Leo Africanus / Africa is a Country

I wrote a review of the film “Blacks Without Borders‘ for the latest issue of Journal of South African and American Studies.

Here’s an excerpt:

Blacks without Borders gives little sense of the historical contexts of African-American immigration to South Africa in relation to the longer history of the settlement of African Americans in Africa, and that group’s relation to modern South African history. In 1859, two free descendants of African slaves brought to the Americas—Robert Campbell, a chemist from Jamaica, and Martin Delaney, a medical doctor from the United States, travelled to what is now Nigeria to investigate possibilities of settling in Africa. Their trip included signing agreements with Yoruba authorities to settle African Americans there in exchange for contributing their skills as tradesmen and entrepreneurs. Both men returned to the Americas, but Campbell would later return and settle in Lagos with his family in 1862, where he established one of the colony’s first black-owned newspapers. Though freed slaves established the West African country of Liberia in 1822 and settled in Sierra Leone in the mid-19th century, Campbell and Delaney were the first to popularize the idea of returning to Africa among black Americans. Later Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement garnered a strong following among urban black Americans during the first half of the twentieth century.

It was only from the late 1950s, however, with the advent of political independence for a large number of sub-Saharan African countries, that emigrating to Africa became an attractive (and feasible) option for African Americans tired of American racial segregation. In 1957, when the Gold Coast attained its independence, Kwame Nkrumah—who had a long association with American blacks and studied outside Philadelphia—invited African-Americans to come and live in the newly independent Ghana. Many of these—including Maya Angelou and Shirley Du Bois, who started Ghana’s television service—would play key roles in Ghana’s new government, business classes, and civil society. However, as early romantic enthusiasm for independence tapered off (Nkrumah, for one, was removed by a military coup in 1966), many of these immigrants returned to the United States, or moved elsewhere. By the mid-1970s only a few scattered committed individuals—former Black Panthers in Tanzania, Kwame Toure in Guinea, development workers and academics scattered over Southern African frontline states—remained. Despite persistent racism and inequality, blacks in the United States were making some headway in political and economic life. A number of blacks were elected to public office and private entities were under pressure to hire more minorities. For most Americans—in its media at least—the continent was increasingly associated with political and economic crises. Not surprisingly, by 1997, black journalist Keith Richburg, who had worked as a foreign correspondent covering civil wars in Somalia and Rwanda in the early 1990s, wrote in his memoir: “Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers, and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose into the images of the rotting flesh.”1 He added for good measure that he was happy his ancestors escaped Africa, even if through slavery.

One country, however, fed the African-American imagination: South Africa. African-Americans had played some role in that country’s history since the mid-nineteenth century, especially in educating some of its nationalist leadership (among others, ANC leader John Dube, who studied at Oberlin College, Charlotte Maxeke, who started the ANC Women’s League and was educated at Wilberforce College, also in Ohio, and Alfred B. Xuma, educated at Tuskegee, the University of Minnesota, and Northwestern).2 In South Africa, African-American missionaries started one of the largest black independent churches, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Later when the ANC was outlawed in South Africa, African-Americans were some of the early and most vocal supporters of the South African struggle (while mainstream US opinion largely sided with the apartheid regime until the 1980s). The mid twentieth-century South African system of apartheid mirrored the US Jim Crow system of racial violence and racial discrimination. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X both singled out apartheid for criticism.

When, in 1990, Nelson Mandela, the symbol of the South African freedom struggle, was freed after 27 years in prison, he immediately travelled to the United States. Visiting eight cities in 11 days and addressing the US Congress, as the first African and only the third private citizen to do so, Mandela helped cement Americans’ popular associations with South Africa. This was what Port Elizabeth-born academic Rob Nixon described at the time as South Africa’s “idiom and psychology of redemptive politics”: deliverance from bondage, divine election, promised lands and the destiny of humanity. South Africa’s transition definitely resonated with African-Americans and some began to look to South Africa as an emigration option.