Relations Between Africans and African Americans: Misconceptions, Myths and Realities
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Paperback: 444 pages
Publisher: New Africa Press (10 January 2007)
ISBN-10: 0980253454
ISBN 9780980253450
Chapter One:
Enduring Ties Between Africa and the Diaspora
AFRICA has always been in the consciousness of black Americans as their ancestral homeland even if some of them have not positively identified with it. And there are those who still don't. But even when they became Americans after they ended up in the United States in chains, they never ceased to be African whether some of them like it or not.
Even those who have a negative attitude towards Africa know where they came from. They know Africa is their motherland. They also know they were taken away in chains to a country that claims to have been founded on the twin ideals of liberty and equality while denying Africans freedom on its soil. Instead, it kept them in chains as slaves for centuries, a factor that helps to keep alive memories of Africa among millions of black Americans, and sustain a longing for their motherland.
Black people in the United States have ties to Africa that can never be broken even if those ties are just historical and psychological because of the physical separation from the motherland. But they have bonds that are even deeper than that. They are biological ties.
All blacks in the United States, including those who are racially mixed and have some European and other blood, have blood ties to Africa. In fact, every black person in the United States has relatives in Africa. All of them were not enslaved and shipped to America; all of them did not die during slave raids or perish in the Atlantic, thrown overboard. Most of the relatives remained in the motherland.
Even people with very little African blood have relatives in Africa. This can go on and on, of course, in terms of biological and genealogical roots. But it is a fact that, however little it may be, you could not have been born without that blood. You cannot flush it out of your veins or change your genes. If there is some African blood in you, even just one drop, you have ties to Africa, and have relatives in Africa still living today as you read this book.
In fact, it is estimated that between 70 million and 100 million whites in the United States have some African blood. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's more than that. This does not mean that they are Africans, like African Americans are, any more than black people who have some European blood are European. But it means that denying this biological fact does not change your roots, or at least a part of what you are. You were born that way, and you will die that way, with all your genes intact.
But besides the genetic link to Africa, and the cultural and historical ties that have maintained the identity of black Americans as an African people, the oppression and discrimination they have suffered in the United States through the centuries at the hands of the white majority has also been a powerful motive in their strong identification with Africa. However, it is also important to remember that even after blacks won the civil rights struggle, at least in the courts and in the legislative chambers, a very large number of them have always identified with Africa and have shown great interest in their African heritage.
Therefore, it is not only during hard times that black Americans have shown great interest in Africa, and a longing for their motherland from which they were forcibly removed. They have also shown great interest in the continent and in things African even when they are prosperous. And that includes a large number of middle- and upper-class blacks who have strongly identified with Africa and African causes as an African people themselves. But even those who identify themselves as Americans only, also have shown great interest in Africa.
We should, however, not forget that there is also a significant number of blacks of all classes who don't want to identify themselves with Africa even if they don't say so publicly but instead profess their love for Africa and pride in their African roots. Privately, they resent that or feel ashamed.
Yet, from the slave songs on the plantations and the establishment of the African Methodist Church (AME) and other African-oriented institutions and organizations by blacks throughout their history in the United States, to the founding of Liberia, there is strong evidence that interest in Africa among blacks Americans has always been there, even if it has not been one of enduring obsession of the nationalist kind in all cases.
Sometimes, there have been conflicting responses to African events from the black American community, showing that not only as a people blacks in the United States are not a monolithic whole but also that there are those who are not concerned about Africa as might be expected. For example, during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, some leading black Americans said Ethiopians should not expect help from blacks in the United States because black people in America had never been given any help by Africans during their struggle against racial oppression; and that they had their own problems to contend with. Africans should therefore do the same over there: help themselves.
However, this attitude cannot be said to have been typical of the majority of black Americans during that time, or of even a large number of them, although there was no way to accurately or even approximately gauge such sentiment. Still, the mere fact that there were some influential blacks, as well as others, who felt this way shows that relations between Africa and black America have had some serious problems through the years.
It is also worth remembering that it was during the same time that a number of black American pilots and soldiers volunteered to go to Ethiopia to help the Ethiopians fight Mussolini and his forces, even when it was felt that Ethiopians in general did not want to identify themselves with black Africa, as black people, as Rupert Emerson and Martin Kilson, professors at Harvard University, stated in an essay they wrote in the sixties. The essay was entitled “The American Dilemma in a Changing World: The Rise of Africa and the Negro American,” published in a volume of essays on black America, The Negro American:
"The Italian attack on Ethiopia in 1935, it has been said, had the effect of giving large numbers of Negroes a sense of involvement in world events for the first time, even though the Ethiopians were then by no means sure that they wanted to counted among the black Africans." - (The Negro American, p. 642).
Others made the same observation which has some credibility even today, as it does in the case of Somalis, as well, who also in general don't want to identify themselves with black Africans and think they are better than other Africans, clearly shown by the brutal mistreatment of members of Bantu tribes from Tanzania and Mozambique who were taken to Somalia by the Arabs as slaves more than 300 years ago. Their descendants are still mistreated in Somalia today.
Some of them, for example, members of the Zigua tribe from Tanga region in northeastern Tanzania, returned to their ancestral homeland in the late 1990s with the help of the Tanzanian government and were given some land and some help to settle in Tanzania permanently.
They told of the persecution they suffered in Somalia at the hands of the Somalis who considered them to be inferior and fit only for slave labor. And more than ten thousand other Bantus from Somalia were allowed to emigrate to the United States with the help of the American government and the United Nations in the late nineties and beyond, fleeing persecution.
And during the civil war when American troops were sent to Somalia in the early nineties to help capture one of the warlords and restore order, black American soldiers complained about insults by Somalis when they tried to identify with them. They made fun of their "Negro" features - kinky hair, thick lips, black skin, and wide noses - and made it clear that they had nothing to do with them.
However, one cannot generalize and argue that all Somalis and Ethiopians feel that they are better than other Africans and don't even consider themselves to be black. There are those who do and those who don't.
But even from my own experience, I have noticed that quite a few of them don't want to mingle with other Africans the way members of different African tribes do, identifying themselves as one people: black Africans. I have roots of northeast African origin myself, on my mother's side, and a number of my family members and relatives are easily identified by those features, including my mother. And I know Ethiopians and Somalis who don't have a problem identifying themselves with other Africans. But there is a problem with some of them.
And it is a problem other Africans have noticed, including some Nigerians and Liberians as well as Kenyans I knew when I was a student in the United States, as Rupert Emerson and Martin Kilson did back in the sixties when they wrote an article about black America and the newly independent states of Africa and how blacks in the United States identified with them. That is how Ethiopia and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia came into the picture. Ethiopia was seen as symbol of African dignity, being the oldest independent country in Africa that was never colonized until it was briefly occupied by Mussolini.
Ethiopia's long history of independence, unprecedented anywhere else in Africa, was one of the main factors in the decision by African leaders in 1963 when they chose Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, to be the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), now of the African Union (AU). The choice also was in deference to Emperor Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, King of Kings, and descendant of King Solomon, although some dispute his lineage as Solomon's descendant.
But whatever the case, a number of black Americans paid attention to all that, especially the humiliation of Ethiopia and Emperor Haile Selassie by the Italian invaders. Some of them were deeply offended by the invasion, prompting them to volunteer as soldiers and as pilots to go to Ethiopia and fight the Italians, not only as brothers in the struggle for justice which they themselves were waging in the United States, but mainly as fellow Africans or members of the same black "race."
Unfortunately, their feelings were probably not reciprocated, to the extent that they should have been, by the Ethiopians who were expected to fully embrace black Americans as their kith-and-kin, although there were those who appreciated the help.
And in terms of race, Ethiopians in general are not "Negro" like black Americans or the majority of black Africans are. They also have their own physical features of Semitic - or some other “non-Negro” - origin just like the Somalis do. Even some of their languages, for example Amharic which is the main and official language, and Tigrinya, have Semitic roots.
Those are some of the examples, Ethiopia and Somalia, that help to demonstrate the complex nature of the relations between Africans and African Americans, and between Africans themselves, but which also should be viewed in their proper context instead of making sweeping generalizations that don't have validity in all cases.
Compounding the problem is the way some black Americans have treated Africans in Africa through the years. There were a number of American blacks who went to Africa as missionaries in the nineteenth century, and others even in the twentieth century after the continent had already been "saturated" with missionaries from Europe. While their migration to Africa demonstrated an enduring interest in the continent among them and other black Americans, there was also a paternalistic attitude towards the "natives" in Africa as a "primitive," "backward" people who needed to be "civilized."
So, they went to Africa not only to propagate the gospel among these "heathens"; they returned to the motherland to "civilize" them, whatever the term entails in terms of Western civilization in the African context.
There may have been some black American missionaries who saw African "natives" as their equal, especially as members of the same black race. But a higher percentage of them obviously saw Africans as inferior to them, in terms of education and civilization, along the same lines Albert Schweitzer did; that great humanitarian and missionary doctor who, while working in Gabon in French Equatorial Africa, bluntly proclaimed to whole world: "The Negro is a child, and with children nothing can be done without authority. We must, therefore, so arrange the circumstances of daily life that my natural authority can find expression. With regard to the Negroes, then, I have coined the formula: 'I am your brother, it is true, but your elder brother.'"
Then came the founding of Liberia around the same time some black American missionaries were thinking about spreading the gospel in Africa. And their kinship with Africans was a critical factor in their decision to embark on this mission. Even some American whites who wanted to spread the gospel in Africa felt that black American missionaries were better equipped to do that than they were.
Although the black American missionaries knew that as Christians they were supposed to spread Christianity to all peoples regardless of race, they felt they had a special obligation to do so first in Africa for a number of reasons. They believed that they would be more welcome than their white counterparts because of their biological ties to their ancestral homeland as blacks themselves.
They also, together with whites, believed that they were better equipped, physically, to survive in tropical Africa than white missionaries would because of their genetic adaptation to this environment; that is why American blacks die from sickle cell anemia. They can no longer fight malaria in their new environment in a totally different climate in North America. What was a weapon in their system in the African tropical climate to fight malaria has now been turned against them in the alien environment of America.
Racism also was a critical factor. Very often, whites directed their attention to other parts of the world to spread the gospel, ignoring Africa. And when they did go to Africa and other parts such as the Caribbean, inhabited by blacks, their racist attitude and practices alienated many would-be converts and even those who had already been converted.
That was also the case with white missionaries from Europe. For example, in Nyasaland, now Malawi, just across the border from my home district on the Tanzania-Malawi border, Scottish missionaries did not even allow blacks to wear shoes and refused to share the same quarters with black missionary workers. And it happened in other parts of Africa, including my country Tanzania even in contemporary times.
I remember Professor Henry Louis Gates, chairman of the African American studies center at Harvard University, explaining what he experienced when he worked in Tanzania as a young student. He said in one of his books, Great Zimbabwe to Kilimatinde published in 1996, that when he was a student at Yale University, he went to Tanzania and stayed there for one year from 1970 to 1971, the entire academic year, working at a hospital in Kilimatinde in the central region.
He lived in an ujamaa village and was trained to deliver general anesthesia at an Anglican Missionary Hospital. He said the hospital was run by white Australian missionaries, and their racism towards black patients and other Africans working there was clearly evident.
This is one of the main reasons why many Africans did not trust white missionaries working on the continent. We also remember very well that missionaries helped pave the way for the colonization of Africa. As Jomo Kenyatta said, "When the white man came, he said 'Shut your eyes, let us pray.' When we opened our eyes it was too late. Our land was gone!"
Chinua Achebe, in his classic work Things Fall Apart, articulates the same sentiment when, towards the end of his book, Obierika, in a conversation with Okonkwo, laments: "The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion and...put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."
This kind of sentiment was obviously still strong among many Africans in the nineteenth century when American missionaries, especially of the Baptist church, were making plans to spread Christianity in Africa. The slave trade was still fresh in the minds of Africans, having ended only recently, and it would have been hard for many of them to trust the people, whites, who not too long ago had been busy shipping their kith-and-kin across the Atlantic into slavery in America. The only people who could have been well-received, also as brothers and sisters returning home after being freed as slaves, were black American missionaries.
Black Baptists were among the first Christians to launch missionary campaigns in Africa and elsewhere. For example, David George and other American blacks went to Sierra Leone in 1792 and established the first Baptist church on the continent. They also settled there permanently.
In 1815, Lott Carey and Hilary Teague together with a white deacon, William Crane, of Richmond, Virginia, formed the Richmond African Baptist Foreign Missionary Society to spread Christianity in Africa. In 1821, Carey and his wife went to Sierra Leone and established a mission among members of the Mandingo tribe. He was killed in 1828 in a battle with some of the indigenous people in Liberia and is acclaimed as the first American missionary to Africa.
Together with the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Colonization Society, the Richmond African Baptist Foreign Missionary Society, founded by Lott Carey who was the pastor of the African Baptist Church in Richmond, sent missionary workers to West Africa from 1845 and continued its activities on the continent in the following years. Liberia was one of the main targets. Even before then, Lott Carey and Hilary Teague were, in the early 1820s, among the first missionaries to work in an area that later became the Republic of Liberia. They settled there permanently, spreading the gospel among the indigenous tribes in the region.
After the Civil War, other black Christian groups also sent missionaries to Africa. They included the Virginia Baptists who continued to send missionaries overseas well into the twentieth century; the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention organized in 1880; the National Baptist Convention established in 1895; the Lott Carey Baptist Convention launched in 1897, and other Baptist and non-Baptist missionary groups.
Other black missionaries who spread the gospel in Africa included Robert Hill who was sent to Liberia by the Southern Baptist Convention; Alexander Crummell who settled in Liberia and encouraged other African Americans to move to Africa; John Bryant Small who established a mission station in the Gold Coast, what is Ghana today; William Colley who was sent to Nigeria; William Henry Shepherd who went to Congo; Mary Tearing, and Joseph Phipps, also to Congo. And other black American missionaries went to other parts of Africa including South Africa.
Especially since the mid- and late 1800s, black American missionaries continued, together with other Christians including Presbyterians, to spread the gospel well into the twentieth century and beyond, especially in West Africa, the ancestral homeland of the majority of black Americans, although not all; a significant number of them came from East Africa, especially from what is Mozambique and Tanzania today, mainly after the slave trade was officially abolished and the slave traders turned their attention to East Africa as anti-slavery patrols intensified on the West African coast. For example, I remember reading an article in The New York Times in 1998 which contained excerpts of old slave records showing that some of the slaves who arrived and were sold in Louisiana were members of the Makua tribe who had been captured in what is southern Tanzania today.
One of the West African regions which attracted the largest number of black missionaries from the United States was, of course, Liberia. Founded by freed black American slaves in 1822, at the behest of the American Colonization Society some of whose members wanted all blacks kicked out of the United States and sent back to Africa or to some other place including Venezuela, Liberia became a haven of peace for these former slaves, away from the persecution and lynchings in the United States. Yet, for the "natives" it became, in a very tragic way, living hell.
Black Americans who settled in the area expropriated land owned by the "natives," launched wars against them to forcibly acquire more land, and established a country in which the indigenous people were denied equal rights and virtually became slaves in their own native land; ironically, at the hands of former slaves and fellow blacks. As late as the 1930s, native Liberians were also being sold as slaves to work in Panama, ostensibly sent there on labor contracts negotiated on their behalf by the Liberian government dominated by descendants of the freed American slaves who came to be known as Americo-Liberians as they still are today.
Even within Liberia itself, members of the local tribes were treated as second-class citizens and had no political rights comparable to those enjoyed by Americo-Liberians. House servants and others working for Americo-Liberian families were treated as virtual slaves. Native Liberian leaders such as Didwho Tweh tried to fight for their rights as equal citizens, to no avail. Their plea for help from the League of Nations in the 1930s fell on deaf ears.
It was not until 1980 when members of the indigenous tribes in the army launched a military coup against the government that domination by Americo-Liberians came to an end after 150 years of hegemonic control of the territory and the indigenous population. It had been a long time since the country was founded in 1822 and became a republic in 1847, but with the total exclusion of the indigenous people from power.
The plight of the native Liberians, at the hands of the settler community known as Americo-Liberians, was unique in one fundamental respect: They were the only blacks on the continent who were colonized by fellow blacks. And the people who colonized them were fellow citizens who, ironically, proclaimed to the whole world when they first arrived there to found the colony: "The love of liberty brought us here." To which the indigenous people could have responded: "We have known nothing but misery and oppression since you came here." And it was a sentiment that was expressed in various ways by members of the native tribes some of whom attended school in the United States during the same time I did.
When I was a student in Detroit, Michigan, in the early and mid-seventies, I remember some of them confronting their fellow countrymen, Americo-Liberians who were also students, with ominous warnings such as: "You Americo-Liberians are going to pay for this one day." Their prediction was fulfilled in one of the bloodiest military coups in African post-colonial history when 17 members of the Liberian army led by a 28-year sergeant, Samuel Doe, a member of the Krahn tribe, stormed the Executive Mansion, the president's official residence, in April 1980 and killed President William Tolbert. They also disemboweled him, and his body was displayed in public.
He was the last Americo-Liberian president in the dynasty of the True Whig Party that had ruled Liberia for 150 years. Like his predecessor, William Tubman, his family members had emigrated from South Carolina and became some of the most prominent members of the Americo-Liberian settler community which dominated politics and the economy. And like Tubman, Tolbert was also born in Liberia.
But although the mistreatment of the indigenous tribes by Americo-Liberians had some negative impact on relations between Africans and African-Americans, it was only in a limited way. The wrath was directed against the oppressive Americo-Liberian settler community, and not against African Americans in the United States, although Americo-Liberians were descended from freed American slaves.
And most of this wrath and anger came from members of the indigenous tribes within Liberia itself, and not from other African countries, although there were people in other African countries who sympathized with them.
There was not much response from the people in other African countries to the plight of the members of the native tribes in Liberia at the hands of Americo-Liberians partly because many of them did not know what was going on in that country, and partly because they had their own problems to contend with in their own countries.
But even if many of them had known what was going on in Liberia, they may not have responded as forcefully as they did against racial oppression in South Africa under apartheid because they would not have seen Americo-Liberians as outsiders, like whites in South Africa. They were fellow blacks, and racial solidarity was paramount in the struggle against the apartheid regime and other white minority regimes on the continent. The Americo-Liberian dynasty in Liberia certainly did not fit that category as a foreign institution created by and belonging to whites. It was black. Apartheid was white. The difference was clear as day and night. And it was obvious who the real enemy was.
It should also be remembered that Liberia was only one of two independent countries in black Africa. The other one was Ethiopia. And both, in international forums, spoke on behalf of the rest of the African countries that were still under colonial and white minority rule. And when Ethiopia was invaded by Mussolini, Liberia was the only independent African country during that time that spoke out against the invasion.
Therefore, in spite of the oppressive rule imposed by the Americo-Liberian community on the indigenous people of Liberia, the Americo-Liberian rulers still had some credibility among other Africans as champions of African rights and independence in the international arena, especially at a time when African colonial subjects across the continent had no spokesmen to speak for them in international forums. Only Liberia and Ethiopia did.
And while Liberia has served as a bridge between Africa and black America, it has also facilitated dialogue in a wider context internationally. As the oldest republic in black Africa, it was seen as a beacon of hope for the rest of the continent south of the Sahara during the struggle for independence and inspired those still under colonial rule to fight for their freedom. Liberia also was a source of inspiration to African Americans in their struggle for racial equality which gained momentum in the fifties and sixties.
Together with Liberia were other black African countries which were among the first to win independence: Ghana in 1957, Guinea in 1958, and many others in 1960 which came to be known as Africa's Year and was declared as such by the United Nations because of what happened that year. It was the year in which the largest number of African countries, 17 of them, won independence. And the feat was not duplicated in any of the following years; by 1968, most African countries had won independence.
Coincidentally, it was also during this period that the civil rights movement in the United States gained full momentum. By 1964 when the Civil Rights Bill was passed, more than 30 black African countries had won independence in less than 10 years, beginning with Ghana in 1957. Thus, where some American blacks had been ashamed of Africa, there was now pride, by the same people, of their African heritage. They, and many other blacks, looked to Africa for vindication. If blacks in Africa could prove their worth and rise to towering heights to be equal to the best among the best in governance and other achievements including education, black people in the United States could do no less. That was the rationale.
Even before independence, Africans in Africa had profound influence on black America in terms of inspiration in the struggle for racial equality. The civil rights movement, which simply came to be known as the Movement, started to gain momentum in the 1950s, especially after Dr. Martin Luther King was thrust into the international spotlight by the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama in December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the city bus to a white man. She came to be known as the "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement," although she had been preceded by Claudette Colvin, a 15-year old black girl, who refused to give up her seat on the city bus to a white man many months earlier in March the same year.
But black civil rights leaders in Montgomery decided not to use her as a test case and rallying point because she was very dark, a liability even among blacks in those days, unlike Rosa Parks who was light-complexioned. Claudette was also pregnant and not married, while Rosa Parks was married. And she was already active in the struggle for racial equality as a member of the NAACP and did some work for the organization.
The bus boycott would probably have taken place, anyway, even if nothing had taken place in Africa in terms of struggle for racial equality. But a precedent had been set earlier, in South Africa, when black people and a few whites and Indians as well as Coloureds launched the Defiance Campaign in 1952 led by the African National Congress (ANC) which was multiracial but predominantly black.
They employed non-violent tactics to protest against racial injustice, the same tactics Dr. Martin Luther King and others used in their struggle for racial equality during the civil rights movement. There is no question that the spirit of this campaign in South Africa inspired blacks in the United States during the Montgomery bus boycott and in their struggle for justice. Defiance against injustice was one of the main characteristics of both campaigns. As Rosa Parks said in an interview with Scholastic years later when she was asked, "What made you decide on December 1, 1955, not to get up from your seat?":
"That particular day that I decided was not the first time I had trouble with that particular driver. He evicted me before, because I would not go around to the back door after I was already onto the bus.
The evening that I boarded the bus, and noticed that he was the same driver, I decided to get on anyway. I did not sit at the very front of the bus; I took a seat with a man who was next to the window - the first seat that was allowed for 'colored' people to sit in. We were not disturbed until we reached the third stop after I boarded the bus.
At this point, a few white people boarded the bus, and one white man was left standing. When the driver noticed him standing, he spoke to us (the man and two women across the aisle) and told us to let the man have the seat. The other three all stood up. But the driver saw me still sitting there. He said would I stand up, and I said, 'No, I will not.' Then he said, 'I'll have you arrested.' And I told him he could do that. So he didn't move the bus any farther. Several black people left the bus.
Two policemen got on the bus in a couple of minutes. The driver told the police that I would not stand up. The policeman walked down and asked me why I didn't stand up, and I said I didn't think I should stand up. 'Why do you push us around?' I asked him. And he said, 'I don't know. But the law is the law and you are under arrest.' As soon as he said that, I stood up, and the rest of us left the bus together.
One of them picked up my purse, the other picked up my shopping bag. And we left the bus together. It was the first time I'd had that particular thing happen. I was determined that I let it be known that I did not want to be treated in this manner. The policemen had their squad car waiting, they gave me my purse and bag, and they opened the back door of the police car for me to enter."
It was defiance against injustice at its best. And as the campaigns for freedom and equality went on around the same time in Africa and in the United States, they also reinforced each other and strengthened ties that had always existed between blacks on both sides of the Atlantic.
Apart from the non-violent struggle for freedom that went on in Africa against the colonial authorities and which encouraged the civil rights campaign among blacks in the United States, was the more militant struggle waged by Mau Mau in Kenya. Coincidentally, the launching of the Defiance Campaign in South Africa in 1952 coincided with the arrest of Jomo Kenyatta who was accused of leading Mau Mau. He was arrested in the same year, 1952, together with 182 other African leaders. In 1953, he was sentenced to seven years in prison, with hard labor, and was sent to the barren region of northwestern Kenya to serve his sentence. He was released in 1961.
His release in 1961 was another important milestone in the struggle for freedom and justice for black people on both sides of the Atlantic. It took place only about three years before passage of the Civil Rights Bill in the United States in 1964, and there is no doubt that Kenyatta's release from prison further inspired blacks in America in their struggle for racial justice. If blacks in Kenya could win, there was also some hope that blacks in the United States would win one day. As the civil rights movement anthem went: "Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome someday."
The militancy of Mau Mau in Kenya, involving armed struggle by the Kikuyu against the British, also inspired pride among many blacks in the United States including those who may not have used violence themselves to win freedom. But they saw in the Kikuyu the same burning desire to be free they saw among themselves in the United States. Black militants even endorsed Mau Mau tactics. And the father of the black militant movement in the United States, Malcolm X, spoke proudly of Mau Mau, as much as he did about the liberation war in Algeria which drove the French out after seven years of bitter conflict in which about one million Algerians were killed. And as he said about the Mau Mau in one of his speeches: "It was Mau Mau that brought independence to Kenya."
Malcolm X also worked diligently to forge new and strengthen existing ties between Africa and black America. In 1964, he went to Africa and visited a number of countries where he met with different leaders. He also addressed the OAU summit of the African heads of state and government in Cairo, Egypt, in July 1964 where he almost died when his food was poisoned in a hotel. He was followed by CIA agents throughout his African trip and the American intelligence agency may have been behind the attempt on his life. As he stated in his speech at the OAU summit in Cairo:
"The Organization of Afro-American Unity has sent me to attend this historic African Summit Conference as an observer to represent the interests of 22 million African-Americans whose human rights are being violated daily by the racism of American imperialists.
The Organization of Afro-American Unity has been formed by a cross section of America's African-American community, and is patterned after the letter and spirit of the Organization of African Unity.
Just as the Organization of African Unity has called upon all African leaders to submerge their differences and unite on common objectives for the common good of all Africans, in America the Organization of Afro-American Unity has called upon Afro-American leaders to submerge their differences and find areas of agreement wherein we can work in unity for the good of the entire 22 million African Americans.
Since the 22 million of us were originally Africans, who are now in America, not by choice but only by a cruel accident in our history, we strongly believe that African problems are our problems and our problems are African problems.
We also believe that as heads of the independent African states you are the shepherds of all African peoples everywhere, whether they are still at home here on the mother continent or have been scattered abroad.
Some African leaders at this conference have implied that they have enough problems here on the mother continent without adding the Afro-American problem.
With all due respect to your esteemed positions, I must remind all of you that the Good Shepherd will leave ninety-nine sheep who are safe at home to go to the aid of the one who is lost and has fallen into the clutches of the imperialist wolf.
We in America are your long-lost brothers and sisters, and I am here only to remind you that our problems are your problems. As the African-Americans 'awaken' today, we find ourselves in a strange land that has rejected us, and, like the prodigal son, we are turning to our elder brothers for help. We pray our pleas will not fall upon deaf ears.
We were taken forcibly in chains from this mother continent and have now spent over three hundred years in America, suffering the most inhuman forms of physical and psychological tortures imaginable.
During the past ten years the entire world has witnessed our men, women, and children being attacked and bitten by vicious police dogs, brutally beaten by police clubs, and washed down the sewers by high-pressure water hoses that would rip the clothes from our bodies and the flesh from our limbs.
And all of these inhuman atrocities have been inflicted upon us by the American governmental authorities, the police themselves, for no reason other than that we seek the recognition and respect granted other human beings in America.
The American Government is either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property of your 22 million African-American brothers and sisters.
We stand defenseless, at the mercy of American racists who murder us at will for no reason other than we are black and of African descent.
Last week an unarmed African-American educator was murdered in cold blood in Georgia; a few days before that three civil rights workers disappeared completely, perhaps murdered also, only because they were teaching our people in Mississippi how to vote and how to secure their political rights.
Our problems are your problems. We have lived for over three hundred years in that American den of racist wolves in constant fear of losing life and limb. Recently, three students from Kenya were mistaken for American Negroes and were brutally beaten by the New York police. Shortly after that two diplomats from Uganda were also beaten by the New York City police, who mistook them for American Negroes.
If Africans are brutally beaten while only visiting in America, imagine the physical and psychological suffering received by your brothers and sisters who have lived there for over three hundred years.
Our problem is your problem. No matter how much independence Africans get here on the mother continent, unless you wear your national dress at all time when you visit America, you may be mistaken for one of us and suffer the same psychological and physical mutilation that is an everyday occurrence in our lives.
Your problems will never be fully solved until and unless ours are solved. You will never be fully respected until and unless we are also respected. You will never be recognized as free human beings until and unless we are also recognized and treated as human beings.
Our problem is your problem. It is not a Negro problem, nor an American problem. This is a world problem, a problem for humanity. It is not a problem of civil rights, it is a problem of human rights.
We pray that our African brothers have not freed themselves of European colonialism only to be overcome and held in check now by American dollarism. Don't let American racism be 'legalized' by American dollarism.
America is worse than South Africa, because not only is America racist, but she is also deceitful and hypocritical. South Africa preaches segregation and practices segregation. She, at least, practices what she preaches. America preaches integration and practices segregation. She preaches one thing while deceitfully practicing another.
South Africa is like a vicious wolf, openly hostile toward black humanity. But America is cunning like a fox, friendly and smiling, but even more vicious and deadly than the wolf.
The wolf and the fox are both enemies of humanity, both are canine, both humiliate and mutilate their victims. Both have the same objectives, but differ only in methods.
If South Africa is guilty of violating the human rights of Africans here on the mother continent, then America is guilty of worse violations of the 22 million Africans on the American continent. And if South African racism is not a domestic issue, then American racism also is not a domestic issue.
We beseech independent African states to help us bring our problem before the United Nations, on the grounds that the United States Government is morally incapable of protecting the lives and the property of 22 million African-Americans. And on the grounds that our deteriorating plight is definitely becoming a threat to world peace.
Out of frustration and hopelessness our young people have reached the point of no return. We no longer endorse patience and turning the other cheek. We assert the right of self-defense by whatever means necessary, and reserve the right of maximum retaliation against our racist oppressors, no matter what the odds against us are.
We are well aware that our future efforts to defend ourselves by retaliating- by meeting violence with violence, eye for eye and tooth for tooth-could create the type of racial conflict in America that could easily escalate into a violent, worldwide, bloody race war.
In the interests of world peace and security, we beseech the heads of the independent African states to recommend an immediate investigation into our problem by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
One last word, my beloved brothers at this African Summit: 'No one knows the master better than his servant.' We have been servants in America for over three hundred years. We have a thorough inside knowledge of this man who calls himself 'Uncle Sam.' Therefore, you must heed our warning. Don't escape from European colonialism only to become even more enslaved by deceitful,'friendly' American dollarism.
May Allah's blessings of good health and wisdom be upon you all”.
His speech to the Organization of African Unity (OAU) conference of African leaders was a plea for help. He believed African countries would be able to help African Americans in their struggle for racial equality in the United States by bringing up their case before the United Nations. And a number of African countries agreed to do so. Among the leaders he talked to about the plight of African Americans were Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Presidents Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. And he was well-received wherever he went in Africa. Tanzania was one of the countries he visited, and he mentions this trip in one of his speeches.
When I was working on the second edition of my book, Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era, in 2004, I was in regular contact with Andrew Nyerere, President Nyerere's eldest son who was my high schoolmate in Tanzania, and who said he remembered when Malcolm X visited them at their house in Dar es Salaam in July 1964. As he said in a letter to me: "When he came to Msasani (on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam where President Nyerere and his family lived in a simple house instead of living in the official residence, the State House), he gave Mwalimu the record of 'Message to the Grassroots,' a speech by Malcolm X."
President Nyerere, popularly known as Mwalimu which means teacher in Kiswahili since he was once a teacher, understood the plight of African Americans even before he talked to Malcolm X and was one of the African leaders, together with others such as Nkrumah, who strongly identified with the struggle for racial equality in the United States. And he believed there was an imperative need to strengthen ties between the nations of Africa and black America which black American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier defined as a nation, even if a captive one. In his book, Black Bourgeoisie published in 1957, Professor Frazier argued that black people in the United States constituted "a nation within a nation." And it is a thesis that has some validity and credibility beyond black nationalist circles. Their isolation, because of segregation, helped to solidify this identity. And they looked to Africa for inspiration and spiritual sustenance in their struggle for racial equality in a country that was supposed to be the citadel of democracy.
Therefore, the success of the independence struggles in different African countries in the fifties and sixties served as a great source of inspiration to African Americans during the civil rights movement as much as the civil rights struggle in the United States was a source of great encouragement to many Africans still groaning under white minority rule, especially in South Africa. The situation of black people under apartheid was similar to that of black Americans. And both were being oppressed by a power that was an integral of their country. It was a colonial power within, not a foreign power like in the rest of the African countries ruled by the British, the French and the Portuguese. They were fighting for freedom from fellow citizens who were going nowhere, unlike the British, the French and the Portuguse who left their African colonies and returned to Europe after the colonies won independence. Black Americans were also "colonized" within.
It is also critical to remember that even during the darkest hour in the history of our continent when we were under colonial rule and did not even have political parties fighting for independence, Africans in the diaspora played a major role in championing the cause of African freedom going as back as the early 1900s. Sylvester Williams from Trinidad, and W.E.B. DuBois from the United States, were the most prominent, followed later by George Padmore and CLR James also from Trinidad. They were joined by Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Nnamdi Azikiwe and other African leaders in the 1940s, carrying on a tradition that went back to the early years of the twentieth century when the first Pan-African Congress was held in London in 1900.
The second Pan-African Congress was held in Paris in 1919. It coincided with the Paris Peace Conference by the Allied Powers ending World War I and demanded the right to self-determination in the African colonies. It was also in the same year that there were widespread protests against the exclusion of racial equality from the Covenant of the League of Nations, and delegates from the Pan-African Congress presented resolutions to the League of Nations demanding freedom and independence for Africans. A few years earlier, the African National Congress (ANC) was founded in January 1912 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and more than 80 years later won the struggle against apartheid.
Dr. DuBois played a critical role in organizing these conferences. It was he, together with Blaise Diagne, a Senegalese and highest-ranking African in French politics and deputy to the French parliament, who organized the Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919. It was attended by at least 57 delegates representing 15 countries and colonies, including Liberia, Haiti, the British West Indies, West African British and French colonies, and the United States. At least 19 delegates came from Africa.
The 1919 conference is often referred to as the First Pan-African Congress. But it was actually patterned after the Pan-African Conference, which was really the first Pan-African Congress, convened by Henry Sylvester Williams in London in 1919. DuBois also attended this conference as a delegate. The London conference petitioned the Allied Nations to take specific steps to end oppressive political and economic conditions in predominantly black colonies in Africa and the West Indies.
The Second (or third) Pan-African Congress was held in 1921 in the three main colonial centers - London, Paris, and Brussels - and was attended by 113 delegates. Again, Africans in the diaspora, with DuBois being the most prominent among them, played a major role in organizing this conference. The NAACP was also represented at the conference and provided financial support. The Third Pan-African Congress was held in 1923 in London, and in Lisbon, Portugal, pursuing the same goals as those pursued at the previous conferences. The main goal was independence for black countries in Africa and in the Caribbean.
The Fourth Pan-African Congress was held in Harlem, New York, in 1927 and was funded by an organization of black women, the Circle of Peace and Foreign Relations, long interested in improving the lives of black people in Africa and in the diaspora, including attainment of independence for the African colonies. The conference was chaired by Dr. W.E.B. DuBois and attended by 208 delegates. And about 5000 people participated in the conference. Several sessions were also held in black churches in Harlem. African countries represented included Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast (later renamed Ghana), Nigeria, and Liberia. There were also representatives from the United States and the West Indies.
Dr. DuBois tried to make arrangements for the Fifth Pan-African Congress to be held on African soil, in Tunis, Tunisia. He chose Tunis because it was accessible by shipping lines and was somewhat centrally located to enable many delegates from Africa and Europe to attend the conference. But the French government feared that such a conference held on African soil would lead to unrest in the colonies on the continent, and denied the organizers permission to hold the conference in its colony of Tunisia.
The French told DuBois and other organizers that they could hold the conference in Paris, but the Depression, which came in 1929, the same year the conference was planned, precluded any possibility that the conference would be held anytime soon. Financial problems were one of the main reasons why other conferences could not be held sooner. There were also ideological divisions among the organizers.
There were those who supported the ideology of Marcus Garvey which was strictly racial and excluded anybody who was not black or considered black enough including racially mixed people such as Dr. DuBois himself. And there were those who supported Dr. DuBois and his colleagues whose philosophy was inclusive.
It was not until 16 years later, in 1945, that the Fifth Pan-African Congress was held. It was held in Manchester, England, and was attended by Dr. DuBois, George Padmore, CLR James, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ras Makonnen, and others. Nkrumah and Kenyatta served as secretaries and played a critical role in organizing the conference.
It was also in the same year that Nkrumah left the United States for Britain after attending school in America for 10 years. When he was still a student in the United States, he met CLR James. CLR James said Nkrumah used to talk a lot and "he talked a lot of nonsense in those days," as he said in an article he wrote. But he said he was very much impressed by him because of his determination to achieve his goals. Other people who met Nkrumah were also very much impressed by his personality. He was charismatic. He was dynamic. I remember Professor Ali Mazrui, a Kenyan, saying when he first met Nkrumah, he was impressed by his charisma right away.
CLR James went on to say that when Nkrumah was getting ready to go to Britain to study at the London School of Economics, he wrote George Padmore introducing Nkrumah to him. Padmore lived in London. CLR James said he told Padmore to help Nkrumah, and went on to say: "He's not very bright. But he's determined to throw the white man out of Africa."
Nkrumah also read Karl Marx when he was a student in the United States. CLR James, who was a Marxist, didn't think that Nkrumah understood Marxism well. But he gave him credit saying that he studied further, and when Nkrumah gave a speech at the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, CLR James said "it was an absolute masterpiece."
Nkrumah never looked back. He returned to the Gold Coast in 1947 and, ten years later, led his country to independence, earning it distinction as the first black African country to emerge from colonial rule.
When the Gold Coast won independence as Ghana on March 6, 1957, representatives from the African diaspora were invited to Accra, Ghana's capital, to celebrate. Nkrumah also invited people of African descent to go to Ghana and other parts of Africa to help build the continent.
The people invited by Nkrumah to celebrate Ghana's attainment of independence included Dr. Martin Luther King, Ralph Bunche, A. Philip Randolph, Adam Clayton Powell, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, and Richard Wright. There were also common citizens from the diaspora, such as Lucille Davis, an African American who was working in Los Angeles when the Gold Coast won independence and became Ghana. She wrote Nkrumah directly asking him to intervene on her behalf when the British embassy in Washington tried to stop her from going to Ghana to attend the independence celebrations. As Mary Ellen Ray who has lived in Ghana for almost 20 years stated in her article, "Ghana: 'Home' For African Americans":
"Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, sent out a call to skilled and talented African Americans to come to Ghana to help with the building of a new independent African nation. Many came; some left and some stayed. Today, it's estimated there are between 1,500 and 2,000 residing permanently in the country. This count isn't entirely accurate because many settled outside the larger towns and cities preferring to stay in villages and/or not registering with the U.S. Embassy.
African Americans residing in Ghana represent almost every state in the U.S., even Hawaii. A large number came as the wives of Ghanaians they met in the States. And each year more retirees arrive. Though inflation has hit Ghana and the "bargain" prices are not as much of a bargain anymore, water and electricity and telephone services continue to 'come and go' without notice, and cultural differences can get sticky at times, many of us African Americans 'hang in thar'.
Several have been here for fifty years. Dr. Robert Lee, a classmate of Kwame Nkrumah at Lincoln University, and his wife, Dr. Sara Lee (now deceased) were among Ghana's pioneering dentists. Sara Lee started the nation's first school dental clinic. After five decades of dental practice, Dr. Lee retired in 2002.
When Lucille Davis heard about the upcoming independence of Ghana in 1957 she was working in Los Angeles, an Upper State New Yorker, and decided she wanted to attend this historic event. The British Consulate discouraged her from making the trip. Undeterred, she went home, sat down and wrote a letter directly to Kwame Nkrumah, the president-to-be, explaining her desire and her plight. Within two weeks the British Consulate called Mrs. Davis saying Kwame Nkrumah was inviting her to the independence celebration as an honored guest. She now owns and operates the Beachcomber Guest House facing the Guinea Sea in Teshie Nunga, a suburb of Accra."
Dr. DuBois was one of the African Americans who moved to Ghana and renounced his American citizenship. In 1961, Nkrumah invited Dr. DuBois to spend his last days in Ghana. DuBois was then in conflict with the American government for his opposition to America's Cold War and imperial policies. He left the United States and became a citizen of Ghana and died on August 27, 1963, in Accra, the day before the March on Washington when Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous "I Have A Dream" speech on August 28. He was 95 and died shortly after becoming a Ghanaian citizen.
The involvement of Dr. DuBois and others in the African independence struggle, and the participation in Pan-African conferences by Africans from Africa together with those from the United States, the Caribbean and Europe, demonstrates the indissoluble bonds that have always existed between Africa and the diaspora. Black people in the Americas and elsewhere have always known that the well-being of Africa is inextricably linked with their destiny because whatever affects one, affects the other. No black person is free until all blacks are free.
And until Africa is free and united, there is no hope for the black race. If there is dignity in numbers, there is also humiliation in numbers. If more than 600 million black people in Africa - more than 200 million Africans in Africa are not black - cannot do anything to uplift the black race, 35 million blacks in the United States, or others elsewhere in the diaspora, cannot do it alone. Therefore the destiny of the black race lies with Africa. That is where the numbers and the resources are. And the bonds that have always existed between Africa and the diaspora should be strengthened to help Africans, at home and abroad, achieve their goals to be among the best among men.
When the Sixth Pan-African Congress was held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1974, under the stewardship of President Julius Nyerere almost 35 years after the Fifth Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester in England in 1945, it was the first of its kind to be held on African soil. It was held in Nkrumah Hall at the University of Dar es Salaam. The hall was named after Nkrumah in memory of his dedication and achievements as a Pan-Africanist and Pan-African leader, one of the greatest leaders Africa has ever produced. In a survey of Africans in 2000, as reported by the BBC, the majority of the people voted for Nkrumah as the most influential African leader.
And in a Pan-African context, he probably had the strongest links to black America among all African leaders. And the years he spent as a student in the United States helped to strengthen those ties. But it was the depth of his Pan-African commitment, his ability to fully embrace the people in the diaspora as fellow Africans, as well as his colorful style as a leader, which was the biggest attraction to him among African Americans.
When he was a student, he was also attracted to Marcus Garvey and said in his autobiography that it was the teachings of Garvey which had the biggest influence on him. As he stated: "Of all the literature that I studied, the book that did more than any other to fire my enthusiasm was Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Garvey, with his philosophy of 'Africa for Africans' and his 'Back to Africa' movement, did much to inspire the Negroes of America in the 1920's."
Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1914 at the age of 28. After he moved to Harlem in 1916, New York became the new headquarters of the movement. It was the largest black movement in American history, attracting millions of followers and admirers with its mission to uplift the black race.
Marcus Garvey wanted to unite blacks worldwide and build a strong empire in Africa. Thus, the UNIA also became a back-to-Africa movement. As Garvey stated when he developed his vision for the Universal Negro Improvement Association: "Where is the black man's government? Where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his President, his ambassador, his country, his men of big affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared, 'I will help to make them.'" And the place where he was going to achieve his goal was Africa.
Garvey's vision undoubtedly had a profound impact on Nkrumah when he was a student in the United States and after he became president of Ghana as he sought to unite Africa. He became the most forceful exponent of immediate continental unification with his slogan, "Africa Must Unite." It was also the title of his book published to coincide with the founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in May 1963.
Nyerere had the same kind of Pan-African commitment like Nkrumah. He embraced the African diaspora as much as Nkrumah did but did not have a flamboyant style like Nkrumah's. His style was simple, deceptively simple. Underneath lay a deep commitment to Pan-African causes transcending continental boundaries, without parallel among his contemporaries since Nkrumah whose political career was abruptly cut short by a military coup engineered by the CIA in February 1966.
And while Nkrumah, together with Jomo Kenyatta, played a key role in organizing the Fifth Pan-African Congress which was attended by a number of future African leaders including future presidents such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, and Nkrumah and Kenyatta themselves; Nyerere presided over the Sixth Pan-African Congress during a period when the liberation struggle in southern Africa was most intense.
It was also during this critical phase that African Americans launched a sustained campaign to influence American policy towards Africa, especially southern Africa. Leaders such Reverend Leo Sullivan who drew up the Sullivan principles with which American companies doing business in apartheid South Africa were required to comply to advance the cause of racial justice in that country; black members of the United States Congress who formed the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC); and groups such as TransAfrica led by Randall Robinson, played a critical role in this campaign and in helping to advance the cause of liberation in southern Africa. It was Pan-African unity at its best.
In Africa, Nyerere was, among all African leaders since Nkrumah, the most relentless supporter of the African liberation movements and their most articulate exponent in international forums. And he believed, until his last days, that the destiny of Africans in Africa was inextricably linked with the destiny of black people in the diaspora whom he considered to be Africans like Nkrumah and other African leaders did. As he said in one of his last interviews with the New Internationalist in December 1998 almost one year before he died in October 1999:
"After independence, the wider African community became clear to me. I was concerned about education; the work of Booker T. Washington resonated with me. There were skills we needed and black people outside Africa had them. I gave our US ambassador the specific job of recruiting skilled Africans from the US Diaspora. A few came, like you (the interviewer, Ikaweba Bunting). Some stayed; others left.
We should try to revive it (Pan-Africanism). We should look to our brothers and sisters in the West. We should build a broader Pan-Africansim. There is still room - and the need."
Relations Between Africans and African Americans: Misconceptions, Myths and Realities
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Paperback: 444 pages
Publisher: New Africa Press (10 January 2007)
ISBN-10: 0980253454
ISBN 9780980253450