“The Africans who came to the United States as slaves started their attempts to reclaim their lost African heritage soon after they arrived in this country. They were searching for the lost identity that the slave system had destroyed. Concurrent with the Black man’s search for an identity in America has been his search for an identity in the world, which means, in essence, his identity as a human being with a history, before and after slavery, that can command respect.”
The above passage was written by Dr. John Henrik Clarke in an “Afterward” to the 1986 republication of J. C. DeGraft-Johnson’s 1954 ground-breaking book, African Glory: The Story of Vanished Negro Civilizations (Black Classic Press, Baltimore, MD).
“African Glory is a general history of Africa written by an indigenous African scholar,” said Dr. Clarke. “This book was published in 1954, the eve of the ‘Independence explosion’ in Africa and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Colonialism and the attitudes that went with it were being challenged by African people and people throughout the world. In demanding the right to rule their land, they were also demanding the right to interpret their history.”
When DeGraft-Johnson sat down to write African Glory in the early 1950s he faced a dilemma: Should he write an overall history of Africa without detailing racial types; or, in his words, “regard Africa as the ‘Land of the Negroes’ and give a history of the Negro race[?]” He was aware that a whole section of South Africa’s Witwatersrand University was devoted to research into the origins and distribution of the “Negro race,” but ancient bones found in Africa were still the center of heated controversy. He knew some learned men believed there were “no Negro skulls of any antiquity—the oldest known is about 6000 B. C.”
“It must be noted that we have not yet succeeded in finding out the original home or the evolutionary area of the Negro,” DeGraft-Johnson concluded. He then set aside the arguments and wrote: “In this book we can only hope to touch on some of the salient landmarks in the history of this vast continent.”
Anyone who has watched Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Wonders of the African World on PBS will find familiar ground in African Glory. Histories of lost kingdoms, of African empires, of African literati and the diaspora of the slave trade are common themes. Citing a lecture given by Professor Emil Torday in Geneva in 1931, DeGraft-Johnson wrote that the slave trade broke up or undermined the various and once peaceful “peasantry” of indigenous African cultures. Then came slave traders “and millions of de-tribalized or decentralized Africans were let loose upon each other. . . .”
• • •
In Haiti the 1791 slave rebellion overthrew a French government. For eight years Toussaint L’Ouverture ruled a free black republic. Afrocentrism surfaced in Haiti during the 1820s and declared the origins of black African civilization lay in ancient Egypt.
In the United States Afrocentric thought and the Black Nationalism movement began at least 100 years before the publication of African Glory. William J. Moses (The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925, 1978), suggests that the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law, marked “a point at which several black leaders began to turn in the direction of the back-to-Africa movements.”
Moses noted in the introduction to his book Africans living in a “Westernized” culture recognized “differences between African societies and the self-confident, civilized, Anglo-Saxon culture.” A movement began that advocated African civilization, “which embodied a sense of obligation to aid in the uplifting of the continent and its ‘backward’ peoples as an initial step in the elevation of black people everywhere. . . . If Africa could be uplifted, the slave trade would cease. Africans living abroad could take pride in their homeland. The humanity of the Negro would be vindicated and the link between blackness and slavery would be destroyed, once an African civilization had been established.” Out of “Pan-Africanism” evolved an authoritarian collectivist ideal, “a belief that all black people could and should act unanimously under the leadership of one powerful man or group of men, who would guide the race by virtue of superior knowledge or divine authority towards the goal of civilization.”
Black separatism, the secular form of the Black Nationalism movement, and the religious form, Ethiopeanism (inspired by the Old Testament story of enslaved Israelites in Egypt), were practiced by Westernized Africans of the late nineteenth century.
Ironically, said Moses, “Black chauvinism” was a stepchild of European racial theory. “Strangely, the black nationalists of the nineteenth century tended to accept the descriptions of the various races and their innate characteristics almost exactly as they had been described by the European philosophers. . . . Racial chauvinism therefore often consisted of arguing that nature had actually been kinder to the sensitive and gentle African than the stolid, frigid European.”
• • •
What was known about the history of African people in the late 1800s?
During the 1400s the Portuguese had explored the west African coast and by 1488 Diaz had reached the southern Tip of the continent. Slave trade began in 1442, when 10 Africans were brought to Lisbon. For over 350 years trade along the coasts of Africa, and trade with the sub-Sahara kingdoms by Muslim states of the Near East, brought many parts of Africa under the influence of Eastern and Western countries, and Christian and Islam religions. It wasn’t until 1880 that European powers began to divide Africa into colonies. However, travelers, explorers and missionaries had collected enough information by 1875 so that a series of histories of a sort could be compiled and published in England by Rev. Dr. J. G. Wood. A two volume set of Wood’s works including the African histories was printed in the United States in 1878 under the title The Uncivilized Races of Men in All Countries of the World.
The author’s Preface states that because of “the extraordinary variety of the native customs which prevail in that wonderful land [Africa]. . . . It will be seen . . . how necessary it is to devote to that one continent a considerable portion of this work.” Six hundred and ninety-three pages of the first volume and 185 engravings are allotted to African cultures.
The American publisher’s Preface recognizes the Rev. Dr. Wood as “among the most popular and foremost writers of Great Britain,” and recommends that The Uncivilized Races of Man was worthy of a place in every household library.
The Uncivilized Races of Man indoctrinated the general public with a view of Africa held by white Christian missionaries and judged by Victorian morality. Africa appeared to be a continent of contrasting cultures, cruel practices and pagan “fetish” religions. In Wood’s words: “We have, for example, on one side of the river, a people well clothed, well fed, well governed, and retaining but few of the old savage customs. On the other side, we find people without clothes, government, manners, or morality, and sunk as deeply as man can be in all the squalid miseries of savage life.” In a discussion of Dahome, Wood complained that the West African had not been uplifted by his association with Europeans, “men wiser and more powerful” than himself. Instead, he had “only increased his barbarity by the additional means which he obtained from the white man.”
DeGraft-Johnson expressed a different opinion: “Tribes had to supply slaves or be sold as slaves themselves, for this was the age of the gangster. Violence, brutality, and ferocity became the necessities of survival, for generosity and good neighborliness had lost their meaning.”
No comments:
Post a Comment