum has quoted in her book, stated: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – (James Baldwin, ibid., p. xviii).
Blacks as prime target
As someone who grew up under racial segregation and white domination, I know what it means to be a victim of racism and what it means to be considered inferior to members of other races.
Therefore, when I am insulted or despised simply because I am a black man, either as an individual or as a member of the black race when black people are collectively insulted directly or indirectly now and then in various ways, I am not surprised. I don't feel less human simply because those who insult me say I am. And because of my experience through the years as a victim of racism, I have been able to withstand racial insults which may shock some blacks who are insulted that way for the first time as adults, if such blacks exist at all.
I know what glorification of race does when it is intended to abuse, humiliate and oppress other people. I witnessed the significance of race – and its negative impact – in my life growing up in colonial Tanganyika and even after independence when my home country was still known as Tanganyika, and even later when it became Tanzania after uniting with Zanzibar to form one nation. I also witnessed the significance of race – and its devastating effects on individuals and on society as a whole – after living in the United States for many years.
Race matters are important matters. And race matters. As Professor Cornel West states in his book Race Matters:
“Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them.
No other people have been taught systematically to hate themselves – psychic violence – reinforced by the powers of state and civic coercion – physical violence – for the primary purpose of controlling their minds and exploiting their labor for nearly four hundred years.
The unique combination of American terrorism – Jim Crow and lynching – as well as American barbarism – slave trade and slave labor – bears witness to the distinctive American assault on black humanity.
This vicious ideology and practice of white supremacy has left its indelible mark on all spheres of American life – from the prevailing crimes of Amerindian reservations to the discriminatory realities against Spanish-speaking Latinos to racial stereotypes against Asians.
Yet the fundamental litmus test for American democracy – its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture – remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twentieth-first century remains the problem of the color line....
The legacy of white supremacy lingers – often in the face of the very denials of its realities.” – (Cornel West, Race Matters, Boston, Massachusetts, USA: Beacon Press, 1993, 2001, pp. vii, viii).
He goes on to state:
“Years ago, while driving from New York to teach at Williams College, I was stopped on fake charges of trafficking cocaine. When I told the police officer I was a professor of religion, he replied, 'Yeah, and I'm the Flying Nun. Let's go, nigger.'
I was stopped three times in my first ten days in Princeton for driving too slowly on a residential street with a speed limit of twenty-five miles per hour. (And my son, Clifton, already has similar memories at the tender age of fifteen.)
Needless to say, these incidents are dwarfed by those like Rodney King's beating or the abuse of black targets by the FBI's COINTELPRO efforts in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the memories cut like a merciless knife at my soul.
We confine discussions about race in America to the 'problems' black people pose for whites rather than consider what this way of viewing black people reveals about us as a nation....To engage in a serious discussion of race in America, we must begin not with the problems of black people but with the flaws of American society – flaws rooted in historic inequalities and longstanding cultural stereotypes.
How we set up the terms for discussing racial issues shapes our perception and response to these issues. As long as black people are viewed as a 'them,' the burden falls on blacks to do all the 'cultural' and 'moral' work necessary for healthy race relations. The implication is that only certain Americans can define what it means to be American – and the rest must simply 'fit in.'
The emergence of strong black-nationalist sentiments among blacks, especially among young people, is a revolt against this sense of having to 'fit in.'” – (Ibid., pp. Xii, 2 – 3).
He further states:
“The variety of black-nationalist ideologies, from the moderate views of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his youth to those of Louis Farrakhan today, rest upon a fundamental truth: white America has been historically weak-willed in ensuring racial justice and has continued to resist fully accepting the humanity of blacks.
As long as double standards and differential treatment abound – as long as the rap performer Ice-T is harshly condemned while former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gate's antiblack comments are received in polite silence, as long as Dr. Leonard Jeffries's anti-Semitic statements are met with vitriolic outrage while presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan's anti-Semitism receives a genteel response – black nationalisms will thrive....
We need to begin with a frank acknowledgment of the basic humanness and Americanness of each of us. And we must acknowledge that as a people – E Pluribus Unum – we are on a slippery slope toward economic strife, social turmoil, and cultural chaos. If we go down, we go down together....
The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled when our divisions are deeper. The Civil War and its legacy speak loudly here. And our divisions are growing deeper.
Today, eighty-six percent of white suburban Americans live in neighborhoods that are less than 1 percent black, meaning that the prospects for the country largely depend on how its cities fare in the hands of a suburban electorate. There is no escape from our interracial interdependence, yet enforced racial hierarchy dooms us as a nation to collective paranoia and hysteria – the unmaking of any democratic order.
The verdict in the Rodney King case which sparked the incidents in Los Angeles was perceived to be wrong by the vast majority of Americans. But whites have often failed to acknowledge the wide mistreatment of black people, especially black men, by law enforcement agencies, which helped ignite the spark.” – (Ibid., pp. 3 – 4).
The latest was the tragic murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 25 May 2020....
Black people are not just like any other Americans. They are “the other Americans,” if they are even considered “American” at all by many of their fellow countrymen.
They are in a different and very distinct category as an oppressed and victimised group, not only because of their history as victims of racism since slavery but also because even other people – not all but some of them and may be many – who are not white don't like them. They even hate them just because they are black and for other reasons as well, invoking racial stereotypes about black people which do not correspond to reality....
Black lives mean absolutely nothing to many whites and other non-blacks.
The majority of blacks are deeply suspicious of the police and other law enforcement officers. Their suspicion extends to the larger society. Many of them believe they are not fully accepted as equal members of the American society for one simple reason – because they are black and for no other reason than that.
This has led to a feeling of insecurity across black America, with blacks fearing for their lives whenever they have an encounter with the police. Whites don't have that kind of fear. Insecurity, any kind of insecurity, creates unstable societies which can even dissolve in anarchy, although the United States may not descend into the abyss as some countries have.
Almost every black community across the nation, including Grand Rapids, is a potential tinderbox. And it all can be traced to racism, a malady afflicting the larger society, not just law enforcement agencies which, in spite of their reputation for being racist or racially insensitive, have many officers who try their best to be fair to everybody regardless of race; some of them don't, and deliberately so.
Yet they are all an integral part of a system that serves the ruling class and other powerful interests in society, almost all predominantly white constituting the white power structure, at the expense of the poor of all races although poor whites are treated better than blacks and other minorities but are still victims of those in power; also at the expense of all blacks and other racial minorities regardless of their economic status.
That is why, in many cases, even black law enforcement officers are no better than their white counterparts in their treatment of fellow blacks – they all serve the same powerful interests in society, with black people being the most disadvantaged in terms of justice.
The major problem is the larger society, the incubator of racism which finds comfortable accommodation in the hearts and minds of racists who include many whites who may be sympathetic to the plight of black people as victims of racism yet think they are better than blacks morally, intellectually and in every other conceivable way except in sports, singing and dancing.
Law enforcement agencies, as an integral part of the larger society, embody and reflect the values and attitudes, virtues and vices – including racial views and beliefs as well as insensitivities – of the larger society which is predominantly white and whose moral vision of a better America for all is constantly challenged and contradicted by the racial injustices it perpetrates against its black members and other racial minorities.
A moral choice
The United States has made a lot of progress in terms of race relations. Yet there is one question America has faced since its founding and which goes to the very heart and soul of the nation. It still haunts the nation and it is an existential question. It is also a moral question. It has to do with the presence of black people in America and what to do with them. It is an issue – unresolved, irritating and perplexing – that has put the greatest country on earth and in the history of mankind in a moral quandary.
Black people are in America, and have been in America, since its founding. They laid the foundation of the country as slaves and they continued to build it throughout its history.
The dilemma the country faces, accept them or reject them, is not just a moral choice – it jeopardises the very existence of the nation as a stable entity and as an example to the rest of the world on how people of different races and backgrounds can live together in peace and harmony, and with justice for all, favouring none.
Yet, the United States has not always lived up to its ideals of liberty and equality for all even after racial discrimination and segregation were outlawed.
And who, even in their wildest imagination, would have thought the United States would one day have a president who would unleash terror, physical terror, on the very institutions upon which this country was founded as a democratic nation of law and order – to be emulated by the rest of the world – as Donald Trump did in January 2021 when his supporters, at his behest, and with unconstrained fury, attacked the Capitol, stormed into the building, sending lawmakers – congressmen and women and senators and other people – fleeing for their lives, an attack which claimed a number of lives?
For an American president – of all people – to orchestrate such a thing, which amounted to an insurrection, is unthinkable; it defies imagination. Even people in Third World countries wondered how did this great nation sink so low and become the laughing stock of the world under Trump? And how did he even get the chance to become president?
He became president because the Republican leadership, leaders of the Republican party, embraced him right from the beginning when he declared his candidacy and campaigned for office despite his flaws.
This was a president who had no respect for laws. This was a president who had no moral integrity reminiscent of Mussolini who said morality meant nothing to him; a president who did not listen to advice and ignored it when he did. He was the final arbiter on everything. He thought he was right all the time and everybody else was wrong; a president whose presidency was all about him. Everything he did was to glorify himself. And he took his party, the Republican party, down with him in blazing glory.
People around the world asked themselves: Is this really the United States we have known all along as a great nation and which we have always looked up to for leadership?
Under Trump, yes, it was. That was the United States under Trump who even went so far as to launch an attack on his fellow leaders on Capitol Hill simply because they disagreed with him and accepted the results of the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 but which he falsely claimed was stolen from him.
If he could do that to fellow leaders including fellow Republicans who defended and acquitted him of all charges during his first impeachment trial, only to acquit him again in the second, one can only imagine what he could do to black people, a people he held in utter contempt – before, during and after his presidency – and whom he did not really consider to be fellow Americans and equal to whites; prompting him to tell one African American congresswoman from Massachusetts to go back where she came from, an outburst directed, at the same time, at three other non-white congresswomen born in the United States except one who was born in Somalia.
He told them to go back to the countries where they came from in spite of the fact that they all were American citizens, born in the United States just like he was, except one.
Yet this is the leader almost half of the entire country – those who voted for him when he sought another term in 2020 – were so proud of, as the leader of the most powerful and most influential nation on earth and in the history of mankind; a leader who would wish all blacks vanished from the face of the earth.
Black people in America have faced exclusion – not inclusion – from the larger society simply because of what they are: black; the existence of ghettoes and other segregated communities for black people throughout the nation's history being the most visible symbol – and harsh reality – of such rejection by the larger society.
The existence of such communities is also a manifestation of white supremacy in its most virulent and crudest form at the institutional level since they are a product of deliberate government policies and practices which are also supported and sanctioned by tradition and by the larger society which is an integral part of the white power structure in a predominantly white country.
But black people cannot be wished away – they are not going to disappear, and they are not going anywhere. And they cannot be ignored in a country whose very existence is not even predicated on the premise of racial purity, yet acts as if it were, demonstrated by its non-acceptance of blacks as equal and full citizens in the fullest sense of the term, in practice, not just in terms of theoretical or limited acceptance.
Some of the questions white people should ask themselves concerning their treatment of black people are these:
“Why are we doing this to them? What have they done to us to deserve such treatment? Why don't we want to accept them? Why do we accept some people, such as Asians, but not black people who have been with us longer, much longer – since the founding of the nation – than other people have? In fact, they are among the first Americans, the most American of all Americans besides Native Americans in terms of how long they have been here. The first African slaves arrived in Virginia in August 1619, long before most of our European ancestors did. Yet we say we are more American than they are. Why?”
Native Americans even lost their land and countless lives when they were invaded and conquered by Europeans and their descendants. And they still feel the pain, an enduring legacy of the racial injustices they suffered and continue to suffer long after they were conquered.
I remember one incident involving a white man and a Native American which reminded me of that.
In April 1974, I went to Norman, Oklahoma. I wanted to attend the University of Oklahoma. I was still a student in Detroit but wanted to transfer to another school where there was a possibility of getting a full scholarship.
I travelled from Detroit to Oklahoma City on a Greyhound bus. When I arrived in Oklahoma City, I had to transfer to another bus, Lonestar, to get to Norman, as the bus went on its way to Texas. Norman is about 20 miles south of Oklahoma City.
As I was waiting for the Lonestar bus at the Greyhound bus station, I saw a Native American man, who was probably in his late sixties or seventies, drinking some water from a water fountain at the station. I remember he was tall, at least six feet and two to three inches.
After he drank some water for about half a minute, he seemed to be getting ready to leave. But when he turned around, he saw a white man who had been standing right behind him, also waiting to drink some water. Instead of leaving, the Native American turned back to the water fountain and started drinking some water again. He kept on drinking, probably for at least two minutes. He turned to look at the white man again who was still standing behind him, and again started drinking some water for another minute or so. He looked at the white man again and left, walking away slowly.
Other people at the bus station, almost all white, also noticed that. They were looking at both of them.
It was clear the Native American was not that thirsty. He seemed to be punishing the white man for the evils and injustices whites had done to his people. It was one man's protest, probably repeated by others in different ways, including blacks, whose impact may be minimal in correcting racial injustices but cathartic on an individual level even if it is only for temporary relief.
Black people being no strangers to racial injustices can easily understand why that Native American did what he did. They have been victims of racial injustices more than anybody else except Native Americans.
And they have engaged in protests, collectively and individually, probably more than Native Americans have, but only because of their superiority in numbers not because they have a more resilient spirit than the indigenous people do.
Black people are also the most visible symbol of racial injustices and, in many cases, the most victimised.
This is in a country where even the majority of whites think race relations are bad; they got worse under Trump. Sixty percent of Americans – 6 in 10 of them – said race relations were bad during his presidency.
A majority of blacks, 75 percent, said racism became much worse under Trump, according to a poll by YouGov whose results were released on 19 February 2019.
And according to a July 2016 report by USA Today, a major American newspaper, most Americans across the colour line said racism was a serious problem.
Other surveys among blacks on their views on race relations with whites show that most blacks believe race relations with whites are bad.
It is a moral issue. But it is also a moral challenge demanding initiatives by whites, complemented by efforts and the involvement of black people, to solve the problem. And it is a problem of ages.
Different people think they are so different that they cannot live together in harmony; it is a myth because they can and they have in different parts of the world throughout man's history.
The refusal by many whites to acknowledge this reality, simple yet profound, perpetuates the problem inexorably leading them to seek what they may think is a simple solution to a complex problem: simply ignore blacks and that will be the end of the race problem in America. Just ignore them.
But ignoring black people is not enough. It is not only not enough – it has been tried and it has failed. It has failed to solve the race problem, if that is even a solution at all.
The needle of the moral compass points only in one direction, of reconciliation and accommodation of the races, even if it is sometimes deflected to point towards perpetual conflict and annihilation, which is not a choice at all.
The moral ambivalence of many whites who equivocate on urgent matters of racial justice – critical to the very survival of the nation – is symptomatic of a bigger problem the nation has faced since its founding. And that is its unwillingness to accept black people as full human beings equal to whites and bound by their common humanity. That is still the moral issue confronting America and one that it has to contend with in the twentieth-first century; not just for a few years, or even for a few decades, but throughout the century.
When Jared Taylor, the intellectual godfather of white nationalists, says Trump won the presidential election because he knew the importance of race by appealing to white voters – he virtually ignored the rest yet won because of white voters – he challenges the assumptions of common bonds of humanity which unite people of all races, including blacks whom he despises so much yet who are a part of him as much as he is a part of them for simply being equally human, regardless of what he thinks or believes to be the genetic “inferiority” of black people because of their “low” mental capacity.
You cannot diminish the humanity of others without diminishing yours. Regardless of how different we may look, we are mirror images of each other as fellow human beings whose intrinsic worth is not embodied in physical features.
There is no black blood just as there is no white blood. There is human blood, one blood. And we share blood across the colour line. That shows how “different” we are, to the consternation of racists.
Many white racists in hospitals across the nation have their lives saved everyday during blood transfusion when they get blood from black people, donated by black people. Blacks who have donated the blood have the same blood type white patients have – white racists. The blood type of the white patients is different from the blood type of their fellow whites who are even their brothers and sisters by blood and race. Yet they have the same blood type some blacks have, the people whom they they hate and despise so much.
There is another dimension to that. Given the history of the country, many whites, tens of millions of them including white supremacists and other racists, have African blood and ancestry they revile and detest so much. Yet they could not have been born without it. Even if they have just one drop of African blood, they could not have been born without it.
There are many whites who know they are not just white but don't want their children or anybody else to know that. They include white supremacists.
Professor Mark D. Shriver, a genetics specialist at Pennsylvania State University, says 30 per cent of white Americans have African ancestors, including himself. He says he has 22 per cent West African ancestry. Yet he looks just white. He said his mother knew about their African ancestry but kept it secret.
Whites constitute at least 78 percent of the American population. With 30 percent of them having African ancestry – that is tens of millions of them!
Those are the kinds of indissoluble bonds, natural ties, which exist between members of different races in the United States. They also bind them together as members of the same nation – one nation – and determine the fate of the nation whose existence is predicated on the acceptance of equality for all.
The history, the blood, the ideals and values of one indivisible nation under God, such are the bonds that bind Americans together as members of a nation forged on the anvil of diversity which has become the microcosm of mankind.
Every race, tribe, creed, ethnic group, country and region round the globe is represented in the United States as an integral part of it. There is no other country on earth that is so diverse in its demographic composition, yet so united. Yet the dominant group, in a predominantly white country, puts a premium on race and, in fact, exactly for that reason. It is mostly white, therefore it is a white nation, the argument goes.
Tragically, the importance of race in man's history has been at the expense of others and to the detriment of other people's well-being. That is the trajectory man has taken since the beginning and it is bound to take him towards self-destruction, a destiny even some of the most hardened racists may not want to face.
I have seen what race glorification has done to people in Africa, including my home country when it was colonial Tanganyika and even after independence and when the former island nation of Zanzibar was almost engulfed in a racial conflagration – black African versus Arab. I have also witnessed its corrosive effect on relations between blacks and whites in the years I have lived in the United States. And I shudder at the consequences.
The United States is not a collision course between the races. But if it compromises its vision of a just society, it undermines its sacred principles of liberty and equality, twin pillars of the republic, upon which it was conceived even though in practical terms it was founded on slavery – outright enslavement of millions of Africans – with consequences too ghastly to contemplate.
Trump during his presidency became the embodiment of this nightmare.
It was also founded on the extermination of the indigenous people, prompting President Donald Trump, with imperial arrogance and unbridled racism, to say in his commencement address at the US Naval Academy on 25 May 2018, “Our ancestors tamed a continent and we are not going to apologise for America....Too many people have forgotten that truth....Our independence was won by farmers. And our continent was tamed by farmers”; ignoring the gross injustices the indigenes suffered at the hands of his ancestors, as if the land belonged to nobody.
For an American president to spew such racist filth and bigotry is despicable and unconscionable. But that is the doctrine of white supremacy rooted in American history which finds expression in daily life even today and has been espoused even by some of the nation's leading personalities including John Wayne who stated in an interview in May 1971:
“I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them....Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves....
I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility....”
He expressed a collective sentiment shared by millions of whites that was echoed by Trump decades later.
When a country has such leaders, fanning ambers of racial hatred, prospects for racial reconciliation become bleak.
The country has had such leaders before. That it can have them again in this era of so-called “post-racial” America is a terrifying prospect. And as before, throughout the nation's history, blacks will again, and again, be at the centre of this maelstrom swirling around them.
The moral foundations of the nation are undermined when its leaders who are supposed to uphold standards of moral excellence and act as the conscience of the nation express views that are antithetical to the principles on which this nation was founded; views which are embraced by those who think this country belongs to them alone to the total exclusion of others who don't look like them.
They are toxic views. And they are lethal. Yet they easily seep into the mainstream of society and gain legitimacy because they are a product of the collective conscience of the nation: the leaders.
Such leaders have an impaired moral vision, if they have any at all, and do not have the moral authority to be leaders. Yet, they win elections, and rise to power even without elections in some countries, by inspiring fear of the enemy within – blacks and other nonwhites including nonwhite immigrants in the American context – and by invoking patriotism in a perverted way ostensibly to preserve, protect and promote the interests of the nation as a whole. Morality means nothing to them, as has been demonstrated in a crude way in the era of Trump.
The country witnessed a great increase in the number of white supremacist groups under his leadership and a resurgence of white nationalism as never before but drew little condemnation from the larger society because white nationalism became an accepted ideology among many whites, legitimsied by Trump's racist rhetoric expressed in coded language. Yet his message was clear and continued to inspire and embolden many racists to the detriment of the well-being of minorities and even the nation itself as a whole.
Still, there are many people, of all races, who find those views to be reprehensible and morally repugnant. And they reject them vehemently and try to sway the nation in the right direction with moral suasion. Unfortunately, in a world bereft of conscience, moral suasion is not persuasive enough; which explains, although only partly, the emergence of people like Trump on the national scene and the ease with which they have been able to dominate the political landscape with far-reaching consequences for the nation. And they have found acceptance and comfortable accommodation in an ideological camp whose members are known for their hostility towards blacks. It is the ideological camp of conservatism.
But, in fairness, black people must also accept responsibility for their own actions over which they have control, not for problems – structural and institutional –they face as a result of historical and contemporary injustices perpetrated against them by the larger society; a society that has rejected them.
What, for example, explains the exclusion of blacks from the suburbs where they collectively constitute only a very small percentage nationwide?
Crime, a highly volatile issue with racial connotations blaming all blacks for committing all that crime, is given as one reason – if not as the main reason – for keeping them out of there; so is the stereotype, “all blacks look alike,” and therefore can't tell the difference between a black robber and a black law-abiding citizen in the suburbs and everywhere else.
Yet, the people who are rejected and excluded from getting homes in suburban areas are not the “riffraff” from the ghetto; they are respectable members of society including highly successful blacks in all professions comparable to their white counterparts.
Many whites always – always – try to find excuses to justify their acts of racial injustices against blacks. Compounding the felony – and it is a felony – is the accusation that black people are fully responsible for their condition, any condition they are in, and for all the problems they face as if there is no racism which is responsible for that, thus absolving the larger society, white society, of any responsibility.
The truth lies somewhere in between.
Yet moral suasion, although not effective in many cases, is better than the alternative, conflict, and may be the only viable option – and the last hope for mankind as it has been since the beginning – in a world locked in perpetual conflict with the forces of evil.
There are people of conscience. But they don't do enough to help bring about fundamental change whose success may even change some people who don't care about morality.
Even some racists, to whom morality means nothing, may change their attitude towards blacks, as indeed they have throughout the nation's history, although they are few; a sharp contrast with those who are locked in a vicious cycle of hate – feeding on itself – and don't even make an attempt to break out of it because they are comfortable living in their own world where they reject the humanity of others without realising that, by doing so, they also deny the basis of their own humanity which is universal and includes the humanity of black people.
Yet another harsh reality people have to face is that forced integration never works – nor do coercive tactics of any kind to achieve the goal; in the short term, yes; in the long run, no. It only infuriates its opponents.
That partly, if not largely, explains why millions of whites have fled to the suburbs – white flight – running away from blacks and why many schools in large cities across the nation are still predominantly black years after busing, especially in the seventies.
You cannot force people to accept you just as you cannot force them to love you or even to hate you.
True racial integration comes from the heart out of genuine commitment to racial equality and to the brotherhood of man. It is genuine acceptance of fellow human beings as your brothers and sisters. If you don't accept them, you cannot integrate with them even if you are forced to live with them. Such integration is hollow, more apparent than real.
Busing failed to genuinely integrate schools, not just in Boston, but across the country.
Other forms of integration have also failed to achieve the goal besides limited and sometimes superficial achievements.
Integration in housing – a critical area – has also failed to end racial discrimination (let alone racism) and genuinely integrate members of different races even when they live in the same building.
I speak from experience as one of the blacks who has lived in the same building with members of different races without achieving racial integration which entails genuine acceptance of other people as equal human beings, not just sharing space with different human beings.
Black people have not yet been fully accepted as equal citizens in all areas of life in spite of the progress the United States has made in race relations especially since the civil rights movement which reached its peak in the late sixties.
Still, the United States today is a very different country from what it was in the 1940s and 1950s in terms of opportunities for black people before the civil rights movement that ushered in the dawn of a new era in the quest for racial equality.
The most dramatic symbol of this transformation was the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States decades after the civil rights movement. No one back then, in the forties and fifties – not even in the sixties, seventies and eighties – would have believed that white people would vote in large numbers for a black man or woman to be president of the United States.
Obama's victory was a highly symbolic gesture by whites for the atonement of their sins in the mistreatment of blacks for hundreds of years since slavery. But probably more than anything else, it marked a significant and substantive change in attitude towards blacks among many whites although the majority of them still did not vote for him.
His election did not end racism; nor was his victory even the beginning of the end of racism. But, it nevertheless, marked a dramatic shift, a significant change, in the perception of black people by many whites who had previously thought blacks were not equal to them and were unfit for leadership positions, let alone the presidency.
Support for Obama reflected a change of attitude towards – and even acceptance of – blacks although such acceptance and tolerance did not necessarily translate into addressing and resolving the fundamental problem of racism whose continued existence even in its mitigated form – hence permanence of racism – I have emphasised throughout the book.
But there is no question that his victory was a highly symbolic achievement, yet not as substantive despite claims by some people that the election of Obama signalled the dawn of a new era of post-racial America.
The persistent notion that black people have made tremendous progress through the years since the sixties – and they have in many areas, it must be acknowledged – has the potential to impede progress in pursuit of the very same goals the civil rights movement sought to achieve but which have not yet been fully accomplished; the rationale being, the country has done enough, therefore there is no more work to be done in pursuit of racial equality – while in reality there is still a lot that has yet to be done.
And it can be done. All it takes is the will and the willingness to do so.
Even when violence against blacks is high on the agenda of many social and political activists of all races, black and white as well as other non-blacks, there seems to be no concerted effort on sustained basis on the part of national and local leaders, nationwide, to address the problem.
Yet, the majority of Americans say racism still is a major problem. Many among them say it is a very serious problem and no progress has been made since George Floyd was brutally executed in a painfully slow and agonising way by a racist white police officer Derek Chauvin who dug his knee into the victim's neck for almost ten minutes (9 minutes and 29 seconds). It is terrifying to hear that and makes one wonder what it portends for the nation's future:
“A year after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a white police officer sparked global protests and a racial reckoning, a majority of Americans say racism and police violence are serious problems facing the nation. Yet relatively few believe attention in the past year to the issues has led to positive change.
A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research...found that about 6 in 10 Americans say racism in the United States is a very or extremely serious problem; it’s similar to the percentage that said the same thing one year ago....
'Racism is a core feature of American life and it dominates certain relationships between African Americans and white Americans in ways that I don’t see how they’re going to change in the near or distant future,' said Kyle T. Mays, assistant professor in African American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles....
About 6 in 10 say police are more likely to use deadly force against a Black person than against a white person.
At 77%, the overwhelming majority of Black Americans say police violence is a very serious problem, compared with 36% of white Americans....
Georgia resident Linda R. Curtis, who was a police officer for 24 years, believes police misconduct is a serious issue, partly because of problematic behavior she witnessed throughout her career. Despite her history within law enforcement, as a Black woman, she worries about her family’s safety.
'When police see me, they don’t say, ‘Oh, this is a retired police officer,’ or that my other half is a retired firefighter or that my two children are sons of a retired police officer and firefighter,' Curtis said. 'They just see two Black men and an opportunity. I’ve always taught my sons how to respond when they’re stopped because of what I saw in my own ranks.'
A majority of Americans continue to support sweeping changes to the criminal justice system.... Just 4% think no changes are needed. Black Americans are most likely to call for the largest changes.
Louisiana resident Alan Hence said that as a Black man, he has faced discrimination by police who, he believed, were often aggressive toward him during routine traffic stops because of his race. His personal encounters and the “deep hurt” he felt after the killing of Floyd and other Black Americans at the hands of police reinforced his belief that the nation’s criminal justice system needs to be overhauled.
'This country was founded on supremacy that cultivated racism and I believe that it created a culture in America that stands strong today and has proven extremely hard to change,' said Hence, 40....
'Nothing has really fundamentally changed, even if you put one individual in prison for police violence,' said Mays, the UCLA professor and author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States....
Beyond policing, about 8 in 10 Black Americans and about two-thirds of both Hispanic and Asian Americans say racism in the U.S. is a very or extremely serious problem. Among white Americans, about half call it that serious, and about 3 in 10 more say it is moderately serious.
Black Americans say they personally have faced discrimination in a variety of ways. Six in 10 say they have been discriminated against often or sometimes when dealing with the police, compared with just about 1 in 10 white Americans. About 3 in 10 Asian Americans and about 4 in 10 Hispanic Americans say the same.
bout 6 in 10 Black Americans also say they have been regularly discriminated against when applying for jobs or in stores or shopping malls, about half when applying for housing or for a loan and about 4 in 10 when receiving health care.
The intersection of dueling crises — the pandemic and the racial justice movement — that have disparately impacted people of color has forced some white Americans in particular to struggle with the nation’s history of racism in ways that they never have before.
'George Floyd definitely had an impact on me,' said Andy Campbell, 57 and an Oklahoma minister. 'It was a matter of realizing that the whole country was built on this lie of racism. And that the history of the country was built on a lie of exceptionalism. White supremacy is a white problem. That’s who has to deal with it.'” – (Kat Stafford and Hannah Fingerhut, “Poll: police Violence Remains High Concern in U.S.,” Associated Press (AP), 21 May 2021.
Black people constitute only 13 per cent of the American population. Yet police officers, mostly white, shoot and kill unarmed blacks at least three times more than they do whites in a country that is overwhelmingly white. You don't see whites being routinely shot the way blacks are. Why not?
Exclude race as a factor and see if you are going to get an honest answer to that.
Blacks get shot by white police officers – and even by Hispanic and Asian police officers but mostly by whites – even when they have their hands up, are lying down with their arms spread out, or when they are running away from the police, posing absolutely no danger to the police officers.
It is a fact that has been documented by many researchers through the years. As Ian Thomsen stated in a report not long after George Floyd was killed, “The Research Is Clear: White People Are Not More Likely Than Black People To Be Killed By Police,” about a study conducted by Professor Matt Miller of Northeastern University and his colleagues at Harvard University:
“Overall, close to 1,000 people are shot to death by police officers in the U.S. every year, according to a database maintained by The Washington Post....
Miller participated in a Northeastern-Harvard data-driven study that combed through shooting deaths by police across 27 states in 2014-15, based on details culled from police and medical-examiner reports by the National Violent Death Reporting System. It found that Black people were killed at a rate higher than their proportion to the national population....
'Although Black people represented 12 percent of the population in the states we studied, they made up 25 percent of the deaths in police shootings,' Miller says....
The study found that the racial disparity was even more pronounced in those cases in which the victims were unarmed and offered minimal to no threat to police.
'In those instances in which the victim appeared to pose a minimal-or-less threat to police, based on the data we had, Black people were three times as likely to be killed,' Miller says. 'That doesn’t mean the police didn’t feel threatened. But based on the reports that we were able to to look at, a very low level of threat was directed at the police. And in those specific cases, the numbers rose for Black people: They made up 36 percent of the deaths.'” – (Ian Thomsen, “The Research Is Clear: White People Are Not More Likely Than Black People To Be Killed By Police,” News@Northeastern, 16 July 2020).
I also could have been shot by the white police officer who stopped me in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the summer of 1983 when I was simply walking on the street but automatically triggered something in him simply because I was black, and unarmed, posing no threat to him or anybody else. My black skin was the trigger.
Rule out racism as a factor and put a white man in my position.
Legally, the United States is not a racist country. It is not a racist country in the legal sense it once was during the era of segregation – which was sanctioned by local and state laws in the southern states and by custom and tradition in the northern states – and even before then throughout the nation's history up to that time, especially until the sixties, when all forms of racial discrimination were outlawed.
But it still has the same major problems of racism it had before except that there are now legal means – an arsenal of laws, rules and regulations – to fight racial injustices as never before.
Racism itself, an integral of the nation's history since its founding, is going nowhere as a national problem even if, under the best of circumstances, it continues to exist mostly in mild form; which won't be the case since it has reared its ugly head and manifested its virulence even during the best of times, demonstrated – and this is just one example – by the brutal mistreatment, including killings, of black people mostly by white police officers across the nation through the years even as recently as 2020 when George Floyd was brutally tortured and suffered a slow and extremely painful death at the hands of a white police officer; a clear case of white supremacy and brutal demonstration of white power at its worst and in the most terrifying manner. As Preston Mitchum, a African American lawyer based in Washington, D.C., stated in his article, “The United States Is, Was and Will Always Be A Racist Country,” The Grio, 3 May 2021:
“If a Black Republican and Black Democrat walked into a bar, one wouldn’t usually expect them to agree on anything let alone that racism, in the United States especially, is a thing of the past. But last week, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Vice President Kamala Harris reached across the aisle to agree that (white) American people are not racist.
In his rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress, Scott, the Senate’s only Black Republican, sought to offer an alternative to the Biden agenda while defending the GOP, and the nation at large, against charges of systemic racism. Scott said that 'America is not a racist country' and warned that 'it’s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.'
In her response on ABC News’ Good Morning America on Thursday (April 29th), Vice President Harris, the first Black and Indian American in this role, agreed with Scott, saying that America is not a 'racist country' but the nation must 'speak the truth' about its history with racism. She applauded Biden for being courageous enough to speak the truth about this country’s history with racism.
For many, Harris’ comments were unsurprising, often aligning with her role as a former prosecutor and policies around policing and law enforcement. However, others were shocked, disappointed even, that the first Black and South Asian vice president — particularly with the onslaught of sexist and racist comments toward her own candidacy — would make such disingenuous and harmful comments about race and racism in America.
If placating centrist white voters forces a Black elected official to lie about the past, present, and likely future of the United States’ racism then we are no better than we were in 2016; and that we’ve learned nothing the past 365 days. Thankfully, I’ve learned to not be shocked about politicians politicking.
Let’s assume that Harris obviously knows that racism is still pervasive in the United States. Let’s also stipulate that she must walk a delicate line of not appearing too Black or be seen as too bold after a previous administration who consistently stoked white supremacist flames the past four years.
That’s exactly the problem.
But Harris wasn’t the only Democrat to agree with Scott. In an interview that aired on NBC’s Today show, in being pressed on Scott’s comments on race in America, our commander in chief stated, 'I don’t think the American people are racist, but I think after 400 years, African Americans have been left in a position where they are so far behind the eight ball in terms of education and health, in terms of opportunity.'
Biden continued, 'I don’t think America is racist, but I think the overhang from all of the Jim Crow and before that, slavery, have had a cost and we have to deal with it.'
So, the question becomes: if racism is not responsible for the continued degradation and positionality of Black and Brown Americans, then what is? And if we can acknowledge white supremacist institutions, then, unless the ether, who holds onto it? It is impossible to understand and call attention to the ills of white supremacy and suddenly believe it went away in the 1950s following the end of de jure segregation.
George Floyd being killed was not a thing of the past. He was a 46-year-old Black man with limited options of survival before he was eventually killed by former police officer Derek Chauvin for the world to see. Though Chauvin was found guilty of Floyd’s murder after a one-month trial, this doesn’t account for the numerous times that white law enforcement officers were either not indicted or found not guilty in the murders of Black people, including Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray and Breonna Taylor, and many more named and unnamed.
Ma’Khia Bryant being killed was not a thing of the past. She was a 16-year-old Black girl, in state care and custody, who was defending herself before she was eventually killed by Officer Nicholas Reardon of the Columbus Police Department. Immediately after her killing, Bryant was adultified as Black girls so often are in an attempt to justify her murder. That she was a teenager in the middle of an altercation, in which she was presumed to be defending herself and may have even called the cops to seek help, did not matter.”
He went on to state:
“Anti-Asian violence is not a thing of the past. An analysis of police department statistics has revealed that the United States experienced a significant hike in anti-Asian hate crimes last year across major cities. The analysis released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism revealed that while such crimes in 2020 decreased overall by 7% (in large part due to the pandemic and less interaction in public spaces), those targeting Asian people rose by nearly 150 percent. The Georgia Spa Shootings in particular highlighted the intersections of racism and sexism of AAPI women.
COVID-19 is not a thing of the past. Though the COVID-19 continues to be driven down, the infection and death rates continue to disproportionately impact Black people. A global health pandemic coupled with a haphazard healthcare system creates a perfect storm for systemic racism to exact its deadly toll.
According to Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), even with vaccinations rolling out, Black and Latino people have received smaller shares of vaccinations compared to their shares of cases and deaths and compared to their shares of the total population in most states. On the contrary, white people received a higher share of vaccinations compared to their share of cases and deaths and their share of the total population in most states reporting data.
That’s because of racism, not race.”
Many injustices cut across racial lines mainly for socioeconomic reasons. There are poor blacks, poor whites, poor Native Americans, poor Hispanics and others. They are all poor. There are also other forms of injustice which are attributed to other factors.
But even in almost all those cases – socioeconomic, political, cultural and so on – racism is paramount. They don't transcend racism and become just or simply human problems.
Always, almost always, especially in comparison to whites, black people are the primary victims and most victimised. They suffer the most in terms of poverty, lack of access to resources, lack of medical care, employment opportunities, and so on.
Glossing over facts or twisting them in an attempt to please anybody and everybody does not solve anything. It's simply sweeping dirt under the rug. And the United States has a lot of dirt to hide in terms of its treatment of black people and even Native Americans as well as other non-whites but especially blacks and indigenous Americans who were on “American” soil before there was was America. Truth must be told. As Mitchum further stated in his article:
“The hard truth: Black people, regardless of the American political system, cannot be comfortable stifling our voices. We must not be fixated on the 'what ifs' of every two or four years, especially if that means acquiescing to people who are ready to reject our experience at a moment’s notice. While there are varying calculations at play, none of them should involve lying about how race and racism — past, present, and likely future — impacts Black Americans.
In 'Kamala Harris has to walk a tightrope on race. This time, she slipped,' Global Opinions editor Karen Attiah writes: 'Whatever the reason for Harris’s circumspection, imagine a different approach. Imagine if Harris felt free to plainly share her own thoughts and experiences about racism in America, particularly in a national moment when racist attacks and police brutality dominate so many news cycles.'
Imagine if we were honest about racism. Imagine if we demand that people bend to our truths. Imagine if people were made to capitulate to us. Imagine.”
There is still a long way to go. And it is a minefield. There will be many casualties along the way and across the colour line.
Yet, the country's potential in pursuit of racial equality is virtually unlimited. Therefore, the United States has no excuse or excuses why it has not fulfilled its obligations the way it should, fully harnessing its potential to live up to the ideals of liberty and equality for all embodied in its constitution.
The United States even has the potential – enormous potential – to be a world unto itself, as the land of unlimited opportunities, demonstrated by its ability to attract people from every country, and on every continent, on planet earth in order to become American.
Where it has fallen short is in the realisation of its lofty and noble ideals with regard to blacks and translate those ideals into reality to embrace “people of colour” including non-white immigrants. That has been a major failure throughout the nation's history.
That is why it took more one hundred years since the end of slavery for black people to be accepted as Americans and accorded full citizenship rights, which was only recently in the sixties when civil rights laws were passed.
That is the challenge the nation still faces today.
Yes, a lot of progress has bee made through the years. Yes, there have been a lot of achievements through the decades. But compared to whites, black people are still far behind in many areas because of racism which has compromised the nation's ideals since its founding.
There is more work, a lot more work, to be done; which is “Why We Can't Wait” – also the title of Dr. Martin Luther King's book – as the struggle continues decades after the civil rights movement.
The United States belongs to everybody who is American although many whites – including many white police officers – think it does not. They think it belongs only to them. They act as if it does not belong to black people as well.
Black people and white people cannot avoid each other. They see each other everyday and they run into each other everyday. They even rub shoulders. They can only look the other way even when they rub shoulders – and they always will – in a country where they have no place to hide from each other. They all live in a society, the same society, on the same soil, where they can't avoid each other.
Therefore, they will have to accept each other as a people who are bound by fate and who share a common destiny regardless of how they feel about each other.
Unfortunately, the country still has a long way to go and may never even reach its destination. But it can. If it doesn't, that's because it doesn't want to.
The stiff resistance to school busing I witnessed in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1975 when I was a student at Wayne State University in Detroit made me think then and even now more than 45 years later about the merits and demerits of forced integration even if it is pursued diligently and with the best of intentions.
The United States has tried it for decades since the sixties and still has fallen short of its goal because tens of millions of whites don't want to live with black people, they don't want to accept them in society – anywhere in society even in the ghetto – and as equal citizens. Otherwise integration would have succeeded and the United States would be a fully integrated society.
There would be no segregated schools and no ghettoes and other poverty-stricken segregated areas for blacks across the nation standing out as an eyesore on the American landscape and as a blot on the conscience of the nation.
More than 45 years later, I still vividly remember that trip to Boston, including buses full of students, I among them, when we left our campus for The Cradle of Liberty to oppose violence and support school integration.
I also remember very well the mass rally Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, addressed in support of racial integration, drawing repeated applause from the people of all races who were there.
It was a rainbow coalition that not only condemned racism but questioned the nation's moral commitment to the principles it espoused and which it betrayed whenever black people claimed their rightful place in society.
People of all races who came from all over the country in convoys of buses after violence in the streets made headlines across the nation and put the city in the spotlight, made Boston a focal point in the struggle for genuine acceptance of a people who had always been considered to be less than human.
White opponents of school busing galvanised their opponents into a potent force and highlighted the racial hatred that had gripped Boston in spite of its reputation as one of the most liberal cities in the United States.
Decades later, it is still the same problem, the same pattern, the same humiliation and the same racial injustices black people have experienced throughout American history. And it happens everyday in all parts of the country. As James Baldwin stated:
“Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement containing seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.” – (James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” Esquire, July 1960; and in James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, New York: Dial Press, 1961).
Almost forty years later, Professor Nathan Glazer stated in his book published in 1998, We Are All Multiculturalists Now, that the fundamental problem “is the refusal of other Americans to accept blacks.” – (Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Yet all the racial insults – “nigger” and others including “African monkey” or “African monkeys” which are hurled at us even by other non-blacks not just by whites – as well as injustices black people are subjected to have never dampened my spirits; nor have they dampened the spirits of tens of millions of other blacks. In fact, racism can be an incentive to succeed in life – victims try harder at whatever they do or try to do.
Besides a resilient spirit, one of the biggest weapons in my arsenal against racism is experience.
I have experienced racism before, as did my parents, especially my father because he worked with whites in Tanganyika during British colonial rule.
He was not even allowed to eat his lunch or put it on the table in the office he shared with his white supervisor. But the white supervisor could eat there simply because he was white and believed he had absolute control over my father. He could not accept the idea that a black man had the temerity to think he was equal to whites.
Still, there is hope because of the nature of man. Man's capacity for evil is equally matched by his capacity to transcend evil.
It is a simple moral choice.