West Africa Review (2000)
ISSN: 1525-4488
Unambiguous Diaspora Slavery/Ambiguous African Wonders: 11 Ways of Wondering About the Connection.
|
West Africa Review (2000) ISSN: 1525-4488 Unambiguous Diaspora Slavery/Ambiguous African Wonders: 11 Ways of Wondering About the Connection. |
|
Lemuel Johnson
This is re: Ibrahim Soundiata, Howard University, who instructively observed that:
“Two constructs -- ’The Image of Africa’ and ’The Image of Slavery’ -- have molded, and continue to mold, the Black Diaspora. “Wonders of the African World” gingerly attempts to walk the line between the two...”
Readers,
I offer for your consideration 11 Diaspora contexts, and the tradition within which Gates “gingerly attempts to walk the line” between wonders in Africa and the (complicit) origins of New-World slavery.
The strongest gods are African. I tell you it’s certain they could fly....I don’t know how they permitted slavery. The truth is...I can’t make head or tail of it. To my mind it all started with the scarlet handkerchiefs....It was the scarlet did for the Africans. When the kings saw that the whites--I think the Portuguese were the first--were taking out these scarlet handkerchiefs as if they were waving, they told the blacks, “Go on then and get scarlet handkerchief.” And they were captured, [on the day they crossed the wall.] There was an old wall in Africa right round the coast, made of palm-bark and magic insects which stung like the devil.
-- Biografia de un cimarron (as told to Miguel Barnet)
Rio Reael [New Calabar River, that is] --When you first enter the river in front of the village called Facke [Focko], you pay 24 coarse bracelets there. Then they allow you to pass. When you arrive in front of the trading place, you must first make an agreement with the leading men concerning what you are to give for a man, woman, boy or girl. Having done so, you pay the big men 250 or 300 coarse bracelets--neither more nor less; in the [Rio] Calbary one generally gives the following for slaves:
80 bracelets for a man
60 for a woman
50 for a boy or girl..
This is when there are no foreign ships lying near you. If you have a competitor, you must regulate matters in such a way as to injure him, for he who is first loses little time, and to save time is a great advantage.
-- West Africa in the Mid-Seventeenth Century, An Anonymous Dutch Manuscript
Aye, lad, I have seen these factories... Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah, Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us. And there was one--King Anthracite we named him-- He’d honour us with drum and feast and conjo and palm-oil-glistening wenches deft in love, and for tin crowns that shone with paste, red calico and German-silver trinkets... (1962)
The claim [on the New World] which we put forward now as Africans is not our inheritance, but a bequest, like that of other races, a bill for the condition of our arrival as slaves. Our own ancestors shared that complicity, and there is no one left on whom we can exact revenge. That is the laceration of our shame...[But] the rage for revenge is hard to exorcise.
--”What The Twilight Says: An Overture” (from Dream on Monkey Mountain & Other Plays, 1970)
There were (New-World) Blacks who accepted the contemporary theory of Manifest Destiny promulgated by (New-World) whites. They believed that they had been brought to America for slavery by “providential design,” so that they might be Christianized and “civilized” to return to the “Dark Continent” with the light of “civilization.” As one (African American) Methodist clergyman emphasized, “the obligation, my brethren, for African evangelization is...upon us--the obligation by racial affinity, by providential preparation, by special adaptation, by divine command, is upon us” (sic)
--from M.C.B. Mason (“Africa in America and Africa Beyond the Seas,” 1917)
O black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
.....
Heart of what slave poured forth such melody As “Steal Away to Jesus”? On its strains His spirit must have nightly floated free, Though still about his hand he felt his chains.
.....
but more than [all] this to you belong: You sang a race from wood and stone to Christ. -”O Black & Unknown Bards” (1908)
What is Africa to Me?... One three centuries removed From the scenes his fathers loved, Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me?
....Father, Son, and Holy Ghost So I make an idle boast; Jesus of the twice-turned cheek, Lamb of God, although I speak With my mouth thus, in my heart Do I play a double part?
.... Not yet has my heart or head In the least way realized They and I are civilized.
Do-fe-do [that is, fighting among themselves] mek guinea come a Jamaica.
-proverb
The people in the Tabernacle...had been told in school that their ancestors were pagan. That there had been slaves in Africa, where Black people had put each other in chains. They were given the impression that the whites who brought them here from the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast were only copying a West African custom. As though the whites had not named the Slave Coast themselves....
Before the slaves came to Jamaica, the old women and men believed, before they had to eat salt during their sweated labor in the canefield, Africans could fly. They were the only people on this earth to whom God had given this power. Those who refused to become slaves and did not eat salt flew back to Africa; those who did these things, who were slaves and ate salt to replenish their sweat, had lost the power, because the salt made them heavy, weighted down.
--Abeng (1984) Note: “a-beng” is the name of the conch used to summon slaves as well as to herald slave revolts.
He could fly! You hear me? My great-grandaddy could fly!...The son of a bitch could fly!...That motherfucker could fly! Could fly! He didn’t need no airplane. Didn’t need no fuckin’ tee double ay! He could fly his own self!...
“You belong to that tribe of niggers?”
“Yeah. That tribe. That flyin motherfuckin tribe. Oh, man! He didn’t need no airplane. He just took off; got fed up. *All the way up!* No more cotton! No more bales! No more orders! No more shit! He flew, baby. Lifted his beautiful black ass up in the sky and flew on home. Can you dig it?
Jesus God, that must have been something to see....Wow!....[My] great-granddaddy could flyyyyyy...”
“Back to Africa” (1947)
Back to Africa Miss Matty?
Yuh noh know way yuh dah-sey?
....
Me know sey dat yuh great great great
Gramma was African,
But Matty, doan yuh great great great
Grampa was Englishman?
Den yuh great granmada fada
By yuh fada side was Jew?
An yu grampa by yuh mada side
Was Frenchie parley-vous!
But de balance o’ yuh family
Yuh whole generation...
Oonoo all is Jamaican!
The Year is 1970, in the month of November, when Granmans (Paramount Chiefs) from Suriname embarked on state-sponsored visits from Paramaribo, via Amsterdam, to Ghana and Nigeria.
Friday, November 13 -- Kumasi
The reception of and response from the Granmans are as powerfully affecting : as they are edged with bitterness: “The manner in which they were received made a great impression on them and exceeded their expectations....[All the same,]--and this appeared from later reactions--they were of the opinion that their ancestors had been taken away as slaves with the collaboration of their own brothers, and so they felt that some retribution was owed them.”
Friday, November 27 -- Ibadan
With the Oba, who is seated on a beautiful throne flanked by two enormous elephants tusks. The Granmans and their escorts received a cola pot each (beautifully sculptored...)
Friday, November 27 – Ife
Guests of the University, the Granmans are lodged in the elegant guest house. In the afternoon, University of Ibadan historians organize a meeting with the Granmans to discuss history. “The Granmans asked some aggressive questions about the background of the delivery of slaves. The historians were unable to extricate themselves in a satisfactory manner, neither in their own opinion nor in that of the Granmans....”
Sunday, November 28 -- Ife
“At a lunch, Granman Gazon came out with a remark that we did not translate. “It is a fine meal,” he said, “probably paid for with the money that was earned selling us as slaves.” But then he concluded with a lyrical thank-you speech, in which he also referred to the women who had done the cooking.”
Monday, November 30 -- Ibadan
Ceremony presided over by Federal Minister of Information Enahoro: the Minister, in the matter of the slave trade, acknowledged that “it is not only the white people who should be blamed. The Negroes themselves promoted it. Now, however, was the time, he said, to make up for some of that....”
Tuesday, December 1
“At the airport...the farewells were emotional. Goodbye Africa!” (Redacted from Silvia de Groot’s Back-to- Their-Roots diary, “Vier Surinaamse Groot-Opperhoofden op zoek naar hun oorsprongen,” as excerpted from Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas” [1973)])
All things considered, then, there is always Ryna’s Gulch, that New- World site in Song of Solomon from which, Toni Morrison has written, “You just can’t fly off and leave a body alone,” without being complicatedly stranded in the facts and fictions of how it was that Blacks came to be in the New World. (Never mind the “wonders” of the African world...)
© Copyright 2000 Africa Resource Center
Citation Format
Johnson, Lemuel. (2000). Unambiguous Diaspora Slavery/Ambiguous African Wonders: 11 Ways of Wondering About the Connection. West Africa Review: 1 , 2.