The Africans (29 page)

I know of no studies that adequately describe what long-range effects slavery had on Africa, a continent where up to 50 million people, mostly males between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, were forced to migrate to other worlds. The migration had influenced events economically, politically and socially in the United States to this day. In Africa, one could argue that the economic impact of depopulation was relatively minor. The economy was a subsistence one, there was ample land and the young women left behind continued to produce large families. Africa, though, had been robbed of its masculine strength. Families were torn apart, tribes saw their
warriors disappear, the white man became the symbol of a superior force that was evil enough to be feared and powerful enough to be respected. Psychologically the effect was devastating.

Europe later met great resistance confronting the Moslems in northern Africa. France needed 30,000 troops before Tunisia yielded to colonialism. Britain fought pitched battles with the Egyptians and spent a dozen years fighting in the deserts of the Sudan. But black Africa lost its first confrontation with the white man in the most humiliating way. It surrendered without a struggle, with hardly a bow raised in protest. It had been as passive as the Indians were fierce in defending their rights and land in the United States. The first seeds of the uncertainty and inferiority Africa still feels in its dealings with the outside world had been planted. If Africa had had the means to resist the slave traders, then the era of colonialism might never have spread to its shores. As it was, the course of African history had been changed unalterably.

“Sometimes I sit down and try to think what my life, my family’s life, would be like if I’d been born two hundred years ago,” a civil servant in the Gambia, Abdulla Secka, told me one day as we traveled by boat up the Gambia River to the village of Juffure, where author Alex Haley found his “roots” and later wrote a book that sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into thirty-two languages.

“I really can’t imagine it. Maybe somebody would be trying to sell me or my children. Or maybe I’d be trying to sell someone for some rum or beads. It’s all too distant, too impossible, to imagine. It’s just not something we talk about or think about anymore. God has been kind. He has let us forget the past.”

Africans can no more forget the past than can the 25 million Americans for whom Africa is the distant motherland, beckoning her children home with promises of black dignity, cultural affinity, a sense of belonging. Tens of thousands of these Americans answered that call during the past decade as the reorientation of black Americans gained momentum, signaling a shift from self-criticism and even self-hatred to fascination and pride in black origins. The return to Africa brings joy to some Americans, disillusionment to others. But for almost all, whether expatriate or tourist, there are two overriding impressions: first, the blackness of one’s skin does not guarantee immediate acceptance; second, Africa may be the homeland, but the United States is home.

“I think we’re perceived as Americans first, blacks second,” said David French, a Boston doctor who ran a twenty-county health program in West Africa for the World Health Organization. “When I first visited Africa eight or nine years ago, I had the feeling there was some disdain on the part of Africans toward black Americans. We were suspect because we ended up in the United States in the first place, and because we put up with all we did for three hundred years.

“Now I get the impression that Africans are asking themselves, ‘Where are the most educated, prosperous, technically trained blacks in the world?’ Well, they’re in the United States. And the Africans are saying, ‘If you’ve got something to offer, come on over and join us.’ ”

In the 1960s a group of Black Panthers from the United States went to Kenya, hoping to learn the tactics of revolution. It was in Kenya, after all, that the Mau Mau guerrillas fought black Africa’s first war of liberation and the Panthers expected to find many sympathetic brothers there. Not so. They were ignored by the government, harassed by the police, laughed at by the university students and never even saw an Afro haircut. The Panthers’ intended revolution was a luxury of the middle class in a free society. But in Kenya they were outsiders in an impoverished land of passive people and conservative government. They found no audience at all and within a week were on their way back to the United States.

In Ethiopia, black U.S. Peace Corps volunteers always had a difficult time finding acceptance; they were looked down on, as are most Africans, by the European-featured Ethiopians. And in many capitals, African government officials are distinctly displeased when Washington assigns an abundance of black diplomats to its forty-two embassies on the continent. At one point in the late 1970s when the ambassador, aide director and Peace Corps director at the U.S. embassy in Kenya were all black, a ranking Kenyan official remarked at a cocktail party, “Why doesn’t Washington send us its
top
diplomats, instead of sticking us with all its blacks?” The assumption was both unfair and incorrect; the black American diplomats I met in Africa were on the whole no better or worse than the white diplomats. But most Africans are still imprisoned by a colonial mentality, believing that a European—as all whites are called in East Africa—is somehow more capable than a black. This attitude is not surprising when you consider that most whites an African encounters are in positions of authority, or at least are involved with
missions that can bring change to Africa: they are doctors, businessmen, diplomats dispensing advice and money, missionaries, relief agency workers, journalists, highly trained technicians and professionals with skills in communications, construction, aviation, agriculture and finance.

The African experience for American blacks is a more poignant and moving one than a white American would experience traveling for the first time to, say, England. But blacks are not immune to the lethargy, frustrations, inefficiency and ignorance in Africa, and no small number merely throw up their hands in disillusionment. “Thank God my granddaddy got aboard that ship,” said a member of Muhammad Ali’s entourage during the 1974 Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire. And on a continent where individual liberty is the privilege of a chosen few, there is also the realization that the American black has more dignity, freedom and security at home than most Africans have ever known in their own lands.

“I’ll tell you what I tell blacks who write me, asking if they should come to Africa,” said Clifford Sharp, a Detroit mechanic who moved to Guinea in West Africa in 1968. “I tell them: If you want to come to Africa for fun, don’t come. If you have a superior attitude, don’t come. If you expect to have no problems here, don’t come. But if you want to aid the development of the black race, if you care, then come. But you must have pioneer spirit and missionary zeal, because you’re certainly going to have some problems getting by day to day.”

Sharp was sixty-six years old when I met him in Conakry, as depressing, dilapidated and filthy a capital as you’ll find anywhere in Africa. He had maintained his U.S. passport and voted Democratic on an absentee ballot in each U.S. presidential election, but he considered himself a “returned African,” not an American. He and his wife, Laverna, lived simply on his monthly $404 Social Security check, which he supplemented by tending to President Sékou Touré’s fleet of cars. Touré had run one of the most repressive regimes in Africa for more than twenty years, but the Sharps had remained apolitical, not meddling at all in local affairs, and they spoke with great pride of being black people in a country run by a black president.

Back in the early sixties, when Sharp had decided “I just wanted to be with my own kind,” he and Laverna, a teacher, had started saving their money for a “return” to Africa. They wrote to four
countries asking about the possibility of immigrating. Nigeria never bothered to reply; Ghana responded that the Sharps had flunked the examination for entry, although they had never taken any test; Liberia said it did not need mechanics or teachers; and President Touré had written back personally, saying; “Come. We welcome any brother who wants to help us develop our country.”

“I’d never even seen a black president before we arrived,” Sharp said. “I found it hard to believe there really was such a thing. But just after we got to Conakry, we were ushered into President Touré’s chambers. They were beautiful chambers, and he rose to receive my wife and me. A president of a republic rose to receive us!

“He extended his hand and said ‘
Bon jour
’—we had a translator with us who said that meant ‘good day’—and when we left after about ten minutes, President Touré rose again and led us to the door and opened it for us. Can you imagine how proud we felt as black people.”

Sharp said he had no interest in politics or revolution and he had nothing more than a nodding acquaintance with another American living in Conakry, black activist Stokely Carmichael, who moved to Guinea in 1968. Was there anything Sharp missed in the United States? Sharp thought for a moment as he climbed into his battered 1971 Peugeot. “Chicken,” he finally said. “A good succulent chicken, not the scrawny little ones we got here. How much does a good succulent fried chicken cost in America now?”

By late March the monsoon winds along the Kenyan coast have started to die, leaving the air breathless and heavy with humidity, and on the piers of the Old Port in Mombasa bare-chested stevedores sweat and strain, their backs piled high with cases of dried fish. They struggle up the slippery gangplanks and onto the decks while the captains of the great wooden dhows look anxiously out to sea, hoping to detect even the softest breeze that would carry them home to India on their last journey of the season.

The dhows have plied the waters of the northern Indian Ocean for two thousand years, connecting Africa with Asia and the Persian Gulf states as trading partners. In the early years the dhows brought glass bottles and iron tools to Africa and returned to Arabia with slaves, ivory, animal skins and timber. The single-masted, lateen-rigged ships would slip by Fort Jesus, the fourteenth-century Portuguese bastion that guards the entrance to Mombasa’s port, with
drums beating and flags flying. The crews would throw up their hands in thanksgiving and shout their greetings to friends who had arrived earlier on other vessels. The port would be so packed with dhows that you could hardly see the water.

As recently as 1945, more than four hundred dhows used to call every year at Mombasa and Zanzibar. But trade routes and markets changed, transportation moved into the age of jetliners and supertankers, and today the long-distance dhows, like the monsoon winds in March, are dying. No more than a dozen now make the treacherous five-week journey from Kuwait or Bombay to Mombasa in any given year, and they glide quietly into the empty port with no pounding music or cheering crews. Their time is past, though their role in history is not. For the dhows remain a symbol of another foreign people who affected the character of Africa—the Asians. (The term “Asian” in Africa refers to all brown-skinned people, usually Indians, Pakistanis and Goans.)

For more than a century the Asians in Africa have lived in a twilight zone: half citizen, half refugee, not quite belonging anywhere. They came as traders and sailors and indentured servants, and although the Europeans treated them with contempt and the Africans with suspicion and disdain, they did not succumb to the discrimination and hostility of their new world. Instead they did what the African had been unable to do. They scaled or sidestepped the barriers and emerged as Africa’s first nonwhite entrepreneurial class of money brokers and professionals.

The Indians arrived in their dhows in the 1700s, setting up trading posts along the coast, and before long they were the dominant commercial presence in Mombasa and Zanzibar. Many trafficked in slaves. Others pushed into the interior on foot and in ox carts. They established small shops—an important factor in the development of East Africa—that catered to the African and later to the white settler. In many cases the Indian merchant was the first permanent commercial or foreign contact the African villager had with the outside world. The Asian considered the African slothful and did not hesitate to exploit his ignorance for personal profit.

When slavery was abolished and Africans refused to continue to work on the plantations, even for wages, thousands of Indians were brought in as indentured workers. Nearly 32,000 were imported in 1896 to build the railroad from Mombasa to Uganda that opened up East Africa for the European settler. Others went to Mozambique
to build a rail line from Beira to Southern Rhodesia. Disease, insects, heat and wild animals killed thousands of them.

After the two world wars, new waves of immigration, encouraged by the British, brought thousands more Asians to East Africa. They were dubbed “passenger” Indians, and they came for the same reasons that their forefathers had stayed—a better standard of living. Colonial governors argued that their segregation in residential and commercial zones was essential for sanitary reasons until they learned the “European way of life.”

The Asians were industrious and economically aggressive and they soon controlled a large part of the East African economy.
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They became the merchants, the artisans, the financiers and they garnered large fortunes. To the African, the Asian was an exploiter; to the Asian, the African was culturally inferior and lazy.

“I could start out from scratch tomorrow and I’d be rich again in three years,” an Asian jeweler in Somalia said. “The competition of the Africans is negligible. They don’t know how to work like we do. Even if I had to work twelve or fourteen hours a day, Saturdays and Sundays, I wouldn’t mind.”

In the 1950s, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru urged the Asians in Africa to give their active support to the black nationalist movements that were sweeping the continent. Few did. They had every reason to hate colonialism, but they had learned how to prosper within the system and they feared that independence would threaten the limited privileges they had won.