Is It Time To let Africa Go?
"I hate that Black people call themselves African-American!" Shouted Bola, half-jokingly in my high school's weekly Black Student Association meeting.
"WE are are African! not y’all!" she gestured toward the other proud Nigerians in the room clapping and laughing in approval at their vocal leader. That was the first time I ever saw a clear distinction between African Americans and African immigrants and their descendants. And this realization was in the midst of my cultural identity crisis. I always loved learning about cultures but because of my perceived lack of culture as a black woman (who many of my peers considered to be too “white” anyway) I had gone through phases of really trying to identify and claim cultures that weren't mine. I used to tell people I was Jamaican as I was obsessed with Bob Marley and Caribbean music. Then I found my love for the Spanish language and began listening to Spanish music and watching Spanish TV exclusively searching for a way to identify and set roots. By the time of the aforementioned Black Student Association meeting in my freshman year of high school, I had staked cultural claim onto Africa. It felt right, I thought, as I was clearly a descendant of African people despite having no concrete ties anywhere in my recent family history. I embraced African studies and geography, and after reading a National Geographic Article on DNA tests to trace the lineage of African- Americans, I was ready to take my test and trace my roots. You couldn't tell me that that i wasnt the embodiment of Africa at the time.
So when I heard my assumed African Brothers and Sisters distance themselves from their descendants, I was devastated. They went on and on about how educated African immigrants were and opposing black stereotypes, they introduced us to special words they had that demeaned us. I realized we were in fact very different.
A large part of the Black Nationalist movement is anchored in a reverence to Africa. A praise of a nation that we never knew, of a history that was robbed from us. "Unfinished Migrations" lays out 5 constitutional elements of diasporic consciousness, 3 of which deal with reverence to the Motherland.." The making of a memory and vision of that homeland"..." a commitment to the maintenance/restoration of the homeland, desire for return to the homeland"
From Marcus Garvey’s movement back to Africa, and the migration to Liberia, and the reclaiming of African inspired names and traditions in the 70s, black Americans have always been searching for acceptance in the “motherland” but ti’s always a shock when we realize that after so many years of families being ripped apart, names, customs, and being erased from our minds, we have become culturally different from our counterparts on the ancestral territory.
Saidiya Hartman realized this once she finally got to Africa. In the prologue to “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route” she finds that she feels like more of an outsider than a welcomed child when she arrives to Ghana. She is called “Obruni” by locals, spotted early on by children on the street.
“By the time the captives arrived on the coast, often after trekking hundreds of miles, passed through the hands of African and European traders, and boarded the slaver, they were strangers. In Ghana they say that a stranger is like water running over the ground after a rainstorm: it soon dries up and leaves behind no traces.”
She talks of how desperately she had tried to reinvent herself in search for links to her cultural ties to Africa. Although I never got around to taking a pilgrimage to Africa or changing my name, we both showed that we were ashamed and lost we were as a result of being a stranger - not an African but a Black American.
All remnants of African culture has definitely not been erased from our lineage, we see traces of it in our music, dance, the way we do our hair and of course our genetics. But Black culture has certainly taken on a life of its own the more distant Africa became in the memories of the descendants of the slaves. It took me a while to realize the significance of Black culture and the fact that the every part of our history (the good and the bad) brought us to where we are now.
The fact that I have an english name is evidence of my history, and the way black culture has meshed and reshaped American culture is a testament to survival and something to be very proud of. So letting go of Africa doesn’t have to mean forgetting it or resenting it. It is an understanding that yes my ancestors came from there but history has taken my lineage much further and that is nothing to be ashamed of.