Africana Studies A Survey of Africa and The African Diaspora

Africana Studies
2
Africana Studies
A Survey of Africa and the African
Diaspora
Fourth Edition
Edited by
Mario Azevedo
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Copyright © 2019
Mario Azevedo
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Azevedo, Mario Joaquim, editor, author.

Title: Africana studies : a survey of Africa and the African diaspora / by
Mario Azevedo.
Description: Fourth edition. | Durham : Carolina Academic Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018040977 | ISBN 9781594607325 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: African diaspora. | Africa--History. | Blacks--History.
Classification: LCC DT16.5 .A35 2018 | DDC 960--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040977
eISBN 978-1-5310-1440-7
Carolina Academic Press, LLC

700 Kent Street
Durham, North Carolina 27701
Telephone (919) 489-7486
Fax (919) 493-5668
www.cap-press.com
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
PART I
INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE
1 · African Studies and the State of the Art

Mario J. Azevedo
Introduction
Definition and Historical Evolution of African Studies
The Disciplines and the “State of the Art” in African Studies
The African Studies Association
The Surfacing and Re-Emergence of Old and New Issues in African Studies:
The Twenty-First Century
Summary
Study Questions and Activities
References
2 · African American Studies and the State of the Art

Rico D. Chapman
Introduction
Historical Context
African American Studies and Their Pivotal Role
Black Studies at HBCUs
Early Funding for African American Studies and the Ford Foundation
Foundation and Structure
Summary
References
PART II
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PEOPLES OF AFRICAN DESCENT AND THEIR PLACE IN HISTORY
3 · Africa and the Genesis of Humankind

R. Hunt Davis, Jr.
Introduction
Physical Environment and Human Development
From Sahelanthropus Tchadiensis to Homo Sapiens
The Evolution of Cultures and Civilizations
The Shift to Food Production and Use of Metals
Early African States
Bantu Expansion
Egypt
The Middle Nile
Other Early and Late African States
Summary
References
4 · Transatlantic Slavery and the Underdevelopment of Africa

Agya Boakye-Boaten
Introduction
Underlying Actors of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Slavery and the Dynamics of Internal African “Slavery”
Nature of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Africa's Underdevelopment
Summary
References
5 · Diaspora Africans and Slavery

Raymond Gavins & Marsha J. Tyson Darling
Introduction
The New World Slave System
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Resistance and Rebellion: A Recurring Response to Oppression
Slavery in the United States
The Response to Slavery
Antislavery and Emancipation
Summary
Glossary
References
6 · European Exploration and Conquest of Africa

Mario J. Azevedo
Introduction
The Scramble for Africa and African Response
Colonial Policies in Africa
Impact of Colonial Rule in Africa
Summary
References
7 · The Quest for Equality: From Reconstruction to Obama

Marsha J. Tyson Darling
Introduction
Reconstruction: Education, Leadership, and the “Negro” Movement
Migration, the Military, and the Courts
Direct Social Action and Its Aftermath
Summary
References
8 · The African Experience in the Caribbean: Continuity and Change

Lomarsh Roopnarine
Introduction
Geography, Slavery, and Emancipation
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Post-Emancipation Caribbean: Labor Movements and Decolonization
Social Issues: African-Caribbean Languages and Religions
Summary
References
9 · African Nationalism: Freedom for Men, Women, and the Nation

Maria Martin
Introduction
Establishment of Colonialism
Precursors to African Nationalism: WWI, WWII, and the Cold War
Influences on African Nationalism
The Movement Begins
Where Are the Women?
Women in Nationalism or Women's Nationalism? A Nigerian Case Study
Summary
References
10 · The Pan-African Movement

Michael Williams
Introduction
Origins and Early Emigration Efforts
Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Developments
Post-World War II Trends
Summary
References
PART III
THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE OF THE BLACK WORLD
11 · The Contemporary African World

Luis B. Serapiao
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Introduction
Nation-Building and Economic Development
Africa in World Affairs
The African Union (AU)
Southern Africa
The Chinese Puzzle: Neo-Colonialism or Assistance to “Comrades in Arms”?
Summary
References
12 · The Contemporary African Diaspora

Msia Kibona Clark
Introduction
Overview of Black Migration in the US
Causes for Migration to the US: Push Factors
Pull Factors
Caribbean Migration
The First Phase
The Second Phase
The Third Phase
Caribbean Communities
African Migration
The First Phase
The Second Phase
The Third Phase
African Communities
Popular Culture Representations of African and Caribbean People
Television and Film
Music
Identity
Other Diasporas
The Americas
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The Middle East and Asia
Europe
Summary
Discussion Questions and Activities
References
13 · Continental Africans and Africans in America: The Progression of a

Relationship
F. Ugboaja Ohaegbulam
Introduction
Naming the Race in the Diaspora
Pre- and Post-Garvey Emigration Schemes
Africa and African American Institutions and Scholars
Tensions in African and African American Relations
Summary
References
PART IV
CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE BLACK WORLD
14 · Music in Africa and the Caribbean

Roderic Knight & Kenneth Bilby
Introduction
Music in Africa
Cultural Context and Genres
Musical Instruments: An Overview
Singing Styles and Content
Stylistic Features of Ensemble Performance
The Music of the Caribbean
Survey of Caribbean Music
Popular Music and Its Links with Tradition
Caribbean Music and the Rest of the World
Summary
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References
15 · African American Music: An Introduction

Eddie S. Meadows
Introduction
Cultural Spheres
Richard Waterman
Olly Wilson
Eddie S. Meadows
Old-Time Music
Africa in Blues
Blues: Country, Classic, Early Urban, Urban
Classic Blues
Early Urban and Urban Blues
Boogie Woogie and Ragtime
New Orleans Ragtime
Jelly Roll Morton Influence
St. Louis Ragtime
Eastern Ragtime
Boogie Woogie compared to Ragtime
Africa in Jazz
Jazz Styles
5-Man Group
7-Man Group
Swing
Musical Attributes of Swing
Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington's Musical Attributes, Contributions, and Innovations
Count Basie
Count Basie's Musical Attributes, Contributions, and Innovations
Bebop
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Hard Bop
Jazz Fusion and Funky Style
Soul Jazz
Jazz Rock
Third Stream
Avant-Garde, Free, and Creative Music
Issues, Trends, and Developments in Jazz, Past and Present
Musical
Non-Musical
Doo-Wop and Rhythm and Blues
White Covers of Black Rhythm and Blues
Soul Music
Funk
Musical Attributes of Funk
Recording Labels
Motown
Phase I, 1959–1963
Phase II, 1964–1967
Phase III, 1968–1972
Stax Records
The Stax Sound
Neo Soul
Hip Hop
Hip Hop Culture
Elements of Hip Hop Culture
Additional Core Hip Hop Cultural Elements
Regional Rap
New Directions and Criticism
Religious Music
Spirituals
Gospel
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1900–1930
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970–2017
Euro-American Classical Music
Summary
Selected References
African Origins, Retentions, Transformations, and Reinterpretation
General
Jazz (Text and Reference)
Blues, Popular Music
Spirituals
Gospel
16 · The Art of Africa and the Diaspora

Sharon Pruitt
Introduction
Toward an Approach to Understanding Traditional African Art
A Study of Traditional African Art
Contemporary Art in Africa: Nigeria
Africanisms and Pioneers in African American Art
Some Aspects of Caribbean Art
Summary
References
Images in Videos and Website Articles of Artwork for the Early Part of This
Chapter
Rock Art
Ancient Nigerian Art
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Maasai
17 · Literature in Africa and the Caribbean

Tanure Ojaide
Introduction
Definition
Traditional Oral and Written Literature in Africa
Literary Trends in the English-Speaking Caribbean
Summary
References
18 · African American Literature: A Survey

Trudier Harris
Introduction
Oral Tradition and Slave/Freedom Narratives
African American Poetry
African American Fiction and Drama
Summary
References
19 · Contributions in Science, Business, Film, and Sports

Mario J. Azevedo & Jeffrey Sammons
Introduction
Patenting by African Americans
African Americans and Business Ownership
African Americans in the Film Industry
African Americans in the Sports Arena
Summary
References
PART V
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SOCIETY AND VALUES IN THE BLACK WORLD
20 · The African Family

Mario J. Azevedo
Introduction
Family Structure
Patrilineal and Matrilineal Societies
Modes of Transmission of Tradition
The Impact of Modernization on the Family
Summary
References
21 · The African American Family

Gwendolyn Spencer Prater
Introduction
The Black Family from Slavery to Freedom
The Black Family from Freedom to Civil Rights
A Look at the Present Conditions
The Survival of the African American Family
Summary
References
22 · Religion in Africa
Mario J. Azevedo
Introduction
Traditional Religion
Impact of Christianity
The Expansion of Islam
Summary
References
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23 · Religion in the Diaspora
Kevin D. Butler
Introduction
The United States: The Conjure (Hoodoo) Tradition
The Church in the United States and Slavery
The Roots of the Independent Black Church Movement
The Black Church Movement after Slavery
The Caribbean and Brazil: African Religious Traditions
The Church in the Caribbean: Missionary Work on the Islands Prior to
Emancipation
Emancipation and the Church
Rastafarianism
Islam in the United States
Summary
References
24 · The Evolving Roles of African Women

Agnes Ngoma Leslie
Introduction
Matriarchy and Patriarchy
Dual-Sex Political System
Women and the Economy
Religion and Status
Women and Supernatural Powers
Women's Political Engagement
Two Queen Mothers
Women's Status in Colonialism
Women's Activism against Colonialism
Women's Movements: Post-Independence
The Contemporary Situation
Case Study: Rwanda
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Summary
References
25 · Women of the Caribbean

A. Lynn Bolles & Barbara Shaw
Introduction
Legacies of the Caribbean History
Family Structure and Kinship
Tourism and Women's Work
Health, Sexuality, and HIV/AIDS
Overview of Caribbean Women's Literature in the Diaspora
Glossary
References
26 · Lifting as We Rise: Women in America

Introduction
Key Conceptual and Methodological Issues
Assessing African Roots and Women's Status
The Enslavement of African Females
Free Black American Women
Freedwomen
Summary
References
27 · Africa Anew: Reinventing Community Alliances and Indigenous Ways

in the Age of HIV/AIDS
Almaz Zewede
Introduction
African Traditional Medicine
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The Development of Western Medicine in Africa: A Brief Overview
Centering African Traditional Medicine
Africa: HIV/AIDS and Associated Disorders
Western Medicine and Africa's Campaign against Major Diseases
Health and African Population Growth
Empowerment and Development through Health: Positive Lessons from the
Anti-River Blindness Project in Africa
Future Africa: Community Self-Mobilization in the Age of HIV/AIDS and
Other Challenges
Community Responses to the Health Crisis: The Stephen Lewis Foundation
Model in Africa
Summary
References
28 · Debunking the Myth of the Doctrine of the Discovery of Africa

Jeremias Zunguze
Introduction
The Papal Bulls: A Brief Historical Background
From Non-Christians to People without Religion: Christendom's Conquest,
Cosmological Fundamentalism, and the Origins of Modern Africa
From Non-Christians to the “Zone of Non-Being”: Conquest and the Order of
the Colonial World
From Non-Humans to People without Art, History, And Science: The
Scramble for Africa, Epistemic Fundamentalism, and the Secular
Reconquest of the Continent
Summary
References
PART VI
APPENDIXES
Appendix A
Selected Maps
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Physical Map of Africa
Pre-Colonial Africa
Colonial Africa
Present-Day Africa
The Caribbean
Appendix B
Landmarks in the History of Peoples of African Descent
Appendix C
Selected Periodicals and References in Africana Studies Available in the
United States
Index
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Contributors
Mario J. Azevedo, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, is former Interim Dean
of the College of Public Service and Professor and Chair of the Department of
Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and former Chair of the Department of History
and Philosophy at Jackson State University. He earned his Ph.D. in African
History from Duke University and an M.P.H. in Epidemiology from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an A.M. in History from American
University, and a B.A. in History from The Catholic University of America. His
career began in 1975 in the Department of History at Jackson State University
before moving to chair the Africana Studies Department at the University of
North Carolina at Charlotte (1986–2006). He returned to Jackson State
University as a Visiting Professor in the Public Health Program in 2006,
subsequently becoming the Chair of the Department of Epidemiology
Biostatistics in 2006 and Interim Associate Dean of the School of Health
Sciences (2007–2008). Dr. Azevedo has published 11 books on health and the
history of Africa, more than 30 articles and book chapters on public health and
African history in refereed journals, and over 40 of his essays are featured in
several encyclopedias. Also a Fulbright Fellow (1996–1997), Dr. Azevedo has
conducted studies on health in Cameroon, Chad, Zimbabwe, South Africa,
Mozambique, and Kenya, and has been a recipient of several public and private
grants. In collaboration with Dr. Gwendolyn S. Prater and Dr. Daniel Lantum,
Dean of the Medical School at the University of Yaounde, Cameroon, and
Professor Nyasha, Department of Populations Studies, Dr. Michael Tawanda,
Department of Sociology, and Professor R. Mupedziswa, Director of the School
of Social Work, at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare, Dr. Azevedo
conducted two major infant mortality and cultural attitudes studies in the forest
of East Cameroon and the area Province of East Mashonaland in Zimbabwe in
1986–1987 and 1994–1995, respectively. One of Dr. Azevedo's most recent
books include: Tragedy and Triumph: Mozambique Refugees in Southern
Africa (1977–2001), Heinemann, 2002, Africana Studies: A Survey of Africa
and Its Diaspora (2005 edition), The State of Health and Health Care in
Mississippi (ed.), University Press of Mississippi, and Historical Perspectives
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on Health and health Systems in Africa, Palgrave/Macmillan (2017). Journals
that have published his articles include: Journal of Southern African Affairs;
African Studies Review; Journal of African Affairs; Africa Today; Western
Journal of African American Studies; Journal of Infectious Diseases; American
Journal of Hypertension; Journal of Transatlantic Studies; Current History;
Journal of the Mississippi Medical Association; The Researcher; Journal of
Muslim Studies; Journal Internacional de Estudos Africanos; Journal of Negro
History; International Journal of Research in Human Sciences; International
Journal of Diabetes in the Developing World; International Journal of
Sociology and Anthropology; and Journal of African History.
Kenneth Bilby earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from John Hopkins
University and works at the Smithsonian Institution, Office of Folk Life
Programs in Washington, D.C. He has conducted field research in New
Mexico, Sierra Leone, and Jamaica, published articles in academic journals,
made a number of ethnomusicological phonograph recordings, and produced
(with Jefferson Miller) a documentary film about the Jamaican Maroons,
Capital Earth. Has also carried out research among the Aluku (Boni) Maroons
of French Guiana.
AgyaBoakye-Boaten earned a Ph.D. in Educational Studies, with an emphasis
in Cultural Studies in Education, M.A. in Political Science (International
Relations), and M.A. in International Affairs (African Studies) all from Ohio
University. He also earned his B.A. (Hons) in Social Work/Administration and
Political Science from the University of Ghana, Legon. He has served in several
leadership positions in different universities since 2007. Agya is an
International Scholar as a lifelong member of Phi Beta Delta Honor Society.
His research interests include alternative education for street children, building
intellectual and creative capacities of students using alternative education
strategies, and the use of education as a medium for the promotion of
democracy, and Modern Day Slavery. He has taught various interdisciplinary,
International, and Africana studies courses. Additionally, he is interested in
decolonial options, construction of African philosophical thought, effects of
colonialism on African aesthetics, and the transformation of indigenous cultures
through global engagement. Currently, he is an Associate Professor and Chair
of the Interdisciplinary/International Studies department, and Director of the
Africana Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
A. Lynn Bolles is Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland College
Park. She was professor of Women's Studies and affiliate faculty in
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Anthropology, African American Studies, Comparative Literature and
American Studies. Her research focuses on political economy of women and
the African Diaspora, particularly the Caribbean. Bolles is the author of Sister
Jamaica (1996), We Paid Our Dues (1996), Claiming their Rightful Position
(1992) and My Mother Who Fathered Me and Others (1988). She is the author
of numerous articles and book chapters and her work is widely reprinted.
Active in her profession, Bolles is a past President of the Association of Black
Anthropologists (1983–4), the Caribbean Studies Association (1997–98), the
Association of Feminist Anthropology (1999–01), and the Society for the
Anthropology of North America (2010–12). She is a Fellow of the Society for
Applied Anthropology, the American Anthropological Association, and the
University of Maryland's NSF funded ADVANCE Professors (2012–13). Lynn
Bolles was elected to the Executive Board of the American Anthropological
Association (2012–15). Named the 2004 Outstanding Minority Faculty at
UMD, in 2013, Bolles achieved the Association of Black Anthropologists
Legacy Award for lifetime of outstanding scholarship, mentorship and service
to the ABA. Dr. Bolles was named 2014 UMD Graduate School Mentor of the
year.
Rico Chapman is Professor of History and Assistant Dean/Director of
Humanities at Clark Atlanta University. He earned his B.S. and M.A. degrees
in History at Jackson State University and a Ph.D. in African Studies from
Howard University in 2008. He once served as Interim Chair of the Department
of History and Philosophy at Jackson State University. His latest book is titled
Student Resistance to Apartheid at the University of Fort Hare: Freedom Now,
a Degree Tomorrow (Lexington Books, 2016). Among some of his most recent
peer-reviewed articles is one titled “Civil Society in Africa,” published in the
Transatlantic Studies Journal.
Marsha J. Tyson Darling is Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies,
and Director of the Center for African, Black & Caribbean Studies at Adelphi
University. She earned her bachelor's degree in American Studies at Vassar
College and M.A. and Ph.D. in Social History from Duke University, where she
was a Fellow in the Oral History Program in the Center for the Study of Civil
Rights and Race Relations. Darling has also held faculty appointments at
Wellesley College, Georgetown University, and the University of Maryland at
College Park. Over the course of 40 years in the academy she has held
appointments as a Research Fellow at the William E. B. DuBois Institute for
Afro-American Research at Harvard University, the Heilbrunn Department of
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Population and Family Health, Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia
University, the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution,
the Center for Women's Policy Studies, in Washington, DC, the Center for
Genetics and Society (CGS), in Berkeley, CA., New York University, and as a
Fulbright Professor at Bangalore University and the American Studies Center at
Hyderbad, India. Darling edited Race, Voting, Redistricting and the
Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Fifteenth Amendment, Volume 1:
The 14th and 15th Amendments and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965; Volume 2:
Enforcing and Challenging the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, and Volume 3:
Alternate Redistricting, Registering and Voting Systems, in the Controversies in
Constitutional Law Series, published by Routledge Press. Darling served as
expert witness for the United States Justice Department's litigation on behalf of
defending the creation of the 11th Congressional District in eastern Georgia in
the Supreme Court case, Johnson v. Miller (1995). She worked as a consultant
on the Eyes on the Prize documentary series, and has appeared as a humanities
scholar in a number of public broadcasting television programs and
independent films, including, “Homecoming,” the award winning PBS film that
chronicles the history of Black land loss in the American South. Most recently,
she was a Series Editor for the Humanities in the Black Studies and Critical
Thinking Book Series at Peter Lang Academic Publishing.
Msia Kibona Clark has a BA in Political Science from Johnson C. Smith
University, an MA in International Relations from American University, and a
PhD in African Studies from Howard University. Dr. Clark is currently an
Assistant Professor of African Studies at Howard University. Her research has
focused on African migration and identity, as well as hip hop and popular
culture in Africa. Dr. Clark has published several scholarly publications on
African migration, African immigrant identities, relations between African
migrants and African Americans, and hip hop culture's intersections with social
change, gender, and politics in Africa. Dr. Clark has written extensively on hip
hop in Africa, including the text Hip Hop and Social Change in Africa and her
forthcoming publication with Ohio University Press, Hip Hop in Africa:
Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers. A past Fulbright Scholar, Dr.
Clark has more than five scholarly chapters and articles on hip hop in Africa.
Dr. Clark also produces the Hip Hop African blog and monthly podcast hosted
at hiphopafrican.com, which she also uses as form of pedagogy.
Trudier Harris (B.A. Stillman College, 1969; M.A., The Ohio State
University, 1972; Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 1973—African American
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literature and folklore) is University Distinguished Research Professor,
Department of English, the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and formerly J.
Carlyle Sitterson Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her authored books include From Mammies to
Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982), Exorcising
Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Black
Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin (1985, for which she won the 1987
College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award), Fiction and
Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991), Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong
Black Women in African American Literature (2001), The Scary Mason-Dixon
Line: African American Writers and the South (2009), and Martin Luther King
Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature (2014). Choice designated The
Scary Mason-Dixon Line one of the “Outstanding Academic Titles” for 2009 in
its “best of the best” listings. It also won The College Language Association
Creative Scholarship Award for 2010. Harris's co-edited volumes include The
Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), Call and Response:
The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition (1998),
and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998). She
published her memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the
South, in 2003. During the fall semester of 2006, she was Faculty Director of an
Honors Study Abroad Seminar in Cape Town, South Africa. She is at work on
“Ungraspable? Depictions of Home in African American Literature,” which she
will complete during a residency at the National Humanities Center in 2018–
2019. In March of 2014, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
created the “Trudier Harris Distinguished Professorship” in her honor. Other
honors include: recognition as the first tenured African American faculty
member at the College of William and Mary (2017), an honorary degree from
William and Mary (2018), the Richard Beale Davis Award for Lifetime
Achievement in Southern Literary Studies (2018), and the Clarence E. Cason
Award for Nonfiction Writing (2018).
R. Hunt Davis, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of History and African Studies,
former Interim Director of International Studies and Programs, and former
Director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida. He was
Editor of the African Studies Review, 1980–1988, and Editor-in-Chief of the
African Studies Quarterly, 2008–2018, and he served as the Coordinator of the
University of Florida-Cornell University project that published Global
Research on the Environmental and Agricultural Nexus for the 21st Century
(1995). He holds a B.A. in History from Grinnell College and an M.A. and
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Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His publications
include Bantu Education and the Education of Africans in South Africa (1972),
Apartheid Unravels (1991), Mandela, Tambo, and the African National
Congress (1991), which he co-edited with Sheridan Johns, and numerous
chapters in edited books, journal articles, and reviews. He is the editor and
senior author of the last two volumes and of the revised first three volumes of
the five-volume Encyclopedia of African History and Culture (2005). He was a
Senior Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor of History at the University of
Cape Town in 1999.
Roderic Knight is professor emeritus of ethnomusicology at Oberlin College,
where he taught both lecture and performance courses for 32 years. His
experience with African music began when he taught music at Bo Government
Secondary School in Sierra Leone, 1964–66, during which time he also began
his study of traditional African music. Graduate studies at UCLA (MA 1968,
PhD 1973), focused on the kora of the Mandinka people of Gambia. His
publications on African music include articles in African Music, African Arts,
Ethnomusicology, the World of Music, the New Grove Dictionary of Music,
Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, and chapters in the books Performance
Practice (ed. Gerard Behague, 1984) and The Other Classical Musics (ed.
Michael Church, 2015). He has also done field research in Central India, and in
organology (the scientific study of musical instruments), with articles in Asian
Music and the Galpin Society Journal. He is also known as the producer of
audio and video documentaries on the music of Gambia and India. The titles are
Kora Manding (Ethnodisc, 1971); Gambie: l'art de la kora par JaliNyamaSuso
(OCORA orig. 1972, rereleased 1996); Tribal Music of India (Folkways, 1983);
JaliNyamaSuso, (Original Music VHS 1991); Music and Dance of the Baiga of
Central India (Original Music VHS, 1993); Mande Music and Dance DVD
(Lyrichord DVD, 2005); Village and Town Music of India and Nepal
(Lyrichord DVD, 2007); Music of West Africa: the Mandinka and Their
Neighbors (Lyrichord DVD, 2010).
Agnes Ngoma Leslie is Senior Lecturer and Outreach Director at the Center for
African Studies, University of Florida. She holds a B.A. degree in Mass
Communications from the University of Zambia; an M.A. in Mass
Communications and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of
Florida. Her research focuses on social movements, women and politics, and
China-Africa relations. Her publications include: Social Movements and
Democracy in Africa: The Impact of Women's Rights in Botswana, published by
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Routledge (New York and London, 2006). Her most recent publications
include: “Zambia and China: Workers' Protest, Civil Society and the Role of
Opposition Politics in Elevating State Engagement” in the Journal of African
Studies (2016), Vol. 16, Issues 3–4. She is the senior editor of The
Encyclopedia of African History and Culture (A Learning Source Book (2005).
She has also served as editor for two African Studies Quarterly special issues
focusing on the China-Africa relationship: “China- Africa Relations:
Theoretical and Practical Perspectives on African ‘Migrants’ in China.”
Volume 17, Issue 4 (February 2018); and “China-Africa Relations: Political
and Economic Engagement and Media Strategies” Volume 16, Issue 3–4
(December 2016). She received a multi-year Fulbright award to conduct a
longitudinal study of women and policy making in Zambia, from 2015–2017.
Maria Martin, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, is currently an Assistant Professor
of African History at the University of California. She holds a PhD in African
American and African Studies with a concentration in history and women's
studies from Michigan State University where she is known for her hip hop
teaching methods. She completed her BA in Ancient Near East History and her
MA in Greek and Roman History (focus on Africa) at the University of Toledo,
Ohio. Dr. Martin recently returned from Nigeria where she conducted research,
using oral histories and archives that centered building an intellectual history of
Nigerian women's activism in the nationalist movement. Her publications
include More Power to Your Great Self: The Pan-African Transnationalist
Construction of Black Feminism in the Phylon Journal of Clark Atlanta
University and Taming Cerberus: Against Racism, Sexism, and Oppression in
Colonial Nigeria in the anthology Remembering Women. Her research interests
include African and African American women's activism, Intellectual history,
Transnational Black feminist theory, Pan-Africanism, 19th–20th century
women and gender history. She is a Bill and Melinda Gates Scholarship alumna
and has won four Fulbright awards in addition to receiving an honorable
mention from the Ford Foundation for her research. Dr. Martin has also been a
volunteer grant writer, teacher trainer, and mentor for a non-profit organization
serving young girls from the inner city of Detroit, Michigan for six years.
Eddie S. Meadows is Professor Emeritus of Ethnomusicology and Jazz Studies
and former Graduate Advisor of the School of Music and Dance at San Diego
State University (SDSU). He received the B.S. degree in Music from Tennessee
State University, the M.S. degree in Music from the University of Illinois, and
the Ph.D. in Music Education from Michigan State University. In addition, he
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did postdoctoral work in Ethnomusicology at UCLA, specializing in African
music, and studied Atenteben and Ewe drumming at the University of Ghana,
Legon (West Africa). He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of
Ghana, Michigan State University (Martin Luther King Visiting Scholar),
UCLA, and the University of California, Berkeley. From January to June of
2007 and 2007–09, Dr. Meadows was Visiting professor of Jazz at the
University of Southern California (USC), and from Spring, 2010–2015, he was
Visiting Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. Presently, Dr. Meadows is
Adjunct Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. His publications include the
following books: Jazz Scholarship and Pedagogy: A Research and Information
Guide (Routledge Publishers 2006), Bebop to Cool: Context, Ideology, and
Musical Identity (Praeger Publishers, 2003; Named a Choice Outstanding
Academic Title of 2004), California Soul: Music of African Americans in the
West (co-edited with Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, University of California Press,
1998), Jazz Research and Performance Materials: A Select Annotated
Bibliography (Garland Publishers, 1995), and Jazz Reference and Research
Materials (Garland Publishers, 1981). His latest book, Blues, Funk, R&B, Soul,
Hip Hop and Rap: A Research and Information Guide (Routledge), was
published, May 2010, and is the first annotated reference book on the genres.
Other publications include numerous articles, encyclopedia entries and reprints,
and book/record reviews. In addition to his publications, Dr. Meadows has
given papers and lectures at several colleges, universities, and meetings of
scholarly societies.
F. Ugboaja Ohaegbulam is Professor Emeritus of Government and
International Affairs and former Chair of African/African American Studies at
the University of South Florida. He received his BA in History and English
from Evangel University, the MA in History from Fordham University and the
PhD in International Studies from the Josef Korbel School of International
Studies, the University of Denver. He is widely published in professional
journals and has contributed chapters to several books. Books he has authored
include Progression: United States' Policy Towards Africa Since 1789; A
Culture of Deference: Congress, The President, And The US-Led Invasion And
Occupation of Iraq; U.S. Policy in Post-colonial Africa; A Concise Introduction
to American Foreign Policy; West African Responses to European Imperialism
in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries; Towards An Understanding of the
African Experience From Historical and Contemporary Perspectives; Nigeria
and the UN Mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Nationalism
in Colonial And Post-Colonial Africa. He is the recipient of several research
27
and training grants, including those from the U.S. National Science Foundation,
the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Ford Foundation.
Tanure Ojaide, a Fellow in Writing of the University of Iowa, Tanure Ojaide
was educated at the University of Ibadan, where he received a bachelor's degree
in English, and Syracuse University, where he received both M.A. in Creative
Writing and Ph.D. in English. He has published twenty collections of poetry, as
well as novels, short stories, memoirs, and scholarly work. His literary awards
include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region, the All-Africa
Okigbo Prize for Poetry, the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award, and the
Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Award. In 2016 he won both the
African Literature Association's Folon-Nichols Award for Excellence in
Writing and the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award for the Humanities.
Ojaide taught for many years at the University of Maiduguri (Nigeria) and is
currently The Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at The
University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Gwendolyn Spencer Prater is Dean Emerita of the College of Public Service
and School of Social Work at Jackson State University. She is President of
Children and Family First, Inc. and provides program evaluation and
development, strategic planning and staff enhancement for health and human
service agencies and organizations serving individuals and families across the
lifespan in their own communities. She has a B.A. degree in Sociology from
Tougaloo College, and M.S.W. from the Ohio State University, and a Ph.D.
from the University of Southern California. Her publications include Child
Welfare: A Multi-Cultural Focus and The State of Health and Health Care in
Mississippi, contributor; and articles in the Journal of Social Work, Western
Journal of Black Studies, African Studies Journal, Journal of Social Science
and Medicine, Comprehensive Psychiatry, The Researcher, and Journal of
Islamic Minorities. She has been a recipient of numerous grants from the U.S.
Department of Education (Cameroon and Kenya), U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services, U.S. Department of Transportation, the United States
Agency for International Development (Zimbabwe and Cameroon), and the
Mississippi Department of Human Services. She has also been a Fulbright
Administrator (Germany).
Sharon Pruitt is a retired Professor of Art History at East Carolina University
(ECU). Pruitt received a B.S. in Art Education from Case Western Reserve
University, a M.A. in African Studies from Howard University, and a Ph.D. in
African, American, and Islamic Art History from The Ohio State University.
28
Pruitt's publications include topics on Contemporary Nigerian artists and
African American artists.
Lomarsh Roopnarine, from Guyana, received his Ph.D. from the State
University of New York at Albany in the area of Latin America and Caribbean
Studies. Dr. Roopnarine taught at the University of the Virgin Islands and
Skidmore Collge before coming to Jackson State University in 2012 where is
now a Professor of Caribbean and Global Studies in the Department of History
and Philosophy. Roopnarine has published several works, including: three and
four co-edited books; over forty articles; several book chapters; and forty books
reviews. He has also presented over twenty-five conference papers mainly in
Caribbean migration, ethnicity, identity and environmental issues. His
published books are: Indo-Caribbean Indenture: Resistance and
Accommodation, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press 2007; Indian
Indenture in the Danish West Indies, 1863–1873. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2016; The Indian Caribbean: Migration and Identity in the Diaspora. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2018. His articles have appeared in the Journal
of Caribbean History, Caribbean Quarterly, Labor History, New West Indian
Guide, European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Canadian
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, South Asian Diapora, Third
World Studies, among others. Dr. Roopnarine has recently completed a three-
volume bibliographical series on indentured servitude in the Caribbean for
Oxford University Press. He was a Columnist for Guyana Times newspaper
from 2015–2017.
Jeffrey Sammons is Professor of History at New York University. He received
his Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and
has authored and edited works on the history of African American sports. He is
author of Beyond the Ring: The History of Boxing in American Society, and was
commissioned by MacMillan to edit the encyclopedia on African American
Life and Culture. Dr. Sammons has also served on the editorial board of the
Journal of Sport History. He has also done work on a socio-cultural history of
blacks and golf.
Luis B. Serapiao, retired Professor in the Department of African Studies
Department at Howard University, has an M.A. degree in International
Relations from The Catholic University of America and a Ph.D. in International
Relations from American University. He is co-author of Mozambique in the
Twentieth Century: From Colonialism to Independence (1979) and has
published articles in several journals including Africa Quarterly, Conflict, A
29
Current Bibliography on African Affairs, Issue, Journal of Church and State,
Lusophone Area Studies Journal, and Munger Africana Library Notes.
Barbara L. Shaw is an Associate Professor in Women's, Gender &Sexuality
Studies affiliated with Black Studies and Global Health Studies at Allegheny
College (Meadville, PA) and was recently awarded the Brett '64 and
Gwendolyn '65 Elliot Professorship for Interdisciplinary Studies.
Michael Williams is the Academic Director of Webster University (Ghana).
He is a former Professor at the African University College of Communications
(AUCC), located in Accra, where he served in a dual capacity as the Director
for Africana Studies and the Dean of International Programs. Prior to his
service at AUCC, Dr. Williams served as the Resident Director in Ghana for
the Council on International Educational Exchange for twelve years. Before
moving to, and settling in, Ghana in 1994, Dr. Williams taught at various
universities in the United States for fifteen years—including Fisk University,
Binghamton University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and last
serving as an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of Africana
Studies at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his BA at the
University of Maryland Eastern Shore in Sociology, and his MA and Ph.D. in
Sociology at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Dr.
Williams researches, writes, and publishes in the areas of the sociology of
knowledge, social movements, the political economy of development, and Pan-
Africanism
Almaz Zewde is Associate Professor in the Department of African Studies at
Howard University, Washington, D.C. She earned her B.A. in Sociology from
the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, an M.S. from Columbia University,
New York, in Social Research and Community Organization, and a second
M.S. in Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University, Eastern
Lansing, and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University. She has taught at
Michigan State University in the Department of Sociology, at Georgetown
University in the African Studies Program, and at George Washington
University in the Department of Sociology and the Graduate Program in
Women Studies. Dr. Zewde has also worked in international development in
the US and Africa and has published works on North East Africa and the Third
World Spectrum.
Jeremias Zunguze was born and raised in Mozambique, Southeastern Africa.
He is an Assistant Professor of Africana and Lusophone Studies at the
University of North Carolina Asheville. He holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic
30
Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley,
specializing in Luso-Brazilian Studies and Lusophone African Cultures. From
UC Berkeley he also received his M.A. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures
and a B.A in Portuguese and Spanish. His research interests include: African
and African diaspora epistemologies; critical theory; and cultural and
decolonial studies within the Portuguese-speaking world in Africa and Latin
America (Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São
Tomé and Príncipe). Dr. Zunguze is currently working on his book, Rereading
African Cultural Producers in Portuguese Language: Ancestrality as a
Decolonial Project (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), 2020. Rereading African
Cultural Producers in Portuguese Language analyzes African writers,
filmmakers, and critical and cultural studies theorists from the former
Portuguese colonies in Africa, highlighting how they continue to grapple with
the legacies of colonialism within globalization at work in Angola, Guinea-
Bissau, and Mozambique.
31
Acknowledgments
I am extremely pleased that, after years of careful thought, methodical

planning, and close consultation with colleagues and friends, the fourth revised
edition of African Studies is finally here. First and foremost, I wish to thank
and congratulate all contributors, original and new, who dedicated their time,
energy, and talent, to the completion of this unique volume and its timely
submission to the publisher. I appreciate the encouragement I received from Dr.
Gwendolyn S. Prater at the conception of the project and the support from Dr.
Hunt Davis, Jr., Dr. Marsha Jean Darling, and Dr. Luis Serapiao for suggestions
as how to proceed with the original work. I still acknowledge as well my
former colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Dr. Gregory
Davis and Dr. Tanure Ojaide, who, like me, taught the “Introduction to Afro-
American and African Studies” course. They were an important source of
inspiration for me.
I would also like to acknowledge the role my own students played in the
“Introduction to Afro-American and African Studies” course. I used them to
classroom-test the suitability of the textbook by providing them with bound
copies of the manuscript as reading materials. Dr. Gregory Davis adopted the
same strategy during the Fall 1992 semester. The subsequent response of both
classes and others in the Africana Studies Department convinced me that this
was a sound and critical undertaking, one that was perhaps long overdue.
My gratitude also goes to Carolina Academic Press, particularly to its
untiring first editor, Philip Menzies, and to Linda, Ryland, and Davis, the
editors of the fourth volume. Their vision, patience, and encouragement made
the enterprise less onerous for me and the contributors. Last but not least, words
of thanks go to my family, Ernestine Azevedo, Margarida Azevedo, and Linda
Azevedo, for their patience and understanding, as well as to our former
departmental secretary, Mrs. Roberta Duff, who spent many hours at the
computer preparing the manuscript, and to Mrs. Charlotte Simpson in UNCC
Computer Academic Services, who assisted Mrs. Duff and me efficiently and
expeditiously whenever we needed a professional and competent hand. At
Jackson State University, I would like to thank the work of Miss Fallon Sutton,
32
our Administrative Assistant in the Dean's office, who spent hours trying to
ensure this fourth edition would be completed timely.
Mario J. Azevedo
33
Introduction
This textbook was designed to respond to the present and future student
generation's needs and questions regarding the nature of the disciplines that
constitute the African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latin-
American Studies programs, once generically designated as Black Studies. The
editor's objective is, first, to make readily available the basic content of these
broad fields and discuss their methodologies and themes in an introductory
textbook that is comprehensive in its analysis of the experiences, contributions,
and aspirations of the peoples of Africa and the scattered African Diaspora. The
editor's goal has been to provide this material on a reading level that is
appropriate to American undergraduate and graduate students. Second, unlike
the few textbooks available on the subject at the moment, the present fourth
edition of Africana Studies takes into account, in a single volume, the practical
needs of those programs, departments, institutes, or centers that either combine
into one unit or separately deal with the fields of African, African American,
Caribbean, and Pan-African Studies. In short, this introductory volume attempts
to address and represent fairly and adequately the experience and contributions
of blacks in Africa, the Americas, and other parts of the world, from the earliest
times to the present, and provide a balanced view of the function of the
disciplines and the perspectives of those scholars who have labored arduously
to make the fields academically sound and respected as they are today, and
who, by and large, continue to determine their future place in the academy.
With these premises in mind, each chapter begins with an introductory
statement and a list of the crucial concepts or terms pertinent to the topic,
followed by a discussion of the content, as well as the theoretical framework
and the controversial interpretations (if any) that have dominated the theme(s)
covered, a succinct summary of the chapter, and study questions to help the
student grasp the focus and relevance of the content to generate class
discussion. Each chapter concludes with a short reference list of books and
articles, which may be consulted to get a fuller understanding of the topic,
while capturing student research interests.
The contributors are experienced and respected scholars in the fields of
34
African, African American, and Diaspora Studies, and provide, therefore, a
perspective and content that is both relevant and accurate, consonant with the
“state of the art” in their own disciplines. Others have been teachers of an
introductory course for one or all three fields. The accrued advantage is that, as
“toilers in the trenches and frontlines,” these contributors are not academics
teaching in a platonic world but are classroom educators who, well aware of the
needs and the level of understanding of their students, have made the chapters
readable and the content concise and realistic in relation to the common
coverage time frame (usually one or two semesters or quarters), rejecting
academic dogmatism, single points of view, and tendencies of exclusiveness
that have often marred similar academic undertakings.
For years, the editor and many of his colleagues in African American,
African, and Pan-African Studies have relied on one or two texts, for lack of
better texts. Many of us, to be sure, have tolerated numerous shortcomings in
most of the present introductory level textbooks. In general, these texts, without
an index, tend to be ideological, a pitfall the present textbook attempts to avoid
or at least minimize. Since we are dealing with young minds, easily
impressionable, we prefer a textbook that exposes the students not to a
pontificating, dogmatic point of view, but to a variety of perspectives.
Moreover, as many of the textbooks we have used in the past focus primarily
on the African American experience and often leave the African and the
Caribbean Diaspora Africans in the “tracks of the slave trade,” instructors find
themselves constantly photocopying or adding supplementary reading materials
in order to cover more comprehensively the aggregate experience of all peoples
of African descent. Similar shortcomings apply to most textbooks we have
attempted to adopt for the African past and future: they focus on Africa and fall
short on the Diaspora.
Although this work provides a discussion of the basic content,
methodologies, and issues in Africana Studies, we realize that some chapters
are more relevant than others to specific programs; that a few chapters are more
complex in focus and style than most; and that, for some programs, adequate
coverage may require two semesters or two quarters rather than one semester or
one quarter. Whatever the circumstances, however, the role played by the
instructor will be extremely crucial for the successful use of the textbook. In
fact, on certain occasions, only the instructor's specific guidance will allow
students to discern what is important, as they attempt to fulfill the course
requirements and satisfy any further interests they might develop during the
course of the academic year.
35
Finally, we believe that, unless a superficial coverage of topics is tolerated
(which goes against our training and academic standards), a multi-authored
volume, in principle, has a better chance of doing justice to the totality of the
black experience by combining the knowledge of many scholars. Let it also be
said that, to conform with new trends in the fields of African and African
Diaspora Studies, the textbook explicitly avoids terms and expressions which
elicit negative connotations, such as tribe (for ethnic group, society, or people),
paganism, animism, and heathenism (for African traditional religion),
brideprice (for bridewealth), huts (for homes or houses), negro (for African
American), pygmy (for BaMbuti, Twa), bushman (for Khoi, San), and natives,
a term particularly preferred by the British colonial administrators when
referring to Africans. This volume is not only concerned with providing
accurate information to students but also to sensitize (and not indoctrinate)
them about the feelings of the people whose culture they are learning.
Insofar as the organization is concerned, the volume is divided into six parts,
each with several chapters. Part I focuses on the disciplines that have given us
our knowledge of the cultures and experiences of peoples of African descent.
Part II traces the evolution and history of the black race, and Part III deals with
the state of black people and their relationships with each other and the rest of
the world at present, while outlining the challenges the black community is
expected to face in the future. While Part IV looks at the specific contributions
of black people in a wide array of areas, Part V delves into some of the most
significant aspects of the social life and values of the black communities
scattered across the continents. Part VI, the appendix, provides a chronology of
important events in the history of black people and a list of selected periodicals
and references that should become part of the student's repertoire of knowledge.
In conclusion, the fourth edition of Africana Studies: A Survey of Africa and
the African Diaspora introduces students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds to
a multidisciplinary as well as an interdisciplinary study of the fields of African
and African Diaspora Studies. It focuses on the interaction of cultures,
particularly of black people, in the shaping of past and contemporary societies
and on the methodologies and key interdisciplinary issues, discipline-specific
canons, themes, and problems, all of which provide legitimacy to the two
academic fields. Ours is not, as it were, just a textbook on slavery, on
colonialism, on racism and discrimination, or on the suffering and hardships of
peoples of African origin and descent, or simply on their contribution record.
Africana Studies goes beyond that, as it probes into all related fields and
36
focuses on both the individual and aggregate experiences of black people, not
in a vacuum or in isolation, but within the context of the cultural crisscrossing
between peoples of African descent and the rest of humankind across time and
space. Africana Studies is, therefore, a saga of both the pains and joys (and
aspirations) of black people the world over and an exposé of the key to their
future, not as a separate and monolithic group but as a dynamic, ever changing
part of the world community, with a uniqueness and a heritage worth studying
and preserving.
37
Part I
Intellectual Foundations of the Black

Experience
38
1
African Studies and the State of the

Art
Mario J. Azevedo
39
Introduction
The study of Africa experienced tremendous expansion both in scope and
depth during the past five decades. In England, the University of London's
School of Oriental and African Studies has been in existence since 1916, and in
France, since the 1940s, pioneering work on Africa has been superseded by
more advanced studies in the field we now call African Studies. Since the
1950s, US scholars have successfully continued their effort to study and
understand Africa in a systematic way, using, to the extent possible, socio-
scientific methods. Likewise, the former Soviet Union and the Scandinavian
countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) established several programs on
Africa (such as the well-known African Studies Institute at Uppsala, Sweden)
and are devoting more resources to the study of the continent. Even the
Japanese have added similar programs to some of their institutions of higher
learning, as is the case at Kyoto University, which established the Center for
African Studies in 1979, and Tokyo University with its Institute for the Study
of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, created as far back as 1964. In
fact, the 1950s and 1960s, which the well-known late anthropologist Aidan
Southall (1920–2009) called “the golden age of Africa,” were decades of
excitement, novelty, and experimentation.
At that time, scholars, particularly Americans with strong input from
Diaspora African Americans and continental Africans, were determined to
correct the traditional disciplines' biases against Africa and Africans and
expand the focus of the existing human sciences. In the social sciences (e.g.,
history, political science, sociology, economics, geography, psychology, and
anthropology); humanities (literature, religion, and philosophy); and fine and
performing arts (art, music, dance, and theatre) scholars burnt the midnight oil
collecting data on Africa, restoring its history, dispelling myths, and providing
an accurate picture of the continent and its people. Even the so-called “hard
sciences” (physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and statistics) felt the
pressure to re-examine the role played by Africans and peoples of African
descent in the discovery of new knowledge and the laws of the universe. Today,
there are over 50 recognized African Studies departments and programs
worldwide and 12 Title VI African Studies Centers in the United States,
namely, Boston University, University of California at Los Angeles, University
of California at Berkeley, University of Florida, University of Illinois, Indiana
University, Michigan State University, Ohio University, Ohio State University,
40
University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, University of Wisconsin, and
Yale University, which provide excellent library resources and fellowships to
scholars, administer K-12 school outreach programs, promote and teach
African languages, and offer strong undergraduate and graduate programs to
majors.
This chapter defines the field of African Studies, traces its evolution,
examines the nature of its various disciplines, and weighs the impact it has had
on our understanding of Africa. However, even though the field of African
Studies has been recognized as a legitimate academic pursuit, it still faces many
obstacles, including lack of adequate resources, uneasiness on the part of
African authorities to allow research of areas deemed sensitive, limited
coordination and collaboration between American and African institutions,
epistemological disagreements, the relevance of scholars' current pursuits to
Africa's current conditions, the impact of persistent negative reporting by the
electronic and print media, continued control of the field and the African
Studies Association (ASA) by Western scholars, the role continental African
scholars should play, and its inter-disciplinary nature. The following discussion
should provide the undergraduate (and graduate) student with a foundation for
the understanding of the “state-of-the-art” or the most updated current state of
African Studies and the role played by the social sciences, the humanities, and
the arts toward the acceptance of the field within the “academy” (i.e.,
community of scholars) and our knowledge of the African continent itself.
Major terms and concepts: African Studies, “academy,” scholar,
theoretical framework, ethnocentrism, canon, Eurocentric vs. Afrocentric
perspective, causality, basic versus applied research, modernization, traditional,
class, dependence, Marxism, objectivity, colonial and Pan-African models,
equilibrium and conflict theory, structural-functionalism, behavioralism,
bourgeois, cultural pluralism, charisma, the military.
41
African Studies is a broad field or area of study which combines several
disciplines in the arts, the humanities, and the socio-behavioral sciences for the
sole purpose of studying and understanding Africa and its people from all facets
—their origins, history, culture, experiences, achievements, contributions,
aspirations, and their human and physical environment. A discipline is an
organized body of knowledge accumulated over a period of time that has its
own canons (which are rules, methodologies, and specific focus or parameters;
e.g., history can only focus on human past and anthropology only on culture
and not government per se, the latter being the focus of political science), and
experts—teachers, writers, and researchers—who set the standards and pass on
their knowledge to a generation of students, apprentices, followers, or disciples,
hence the use of the word “discipline.”
Except in the physical sciences, where accumulated knowledge usually does
not change but is constantly added to, in the social sciences, the humanities, and
fine and performing arts, old as well as added knowledge can be altered,
revised, or discarded altogether as new evidence is uncovered. The major
subjects comprising the interdisciplinary field called African Studies are
history, political science, anthropology, sociology, religion, literature, music,
art, philosophy, geography, linguistics, archaeology, and economics.
Africanists (i.e., specialists who are trained, experienced, and conduct research
and publish on Africa) attempt, to the best of their ability, to study the continent
using scientific methodology or the rules of scientific inquiry by collecting data
systematically, analyzing it (i.e., separating the relevant from the non-relevant
data), interpreting it (i.e., giving it a meaning), and applying or using it in a
variety of ways, a phase sometimes known as applied research or translational
research.
The major questions these disciplines attempt to answer are why, what, how,
who, when, where, and what lessons. However, the field of African Studies
deals with human beings whose actions are often unpredictable and cannot be
replicated, as for example, a chemist replicates a compound mixture through
repeated experiments in the laboratory. Because people can be actors with
hidden motives and idiosyncrasies that are capable of escaping all scientific
scrutiny, their motives or “causality” of behavior may be difficult to ascertain.
Therefore, conclusions arrived at in the field of African Studies cannot be as re-
assuring and definitive as those of the natural or “hard” sciences such as
42
physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and zoology. Scientists can replicate
their experiments over and over again and come up with laws and
generalizations that can withstand the test of time. In the socio-behavioral
sciences (which are those that deal with humans and their behavior), as well as
in the humanities (which focus on the interpretation of ideas, values, and
emotions) and fine arts (which study and apply aesthetics or the concept of
beauty), scholars deal mainly with reasonable theories and opinions, feelings
and emotions, probabilities and hypotheses.
Since African Studies deal with Africa, the development of the continent of
Africa and its place in world history determine by and large the content and
focus of the disciplines involved. These disciplines in turn have the ability to
influence and shape the continent's events and processes, particularly those
related to the more relevant and appropriate school curriculum. Prior to the
1950s, Africa was not the object of a systematic focus of any traditional
discipline, although some historians and anthropologists had already taken the
initial steps in that direction. The emergence of the nation-states in Africa
during the 1960s, or the decade of Africa's independence, and the subsequent
role the continent played in the world community indirectly revolutionized the
field of African Studies.
For a long time, Africa was said to have no history and to have contributed
nothing to mankind. For example, while Arnold Toynbee, one of the most
influential British historians, held the view that Africans had “not contributed
positively to any civilization,” Oxford University Professor Hugh Trevor-
Roper, another British historian, called the African past “nothing but the
unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes.” This belief was prevalent in Europe
prior to the twentieth century and was reinforced by misguided nineteenth
century social Darwinists who, applying the evolutionary theory of the
“survival of the fittest,” saw Africans as belonging to an inferior race, one that
was destined to extinction. While, on one hand, as Festus Ohaegbulam notes in
his Towards an Understanding of the African Experience from Contemporary
and Historical Perspectives (1990), German philosopher George Hegel
declared that Africa did not constitute a part of the history of the world, on the
other hand, such American “scientists” as John Burgess, William Sumner, and
Josiah Strong carried out studies designed to prove the inferiority of the black
race.
Even though at times, Western denial of a worthy African past was done
unconsciously, it was often a deliberate act to justify and maintain European
43
subjugation of the continent and its people. Europeans claimed that Africans
should be enslaved and colonized in order to be saved from extinction and
rescued from their own barbaric ways of life. Civilizing Africa was, as the
English poet Rudyard Kipling put it, the “white man's burden.” As Ohaegbulam
further reminds us, British geographer James McQueen expressed more clearly
the issue of white superiority when he once wrote that “if we [the British] really
wish to do good in Africa, we must teach her savage sons that white men are
their superiors.” As inferior people, therefore, Africans had nothing to show but
so much to learn. Similar writings and pronouncements by prominent Western
scholars were commonplace prior to the 1960s.
Festus Ohaegbulam identifies several reasons why Africa was excluded from
the academic community. Some of these reasons are summarized below. One
was the narrow European definition of history that recognized only written
records as sources of knowledge of man's past. Since Africa, except for Egypt,
Ethiopia, Nubia, and some early states, such as Mali, had mostly non-literate
languages (i.e., with no writing system), its people were excluded from
historical consideration. In fact, while Egyptian civilization, prior to the works
of scholars such as Anta Cheik Diop of Senegal, was considered to be non-
African, the Ethiopian and the Nubian civilizations were attributed to Arabs and
fair-skinned outsiders. Two other factors that kept the continent outside the
“academy” were the impact of the early missionaries who looked down upon
African culture—its music, languages, arts, religion(s), and customs—and the
overall inability of the Africans to shape their own destiny as a result of the
Atlantic slave trade that began during the fifteenth century and the subsequent
European colonial occupation of the continent from the 1880s to the 1960s–
1970s.
However, African independence, the changing pattern of world relationships,
the student movement of the 1960s in the United States, which, among other
things, demanded the establishment of African American and African Studies
programs and the creation of autonomous African universities staffed by
African scholars, had the effect of restoring credit to Africa's pristine
contributions to world civilizations, particularly in the fields of art and music.
No longer, therefore, did one have to prove that Africa had a history. The
acceptance of oral tradition as a valid source of historical knowledge,
accomplished through the efforts of scholars such as Jan Vansina (a Belgian
historian and anthropologist who worked in Zaire, now the Democratic
Republic of Congo), the availability of new written documents, the effort of
such archaeologists as Louis Leakey, who worked in Kenya during the 1950s
44
and 1960s, and that of linguists, particularly German, and the involvement of
continental African scholars enhanced the development of the field of African
Studies.
For the first time, historians read with interest Greco-Roman references to
Africa and marveled at the descriptions of African kingdoms by a number of
Arab and non-Arab travelers and scholars, as summarized by Joseph Ki-Zerbo's
Histoire de l'Afrique noire (1972). Among others, Ki-Zerbo cites the following
chroniclers: Al Masoudi (of Baghdad, d. 956), who traveled to Iran, India, and
Indonesia, and included in his memoirs two chapters on Africa; Ibn Hawkal
(also of Baghdad), author and traveler, who wrote about Africa in 976; Al
Bakri, from Cordova (1040–1094), who wrote on ancient Ghana; Al Idris
(1099–1164), of Ceuta, Morocco, geographer-traveler, and student at Cordova,
who described Africa and Spain in his writings; Aboulfeda (1273–1331),
scholar, born in Damascus, who devoted some of his work to the Sudanic
states; Al Omari (known as Ibn Fadl Allah), also from Damascus, advisor to
sultans in Cairo and Damascus, and author of an encyclopedia, who described
Africa, and made special references to the kingdom of Mali; Ibn Battuta (1303–
1377), from Tangier, who travelled to China, the Middle East, East Africa
(down to Zanzibar), and West Africa, where he was a guest of the emperor of
Mali, and left insightful references to the ancient kingdoms of West and East
Africa; and Ibn Khaldoun (1332–1406), of Tunis, secretary, minister,
ambassador, courtier, traveler, mercenary, and once prisoner, who visited North
Africa and Spain and, in 1382, wrote a universal history that described the
Berbers of North Africa.
Ki-Zerbo also enlightens the students of African history about the works of
Hassan (alias John Leo the African) (1463–1554), born in Granada (Spain) and
student at Fez, who left interesting comments about the continent. In fact,
Hassan crossed the Sudan around 1507, visited Cairo and Mecca, was captured
by pirates and eventually taken to Pope Leo X, who baptized him under the
name of Johannes Leo de Medicis. Subsequently, he became a professor at the
University of Bologna, Italy, and later returned to Tunisia only to reconvert to
Islam. While in Rome, in 1526, he wrote about the continent of Africa and its
wonders. In 1520, Mohamad Kate, historian from Timbuktu (ancient Mali),
advisor to King Askia Mohamad, wrote of Songhay and the Moroccan invasion
in his Tarikh el-Fettac (Chronicle of the Searcher). Finally, “Moor” Es Sadi (or
Abderhamane) wrote of the continent in his Tarikh es-Sudan (Chronicle of
Black Lands) around 1655. Ki-Zerbo further points out that the uncovering of
several sources (both from the Middle Ages and the modern era) at the Vatican,
45
from private European collections, monasteries, and other institutions have
allowed interested scholars to piece together the missing links of the African
past.
46
The Disciplines and the “State of the Art” in African
Studies
History, the “queen” of the social sciences (or the humanities, according to
some) has been more responsible for the restoration of the African past than
any other discipline. With its rigorous methodology of data collection using
every available primary and secondary source (government documents, diaries,
memoirs, books, newspapers, oral traditions, witnesses or contemporary actors,
fossils, pictorial data, artifacts, etc.) from archives, libraries, excavations, and
corroborative materials from other disciplines, the Africanist (i.e., Africa-
trained) historian, insisting on objectivity, has pioneered the systematic
understanding of Africa and provided the foundation for other social sciences
and the humanities to utilize their methodologies and thus reach a more
comprehensive understanding of the continent and its people.
The historiography of the colonial period treated Africa primarily as an
extension of Europe, using European concepts and a Eurocentric point of view.
The new Africanist historians brought Africans center-stage, treating them as
the primary focus of their work. African scholars, such as Kenneth Onwuka
Dike and J. F. Ade Ajayi at Ibadan University, Nigeria, Abu Boahen at Legon,
Ghana, Bethwell Ogot at Makerere University, Uganda, Joseph Ki-Zerbo at
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and Engelbert Mveng at the University of
Yaounde, Cameroon, were among the trailblazers of this development. In the
words of Abiola Irele, once professor of French at the University of Ibadan,
Nigeria, and Harvard,
It was inevitable that the most significant development should have
taken place within the discipline of history. This was the most
convenient terrain for taking on the colonizer, so to speak: for
repudiating the colonial thesis that Africa had no history before the
coming of the white man and that nowhere had the black race displayed
an initiative for creating a framework of life and expression with any
real human value or significance.
In the United States and England, the critical methodologies of historians
such as Jan Vansina, Philip Curtin, the late Basil Davidson, the late Walter
Rodney, Rene Pelissier, and many others contributed to the credibility of
Africanist history as a legitimate social science with Africa as its focus.
Eventually, as a result, Africanist historians came to dominate the field of
47
African Studies and the African Studies Association (ASA). The
accomplishment of historians is evidenced by the monumental eight volumes of
the Cambridge History of Africa edited by J. D. Fage and the completed eight
volumes of the General History of Africa commissioned by UNESCO, a project
that involved some of the best known scholars, including Ajayi, Boahen, Ogot,
Ki-Zerbo, and Davidson.
However, pioneering Africanist historians have been criticized by a younger
generation of Africans and “radical” scholars who insist that the discipline is
too conservative and irrelevant to Africa's current problems partly because it
still utilizes a Eurocentric rather than an Afri- or Afrocentric approach to the
study of the continent. They point out, for example, that most of the focus has
been the history of Europe in Africa, narratives about African kings and chiefs,
of wars and empires, of great men and their deeds, of nationalists and trade
union leaders, and perhaps of some oppressed segment of society simply to
vindicate the past, rather than the account of the masses or the internal
dynamics and workings of African societies. Historians are further accused of
undertaking “micro-histories” rather than “macro-studies” of the African past,
thus rarely presenting a larger picture of the continent as European historians
have successfully done regarding their own continent. Marxist Africanist
historians have insisted, for example, that a class analysis of Africa must be an
intrinsic part of the study of African history.
On methodology, the neo-historians (i.e., the new breed of historians, who
wish to revise traditional history) argue that the claim of objectivity leads the
Africanist historian to nothing, or, as historians A. Temu and B. Swai of the
School of Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, put it in their Historians and Africanist
History: A Critique (1981), reduces history to a cul-de-sac, never venturing
“beyond a timid empiricism” (which is a description of facts without analysis or
vision of the world). They point out that ideology and methodology cannot be
separated because the mere choice of a specific focus betrays the historian's
predisposition, values, and partisanship, thus shattering the claim of objectivity.
Temu and Swai sarcastically conclude that the historian's objectivity has been
the “objectivity of a eunuch” (i.e., that of a castrated man who brags about his
sexual escapades). The claim of the universal applicability of their theories and
conclusions (i.e., that generalizations about European history necessarily apply
to African history as well) has likewise come under attack. Western academics
have, in fact, unwittingly tended to generalize about all societies and cultures
using ethnocentric standards, which have often distorted the reality of the world
under study. This was clear, for example, when political scientists, sociologists,
48
and economists misapplied to Africa the universality of the modernization
theory (to be discussed later in this chapter) during the 1960s.
In the United States, some scholars have coined the term Africology or
Afrocology in an attempt to stress the point that Africa is both the object and
the subject of inquiry and to distance themselves from the shortcomings and
biases of traditional scholarship. Note: The expressions “traditional disciplines”
or “traditional scholarship” refer to the disciplines that have been long
established and accepted by the “academy,” such as history, political science,
anthropology, Western music, and Western literature. Non-traditional
disciplines would include African Studies, African American Studies, Women's
Studies, Jewish Studies, history of science, medical history, and art history. It is
interesting to point out that several decades ago some historians toyed with a
new popular but shallow methodology called “quantification.” This quantitative
analysis or statistical analysis in the social sciences was supposed to add a
scientific flavor to their work, one that would strengthen their generalizations
and allow prediction of human behavior. The attempt has virtually failed
because it raised more questions than it provided answers. History or other
social sciences are not precise sciences and cannot, therefore, predict human
behavior.
Thus, most historians have now distanced themselves from this tempting but
problematic methodology, which, interestingly, continues to attract political
scientists, sociologists, and economists. Along the same lines, the so-called
Ibadan and Dar-es-Salaam schools of Africanist historians, of which the late
Walter Rodney was the major exponent, have further complained that present
historiography is dominated by Western historians who continue to misinterpret
Africa. Temu and Swai go on to make the interesting point that, even though
Leopold von Ranke, the “father of modern historiography,” advocated
objectivity and a dispassionate approach to the study of the past, he himself
glorified his Prussian state, and that Lord Ashley, renowned British historian,
extolled the virtues of the British Empire in which, as we all know, Africans
were exploited and treated as sub-humans. Therefore, many new African
scholars demand a combination of objectivity, to the extent that it is possible to
be objective, and ideology (the latter meaning a “revolutionary consciousness,”
to use Lansine Kaba's expression)—to make history and other disciplines more
relevant to Africa's needs and conditions.
Anthropology, or the study of culture, first in the form of ethnography
(which is the study of technologically less advanced societies or what
49
ethnographers used to call “primitive societies”), began studying Africa before
history did. However, the anthropological methodology has encountered the ire
of even the most fair-minded Africanists both on the continent and in the West.
The first ethnographers, who worked during the 1920s through the 1940s, did
their research in collaboration with the colonial administrators whose aim was
to understand the African cultures they encountered and facilitate colonization.
Some of the ethnographers themselves were colonial administrators who visited
their areas of authority and, in their free time, interviewed a few Africans about
their most exotic customs and produced sensational monographs. A good
example of the latter was Felix Eboue, black-Antillian and governor-general of
former French Equatorial Africa (1941–1944), who left several ethnographic
treatises on Oubangui-Shari (present Central African Republic). His
observations constitute interesting reading because of the unique practices he
describes but are of little scientific value.
These early anthropologists, mostly British and French (Americans entered
the field only after 1945), concentrated their attention on the culture of small
African social units—which they called “tribes.” In most cases, they presented
a picture of timeless, static, small societies, characterizing their values, to
paraphrase Kaba, “as savage or at best as exotic curiosities.” It is true, however,
that despite their ethnocentric assumptions, the new “social scientists” tended to
sympathize with the ethnic groups they studied and demanded their
preservation rather than their extinction by what they called the “superior”
European culture.
Thus, although they contributed to our knowledge of some African societies,
the first ethnographers, who claimed to be using a scientific approach, were no
more than, to use the words of Southall (once president of the African Studies
Association), the “handmaiden of colonialism.” No wonder Kaba notes with
scorn that “the collusion between this sort of scholarship [that of
anthropologists] and the colonial doctrine culminated in the rise of the ‘tribal’
image of African societies among Westerners.” While they popularized the
scientific method of field work and participant-observation (meaning the
method whereby researchers observe and participate in the culture they are
studying) and sometimes criticized the colonial status quo, anthropologists were
seen, up to the 1950s, as allies of colonialism. Their critics charged that they
denigrated African cultures and engaged in micro-, rather than macro-, studies
of African societies, while displaying no concern whatsoever for history.
Furthermore, as defenders of minority cultures, they showed no regard for
50
the concept of the nation in a culturally divided continent for the simple
purpose of preserving exotic “ethnic distinctiveness.” In other words, they were
fascinated by small societies they characterized as “primitive” and tended to
generalize their findings and apply them to the whole continent of Africa. One
result of such ethnocentric scholarly arrogance is the strong criticism directed
against the works of such well-known anthropologists as E. Evans-Pritchard,
who wrote on the Nuer Sudan in 1935. Thus, the claim of objectivity on the
part of the early anthropologists has been questioned and characterized, as one
African scholar put it, as “another name for Western ethnocentrism and
monopoly of the right to interpret other cultures of the world,” and as a subtle
way of infusing their “moral values, unrecognized prejudices, covert racism,
vested interests and, indeed, political economy upon theory” (Katorobo).
In fact, there continues to be concern among continental African
anthropologists and others that the damage done by European and some
American anthropologists is beyond repair. According to Maxwell Owusu,
three conditions must be fulfilled before Western anthropologists are totally
accepted in Africa: (1) they must have a mastery of the language of the society
they study; (2) they ought to show readiness and commitment to letting African
scholars do the necessary and basic research, which requires in-depth cultural
knowledge; and (3) they should be willing to engage in a critical and open
intellectual dialogue with their African counterparts and abandon their alleged
“arrogance.” As expected, of course, the younger generation of anthropologists
is aware of the errors of its predecessors and has been much more careful in its
study of and conclusions about African societies. Many of them have, for
example, abandoned the use of the term “tribe” for “ethnic group,” society, or
people; bride-price for bride-wealth; paganism or heathenism for African
traditional religion; and huts for homes (or houses). Overall, however,
notwithstanding the errors of the past, the works of anthropologists such as
Melville Herskovits, founder of the Center for African Studies at Northwestern
University in the early 1950s, as well as those of African American
sociologists, including E. Franklin Frazier, have contributed to the reintegration
of anthropologists as credible social scientists in the field of African Studies.
Their influence can be measured by the fact that, from 1957 to 2005, more than
eight presidents of the African Studies Association were anthropologists. In
fact, anthropologist Melville Herskovits, sometimes known as the “Dean of
African Studies” in the United States, was the first president.
Just as with the earlier anthropologists, the first sociologists (i.e., scholars
who focus on the human institutions and societies) have been highly criticized
51
by continental African scholars. In fact, the first sociologists were
undistinguishable from the ethnographers criticized above. Properly trained and
unbiased sociologists did not enter the African field until 1945 and expanded
their work in Africa only following independence during the 1960s. Thereafter,
their major concern was to disengage themselves from anthropology and
abandon the tendency to focus their attention on “scientific exoticism” (i.e.,
looking “scientifically” at unimportant and farfetched cultural issues), as was
popular among the ethnographers. As Jean Copans writes, sociology was not
just “a new specialization, it constituted a complete break on several counts;
empirically, as it was taking into consideration the real history of the African
peoples; in scale, as it moved on from village to national social groups (from
‘mini’ to ‘maxi’);” and theoretically, as it did not ignore the reality of
colonialism on the continent.
However, just like other social scientists immediately following
independence, sociologists saw Africa as a fertile ground for the testing of their
theories on modernization, social change, and development, and assumed that
African societies would follow the same developmental pattern as European
societies. They were, in essence, evolutionaries who used the European
theoretical framework to explain Africa's “transition from feudalism to
capitalism” and from a traditional lifestyle to a modern (European) lifestyle. As
a result, African (and African American) scholars have seriously questioned the
methodologies and assumptions of modern sociologists, casting doubt upon
their claim of scientific objectivism (in this case, non-biased treatment of black
people) and rejecting one of their major theoretical frameworks, namely, that
which looks at black societies through the prism of the white, middle-class
family.
It is understandable, therefore, that a well-known African scholar, O. Onoge,
of Nigeria, would echo loudly what many critics feel and will continue to feel
—that is, insofar as Africa is concerned, sociologists, including Lucy Mair,
whom he calls “the Dean of applied functionalism,” have demonstrated
“amnesia [purposeful ignorance] of the colonial period,” bias, and reactionary
tendencies. In fact, like many Africans, Onoge still maintains that the “history
of African sociology has few redeeming features. In the main [he adds], it is
perverse and counter-revolutionary from an African standpoint.” Temu and
Swai, already mentioned in this chapter, scorn the discipline when they note
sarcastically that sociology “soars into empty abstraction” (meaning that it is
too abstract and irrelevant for Africa).
52
On another level, two female Kenyan sociologists, Diane Kayongo-Male and
Philista Onyango in The Sociology of the African Family (1984), cast doubt on
many research activities undertaken by Western sociologists in Africa,
particularly in reference to the African family. They point out that over-reliance
on the survey method (which uses questionnaires and interviews) has been a
major problem and that the interviews are usually not private and are conducted
by people who are alien to the culture and the language, whose final product is
usually replete with translation misrepresentations. They urge that scholars
“place highest reliability on family studies coming from indigenous
researchers” and “read clearly to find out exactly how the study was carried out
before we jump to unwarranted conclusions about African family life.” The
criticism, however, seems to have transformed the discipline for the better,
making sociology one of the most vibrant and relevant disciplines in African
Studies today.
Political scientists, who study government and the decision-making process,
were the last to enter the field of African Studies for reasons not too difficult to
ascertain and, when they did, they entered in full force. In Africa, the colonial
administration (1885–1960) was weary of political scientists because they
inevitably found too many unacceptable features within the governing system.
Furthermore, because political education in the schools was forbidden, African
political scientists were almost non-existent on the continent during the colonial
era. Just prior to and following independence, however, political scientists,
particularly Americans, were welcomed and even invited by the new African
leaders as advisors, professors, and human resources. Some of the best known
names include James Coleman and Carl Rosberg (Nigeria), Henry Bienen
(Tanzania), Martin Kilson (Sierra Leone), Aristide Zolberg (Côte d'Ivoire), and
Dennis Austin (Ghana). This first wave of political scientists was ebullient
about the future of Africa: they enthusiastically talked and wrote of the process
of modernization. They viewed Africa's problems of instability, centralization,
ethnic and elite competition for resources, political repression, and competing
power politics as temporary stages and as the pains of growth, so to speak, in
the process toward democratization (the maintenance of multi-party states and
the institutionalization of free elections), rapid industrialization, equitable
distribution of national resources, an end to intense ethnic loyalties, social
mobility, the weakening of obstructive traditional values, urbanization,
expansion of literacy, elimination of diseases, and improved infrastructure (new
roads, schools, health centers, and communication networks).
Unfortunately, as Naomi Chazan et al. noted in Politics and Society in
53
Contemporary Africa (1988), “the modernization theory focused on internal
factors to explain political processes in Africa” and underestimated the agrarian
nature of African societies, the entrenchment of the bureaucracy, and the
impact of external factors, such as neo-colonialism, the external debt, and the
unfair international trade system. It also showed clear ethnocentric arrogance in
its patterning of African realities after Western values. A number of others,
however, looked at the various competing cultures on the continent and foresaw
the potential for serious political conflict. Unlike the modernization theorists,
this group of political scientists emphasized ethnic differences or “tribalism,” to
use their preferred terminology at the time, group interests, and aspiring
leaders, all vying to acquire for them and their “cronies” the state's scarce
resources. Overall, the themes political scientists dealt with in general, up to the
1970s, were African nationalist leaders, parties, elections, constitutions,
ideologies, political instability, African “charismatic” (i.e., articulate
nationalist) leaders, ethnicity, and intra-African relations. Unfortunately, their
initial euphoria was shattered in 1963 when the first military coup in Sub-
Saharan Africa resulted in the assassination of President Sylvanus Olympio of
Togo. Several other military coups followed, including one that puzzled
nationalists and pan-Africanists alike: the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah,
Ghana's first president, by the army in 1966. Prior to 1966, most political
scientists had viewed the army as a modernizing force, disciplined and
cohesive, and as a professional corps trained at such best military academies as
Sandhurst (England) and St. Cyr (France), ready to defend the modern state
rather than topple or overthrow it.
As a result of the shock, many political scientists began to revise their
theoretical frameworks. In the tradition of Samuel Huntington, they began
looking at the “stress and structural weaknesses” of African institutions which,
in their view, showed extreme “fragility, systemic flaws, and low levels of
political culture—which act[ed] as a sort of magnet to pull the armed forces
into the power and legitimacy vacuum.” Huntington had postulated that, in the
developing world, “the most important causes of military intervention in
politics ... [were] not military but political and reflect[ed] not the social and
organizational characteristics of the military establishment but the political and
institutional structure of society.” In other words, the army's behavior simply
reflected how inadequate African societies were, with weak and corrupt
governments, functioning primarily on the basis of ethnic loyalties, selfishness,
and abuses of citizens' rights. Later political scientists, however, Samuel Decalo
having been a good example, discredited both theories, and instead focused
54
their attention on the internal organization of the army itself, namely, its
weaknesses and rivalries, which are often based on ethnicity, age, rank,
education, personal ambition, and nepotism. These social scientists have
pointed to the inefficient performance of the military as they replace a civilian
government, making a mockery of their announced objectives of ending ethnic
conflict and corruption and improving the economy.
As in other disciplines, political scientists have been criticized for distorting
African realities to fit their own personal theoretical framework, explaining
African realities through complicated and exotic terms and concepts such as
“clientelism, dependence, machine politics, corporativism, modernization,
cultural pluralism,” and so on. In their midst, there has been a conflict between
“bourgeois and non-bourgeois” political scientists, the terms bourgeois and
bourgeoisie being negatively used by African Marxists and neo-Marxists to
characterize most American scholars and their colleagues on the African
continent. Barongo once wrote that “bourgeois African political scientists have
turned political science into an instrument of class domination and
exploitation.” He advised them to focus more on the issues of class exploitation
and poverty as causes of dependence, the dominant role of the elite, excessive
exercise of power, destabilization, and the colonially inherited political
institutions and practices that corrupted many African leaders.
The reader might wish to know that there are other ideological and
epistemological divisions within the political science “academy,” a topic that is
suited only for more advanced students. Yet, for the sake of completeness and
for the benefit of the instructor, we will briefly note them here. There are the
traditionalists who use a descriptive quasi-historical approach to the study of
politics and focus mainly on diplomacy, formal institutions, and legal systems
such as constitutions, states, and parties. They dominated the discipline prior to
1945. This breed of political scientists has tended to doubt the validity of
scientific methods as applied to human behavior, and, although it has carefully
studied and observed political behavior, it did not attempt to predict, as they
had no faith in statistical probabilities. Very few traditionalists exist today.
As a result of the changes in world politics in the aftermath of the Second
World War (1939–1945), however, a new breed of political scientists, less
Eurocentric, emerged in reaction to the traditionalist model, namely, the
behavioralists, who focused on the concept of nation-state, calling for the use of
scientific methods and theory-building to explain and even predict political
behavior. (Patrick McGowan represents the major revisionists in the discipline.)
55
Accordingly, behavioralists attempted to use data quantification (statistics) and
measurements (numbers) to predict political behavior and test their “empirical
hypotheses.” They too are on their way out as relevant political scientists. The
structural-functionalists ridicule the claims of (social) “scientific” approaches
that produce “scientific” results. Instead, they look at international political
systems rather than at individual nation-states and use a comparative approach
to politics focused on such features as legislatures and leaders' roles and
assessing how these function. (Immanuel Wallerstein was a proponent of this
theory on Africa, and most remaining Marxists and neo-Marxists fall within
this category of thinkers.)
Interestingly enough, however, following in the footsteps of Samir Amin,
once Director of the Institut pour le Development Economique et Progres in
Dakar, Senegal, many political scientists are now fascinated by a variety of
frameworks focusing on political economy (i.e., the interface between politics
and the economy), which were popular at the schools of Dar-es-Salaam and
Ibadan. Political economy attempts to use the scientific tools of economics and
stresses the point that politics are dictated by economic considerations and vice-
versa. In this group, one finds the political science activists, Marxists, and
proponents of the dependency and underdevelopment theories. The dependence
model viewed Africa (the periphery, the margin or the exploited end of the
relationship) as a victim of international capitalism (the core, or the center that
decides about and benefits from the dependence relationship) and claimed that
the African masses were exploited by a small African elite—the bourgeoisie or
petty bourgeoisie—that rendered Africa dependent and underdeveloped. This
theory is certainly pessimistic, as it portrays African societies and states as
inexorably trapped by a worldwide capitalist conspiracy which controls
information and knowledge, technology, wealth, and the economic market.
Immanuel Wallerstein (according to Chazan et al.) holds this theory, which also
implies that the progress of one nation necessarily “impedes” the progress of
other nations.
Although the dependency theory sheds light on the roots of
underdevelopment, on social inequalities, and on economic structures, it falls
short as it focuses primarily on factors external to Africa, makes Africans
passive receptors rather than actors, neglects the issues of ethnicity, race, and
nationalism, and provides a totally materialistic perspective of African
societies, disregarding the spiritual and intellectual side of life. The statist
school, as classified by Chazan et al., on the other hand, which seems to be
popular among African scholars as advanced by well-known Africanists such as
56
Carl Rosberg and Robert Jackson, emerged during the 1970s. The statist (a
word derived from the word state) emphasizes the state as “the motor force
behind social and economic occurrences in Africa,” and focuses, therefore, on
the autonomy of the state apparatus, on leadership styles, and patron-client
relationships. It concludes by noting that the post-colonial state does have the
power to mobilize and transform resources but that it has not done so for the
benefit of the masses. It blames African leaders for most failures, accuses them
of abusing their power for personal gains, and makes them responsible for the
continent's chronic international debt. Again, to borrow from Chazan et al., the
statist theory, while drawing attention to African “internal dynamics [i.e., the
state itself],” confuses the concept of state and government. States remain but
governments come and go easily. In addition, it provides no understanding of
the relations between state and society or between state and classes and
exaggerates the degree of power held by leaders.
A theory related to the statist model is one expanded by Robert Bates, known
as the political choice theory, which sees the state as autonomous or, as Bates
put it, asserts “the independent status and determining power of politics.” Bates
goes on to say in Essays on the Political Economy of Rural Africa (1983) that
states have their own objectives:
They want taxes and revenues and intervene in their economic
environments to secure them. Politicians want power. And they use the
instruments of the state to secure and retain it by manipulating the
economy to political advantage. In Africa, political elites have rendered
economic markets instruments of political organization.
Whereas the statist approach has been fundamentally negative on the nature
and intentions of African states as it portrays them as inexorably linked to the
imperfect nature of the leadership, Bate's theory seems to straddle the middle
ground, stressing the enormous but not absolute power and autonomy of the
state, which has been used to enhance leaders' political gains to the detriment
and misery of the masses. Contrary to the dependency theory, the political
choice theory sees economic development not as simply related but as
subordinate to internal politics. Bates claims that: “the political is not merely
reducible to the economic; rather, it stands apart from it and can act upon it,
often in a manner that is costly in economic terms.”
One of the most recent versions of the political choice perspective has been
advanced by Naomi Chazan, Robert Mortimer, John Raveland, and Donald
Rothchild. They look at the state in Africa as maintaining some degree of
57
autonomy and at political leaders as being able to mobilize resources, the
economy, and society to achieve certain goals but also as constrained by
historical legacies, demographic pressures, cultural ecology, ideological
divisions, and international factors. Thus, while this perception focuses on past
errors, its proponents say, it “uncovers components of ongoing processes and
elucidates future opportunities and constraints.” Unlike the statist theory, the
political choice model further posits that a study of politics in Africa should
focus on state-society relationships rather than on state-economic relationships
or simply on the state itself.
To recapitulate, here is a brief summary of the preceding theories as applied
to Africa: (1) the traditionalists used historical narrative to study politics and
did not believe in the so-called social “scientific” method nor did they attempt
to explain “scientifically” current events and predict future political behavior in
Africa; (2) the behavioralists focused on the functioning of the new nation-
states in Africa and, unlike the traditionalists, had faith in using numbers and
statistics to explain and predict political behavior; (3) the structural-
functionalists study the structures and functions of political institutions,
disregard the claim of “scientism,” and compare nation-states in order to make
more realistic generalizations; (4) the Marxists focus on the role of social
classes and the resulting exploitation, as well as on the relationship between
politics and the economy, and claim that an equitable economic system would
solve all societal ills; (5) the proponents of the political economy statist school
focus attention on the strong power of the African state and its political leaders,
who thus determine the direction of the economy, and blame the African
leadership for the problems the continent experiences, especially in the
economic sector; (6) Bates' political choice theory, like the preceding theory,
capitalizes on the power and autonomy of the state in Africa, making the
economy subservient to politics and the state, and blames African leadership for
the continent's economic mess, a result of their unwise choices; (7) Chazan et
al.'s type of political choice theory differs from Bate's in that, although
recognizing the power of the state, it points to the various challenges and
constraints the leadership faces, including the various colonial legacies,
personal ideologies, cultural traditions, and the inequalities of the international
market system.
The new emphases and approaches in the discipline will perhaps make
political scientists less vulnerable to criticism from continental African scholars
and others in the academy. In fact, Barongo, a major critic, gives some credit to
the scholars in the discipline when he observes that, “Ladd's and Lipset's survey
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of the profession clearly shows that American political scientists in general
stand politically to the right of sociologists but well to the left of the general
population.”
Geographers have been the least controversial in the field of African Studies.
Even during the colonial period, geographers had established several
associations which sent trained and quasi-trained “scientists” to the continent to
survey the terrain for the benefit of diplomats and the army, and for other
scientists interested in Africa. As expected, their activity increased following
independence. For a number of developmental reasons, African governments
undertook surveys of different regions of their countries. In general,
geographers tend to be less hindered than political scientists or sociologists in
their analysis of African affairs. One reason, as pointed out by critics, is that, at
least in their earlier period, they concentrated on apolitical physical geography
and paid little attention to cultural and demographic geography. Most
geographers, including the greatest pioneer, the late William Hance, have
escaped criticism.
Linguists have been less conspicuous in African Studies circles but have
played a vital role in the analysis of cultural origins, and, along with literature
experts, such as Ruth Finnegan, have shed light on African societies, on the
possible influences these exerted upon each other, on migratory movements,
and on geographic and demographic distribution patterns. Since the 1850s,
German missionaries and linguists (such as Westermann and Homburger) and
lovers of oral literature, collected African folklore, proverbs, riddles, and
stories, some of which were later accepted as valid historical sources. A similar
role has been played by musicologists who have strengthened the history of
Africa by showing cultural and material contact (through musical instruments,
for example) even prior to the 1884–85 partition of the continent. This is
exemplified by works done by musicologist Percival Kirby in Southern Africa.
In other words, one could establish the nature of contact between two cultures
or peoples by studying their musical instruments or songs and discover, through
similarities, whether or not the two borrowed from each other. If yes, then their
history may be linked. These humanists and artists have helped restore the
worth and dignity of African traditions and cultural manifestations, often
denigrated and neglected during the colonial era. In post-colonial Africa,
musicologists and ethnomusicologists have pleaded with the African elite and
their leaders to preserve their rich but potentially vanishing traditions.
The study of African art has also been a significant component of African
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Studies. Since 1905, when a mask from the Fang people of Gabon was taken to
Europe and its stylistic freedom eventually inspired such artists as Pablo
Picasso and Andre Matisse, African art, particularly sculpture, through the
works of such scholars as Frank Willett and William Fagg, has gained
acceptance from the academic community. Therefore, earlier ethnography-art
specialists, including P. German (on Cameroon, 1910), Gunter Pressman (on
Fang of Gabon, 1913), and J. Van Wing (on the former Belgian Congo, 1921–
1938), paved the way for the new artists to establish once and for all the fact
that art and music are two of the most important contributions of Africa to
world civilizations.
According to Daniel Biebuyck, however, African art specialists still have a
long way to go. Their achievements in the discipline still “lag in range, scope,
depth, and comprehensiveness, and ... impact on the other academic fields of
study.” Biebuyck outlined several approaches and themes that need to be
explored, including more focus on the neglected areas such as the former
Spanish, French, and Portuguese-speaking colonies in Africa; individual
African artists; socioeconomic and legal aspects of art; the acquisition of
artifacts through purchase and inheritance; labor and acquisition of the primary
materials of art and payment of services; taxonomy of materials; and the system
of ownership or temporary control and stewardship of an artist's creative
possessions. Biebuyck also complained that there was much confusion and
uncertainty among the experts themselves regarding the scope and the
definition of basic terminology such as art, craft, artistic, material culture, and
aesthetics.
The study of African religion by scholars such as John Mbiti, George
Parrinder, and Aylard Shorter (in African Theology, 1975) has had two effects.
The first has been the restoration of Africa's religion(s) to almost the same level
of respectability and acceptance as other religions of the world, as a system that
attempts to cope with human existence, understand the cosmos, and explain the
relationship between humans and the supernatural. These authors have thus
attempted to dispel the stereotypes and myths attributed to African religion by
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century missionaries who viewed it as nothing
more than a series of superstitious beliefs associated with ancestors' “worship”
(rather than veneration), with human sacrifice, the drum, and polytheistic
practices.
The second effect has been to sharpen the similarities of African religion
(e.g., belief in one creator of the universe), and differences (e.g., absence of
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elaborate physical buildings for worship as in the West, of proselytizers or
ambulant preachers who strive to convert others by traveling from one locality
to another, and weekly predictable days of worship) between African
religion(s) and Christianity or Islam. African philosophy, on the other hand, is
the latest of the disciplines in African Studies. Catholic priest, Placide Temples
(who worked in former Zaire and wrote Bantu Philosophy, 1945), and Kenyan-
born John Mbiti, himself an African philosopher and theologian, are known for
their pioneering works in this discipline. Again, their studies refuted claims that
Africans were unable to develop or understand complex philosophical systems
and that their thought patterns resemble those of a Western child with whom
one must talk in symbols and examples. In fact, proponents of these claims
attempted to prove the validity of their position by pointing to the round (rather
than rectangular) shapes of African homes and the “crooked” or curvilinear
rather than straight nature of their paths and traditional walkways. They were
trying to make the point that Africans think in a circular fashion.
Notwithstanding the importance of economic development in Africa,
economists have been the late-comers into the field of African Studies. Just as
the sociologists, however, Africanist economists, during the 1950s and early
1960s, also assumed that African societies would follow the same
developmental stages as Western societies. They, therefore, attempted to apply
the theoretical models fitting European societies. Essentially, they used the
traditional vs. the modern framework or the economic stages theory advanced
by W. W. Rostow. Rostow identified at least five stages which all societies are
expected to go through, and postulated that, once conditions such as enough
capital, entrepreneurship, needed skills, existence of foreign exchange (i.e.,
American dollars, British pounds, and French francs), and sound management
practices were present, African economies would advance the same way those
of the West did centuries ago.
This unrealistic framework has been replaced by the international-
structuralist model, which views the developing world, especially Africa, as
helplessly dependent on the capitalist world due to unfair and unequal
economic and power relationships. Proponents of the theory see the world as
made up of two societies and two economies: The capitalist and the less-
developed world and the “haves” and “have-nots” within the developing
countries themselves. As social scientists, these economists have tended to
focus on policies designed to eradicate poverty and provide employment for all.
As Michael Todaro notes, there are two sub-models or versions of the theory,
both attempting to explain the reasons for underdevelopment. The first is the
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neo-colonial dependence sub-model, which focuses on the unequal
relationships between the Western economies (the core or center) and the
developing nations (the periphery or margin). Todaro claims that “landlords,
entrepreneurs, merchants, salaried public officials, trade union leaders, etc.” in
the developing world simply perpetuate the conditions of dependence, as they
serve as compradors (buyers) of the former, with no power or initiative of their
own. The second sub-model, which Todaro calls the “false paradigm” model,
claims that underdevelopment has been caused and perpetuated by the ill advice
of the Western institutions (the UN, UNESCO, the IMF, the World Bank, and
others) and their experts, who distort African realities to serve their own
economic purposes and test their assumptions and theories on development.
Scholars who advance this sub-model also hasten to add that, because the
training of most of the Developing World experts takes place in the West, the
cycle of underdevelopment and dependence will continue as the indigenous
experts return home simply to apply their irrelevant and distorted theories and
end up defending the status quo of the elites. (Both sub-models have been
advanced by neo-Marxists.) As expected, many African scholars from the
continent tend to look with suspicion at these developmental theories. Wang
Metuge, for example, characterizes both political scientists and economists as
pseudo-scientists who, to gain “scientific credibility,” have lately inundated
their journals with statistics, expressed in “econometrics” and “politimetrics.”
What, then, seems to somewhat unify the scholars from so many persuasions
and disciplines in African Studies? Ohaegbulam, referred to earlier, identifies
four interdisciplinary models that are implicit in many of the intellectual
constructs advanced by Africanists, which are summarized below: The
traditional, the colonial, the Marxist, and the pan-African models. Ohaegbulam
notes that the traditional model has been proposed by some as the most
appropriate for the understanding of Africa and the black experience.
Proponents of the model claim that a return to “the source,” such as Egypt, to
African traditions, to early civilizations, and to Africa's pristine state is a
conditio sine qua non for any study of black people. One of the weaknesses of
the model is that it ignores the fact that Africa is no longer purely traditional:
The old and the new either live side by side or have managed to merge.
The colonial model tends to emphasize the colonial period (1885–1960) and
its everlasting impact on all African institutions, without, in any way, justifying
colonialism. Its proponents maintain that Africa would not be what it is today
without the misfortune of colonial domination. They tend to see Africa and
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African-America, for that matter, as colonies of the West: Africans under neo-
colonialism (i.e., a new type of colonial domination following Africa's
independence during the 1960s and 1970s) and dependence, and black
Americans under domestic colonialism, with both people still experiencing
“political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural subjugation.” One of
the problems of this model is that it tends to overlook the African traditional
past and its lasting impact. It also looks at the continent from a negative
perspective, portraying Africans as struggling helplessly to free themselves
from Western colonial and neo-colonial domination and the evil and sinister
intentions of the white man.
The Marxist model, increasingly popular during the 1970s, when it was
energized by the establishment of the now-defunct “revolutionary” Marxist
governments in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Ethiopia, posits that
the only way to understand accurately the African experience on the continent
and in the Diaspora is to “scientifically” analyze the class phenomenon, which
is based on the control, ownership, and management of the means of production
(property, business, land, equipment, factories, mineral resources). Marxists, or
the followers of Karl Marx's philosophy, hold that the major social problems
are caused by class differences, which pit the poor against the rich, hence their
use of the expression class struggle. For Marxists, while the spiritual world
does not exist and religion is the opium of the people, our actions are
fundamentally and primarily motivated by economic considerations, even
though we are often not aware of it. Interestingly, Marxists and neo-Marxists
(which are scholars who wish to revise Marxism in light of the fall of socialism
and its economic system, as is the case in the former Soviet Union) hold that
racism is based on economic factors and that it can be eliminated if social
classes are done away with. Thus, according to them, once the economic issue
is resolved, race will simply wither away. Such an assertion is certainly
problematic as the concept of class in Marxist terms may not be applicable to
Africa. Roxborough notes, for example, that “classes in Africa are more
complex, and ... usually weaker. They are frequently incomplete in the sense
that the dominant class, or one fraction of the dominant class, is absent.” Rural
“classes,” are much more important in developing societies than in Europe or
America. Furthermore, to believe that racism will vanish when economic
conditions become equitable is tantamount to living in a utopia or an unreal
world.
The pan-African model, on the other hand, focuses on the commonalities of
experiences of black people—slavery, colonialism, racism, imperialism, neo-
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colonialism, and a desire for unity—and on one naturally unifying factor: skin
color. The proponents of the model, invoking the ideals and goals of the early
pan-Africanist movement led by W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, George
Padmore, Marcus Garvey, and later, by Malcom X and the late Reverend Leon
Sullivan, hold that pan-Africanism not only explains the black experience but
also provides solutions to black peoples' problems. However, as Ohaegbulam
observes, the pan-Africanist framework tends to gloss over or even write off
major differences among black people on the continent and in the Diaspora. For
example, language, religious beliefs, and even the experience and perception of
slavery and freedom are dissimilar in Africa, in the African American
community, in the Caribbean, and in Latin American countries, such as Brazil.
Notwithstanding its shortcomings, the pan-Africanist model is a useful
comparative analytical and teaching tool.
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The study of Africa acquired enhanced status from the creation of the
African Studies Association (ASA) in 1957. The first meeting that led to the
establishment of the association took place at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York
City under the auspices of the Carnegie Corporation (which provided $6,500 to
underwrite the proceedings). The corporation was represented by its president,
Dr. Alan Pifer, and some 35 scholars from several disciplines, particularly
anthropology, history, and sociology, that met and decided to form the
association whose objective would be to collect data and expand knowledge
about Africa and its people. In addition, the ASA would stimulate and promote
research “in ways appropriate to a scholarly organization” and facilitate
communication among interested scholars.
However, some members, particularly African, Caribbean, and African
American scholars, came to believe that the ASA should play the role of an
active advocate of African causes as well as that of a promoter of knowledge.
Likewise, these same scholars began to resent the fact that the association was
dominated by white, Anglo-Saxon male scholars, whose research agendas
seemed to them totally irrelevant to Africa's needs. They accused the
association's leadership of continuing to play the condescending role of “liberal
mediators” and secular “missionaries” of Africa, while collaborating with
government agencies such as the US State Department, the Defense
Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the African American
Institute (headquartered in New York). They wished to see the ASA play a
major role on critical issues and problems relevant to Africa, such as the
liberation of the whole of Southern Africa, especially South Africa at that time,
economic development, the strengthening of democratic institutions, health
promotion, literacy expansion, and combating the threat posed by military rule
on the continent.
These differences burst out in the open in the 1969 ASA meeting in Montreal
when, according to Immanuel Wallerstein, a group of black American scholars
“seized the platform and put forward a series of demands” they had voiced two
years earlier through their splinter African Heritage Studies Association. As a
result, the association became much more sensitive to the views and feelings of
minority scholars. Yet, few African Americans remained members of the
association, long dominated by historians (in 1988, for example, six out of nine
board members were historians), political scientists, and anthropologists.
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(Unlike Africanist historians, however, Africa-trained anthropologists, artists,
musicians, and literature scholars have also their own discipline-specific
associations.)
Continental African scholars, as noted earlier, have also been critical of the
association's research agenda, have questioned the theoretical premises of some
of its members, and have resented their control over the canons of the various
traditional disciplines. Furthermore, Africans would like to see a more radical
approach to scholarship, whereby the researcher is not just a passive onlooker
of events occurring in Africa but remains active, embracing African causes
throughout his scholarly life. They have also demanded that more credit be
given to the work of continental scholars and that blacks have a fairer
representation in the association's decision-making process. Over the years,
some of their concerns have been addressed by the association's board of
directors. For example, an effort has been made to bring African scholars from
the continent to the annual meetings at no cost to them and to guarantee
minority representation on the board. What is the situation today? Even though
relations between American Africanists and continental African scholars have
improved over the years, much of the earlier tension has surfaced openly from
time to time. Although the reasons are complex and varied, the most resented is
the fact that the field is still dominated by Western Africanists and not by those
who arduously “toil in the trenches” of the continent. No one has expressed this
problem more succinctly than Thandika Mkandawire, whose remarks are
summarized below.
First, according to Mkandawire, part of the uneasiness stems from the fact
that Anglo-Saxon male Africanists have remained the “gatekeepers” of African
Studies and its disciplines, as common referees of journals, manuscript
reviewers and evaluators, and researchers who are constantly looking for
collaborators on the continent to further their personal goals; who act as a
police force that not only inspects one's outfit but, above all, is intent on
admitting as few Africans as possible through the gates of “the palace,” or what
is commonly called the “academy,” in order not to turn it into a “ghetto.”
Indeed, this repugnant attitude came to the fore in 1995 when one of the
foremost and renowned Africanists, Philip Curtin (at Johns Hopkins University
then), who died in June 2009 at the age of 87, acrimoniously complained in the
Chronicle of Higher Education that the hiring of many “unqualified” or
untrained minorities such as Africans (and African Americans) in the name of
affirmative action, and the concomitant rejection of qualified young white
graduates, had contributed to the ghettoization of African Studies units across
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the country. Confronted that year by members of both black and white races at
the annual meeting of the African Studies Association in Orlando, Florida, who
accused him of creating divisiveness and injecting racism into the field of
African Studies in the United States and elsewhere, Curtin adamantly refused to
apologize or recant what, in the view of most members, were unwarranted,
insensitive, self-serving, and inaccurate remarks. The debate did not, of course,
die in Florida—it continued (this researcher was present at the Orlando,
Florida, ASA conference).
The second cause of friction, according to Mkandawire, is the “primacy” of
dubious deductive “theoretical frameworks” or guiding theories used by many
Africanists when they study Africa and its people. As funds become scarce and
the pressure to publish increases at the universities, there is the tendency on the
part of many scholars to mold reality to fit theories rather than molding one's
theory to fit the African reality. Indeed, certain disciplines will not consider a
paper to be scholarly unless it is couched theories or a theoretical framework
both before and after the research is completed. Third is the resentment on the
part of African scholars when they see their on-going work on the continent
almost totally ignored by their Africanist colleagues who are quick to claim
eureka's (“I single-handedly discovered this”) when they come up with new
conclusions about Africa. Arguably, American scholars often counter this
charge by alleging that the African scholars themselves are unable or, for
reasons of suspicion that Western researchers will “steal” their work, are
unwilling to share their research agendas until the work is completed.
The fourth source of tension seems to lie on the fact that study protocols or
research designs, the conduct of interviews (a popular way of doing research in
Africa), and control of important facets of field work are the purview of the
Northern Hemisphere or Western scholars, with African scholars in the
Southern Hemisphere remaining as onlookers or sometimes as simple paid
collaborators, or study facilitators. Relegated to the receiving-end of the
competition for funds and control of the research agendas, Africans, therefore,
are reduced to what Mkandwaire calls “barefoot empiricists,” similar to men
walking without shoes in the streets looking for data. Fifth is the Western
Africanists' seeming tendency to simply dismiss as “irrelevant” or unscholarly
the publications of continental Africans by either not listing them in their
bibliographical entries or listing them as references but never directly citing
them. The sixth factor is the propensity for foreign scholars to think that they
know best when it comes to Africa, reflected clearly in their “teleological bent”
(i.e., tendency to predict future events) of the sixties and seventies—to use the
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author's words—as they pushed forward their modernizing and developmental
theories discussed in the preceding sections. Thus, Western scholars are
perceived as constantly giving unsolicited advice to African statesmen and
continental African scholars. At present, for example, they claim to have all the
answers to Africa's problems, from democratic reforms and economic recovery
to conflict resolution.
Finally, says Mkandawire, what irks many Africans is Western scholars'
“Afro-pessimism” or the “CNN factor,” which looks at Africa only in terms of
crisis and contributes to “disdain” and “contempt” for all that is African.
Indeed, no longer do these Africanists project the image of solidarity and
admiration about which they wrote during the 1960s and early 1970s, as Africa
entered the period of independence. To prove his point, Mkandawire lists the
most common demeaning terms Africanists, especially political scientists and
economists, have used in the context of Africa's economic system and state
apparatus: Pirate capitalism, crony capitalism, nurture capitalism, the state as a
lame Leviathan, swollen state, soft state, predatory state, parasitical state, rent-
seeking state, over-extended state, kleptocratic (thief) state, perverted capitalist
state, unsteady state, fallen state, underground state, one that “squats like a
bloated toad, simultaneously developed and underdeveloped.” Africa is
described as moving toward its “final collapse, oblivion, and self-destruction.”
(In fact, some “experts” have suggested that Africa should be re-colonized or
colonized again.)
To be sure, one could say that the tendency to generalize and write only
about problems that affect Africa has hurt Africa's ability to redefine its image
abroad. To those who are sensitive to the feelings of African scholars and are
aware of the resilient tendencies for the West to denigrate Africa, there is no
doubt that a residue of arrogance, a superiority complex, and scholastic
mercilessness surfaces when the worth of scholarship from Africa is evaluated.
One way to illustrate this point is to examine the language with which some
manuscripts by African scholars are rejected by reviewers of journal articles or
book manuscripts. Although rejection of manuscripts submitted by Africanists
in the West is at times expressed in unflattering terms, yet (if one is privy to
some of the reviewers' comments), the tone of rejection of a continental
African's work is often quite appalling. This writer has seen reviews that have
classified a Cameroonian Ph.D.'s article submitted for possible publication as
“worse than the work of an undergraduate student.” Commenting on a Kenyan
scholar's article, one reviewer wrote: “Absolutely useless internationally and
domestically,” “unworthy of our journal” or “our university press.” In the
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majority of the cases where rejection is the end result, there is no constructive
criticism to salvage or improve the work submitted. Such an attitude and
humiliating characterization should not have a place in academia, but, perhaps
to protect their academic turf, many scholars act this way and with much
virulence. Under these circumstances, Western Africanists should understand
why, at times, their continental colleagues do not welcome them with open
arms when they set foot on African soil in pursuit of their academic goals.
Francis B. Nyamnjoh and Natang B. Jua, after discussing the crisis, including
the actual violence Africans have experienced, underscore the minor role to
which continental African scholars have been relegated, and conclude by
admonishing that:
Only by creating space for African scholarship based on Africa as a unit
of analysis in its own right can we begin to correct prevalent situations
whereby much is what African states, societies, and economies are not
(thanks to dogmatic and normative assumptions of mainstream
scholarship) but very little of what they actually are. Accepting the
research agendas of African scholars may be not just ‘a matter of
ecumenism or goodwill,’ but also the beginnings of a conversation that
could enrich scholarship in the West and elsewhere.
Even though, in the process of highlighting the differences between
Africanists and African scholars, one should avoid generalizing, most
Africanists, both at home and abroad, would not dispute the general accuracy of
Mkandawire's earlier remarks. The question is the degree of the pervasiveness
of the attitudes he chronicled within the African Studies academy. Does he
believe that the differences cannot be resolved? No! Mkandawire, who
undoubtedly speaks for many African scholars, advocates tolerance between the
two opposing groups. Such understanding can be achieved through
collaboration on the basis of equal partnership in research and other academic
endeavors, through respect of each other's work, and through open admission
that race is a factor to contend with, one which Western scholars, especially
Africanists in North America, must strive to overcome in their encounter with
continental black scholars. As Gwendolyn Mikell, director of the African
Studies Program at Georgetwon University, noted in 1999, the ASA has to
forge mutually beneficial relationships with other associations and Africa. The
ASA, she wrote, must “overcome the historical hierarchies based on race and
nationality that attended [its] creation and early history.” After demonstrating
the need to forge closer relations with Africa, Mikell addressed the ASA
internal problems and concluded by saying: “We cannot cede African studies to
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either black or white Africanists, but we must insist that our association, our
newly trained professionals, and our ASA leadership mirror the cultural and
ethnic diversity that is America.” African scholars, on their part, must learn to
accept as legitimate the training and the skills of their overseas colleagues and
realize that a diversity of perspectives can only enrich their knowledge and
perhaps assist Africa and its institutions in moving forward.
In her 1996 African Studies Association presidential address, Iris Burger
joined Mkandawire in echoing the theme of collaboration among scholars
across regions and disciplines and underscored the need to stop the tide of brain
drain or the flight of “human intellectual and social capital” from African
universities. She urged members to share with their continental colleagues the
benefits of modern research techniques and the opportunities offered by the
Internet. Yet, the issues of who should speak for Africans and who holds the
“right” perspective on Africa (i.e., is it the Africanist in America or Europe or
the continental African scholar who has the right to lead the discourse on
Africentricity or Afrocentricity?) will continue to enliven the debate within the
African Studies academy. While scholars such as Edward Said, Molefi Asante,
and Oyekan Owomoyela, just to mention a few, will continue to impugn
Western scholars of allegedly spreading “tainted” African scholarship through
their Eurocentric perspectives, others wish to see a field of African Studies that
specifically addresses one or all of the following practical themes in Africa:
The primacy of a development-centered focus or sustained development (Ann
Seidman); the pursuit of health and gender studies (the latter an agenda pushed
forward partly by feminist literature and partly by the Women's Caucus of the
African Studies Association); vigorous research on sexuality in Africa; and a
focus on democratic reforms (Mahmood Mamdani and Claude Ake).
Finally, we should also note that some scholars are uneasy about the debate
that Burger characterizes as the conflict over “epistemological boundaries.” A
need arises to reconcile global, interdisciplinary area studies (pronounced dead
by such scholars as Robert Bates) and discipline autonomy, specifically the
dichotomy between a local perspective and a global perspective brought into
focus by what we have commonly characterized as “village globalization.” On
this issue, many would agree with Burger when she notes that “at a time when
‘global’ has become the buzzword in scholarship and policy, we should
continue to insist on the necessity for the contextualized knowledge of language
and culture that has been a strength of area studies and to see local and global
knowledge as complementary.” In other words, the two are not mutually
exclusive, as globalization always starts with villagization in an evolutionary
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process that necessarily binds the beginning and the end together, that is, the
village and the globe, thus the adage “act locally but think globally.” Most
likely, however, the complaints of the continental African scholars will
continue, as they are powerless to change the system. Lack of financial
resources to pursue meaningful research activities, the absence of a long
tradition of scholarship on the continent due to historical factors, and the
scarcity of publishing houses and adequate library materials, all contribute to a
sense of frustration and bitterness. Unfortunately, there is no light in sight at the
end of the tunnel.
As we conclude this chapter, we owe our readers a brief discussion of the
state of most African universities as we continue to make strides into the
twenty-first century. The situation of many African universities as centers of
learning and vigorous, objective research has been deteriorating since the
1970s, the major obstacle being the absence of academic freedom and adequate
funding from the state, which remains the sole significant source of funds for
the overwhelming majority of the institutions of higher learning on the
continent. Aware of their power of leverage, governments choose to close the
institutions whenever there is a strong voice of dissent from students or the
faculty. This has happened in Kenya, Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, Sierra
Leone, and in many other African countries. Again, speaking for many African
scholars, Thandika Mkandawire writes that the state in Africa “has not hesitated
to use its power to bludgeon our skulls, close universities, ban books or
generally do everything to silence real or imagined dissidents in institutions of
higher learning.”
On Kenya, for example, James Mittelman reminds us that research proposals
by faculty and students had to be approved formally by the president's office
and that students and staff have to obtain clearance from this office to travel
abroad for a conference. Once a pride of East African institutions of higher
learning, most Kenyan universities are becoming obsolete. A combination of
“political repression and material shortages [of chalk, paper, supplies, current
journals, books, and Internet software] has put a choke hold on academic
freedom.” While new construction at African universities is virtually at a
standstill, in countries such as Nigeria, adds Mittelman, at times university
faculty and students are allowed to use the library only one day a week.
Dormitory rooms in such countries as Chad, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and
Kenya, designed for three or four students, are now housing as many as seven
or more students! State-of-the-art computers are still a novelty in several
African institutions, and transactions are still done by pen, pencil, and a
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typewriter.
The precarious conditions under which most African universities operate
have been exacerbated by a reduction in research funds out of economic
hardships and the demise of the Cold War, which diverted foreign assistance
funds away from Africa, resulting in an unprecedented flight of faculty to
institutions overseas, causing what has been called Africa's “brain drain.”
Furthermore, as a result of sustained repression of freedom of expression, much
of the research in the social sciences is irrelevant to the practical needs of the
Africans and remains distant from public policy. Mkandawire places some of
the blame on the African scholars themselves who, following independence in
the 1960s, went along with the nationalist ideology that repressed open
discussion and controlled any research effort on sensitive issues that could
allegedly impede the process of nation building. Their “collaborationist”
attitude vis-à-vis the modernization and developmental ideologies of the 1960s
and 1970s, which channeled research agendas towards modernizing the newly
independent countries, did not help the cause of the institutions of higher
learning either.
In this context, development meant nothing more than concentration on
programs and studies that would contribute overnight to the “growth of per
capita incomes.” In most countries, academics were given cars, “mansions,”
and allowances of all sorts to silence their voices. This strategy, says
Mkandawire, was so openly blatant in former Zaire during Mobutu's regime
that people in the street amusingly called a state-donated faculty car PTT
(“professeur tais-toi” or “professor you shut up”). Even though the new
generation of students and scholars is becoming more vocal against injustices
and repression of academic freedom, it has not yet won the war. The obstacles
are numerous, as many African leaders, democratic reforms and international
outcry notwithstanding, still do not hesitate to imprison students and faculty
alike, reduce financial support to the universities to a minimum and, quite
often, close them indefinitely altogether. The shortage of textbooks, lack of
university presses and science laboratories, continued reliance on Western
textbooks and expatriates, and the decline of external funds to support research,
make the future of African universities look so bleak that, short of revolution,
some experts say, no substantive change for the better is likely to occur.
72
The Surfacing and Re-Emergence of Old and New Issues
in African Studies: The Twenty-First Century
It is amazing how issues that have not been completely resolved tend to
resurface, while new ones come to the fore, as this short section purports to
demonstrate. More recently, scholars have pointed out that the pouring of
financial resources, especially by the US Departments of Education and
Defense into area studies, including Africa, accelerated the shaping and
sustainability of the African Studies centers and academic units throughout the
country, giving, however, preference to the Ivy League, predominantly white
institutions. The aim, later openly expressed by Africanists, was the result of
the Cold War and the struggle for control over the world by the two
superpowers, at the time the Soviet Union and the United States. It was clear by
the mid-1960s and 1970s that the Soviet Union had the upper hand in Africa, as
the liberation movements began to spring up virtually everywhere and
independence was becoming a new global reality. The Soviet Union was more
sympathetic ideologically, financially, and militarily and, therefore, willing to
assist African's quest for freedom and independence, particularly in Sub-
Saharan Africa, and in this particular region, Southern Africa's colonies waging
guerrilla warfare against the Portuguese government, the British in former
Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and the whites in South Africa and its
puppet colony or “trust territory,” South-West Africa, now known as Namibia.
The rapprochement with Africa on the part of the United States, on the other
hand, was an attempt to buy out the liberation movements by training its future
leaders and the intelligentsia using the New York-based African-American
Institute that provided scholarships to the young men and women from Sub-
Saharan Africa, hoping to make long-lasting friendships on the continent. If the
policy were to win, both the US and its Western allies would be more secure
and able to exert a lasting hegemony over the affairs of the future African
states.
The US co-option policy was especially clear during the administrations of
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. However, the Nixon administration's
policy, botched by Kissinger's dogged pro-white leanings in South Africa,
Namibia, and Southern Rhodesia, dwarfed the effort, thus allowing the Soviet
Union to preserve its upper hand in the African sub-continent, even though this
was not the view and wish of many Africanist scholars both in Africa and the
73
US. Yet, the rift within the African Studies Association, as noted earlier, has
resurfaced with the questioning by a small but vocal group of scholars that
resented the ethics of the academic institutions and scholars who had shown no
scruples in accepting grants and consultancy fees from the Department of
Defense. This minority was quick to stress the point that most of the US
government assistance was designed to covertly collect intelligence for its
national use, the reason why several African states either expelled or curtailed
the activities of many dedicated and honest young men and women volunteers
of the American Peace Corps.
As the African or Africana Studies achieved their maturity and became
established units at many universities, a period that coincided with the end of
the Cold War in 1988, it seemed clear that the US had succeeded in dislodging
its nemesis from most of the African continent, with exception of Ethiopia,
Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. Indeed, at the dawn of the twenty-
first century, the Soviet Union had suffered a major internal political and social
upheaval that resulted in its dissolution, bringing present-day Russia into being.
Thus, the new country was forced to fend for itself to survive as a superpower,
as the resources were no longer there to extend a long-tentacle policy it had
devised for Africa: The Western World had won the context. With the fall of
the Soviet Union, China became the new contender. Indeed, by 2017, it had
become clear that, through its infrastructure building and investment in the oil
industry in Africa, China had moved to be the sole noteworthy remaining
communist country on the globe and seen by the new African leaders as their
potential new friend and partner that would be able to help them in their quest
for meaningful and lasting development and prosperity. The influence of China
in Africa has, as well, been noticed by Africanist scholars who, over the past
few decades, have cautiously praised the promising role it could play in the
improvement of the lives of future generations of Africans. One may ask
whether this has been a delusion or clairvoyance on the part of some African
Studies scholars, given that the Chinese spend fewer resources for the education
of Africans, focusing mainly on building roads, railroads, and improving the
capacity of oil refineries. Do the Chinese, in this process, transfer their
technology and know-how to Africans for the sustainability and progress of the
continent? As journalists put it, it remains to be seen.
It is also interesting that one or two other issues that Africanists thought had
been resolved decades ago have resurfaced but with a new twist. One question
being asked again is the role of African Studies, particularly in their new form
as Africana Studies, which encompasses the African Diaspora as a whole or
74
those people of African descent who are scattered throughout the globe, more
so in some places, such as the Caribbean, and fewer so in others, such as
Eastern Europe. Essentially, in the past, a two-pronged answer to the question
has been the norm. While one school of thought has viewed African Studies as
providing primarily the knowledge and understanding of Africa and its
descendants, the other sees the new field as a program that should be not only
theoretical but also practical, in that it had the explicit social, political, cultural,
and “scientific” mission of applying the basic findings of the field to improve
the lives of the African peoples wherever they might be on the globe. However,
since the founding of the African and Africana Studies, there has been
resistance to using the field as a conduit to impart the sense of identity to
continental Africans and to those living in the Diaspora, who had been robbed
of their identity, energy, and creativity by the slave trade, colonialism, and neo-
colonialism, all still imbued with racism and cultural ethnocentrism. Resistance
against this interpretation of the mission of African and Africana Studies was
based on the consensus that such a practice would tantamount to using the field
as a tool for the indoctrination of students and an encouragement to destructive
“radical” activists. In other words, these scholars hold the view that people
should decide for themselves who they wish to be and not have that dictated by
the intellectuals who are less concerned about the plight of ordinary black
people.
It appears now, however, that most scholars in African or Africana Studies
academic units viewed their mission as simply laying out there the truth
falsified to the white world and the mass of black people, and divulging the
uncovered “accurate” facts, letting the students, their professors, and their
mentors make their own decision as to who they think they are and should be in
terms of their identity, that is, whether or not they would like to see themselves
as Africans or something else, wherever they might be living on the globe.
Writing in the African Studies Quarterly, Kwasi Konadu is of the opinion that
African Studies programs are to have their own epistemology, one that puts
Africa and Africans at the center of every academic endeavor, as the subject
and the object of learning. Africana Studies, Konadu adds, “must resolve the
central question ‘to be African or not.’” His preferred choice is the first part of
the question—not to let African or Africana Studies waste their time by
dwelling “in Western-derived delusionary and misguided comparative
hypotheses and methodologies.” To him, what we use now in the disciplines
about black people are nothing but “inferences based on incomplete evidence
characteristic of the [old and racist] European thought and behavior as the
75
referenced universe,” as if the African reality, truth, and cosmology did not
exist at all.
Additionally, all African or Africana Studies should, in his view, embrace a
process “of cultural rediscovery and reclamation, and by extension, personal
transformation.” In other words, symbolically, all answers can and will be
found in the “‘circle’ (collective)” of Africa and the Diaspora. Konadu goes on
to assert that, in the past, whenever Africans have attempted to adopt Western
cultural practices and epistemologies, for example, they have always lost in the
end, making their lives more miserable. Indeed, whenever they have adopted
“things non-African, whether they be liquor, money, or gadgets (technology),”
the more they have become “dependent, mystified,” losing “their sense of
cultural being (including their cultural and material resources).” The thought-
provoking point made here should compel African scholars to revisit the old
paradigms and respond to the thinking of a new generation of Africanists and
Diaspora scholars, as Konadu is.
There are several other issues related to research and epistemology that the
new millennial generation of scholars raises. One that caught this researcher's
attention refers to the study of the urban areas or cities of Africa. So far, most
pre-2000 urban area studies have focused on population growth and the lure
they represent to village dwellers, namely, an opportunity for education, good
heath, employment, and good times. A couple of new scholars in the field of
post-modern scientific and social geography believe that the methodology and
focus in all urban studies have been completely wrong and misplaced and that
Africanists have simply followed the ethnocentric dictates and traditions of the
Western model, comparing African cities with their European counterparts,
focusing on such factors as assessments that have nothing to do with African
realities, history, cosmology, and demographics. These studies have looked at
the urban settings from inside rather than from outside (European cities),
resulting always in negative assessments and conclusions. Garth Myers, who
questions the past models, writes “as African societies urbanize, they often do
so in ways that seem to challenge prevailing theories and models in the
discipline—which has often led to normative ‘African Exceptionalism’
explanations, instead of conclusions that the theories might be inapplicable to
some African situations.” This new perspective has the potential for rendering
geographic studies more vibrant and reflective of the true reality of African
urban settings, their origins, and their social implications. While urban
researchers such as Deborah Potts (2009) have, for example, challenged the
“truism that Africa has high rates of urbanization,” others, such as Franklin
76
Obeng-Odoom, have rejected studies that posit that African urbanization is
associated with economic development.
In general, says Obeng-Odoom, scholars often deal with seven urban issues,
namely: (1) the legacy of colonialism; (2) the growing informal economic
system; (3) deprivation, poverty, inequality, and socio-political isolation; (4)
the unpredictable provision of necessary services such as waste and refuse,
water, land, housing, and electricity; (5) the prevalence of violence, warfare,
and disease; (6) expanded cosmopolitanism and “connectivity of cities”; and (7)
the “imaginative and generative character of urban cultures.” Garth Myers
notes, however, that the first four issues listed here are currently the most
common tools of analysis of urban areas, whereas the last three are only now
emerging as important considerations for the accurate understanding of cities in
Africa and their impact on African lives. He sharpens his analysis by adding
that “it is important to resist an overarching crisis narrative, in the interest of
maintaining a concern with both theory and practice.” The new strategy, he
says, would lead to further development of an “African” urban geography in the
future of African Studies.
The most recent and neglected issue is a narrative of the impact of new
technologies. Worthy of note in this is the lack of substantive research by
Africanists on both the positive and negative impacts of technology in Africa,
reflected by the ubiquity of social media—Facebook, Twitter, iPads, cell
phones, IMO, What's App, and the desktop and laptop computers that connect
one to the Internet. These new communication devices and tools of knowledge
deserve greater attention from scholars due to their unregulated and careless
democratization of the interpretation of facts and messages but also as a result
of the nefarious influence they are prone to exert on the family and the
millennial generation in Africa, in particular. It is reasonable to expect that
African Studies of any designation be at the forefront of the new but old issue
of false identity formation in Africa and in the Diaspora. One might also note
that, along with the study of new forms of communication that alter people's
perceptions of one another and spread new ideas that shape identity, there is a
growing movement among African Americans specifically that attempt to learn
about their ancestry by excitingly tracing their genetic roots to Africa.
Is this growing new wave of soul searching bringing more understanding
among continental Africans and those in the United States and the Caribbean
islands? This researcher believes that this is a new phenomenon that African
Studies departments and centers should turn their attention to and try to find out
77
whether the emerging efforts so far have had measurable impact on Diaspora
identities. In other words, scholars should ask whether the movement to visit
Africa and shape one's identity through the archives and the ancestry genome is
a reflection of African Americans seeking their roots in Africa to shape their
identity or just an exercise in curiosity. Questions like these, while they seem to
confirm that African or Africana Studies are here to stay, also remind us that
the relatively new field will continue to face life-and-death issues and
challenges, unless they aspire to be more relevant to all peoples of African
descent across the globe.
Finally, it is obvious that, as all institutions and academic programs on the
globe today, including Africa, African or Africana Studies departments and
centers must be a part of the intellectual and pragmatic discussion of the issue
of terrorism and how it is often related to religions and interpretation of
religious tenets. The African Studies Association and its Africana or African
Studies departments and centers must be at the forefront of the effort to be a
part of the solution and not the problem through vigorous and frank discussions
and recommendations for African and US policy-makers. The University of
Oxford African Studies Centre, for instance, is a pioneer in this effort, as it
deliberately uses workshops that focus on issues related to terrorism as
“contested histories, securitization and regional circulation, local impact and
responses,” with specific reference to Boko Haram and the violent occurrences
in Central Africa—Nigeria, Chad, Mali, and Cameroon—and Al-Shabab's
deadly activities in Eastern Africa, Somalia, and Kenya, as well as in every
place that has been turned upside down by recently flared religious
persecutions. In sum, the new generation of scholars wishes their study base to
be a source of solutions to the problems of black peoples so that they can
become relevant to the lives of all peoples of African descent. How it can be
done is a question of methodology and ideology that will never satisfy
everyone, no matter how frank and honest they might be. In fact, as people say,
there are always two sides to a history.
78
Summary
The field of African Studies comprises all the disciplines in the humanities,
the arts, and the social sciences that focus specifically on Africa and African
peoples from early times to the present. Because these disciplines are different
from each other in focus and methodologies, the resulting research conclusions
may differ, and tensions among the respective scholars do arise. Despite their
differences, however, all studies aim at looking at Africa “scientifically” to the
extent possible in order to provide an accurate understanding of the continent
and its people, suggest solutions to pressing problems, and facilitate the
exchange of useful information among interested scholars and the public.
Since, for a long time, Africa was left out of the academic world due to such
factors as European ethnocentrism, the slave trade, colonialism, and racism,
African Studies is a relatively new field which, in fact, did not fully develop
until the 1970s. The establishment of the African Studies Association in 1957,
the emergence of independent African states during the 1960s, the uncovering
of new written sources, the inclusion of oral tradition as a valid historical tool,
and the impact of student activism from the civil rights movement in the United
States during the 1960s, all facilitated the acceptance and respectability of
African Studies within the “academy.”
Historically, anthropology, history, sociology, political science, literature,
and economics have played a major role in the field, while music, fine and the
performing arts, geography, linguistics, archaeology, philosophy, and religion
have been vital ancillary disciplines in the development of the field and the
understanding of Africa. The field of African Studies, which began in the West
(Britain, France, and the United States), is still dominated by Western scholars
who also control its association, determine by and large the acceptable canons
of the disciplines, set the research agenda, and have the resources and access to
publishing commercial houses and university presses. As a result, continental
African scholars often feel that they are treated as “second class” academics.
Continental Africanists have also questioned some of the Western
assumptions including the claim of “scientific objectivity” and are of the
opinion that many of the studies undertaken by Africanist scholars are biased
and irrelevant to or distort the African reality. The debate heightened as a result
of the emergence of the Marxist and neo-Marxist school, which insists on
thorough analysis of classes and the modes of production as the only viable and
79
accurate basis for a realistic understanding of the development of Africa. Put
simply, as Martin Staniland did, the relevant questions that Africanists have
been asked to respond to are: What is the intellectual or cultural mission of
African Studies? Do scholars have the obligation to commit themselves to
solving the problems of Africa through their disciplines? How and who should
interpret Africa? What is the role of the non-African scholar? Although the
answers have been numerous, Staniland identifies four general responses to
these queries.
The “Washingtonian formula,” in Staniland's view (prevalent particularly
during the 1950s and 1960s), saw African Studies as a partial response to the
Cold War and a tool to help preserve the “free world.” This mission was, in
fact, the condition the American government set for its support of the field
during its initial stages, namely, to promote capitalism, democracy, and justice
abroad. Consequently, the seeming attempt by the government to interfere in
the affairs of the new academic effort in African Studies was one of the reasons
for the conflict that erupted at the 1969 Montreal meeting of the African
Studies Association. The currently less popular “brokerage and discipline
formula,” on the other hand, considered African Studies to be a forum and an
endeavor to prevent conflicts among cultures and societies, build international
“bridges,” and foster intercultural understanding. Proponents of the formula
emphasize the triple mission of the scholar as “a researcher, educator, and
advisor to Africa” (sometimes known as the role of the “secular missionary” or
the “liberal mediator,” to use Wallerstein's terminology). However, the
proponents have also felt that the scholar's most important loyalty was to the
discipline itself and that Africa, in a sense, was “a laboratory” for the theories
and the evolving methods of the social sciences.
The “developmental formula,” on the contrary, holds that African Studies
ought to be actively engaged in the “formulation, implementation, and
evaluation of policies concerned with increasing the standards of living and
expanding opportunities in Africa.” Many continental Africans favor this view.
Finally, the “advocacy and solidarity formula,” for its part, maintains that the
Africanist's mission is to “articulate, defend, and promote the interests of
groups suffering some form of injustice, oppression, or deprivation.” This
radical view also has many adepts on the African continent.
No matter what the nature of the debate may be in the future, African Studies
is a socio-scientific field whose objective is to establish the fact that Africa and
Africans are here to stay and are worth studying. The field has, in fact, done
80
considerable good among American scholars. It is clear, for example, that most
Africanist scholars tend to be more sensitive than their counterparts in their
views and treatment of Africa and the African people. To borrow from
Staniland once again, the commitment and “Afrophilia” are equally prevalent
among leftist, radical, liberal, and religious scholars, and even among
“moderate conservative postures in domestic politics,” with the exception to be
found only among “conservative nationalists [for whom only America counts]
and white racist groups.” Yet, there is no doubt that the field, its scholars, and
its official association must be relevant to Africa. Wisdom J. Tottey and Korbla
P. Puplampu (2000) discuss several challenges facing the Africanist, including
the “intellectual distancing of the disciplines from society, the retrogressive
socio-political atmosphere that characterizes some African universities, and the
negative attitudes of individual academics.” The two scholars conclude by
pointing out that “without a correction of these internal and external
deficiencies, it will be difficult to maintain a respectable and beneficial level of
research endeavor, integrity, collaboration, and sustainability.”
Evidently, differing views and sharp disagreements will continue among
scholars, as was illustrated in 1990 when a well-known historian, L. H. Gann,
accused the African Studies Association's leadership of discriminating against
conservatives, such as himself, and charged in Issue (Vol. XVIII, Summer
1990), that the association was dominated by leftists and Marxists. The charges
prompted a stinging reply by four former presidents of the association: Ann
Seidman, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, Aidan Southall, and Simon Ottenberg.
One can say, however, that although the criticisms have been at times vicious,
the end results have proven healthy for the academic community and have
contributed to a marked improvement in the standards of the research activity
on Africa. For example, many disciplines require that Ph.D. candidates in
African Studies conduct field work in Africa itself for a certain period of time
as participant-observers of the groups they might happen to study. One should
not forget as well the criticism from some scholars of the link between the
development of African Studies and the political and military interests of the
United States, such as ending communism and the Cold War. There are also
common standards among the various African or Africana Studies disciplines
regarding research design, sampling, interviewing and coding, data analysis,
interpretation, and outcome reporting. All these are positive results that critics
should not overlook. Readers should be clear by now that the new issues related
to the African area of studies go beyond the championing of the need for
multidisciplinary approaches to the study of peoples of Africa and the African
81
Diaspora, as was the case during the 1990s, or the issues of objectivity,
dispelling myths and stereotypes, and proclaiming to the globe the
contributions of black people in the fine and performing arts.
82
1. Define African Studies and discuss its evolution.
2. Compare and contrast the methodologies and perspectives of historians,
anthropologists, and sociologists. How useful are their assumptions and
practices?
3. What have been the major problems among scholars within the African
Studies field and the African Studies Association?
4. Discuss some of the most recent issues in African Studies.
5. What were the major themes of Africanist scholars during the 1960s? Has
the emphasis shifted at present? Compare and contrast the methodologies of
a historian, a political scientist, and an anthropologist, and draw a chart
outlining the discipline's focus. How useful has each one of them been in the
understanding of Africa as it “really” is or was?
6. Can you find, through your research, identify other new themes that the new
generation of scholars has been raising over the past two decades?
83
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2
African American Studies and the

State of the Art
Rico D. Chapman
89
Introduction
African American Studies is a discipline rather young compared to the
traditional disciplines in the academy. Its beginnings are usually attributed to
the late 1960s Black Power Movement era, when students on college campuses
throughout the United States were demanding courses related to the African
experience in America; however, its early stages go back to the late nineteenth
century. African-American scholars produced ground-breaking scholarship at
the time, including W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Alain
Locke's The New Negro (1925), and E. Franklin Frazier's Negro at the
Crossroads (1940). As early as 1915, historian Carter G. Woodson established
the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History while also founding the
first academic journal dedicated to the African American experience. In what
Manning Marable terms the “conceptual period” of Black Studies, from
Reconstruction through the Great Depression, over one hundred public and
private colleges were established for African descended peoples.
African American Studies has as its focus people of African descent,
primarily in the Western Hemisphere, though Africa and the diaspora are
generally included. In the early stages of the discipline's growth, the term
“Black Studies” was widely used, until the 1980s when the designation of
“African-American Studies” became more commonplace, although most
programs and departments would have used African American Studies to
broadly mean the study of African descended peoples in the United States and
abroad; however, as more programs, centers, institutes, and departments
emerged, some being called “Black Studies,” “African and African American
Studies,” “Africana Studies,” and “Pan-African Studies,” there arose the need
to be more specific in scope. These terms will be used interchangeably
throughout the chapter.
Major terms and concepts: Africana, Afrocentricity, Afrology, Pan-
African, Black Studies, Diaspora, interdisciplinary, HBCU, Jim Crow, Black
Panther, Black Power, the Ford Foundation, Jubilee.
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Historical Context
The emergence of African American Studies is part of a longer history of
struggle on the part of people of African descent, though the more
contemporary beginnings can be traced back to the Black Power Movement.
The decade of the 1960s leading up to the founding of Black Studies programs
across the country was one of the most turbulent eras in United States history.
The modern civil rights movement was garnering national attention and white
supremacists were ramping up their efforts to thwart any progressive gains
made by African Americans. In the early 1960s, African American students
played a major role in bringing attention to the movement through their fearless
dedication to non-violent direct action. Students in Atlanta, Georgia,
Greensboro, North Carolina, Jackson, Mississippi, and Washington, D.C.,
challenged Jim Crow segregation head on, by attempting to desegregate
Whites-only lunch counters, libraries, restrooms, and department stores. The
mid-1960s were equally riveting as college students continued to display acts of
courage through non-violent direct action.
As attacks on civil rights workers became more bloody and brutal, students
began to question the efficacy of the non-violent approach to social change.
There were, as a result, countless high-profile murders of civil rights activists in
the mid-1960s. Medgar Evers was killed in the driveway of his home in
Jackson, Mississippi, by white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith, in 1963. The
bodies of three young civil rights workers from the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE), Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were
found buried in an earth fill dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964.
Malcolm X fell to assassin's bullets in front of hundreds of people in the
Audubon Ballroom in New York City in 1965. Though these were some the
most publicized, there would be countless other killings of activists across the
United States during this time period. The mid-1960s began to see a shift from
non-violent direct action to a more aggressive display of resistance, which
subsequently led to the call for Black Power by young men and women such as
Stokely Carmichael.
James Meredith, who enrolled at the University of Mississippi as the first
African-American student in 1962, started a one-man walk from Memphis,
Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, on June 6, 1966. He was shot along the
way, and had to be taken to the hospital, prompting other civil rights leaders,
including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael, to complete the
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journey. As Carmichael, King, and others came to Meredith's aid to complete
the march, the debate between King and Carmichael over non-violence as a
strategy or principle would take center stage, in what became known as the
“March Against Fear.”
It was during this moment that the slogan “Black Power” began to gain
prominence. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had
been working in Mississippi for over five years by now and had established a
generous support network from Black Mississippians. When the march reached
Greenwood, Mississippi, Carmichael was arrested for the 27th time and, upon
his release, he made a speech to the crowd in Greenwood calling for Black
Power. The speech was exhilarating, and the crowd, comprised of mostly young
people, was captivated by his message. The slogan would come to have a major
impact on the civil rights movement, which was now taking a more radical turn
culminating into what we now know as the Black Power Movement. Many
youth, particularly students, had become frustrated with the strategy of non-
violence and sought now to engage directly with the White power structure.
Thus, the June 16, 1966, call for Black Power marked a turning-point in the
movement from non-violent direct action to outright armed struggle.
The Black Panther Party for Self Defense, an armed citizens' patrol in
Oakland, California, emerged in October 1966 and grew enough in popularity
to form chapters in several major cities. Then, too, murders of activists
continued into the late sixties, and further fueled student resentment towards
authorities. For instance, in 1967, local Jackson, Mississippi, youth activist,
Benjamin Brown was killed only a few blocks from Jackson State College by
police. The following year, in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., the most well-
known civil rights leader and proponent of non-violence was murdered in
Memphis, Tennessee, sparking urban rebellion throughout major cities in the
US. In 1969, Fred Hampton, a 21-year-old leader in the Black Panther Party in
Chicago, was gunned downed by the police in his home. The blatant violence
perpetrated against young Black activists only heightened the spirit of
resistance on the part of young people and students. This was becoming more
often seen in the form of strikes and revolts on college campuses.
Meanwhile, college campuses continued to serve as sites for student activism
and served as an ideal space to recruit young people for civil rights work; and
Black college campuses, in particular, were becoming sites of contestation and
expressions of Black assertiveness. Students were wearing Afros and African
dress and exploring ideas of Black self-empowerment. This self-empowerment
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spirit led Black students to demand that university officials increase the
minority population at predominantly White institutions and establish Black
Studies departments and programs that offered more courses on the Black
experience. Consequently, the establishment of Black Studies departments and
programs often came as a result of student protests at colleges and universities
across the United States, particularly at predominantly White campuses.
Two of the most well-known campus protests that catapulted the
establishment of Black Studies programs was the San Francisco State College
student strike between November 1968 and March 1969 and the Cornell
University student occupation in April 1969. What made them pivotal in the
formation of Black Studies was the ability of students to have a major impact
on the direction of higher education and the overwhelming amount of press
coverage that they both received. At San Francisco State, student-led groups
presented several demands to the administration, among them including a Black
Studies department for African American students. After demands were not
met, students launched a strike that culminated into numerous clashes with the
police who, as a result, had occupied the campus. At the time, the governor of
California was Ronald Reagan, who served as president of the United States
during the 1980s. At Cornell, African American students, armed with rifles,
took over Willard Straight Hall after two years of insisting on the hiring of
Black faculty and the establishment of a Black Studies academic unit on
campus. Through student efforts and their allies, between 1968 and 1971, over
five hundred Black Studies programs, institutes, and departments were
established at dozens of colleges and universities throughout the United States.
During this period, there was also the influx of African American students to
predominantly White colleges and universities due to affirmative action
policies. There had been a number of court cases that led to the eventual
desegregation of America's White colleges and universities, such as Sweat v.
Painter (1950), McLaurin v. Oklahoma (1950), and Brown v. Board of
Education (1954), all of which challenged segregation at educational
institutions. Though these laws were slow to be implemented, with the help of
the civil rights and Black Power movements, by the seventies, African
American students were entering predominantly White institutions at record
rates. This increase in Black student enrollment allowed for the collective
organization necessary to mobilize for canvassing, demonstrations, and
takeovers that would eventually lead to the establishment of Black Studies.
Moreover, the student movement in the United States did not happen in
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isolation. In fact, there were several other similar movements throughout the
world that gave impetus to the student movement in the US, forcing some
universities to accede to the new demands of the 1960s and 1970s. For
example, there were the liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies and in
such former British territories as Zimbabwe against European domination.
Thus, even though Ghana achieved its independence from Britain peacefully in
1957, boycotts, demonstrations, and sit-ins led by Kwame Nkrumah, who was
educated at Lincoln University in the United States, resembled in strategy and
goals what was happening in America during the Civil Rights and Black Power
movements. In the context of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, many Black
scholars and activists considered Black people in the United States as an
internal colony, equating, therefore, the quest for equality in the US and in
Africa as the same. In both places, the educational system was decried and
considered to be a manifestation of the remnants and marks of both slavery and
colonialism.
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African American Studies is an interdisciplinary academic field of study
established to research, interpret, and present the history, culture, and life of
people of African descent, focusing particularly on those in the US. The
beginning of Black Studies programs in the academy was viewed with
skepticism by some and welcomed by many. Those who hailed the introduction
of Black Studies saw it as a long-fought victory and part of the overall struggle
for freedom. The skeptics had serious doubts about the new field and felt that it
was not a “real” discipline that could produce quality scholarship. The cynics of
the new field also felt that having a field solely for the study of Black life,
history, and culture was undermining the fight for an integrated American
society.
Therefore, on the heels of the civil rights movement, it was important that
Black history and culture be recognized and taught to the growing Black
student population on college campuses. At predominantly White institutions, it
was argued that White students needed to learn as much about Black people as
possible to avoid the negative myths and stereotypes that were often associated
with people of African descent. The demonization of African-descended people
in the media was the cause of misinformation that not only the American public
had, but the world has of Black people even presently. Black Studies on White
campuses were a counter-effort against such stereotypes. Black Studies on
White campuses also sought to give Black students a safe place to socialize
culturally without stigma. Then, too, Black Studies on White campuses was a
precautionary measure taken to avoid campus disruptions such as those that
occurred at San Francisco State and Cornell University. White administrators
often supported Black Studies because it could seemingly show that they
understood the importance of diversity on their campuses by hiring Black
faculty and recruiting Black students. As noted, Black Studies, for some, was
seen as a way to further integrate American society.
Within the American universities, right wing-leaning faculty and
administrators argued against any effort to desegregate and admit Black
students and the systematic offering of courses or programs of study focusing
on Black culture and life. They claimed that African American programs would
be nothing but a locus of anti-White indoctrination and anti-American identity
propagated by Black faculty and/or White radicals, and, therefore, not places of
intellectual discussion. The other claim was that all subjects that could be
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taught in an African American program were already a part of the traditional
disciplines and curricula, which made the creation of independent African
American academic units a duplication and waste of scarce resources. The issue
of epistemology or methods of generating new knowledge was another
argument submitted by the faculty who defended the status quo in the academy.
Opponents argued that the new programs had no means to train and produce
new credible canons for sound intellectual programs. Some went on to say that
Black Studies would become “ghetto” departments, training individuals who
were not worthy of leading and teaching serious academic subjects. Black
scholars, of course, vehemently denied such assertions, while assailing the
claim of objectivity, inclusion, and diversity of the work done by White
scholars, thus making the creation of specific programs focused on African
Americans relevant and fair.
The counter-argument to diversity was the need for Black Studies to be an
independent program or department that catered to the needs of the Black
student population only. It would be a program that promoted self-awareness,
community activism, and the connection to the overall struggle for liberation of
all African people. This approach to Black Studies called for more community
involvement in the decision-making of Black Studies programs and felt that, as
such, they should be autonomous academic units. This would be an ongoing
debate throughout the early years of African American Studies.
The radicalization of African American students became a hallmark at some
universities, where students were even demanding that all courses in African
American Studies be taught by Black professors only, which put many chairs
and directors of newly created African American Studies departments or
programs in a difficult situation, as the administration was opposed to such
thinking, arguing that, if White professors could not qualify to teach the new
courses, even though they might have taken them during their Ph.D. training,
then, by the same token, Black faculty could not possibly qualify to teach
European history, French, or classical music. Leaders who decided to enforce
the administration's policies were often seen as traitors of the race or sell-outs.
However, as the Black Studies programs stabilized, such thinking and demands
subsided and both White and Black faculty, national or international, taught
side by side, as is the case presently. In fact, at many universities and colleges,
African American Studies are combined with African Studies programs,
Caribbean Studies, Transatlantic Studies, or Diaspora Studies, at times called
Africana Studies, thus creating a larger and more powerful academic unit where
extensive studies of African people can be undertaken.
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As the field grew, ideologies arose that led to various internal differences
that affected how academic units were governed. For example, Afrocentricity
became a buzz word, popularized by Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, once chair of the
African American Studies Department at Temple University. Afrocentricity is
embedded in an epistemology that puts the views, realities, and lives of peoples
of African descent at center-stage, holding the view that true knowledge of
African people is better done by African people as both subjects and agents, as
Asante posited for the study of Africa. Asante's teaching and learning
philosophy has been criticized by some White scholars as racist, subjective, and
exclusivist, perpetrating reverse-racist tendencies in academia, particularly
from his teachings on the importance of the unparalleled contributions of
ancient KMT (Egypt) and Africans in the evolution of all civilizations. Asante
suggested the coining of a new focus on Afrology, later refined as Africology
by Winston Van Horne, which signaled a growth from a field of study to a
discipline.
One of the arguments that surfaced was the distinction concerning Pan-
Africanism and Afrocentricity, which was seen in a poignant public debate at
the University of Cincinnati between Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael)
and Molefi Asante in 1996. There were also at times differences between
African American academic units and African Studies academic programs. For
instance, the discord between African American Studies and African Studies
emerged around 2010 when the administration at Howard University attempted
to combine the African Studies Department, a well-known and internationally
respected academic unit that offers graduate degrees, including a Ph.D., with
the undergraduate African American Studies Department. Both units
questioned the suggested move, citing differences in the two fields and the
availability of new resources to administer a larger, more comprehensive
department. Eventually the administration put the idea to rest by not pursuing
the merger. The above examples serve only to illustrate the role and growth of
Black Studies over the decades from offering only courses to granting graduate
degrees that explore Africana history, culture, and worldview.
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At historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, Black Studies
were more of an opportunity to address the inferiority complex that had festered
for years due to discrimination in education. As already noted, many rural
Black students in the South, where most HBCUs were located, were taught with
secondhand books from White schools before attending college. At a time when
these programs were being established throughout the country as a result of
student protests at White colleges and universities, historically Black colleges
and universities were creating their own Black Studies programs as well. It is
important to highlight the founding and significance of the Black Studies
programs at HBCUs, since critics point out that HBCUs have not been leaders
in establishing most Black Studies programs. Though small in number, there
are three HBCUs that will be highlighted due to the pivotal role they played and
continue to play in the development of the field of Black Studies.
The Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People,
also known as the Black Studies Institute at Jackson State College (JSC) under
the leadership of Margaret Walker Alexander from 1968–1979, is important in
this context. The Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of
Black People was founded in September 1968 by Margaret Walker Alexander,
a prolific writer and faculty member in the Department of English at Jackson
State College. She is best known for her groundbreaking historical novel
Jubilee, which details the life of her enslaved grandmother. According to the
official memo that established the Institute, it was designed as:
An inter-departmental, inter-disciplinary, and inter-cultural program
within the regular college curriculum of Jackson State College. The
inherent philosophy [being] one of racial inclusion rather than exclusion
and the courses designed to enrich the students' general knowledge with
specific information concerning the heritage, culture, and life of all
black people.
The African American Studies degree program was established at Clark
College in Atlanta in 1968. The degree was designed for students with
professional interest in understanding African American history and culture
needed for work in various communities and institutions. Graduates were
equipped with knowledge of Africana socio-political cultures. The degree
program offered interdisciplinary courses in many departments. The growth of
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the Moorland Spingarn Research Center, established in 1930 with the
appointment of Dorothy Porter, firmly established Howard University as a
major research center of African American Studies. The university created a
Department of Afro-American Studies in 1969 with funding from the Ford
Foundation. Howard was also one of the first to offer a major in African
Studies and Research, founded in 1953 and the first HBCU to offer a Ph.D. in
African Studies. Though only a glimpse into Black Studies founding at
HBCUs, it is worth noting that HBCUs were on the forefront of offering
courses related to the Black experience and establishing programs and
departments.
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Early Funding for African American Studies and the
Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation began funding Black Studies programs in 1969 for
updating curricula, designing new courses, and organizing conferences; and
over the next two years, it would approve funding for nearly two dozen
applications. For almost a decade, the Ford Foundation awarded millions of
dollars to institutions that were dedicated to developing Black Studies. Such
grants went to the Atlanta University Center, Howard University, and Jackson
State College (later University), to name a few. The primary reason that Ford
began giving to Black Studies programs was to promote diversity at
predominantly White universities after the surge in Black radical student
protests and the growing numbers of African Americans now being admitted
into White colleges and universities. Ford was not new in terms of granting
funds to area studies programs. In fact, it had been doing so since the 1950s.
However, it was the rise in Black militancy on college campuses and the need
to quell student protests that led to its focus on Black Studies. It was its way of
promoting diversity on White campuses, as well as attracting Black students
who were previously not allowed at segregated White institutions.
The change in direction came also with the appointment of McGeorge Bundy
as president of the Ford Foundation. Bundy had a military background, having
served in the US Army, as well as academic experience from serving as a dean
at Harvard. He was responsible for having directed large grants in the sixties
towards such civil rights organizations as the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). As the civil
rights movement shifted to Black Power through the more aggressive stance
taken by students, the demands for Black Studies then became his focus in the
late sixties and early seventies.
The Ford Foundation continued to give funds in support of Black Studies in
the 1980s, with many of the grants going to major research universities.
Considered one of the premier organizations of Black Studies, the National
Council for Black Studies, established in 1975, received funding as well for
faculty seminars and research. In addition, the foundation published two reports
in 1985 and 1990 that evaluated the field of Black Studies. While the Ford
Foundation was one of the first to administer grants to Black Studies, presently
there have been a number of private local, state, and national agencies to give
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money for African American Studies, such as the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the US Department of
Education, the National Research Council, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
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The designation of “African American Studies,” whether a program, center,
institute, or department, as a field dedicated to the study of Black people, has
gone through a shift in nomenclature over the decades. At its inception, “Black”
was used widely as a result of the Black Power era when Black Nationalism
was at its peak. “Afro-American” then became commonplace terminology until
the mid-1980s when Reverend Jesse Jackson popularized the term “African-
American.” This term became problematic in the 1990s as it left out the history
and culture of Black people in Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. Hence,
African American Studies units began to change their names to “African
Diaspora Studies,” “Africana Studies,” “Afro-American Studies,” or “Pan-
African Studies,” to broaden the focus and be inclusive of the entire Black
world. Generally, courses and programs had been global since the inception of
Black Studies; however, the name often did not reflect the diasporic worldview.
Presently, the name of Black Studies programs, centers, institutes, and
departments reflects a multitude of titles, and many have begun to rename their
units in honor of scholar activists who made significant contributions to the
field.
African American Studies began as an interdisciplinary field of study and
continues as such. The structure can vary depending on the institution, but
usually they are programs, centers, institutes, or departments. Sometimes, the
role and functions of these academic units can overlap. It is important to
underscore this point since the structure usually determines how units are
funded on college campuses. More often than not, if an academic unit is not a
tenure granting department with students enrolled as majors, its survival
depends on consistent institutional support and external funding in the form of
grants. As a result, the backing of African American Studies will vary by
institution and the commitment of the administration to supporting its work.
The majority of African American Studies academic units at colleges and
universities are programs with faculty having links to traditional departments,
such as History, English, Psychology, Art, and Music. These programs
typically coordinate the required or elective course offerings related to the
Africana experience, which can vary widely by discipline. Another function of
African American Studies programs is the advocacy of diversity initiatives, if
located at predominantly White institutions, which is quite similar, if not
identical, to its original purpose of diversifying segregated White campuses
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with an African American student and faculty presence.
African American Studies centers and institutes often take on a
programmatic role. Centers and institutes typically organize activities and
programs related to the African diasporic community, such as commemorating
watershed moments in Africana history and culture, holding Kwanzaa
celebrations, celebrating birthdays of iconic people of African descent, and
displaying exhibitions that highlight African culture. Many also address
contemporary social and political concerns, such as bias against the LGBTQ
community, environmental racism, and police brutality, to name a few.
Recently, with the re-emergence of White hate groups and incidents of violence
and discrimination at predominantly White institutions, these centers have also
served as safe spaces for the small percentage of African American students on
White campuses. Centers and institutes can be extensions of traditional
departments, African American Studies departments, or stand-alone entities.
Notwithstanding all of the progress made over the decades, there are few
African American departments that have reached the level of institutional
support and sustainability to be considered departments. The most stable are
those African American Studies departments that are structured in a way that
allow faculty to be tenured within the department without being attached to
another traditional department. Students are also permitted to major in the
discipline and receive a bachelor's, master's, and/or doctorate degree, depending
on the institution. Another benefit of departmental status includes full-time
faculty and staff hiring lines from the university budget. The most recent
program to receive the coveted departmental status, at the time of this writing in
2018, was the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African
Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Also, the HBCU,
Tuskegee University, in 2018, was awarded a grant from the national
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to establish an African American
Studies minor. A combination of disciplines is one creative way of going
around the problem of cost and ensuring that willing students may obtain a
Ph.D. in African American Studies. Clark Atlanta University, for example, has
a Humanities Ph.D. Program that offers a concentration in African American
Studies and Africana Women's Studies.
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Summary
In summary, African American Studies has grown to be a recognized
discipline in the academy with broad support from scholars, community
organizers, public officials, and students. Though often plagued with funding
constraints, it has no doubt held on through difficult times to become respected
as a legitimate field of study that offers the academy and public sound
scholarship and practice that presents solutions to some of today's most
pressing problems. This chapter would not be complete without recognizing
some of the forefathers of the field who contributed groundbreaking research to
fortify what is now known as African American Studies, Africana Studies,
Black Studies, and Diaspora Studies. Such prominent figures include W. E. B.
Du Bois, who gave his life to the study of people of African descent, having
served as a faculty member at the HBCU Atlanta University for 23 years; E.
Franklin Frazier, the esteemed sociologist who taught at Howard University for
over three decades; and John Hope Franklin, whose pivotal work From Slavery
to Freedom, continues to be part of the canon of African American Studies.
Others include Dr. John Henrik Clark, the self-trained historian and Pan-
Africanist; Yoseph Ben-Jochannan, J. A. Rogers, Ivan Van Sertima, and Cheik
Anta Diop.
Some contemporary scholars include James Turner, founding director of
Africana Studies and Research at Cornell University; Molefi Asante, once chair
of African American Studies at Temple University; Henry Louis Gates Jr.,
director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at
Harvard University, the late Manning Marable, director of the Institute for
Research in African American Studies at Columbia University; and Maulana
Karenga, chair of Africana Studies at California State University-Long Beach.
While these names, of course, do not represent an exhaustive list, they are
considered stalwarts in the field. Women scholars played as significant a role as
men and have often gone unrecognized. Margaret Walker Alexander,
mentioned earlier in this chapter, hosted some of the first conferences on Black
Studies at Jackson State College. Women writers Sonia Sanchez, Toni
Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, and Mari Evans were influenced and
nurtured to some degree by her. Other women to have a significant impact on
African American Studies are Johnetta B. Cole, Darlene Clark Hine, Delores
Aldridge, and Gloria T. Hull. There are countless women scholars who have
produced amazing work related to the Africana experience and served as
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leaders in the field; however, the vast majority of Black Studies academic units
historically have been directed by men following the White patriarchal tradition
in the academy. This old way of thinking is coming to an end as we see more
and more women of African descent taking the helm as chairs of departments,
directors of centers, and university presidents.
Africana Studies as a discipline is a permanent fixture in the academy and is
here to stay in some shape and form, well underscored by the various graduate
programs, including the Ph.D. in African American Studies offered at such
renowned institutions as Temple University, University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, Ohio State University, Harvard University, Brown University,
Michigan State University, Cornell University, Northwestern University, the
University of Louisville, and Howard University (in African Studies) just to
name a few. As university budgets continue to be squeezed and the validity of
academic units are questioned, the role of Africana Studies, Black Studies,
African American Studies, and Pan-African Studies remains as a bona fide area
of inquiry to help shape the future of humanity. The lack of doctorates in
African American Studies at HBCUs has raised a serious issue among scholars,
especially African Americans and Africans.
Unfortunately, of the 103 HBCUs, none offers a Ph.D. or doctorate in
African American Studies, which has raised an issue among African American
scholars and others. In a short article in Diverse Issues in Higher Education
(2008) written by Gasman, Professors Delores Aldridge and Carlen Young list
three problems that explain the vacuum. One, they say, is the belief among
administrators, noted earlier in this chapter, that African American content and
Afrocentric perspective are integrated in the courses offered at black
institutions. The two, writes Gasman, said that, “to date, no black college has
‘required institution-wide a course with the black experience as the exclusive or
primary focus.’” The other two reasons are that Ph.D. programs are not a
priority for most HBCUs because of their limited mission and lack of resources,
which explains why, in 2008, only 23 offered doctorates but none in the field of
the black experience. For the two scholars, however, the reasons are skewed, as
Gasman further notes:
Regardless of these reasons, Black colleges should aim to establish
doctoral problems in African American Studies. They should lead the
nation in providing a doctoral experience that focus on the African
experience. And, more importantly, they should produce future scholars
and faculty members who will shape and challenge the minds of
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African American students. In the words of Alan Colon, the article goes
on, “HBCUs have the obligation to help challenge assumptions that
have prevailed about the sanctity of Western civilization and the
conventional ideologies that emanate from it.”
Molefi Asante, whose leadership led to Temple University offering a Ph.D.
in African American Studies, has gone further to impugn Black HBCUs
presidents as “lacking vision” because “they have limited consciousness about
African or African American studies.” Indeed, few scholars would dispute the
fact that African American Studies are an area of academic focus that gives
credence to the contributions of African and African American people which
have been often left out, intentionally, by a society built from forced labor and
stolen resources from the African continent and its Diaspora. More
significantly, Africana Studies is not only a discipline for theoretical discourse,
but it has proven to be a practical tool for the eventual liberation and
reclamation of a people's humanity, which once realized, will, in the words of
Steve Biko, “give the world a more human face.”
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1. What factors led to the growth and development of African American
Studies?
2. Identify various academic structures of African American Studies, and
explain their differences.
3. What role did external funding play in creating Black Studies academic
units?
4. Explain the significance of African American Studies at HBCUs in the
twenty-first century.
5. What were some of the internal debates and issues with the field of Africana
Studies?
6. Name some key figures in the development of Black Studies and describe
their contributions to the field.
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References
Delores P. Aldridge and Carlene Young (ed.). Out of the Revolution: The
Development of Africana Studies. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000.
Margaret Walker Alexander. Personal Papers, Margaret Walker Alexander
National Research Center, Jackson State University.
Mario Azevedo (ed.). Africana Studies: A Survey of Africa and the African
Diaspora. Durham: North Carolina Press, 2005.
James L. Conyers. Africana Studies: A Disciplinary Quest for Both Theory
and Method. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Publishers, 1997.
Clark Atlanta University, Department Handbook, Department of Africana
Women's Studies, African American Studies and History, 2013.
Steven Ferguson II. Philosophy of African American Studies: Nothing Left of
Blackness. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015.
Marybeth Gasman. “Ph.D.'s in African American Studies at HBCUs: A
Response to Where Are They?” Diverse Issues in Higher Education, June
19, 2008, (http://diverseeducation.com/article/author/mbgasman,
Retrieved 2/15/2018.
Perry Hally. In the Vineyard: Working in African American Studies.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999.
Joyce A. Joyce. Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and
Interviews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.
Manning Marable (ed.). Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals
Confront the African American Experience. New York: Columbia
Ibram H. Rogers. The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the
Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Fabio Rojas. From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social
Movement Became an Academic Discipline. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 2007.
Noliwe Rooks. White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of
African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education.
Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.
Joy Ann Williamson. Radicalizing the Ebony Tower. New York: Teachers
108
College Press, 2008.
109
Part II
Peoples of African Descent and Their

Place in History
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3
Africa and the Genesis of

Humankind
R. Hunt Davis, Jr.
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Introduction
Africa has long been considered the cradle of humankind, for it is the only
continent where scientists have located evidence for the early evolution of
humankind. As with the later development of human societies on the African
continent, so it was with early human evolution that the physical environment
played a crucial role. But the physical environment is more than just a given—it
undergoes gradual change, such as the desiccation and expansion of the Sahara
Desert that began some 7,000 years ago. Humans also change the environment
through their interaction with it, as in the case of the expansion of the African
grasslands as agriculturalists cut down the forests to enlarge their areas of
cultivation. The discussion of the African physical environment that follows is
thus based on two basic operating assumptions:
1. The physical environment conditions and constrains human activity and,

thus, the development of human society, which means that the physical
environment plays a central role in historical development; and
2. Humans through their technology have progressively lessened or altered
the constraints of the physical environment to the point that today the
relationship between human society and the physical environment is vastly
different, and vastly more complex, than it was a century ago, let alone
several thousand years ago, as global climate change so readily
demonstrates.
Major terms and concepts: Paleolithic age, Neolithic age, a continent of

diversity, hominid, Homo sapiens, tropics, equator, transhumance, pastoralist,
Intertropical Convergence Zone, humus, agricultural revolution, subsistence,
Bantu expansion, the iron revolution, feudalism, plateau.
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With the above operating assumptions in mind, let us turn to the geography
of Africa, first considering the size, shape, and geological composition of the
continent. Africa is a vast continent, not a single country. In fact, it is nearly
three and a half times the size of the continental United States (the forty-eight
contiguous states). It is also a relatively high continent—90 percent of its area
is more than 500 feet above sea level, compared with less than 50 percent of
Europe. On the other hand, there is only a limited amount of truly high terrain,
such as in East Africa, where Mt. Kilimanjaro stands 19,340 feet above sea
level and several other mountains range between 14,000 and 17,000 feet. In
contrast to the Western Hemisphere, Africa lacks a continental divide. Instead,
there is a reverse feature—the great continental fault known as the Rift Valley
that runs from the Red Sea through the Ethiopian highlands, down the line of
East African lakes and out to sea in Mozambique.
Africa, then, is a vast interior plateau astride the equator. Its most common
feature is a series of major internal basins—the Djouf Basin of the middle and
upper Niger River; the Chad Basin centering on Lake Chad; the Sudan Basin of
the upper Nile; the Congo Basin of the two Congo republics; and the Kalahari
Basin of southern Africa. Another feature of the plateau is that the river systems
generally have major falls near their mouths as they descend from the inland
plateau to the sea. Except for the Gambia, Nile, Niger, and Senegal Rivers,
African river systems are not navigable very far inland from the sea. On the
other hand, once inland past the falls, they are, as in the case of the Congo
River, often navigable for long distances.
As would be expected of a continent of nearly 12 million square miles,
Africa has five major climatic regions and contains a wide variety of climates
and vegetation, even though three-fourths of its surface is in the tropics
(between 23.5˚N and 23.5˚S). Because of its largely tropical location, it is the
continent that will suffer most severely from global climate change. To the far
north and far south are zones of a Mediterranean style climate, with winter
rainfall. Moving into the interior are vast stretches of the Sahara Desert in the
north and the Kalahari and Namib Deserts of the south. Bordering the desert
areas are broad belts of grassland savanna mixed with light forest, the most
widespread ecological type for the continent. Between the grassland zones lies
the tropical rain forest. Basically, the climatic zones, which shade gradually
into each other, constitute a mirror image except for the fifth zone, that of the
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East African highlands.
While factors such as latitude, altitude, and temperature affect the continent's
vegetation patterns, no factor is more important than rainfall. Basically, the
rainfall amounts are heaviest in the equatorial zones and lessen the farther one
moves north or south of the equator. There is also a distinct seasonal pattern to
the rains, with the heaviest rainfall in the summer months (except for the winter
rains at the northern and southern extremes of the continent). Thus, tropical
forest regions of West and West Central Africa have rain throughout the year,
with total annual amounts often in excess of 80 inches. By way of contrast, the
Sahelian border zone south of the Sahara Desert receives up to 20 inches of rain
a year, but almost all of it is in the summer months, and it can vary greatly from
year to year. The result is that farming, except with irrigation, is not possible,
and the grazing areas for the pastoralists' herds dry up in the winter, forcing a
seasonal pattern of migration (transhumance) in search for good pastures. The
atmospheric force behind the seasonal rainfall pattern is the Intertropical
Convergence Zone (ITCZ), which is a zone of airmass convergence that moves
north or south of the equator according to the season. A final feature of the
rains is that they are generally very heavy, which can lead to rapid runoff. In
East Africa, the Indian Ocean monsoon winds, flowing southward from
November through April and reversing course to flow northward from May
through October, rather than the ITCZ, constitute the main determinant of the
weather.
When it comes to discussing the significance of the physical environment for
human activity, soils are another highly important factor. Tropical soils have
several general characteristics that are very important for human development.
First, they are devoid of humus (decaying matter) since, except at high
altitudes, there is no cold season to slow down the decay of vegetation. As a
result, they are generally of low fertility and soon become exhausted when
farmed. They also leach out readily—especially with the heavy rains that are so
typical of most of Africa—and thus lose their limited nutrients. Furthermore,
because most African soils have high iron content, they tend to harden and
compact when stripped of their vegetation and exposed to the elements. There
are exceptions, such as the volcanic soils of Cameroon, Rwanda, Burundi, and
Ethiopia; the fertile silts of the Nile valley and the upper Niger delta; the high
veldt of southern Africa; and limited other special situations. Overall, however,
African soils are of relatively poor quality and frequently possess a moisture-
stressed condition.
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The condition of Africa's soils gave rise to agricultural practices that were
suitable to the land being farmed. A particularly prevalent farming practice was
that of “shifting” or “slash and burn” cultivation, where the field would be
cleared of vegetation, the vegetation burned (which helped provide nutrients for
the soil), and the land farmed for several years until crop yields declined. The
field would then be allowed to lie fallow for up to twenty years to enable the
soil to regenerate, as a succession of other fields were brought into production
and then also allowed to lie fallow. Thus, except for the relatively limited areas
of high productivity, the practice in African agriculture was of extensive rather
than intensive land use. As shall be seen later in the chapter, it was those areas
of the continent with highly productive agricultural lands that were the focal
points of the complex societies that gave rise to the early cities and states of the
continent.
The mineral resources of the continent have also played a significant role in
the development of agriculture and the processes of urbanization and state
formation. Africa is, in many ways, a mineral storehouse. In comparison with
Europe, for instance, it has extensive mineral holdings. Perhaps the most
important of these is iron, which was so critical for the manufacture of tools,
weapons, and various other commodities. Some have described Africa in a
geological sense as “almost a solid chunk of iron ore,” although much of it is of
low grade. Gold, which has been mined from early times, has long figured in
African history, as has copper. Africa also has major petroleum deposits and
many other important minerals such as uranium, manganese, and chrome.
There are some countries such as Tanzania, however, that have virtually no
exploitable mineral deposits, so the distribution of the mineral resources is
uneven.
The climate, vegetation, soils, and mineral resources of the continent have all
contributed and posed obstacles to human endeavor on the African continent
over the centuries. Disease is yet another dimension of the physical
environment that has had tremendous consequences for human development.
For a long time, the standard view has been that Africa is an intrinsically
unhealthy continent. The argument runs that, while human groups have
developed some biological defenses against the tropical diseases, there has,
nonetheless, been an exceptionally high infant mortality rate that has led to
underpopulation until recent times. It is clear that the African environment
hosts certain tropical diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, onchocerciasis
(river blindness), and trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) that have been highly
detrimental to humankind. Yet, as some scholars are beginning to argue, the
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position that over the course of human history Africa has been intrinsically less
healthy than other continents is an untestable proposition.
Indeed, another and more recent perspective on the African disease
environment is that, instead of being intrinsically unhealthy, it has become
increasingly unhealthy as a result of intensified contact with the rest of the
world, in particular dating from the start of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, some
five hundred years ago. Major epidemic diseases such as smallpox, venereal
disease, influenza, and cholera entered Africa through the coastal ports and then
spread into the interior along the trade routes. The colonial era continued the
introduction and dispersal of diseases from outside the continent through
intensified contact and increased population mobility within the continent. In
recent decades, this process has increased even further with additional negative
consequences for the health of the continent's population. Of special note is the
HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has had a greater impact to date on the population
of Africa than that of any other continent. Another example is the 2014 West
African Ebola epidemic, which took place in one of the continent's most
interconnected and densely populated regions. Finally, and particularly in more
recent times, changes within various ecosystems of the continent have altered
disease patterns, but often with a varying impact on different segments of the
affected population. An example of this can be seen in the spread of
schistosomiasis in association with development projects involving dams and
irrigation.

For a number of decades, scientists have accepted Africa as the birthplace of
humankind. This is due largely to the favorable environment of the African
continent. Modern human beings (Homo sapiens) belong to the general branch
of primates known as hominids, that is, creatures with brains larger than other
primates and able to walk upright on two legs. Until very recently the search for
human origins focused on the fossil remains of early hominids in the open
savanna grasslands and woodlands of eastern and southern Africa. In 1925,
based on the discovery of a skull 2.5 million years old, Professor Raymond
Dart named these creatures, ape-like in appearance but with certain human
characteristics, Australopithecus. The 1974 discovery in Ethiopia of a 3.18
million-year-old skeleton, named “Lucy” by archaeologists (from the Beatles
song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”), provided substantial new insights into
the physical characteristics of these earliest hominids. Then, in 2002, scientists
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announced the discovery of a skull along with fragments of five other hominid
specimens from Chad that belonged to a new genus and dated between six and
seven million years ago. They named the genus Sahelanthropus and the species
Tchadensis, with the nickname of Toumaï (meaning “hope of life” in the local
Goran language). With this momentous discovery, the search for the point at
which the human lineage separated from that of chimpanzees moved much
further back in time and broadened out from its earlier eastern and southern
Africa focus.
Other early hominid forms also emerged. In 1973, Louis and Mary Leakey
announced the discovery of the 1.9 million-year-old Homo habilis species from
their research at Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge. A 2010 discovery of fossil remains
in South Africa indicated yet another hominid species living 1.78 to 1.95
million years ago, named Australopithecus sediba, which was a possible
ancestor to the more advanced genus Homo erectus that appeared 1.6 million
years ago. They soon replaced the other hominid types. By this time, too, it was
clear that hominids were engaged in hunting. It was also with Homo erectus
that hominids began to move out of Africa, perhaps almost as soon as the genus
emerged, as the 1991 discovery of a hominid fossil jawbone in the former
Soviet republic of Georgia, dating back perhaps as early as 1.6 million years
ago, suggests. This migration was possible because of an ability to adapt to a
far wider range of environmental conditions than had been the case for earlier
hominids. A 2013 hominid fossil find in a South African cave, of Homo naledi,
who lived 226,000 to 335,000 years ago, brought to light yet another hominid
species different from archaic humans.
Well into the 1980s, the study of human evolution had been based on the
discovery and dating of fossil remains and other evidence of human activity. In
the late 1980s, however, scientists studying human origins began to utilize
molecular biological evidence as well as fossil evidence and came to the
conclusion that Africa was not only the place of origin of hominids, some 4
million years ago, but also of anatomically modern human beings (Homo
sapiens). In 2017, an archaeological report on fossil finds in Morocco dated
Homo sapiens to approximately 300,000 years ago rather than the previously
thought 200,000 years based on evidence from Ethiopia. Specifically, through
studying DNA evidence, scientists have traced modern humans back to a
common woman ancestor (who they named “Eve”) living in Africa. Her genes
seem to be in the blood of all currently living humans. Furthermore, sometime
between 90,000 and 180,000 years ago, her descendants began to emigrate from
Africa, gradually displacing other hominids such as the Neanderthals and
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eventually populating the entire world.
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The complex and diverse cultural patterns of contemporary human society
are simply the current stage of a long process of cultural evolution that goes
back to early hominids. The material evidence for the development of culture
begins with the identification of the earliest stone tool technology. The Homo
habilis species were seemingly the first hominids to use simple stone tools for
cutting and scraping. With the appearance of Homo erectus, a much more
sophisticated stone technology emerged, centered on the hand axe. There is also
evidence of organized hunting and the use of fire.
The emergence of early Homo sapiens signaled a quickening pace of cultural
change and growing sophistication of technology and social organization, often
referred to as the Middle Stone Age. New techniques emerged in tool making,
and the resulting products were more efficient and applicable to a wider range
of tasks. Hunting skills seem to have advanced as well, fire was used more
extensively, and rudimentary shelters were constructed from readily available
materials. The earliest examples of modern human behavior also appear to date
from Africa, as exemplified by the discovery of engraving at Blombos Cave in
South Africa in 2001. As of now, this is the earliest known example of human
abstract symbolism.
A yet more advanced stage of the Stone Age, known as the Later Stone Age,
was in evidence by 40,000 years ago. People became even more skilled in
working with stone and were able to make artifacts such as arrowheads (thus
leading to the development of the bow and arrow, yet another significant
advance in hunting and fighting techniques). Fine bone tools were also in
evidence, as were artistic efforts such as beads made from eggshell and scenes
painted and engraved on rocks and in caves. In contrast to earlier Stone Age
developments, there was also greater regional variation in cultural patterns.
Thus, the culture of the savanna grasslands differed from that of the rainforest
and so forth.
As humans evolved, so too did their skills at hunting and gathering. By
10,000 years ago, hunting and gathering societies had emerged on the African
continent in their modern form—a form that has continued to exist in some
regions of the continent. Anthropologists have extensively studied peoples such
as the Khoisan speakers of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana and the BaMbuti of
the Ituri forest in the Congo Basin to gain insights into the earlier era when all
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Africans sustained themselves through hunting and gathering. That even today
some few Africans still largely follow such a way of life is due primarily to the
fact that the environments in which they live are more conducive to economies
based on hunting and gathering than they are to food production. Indeed, while
some societies rapidly adopted food production techniques once they were
available, others persisted in utilizing hunting and gathering and only gradually
shifted to food production. The primary explanation for these differences lies in
the environmental conditions various societies faced.
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The pace of human cultural development gradually picks up the closer one
moves to the present. Yet, the transition from one major stage to the next
required significant new technological breakthroughs. Hunting and gathering
societies ultimately reached an optimum level beyond which they could not
move. No matter how refined, tools made from stone, bone, and wood could
only accomplish so much. Similarly, hunting and gathering techniques could
only be developed to sustain a certain level of population and social
organization. They simply did not have the capability of providing an economic
base for the increasingly complex and diverse human cultures and societies that
have taken shape over the past several thousand years. Two developments were
crucial in enabling human society to advance to more complex stages: food
production, that is, the development of farming and pastoralism; and
metallurgy, especially the development of an iron-based technology.
The beginning of food production has often been referred to as the
“agricultural revolution” because of its implications for human society and the
pace of change it introduced. In many ways, this revolution marks the
beginning of history. History is, above all else, about change over time. Prior to
the emergence of agriculture, change was so imperceptible that it was measured
in the Late Stone Age in thousands of years, and prior to that in tens of
thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years. With farming and, perhaps
to a lesser extent, pastoralism, the process of change propelled itself forward at
an ever-increasing intensification. However, one should not envisage the pace
of change being even remotely similar to that of the “communications
revolution” of our own era or even that of the “industrial revolution” of the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when change came to be measured in
decades and then in years or even shorter periods of time.
Africa was at the forefront of the agricultural revolution. Between 11,500
and 10,000 years ago, people living in three widely separate areas of the world
—the Middle East, southern East Asia, and the eastern Sahara region of Africa
(which was much wetter than today)—began to grow crops. The Saharan
Africans were also domesticating cattle, perhaps even before they grew crops.
A second global wave of agricultural innovation emerged by 7,000 years ago,
with two of the new centers in the Horn of Africa and a third in the wooded
savanna region of West Africa. The principal crops developed in Africa during
the early agricultural revolution were the grains sorghum, millet, rice, and teff,
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plus yams, cotton, and enset.
The key factor in food production, in terms of human existence, was the
beginning of control over the environment. Human activity through planting
and the breeding and care of animals could begin to determine the level of food
supply (the most basic of all economic factors)—something previously entirely
at the whim of nature. Furthermore, in favorable environments (as was the case
in the Nile Valley), food production could lead to food surpluses, sometimes in
large quantities. On the other hand, where the environment was unfavorable to
food production, societies continued to practice hunting and gathering. Such
societies generally had to move with the food supply; farming communities
mainly stayed put; and pastoralists, as they moved, took their food supply with
them. Food production thus led to a concentration and growth of population.
The existence of a food surplus enabled part of the population to move out of
the tasks of food production and into other occupations, thus leading to both job
specialization and social differentiation. The potential for the most far-reaching
developments along these lines was greater for farming populations than it was
for pastoralist societies.
It was the farming communities that, beginning with copper in southern
Egypt in the fifth millennium BCE, began using metals. At first copper was
used for small items, but once people learned how to smelt it and make alloys
such as bronze, then it could be used for tools and weapons. Learning how to
smelt iron from iron ore, a process that required very high heat, constituted the
most significant metallurgical advance. For Africa, there appear to have been
two independent sources of the invention of iron smelting. One source was
ancient Turkey, where iron tools and weapons date from 1650 BCE, and from
where it spread into northern Africa by 750 BCE and up the Nile and across the
Sahara. The other source was the interior of East Africa, where iron technology
appeared by about 1400 BCE. It was not until about 2,000 years ago, however,
that iron smelting became widely diffused across the continent. From the
agricultural societies and those that used metals, the earliest states in Africa
emerged.
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A number of factors influenced and determined the location of early states in
Africa. None, however, were more important than an environment that was
conducive to highly productive agriculture. There were, of course, other factors.
One of these was geographic location. The earliest states in Africa emerged in
areas that could readily be in contact and communication with areas outside the
continent going through similar processes of development. Another factor was
trade, which was facilitated by geographic location. Trade not only involved an
exchange of goods but also of ideas, thus facilitating the transfer of cultural and
technological knowledge in a decidedly two-way process.
Bantu Expansion
It is within this context of cultural and economic diffusion that the great
Bantu expansion, although occurring at a later date (between the early first
millennium BCE and continuing into the eighteenth century), has significance.
Speakers of the closely related (in linguistic terms) Bantu languages,
comprising most of the ethnic groups in Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa,
are believed to have originated in the area now linking Nigeria and Cameroon,
and to have spread out in search of new lands to settle and perhaps new peoples
to conquer. They had two major advantages over the people they encountered:
they had a long sedentary tradition as experienced farmers and by the mid-first
millennium BCE had mastered the use of iron. Consequently, not only did they
possess superior technology over their new acquaintances, but they also had a
more advanced culture. This culture provided opportunities for more leisure
time and higher accomplishments in the arts than that of their new counterparts,
most of who are said to have been fruit gatherers and hunters, pastoralists, or
both.
As the Bantu speakers pushed east and south, they mingled (peacefully or
through war) with the indigenous populations, intermarrying and thus creating,
over the centuries, new cultures, new kingdoms, new civilizations, and new
languages. At times, the encounter resulted in clashes, which may have forced
the original inhabitants to seek a new but less hospitable environment, as
presumably was the case with the BaMbuti who now inhabit the Ituri forest and
the San who live in the Kalahari Desert.
Although much has been written on the long and sustained expansion of the
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Bantu speakers, the evidence remains largely linguistic. Historians still question
the precise origins, the path of migration (was it through the rainforest, skirting
the rainforest, or otherwise?), and the nature of Bantu assimilation with the new
people. However, the Bantu expansion occurred, its impact on Sub-Saharan
Africa prior to the conquest of the continent during the nineteenth century was
significant. From Zaire to Uganda, from Angola to Kenya, and from Namibia to
South Africa, the multitude of new communities and states, and of languages
with similar vocabulary and grammatical structures reflect the Bantu expansion.
It may be helpful at this point to clarify briefly the issue of languages in
Africa. Linguists have identified at least 1,000 indigenous languages on the
continent and have attempted to give a semblance of rationality to them for
comparative purposes and to facilitate the study of human cultural evolution
and diffusion on the continent. Joseph Greenberg and other modern linguistics
have classified these African languages into four major families: (1) Afro-
Asiatic, in the northern half of the continent, comprising ancient Egyptian, the
Berber languages of the Maghrib, Chadic, which includes Hausa, the Cushitic
languages of the Horn, and the Semitic branch that includes Arabic; (2) Niger-
Congo, of which the Bantu (meaning humankind) sub-group is a part, spoken in
parts of West, Central, East, and Southern Africa; (3) Nilo-Saharan, which
includes the Shilluk and Dinka languages of Sudan, and some others along the
Nile and in the Sahara (Chad, for example); and (4) Khoisan, comprising the
languages spoken by the Khoi and the San in the Namib and Kalahari desert
areas.
Egypt
The first states in Africa emerged in the Nile Valley and were ultimately to
evolve into Egypt, one of the cornerstones of the ancient world. In discussing
the nature of Egyptian civilization, it is worth keeping several points in mind.
The first is that Egypt rested on the rich agricultural potential and the natural
unity of the Nile Valley from the Mediterranean shoreline to the First Cataract
(i.e., the border between modern-day Egypt and the Sudan). Second, the
flowering and then the continuity of Egyptian civilization grew out of mastery
of the Nile Valley's agricultural potential. Until the nineteenth century, the
techniques of cultivation had not changed greatly from those utilized by the
farmers who worked the fields some 5,000 years earlier. These early and rather
remarkable accomplishments provided effective answers to the environmental
problems that the valley's inhabitants faced and enabled them to establish an
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effective social and political system. Third, Egypt was, relatively speaking,
geographically isolated from other civilizations at the time of its flowering.
This isolation and its own successes with developing the potential of the Nile
helped produce an innate conservatism. Once launched, this great civilization
during its peak had little to fear and, due to its own accomplishments, little to
learn from its neighbors. This view was reflected in the Egyptian outlook on the
world. The Egyptians identified their own land with the organized world and
other lands with the forces of chaos. With these points in mind, let us turn to a
brief discussion of the Egyptian civilization.
The roots of Egyptian civilization lie in the development of agricultural
production, which appears to date from some 7,000 years ago. At this time,
communities were organized on a small scale, and hunting and fishing, rather
than agriculture, provided the basic economic subsistence. There was as of yet
no thought of public works or capital improvements such as the later irrigation
system. However, a changing environment, brought about by the gradual
desiccation of the Sahara, forced a change in the economic level of these early
Egyptians.
The fourth millennium was a critical period, for as agriculture became
impossible on the edge of the Nile Valley, the population moved into the valley
itself, which was an area of greater agricultural potential. This move led to
expanded agricultural productivity and consequently a growth in population.
Other developments also began to take place. Permanently settled communities
grew in size and complexity, and trade began to develop among these
communities and with centers in the Aegean and the Middle East. The
establishment of agriculture and the expansion of trade led to both job
specialization and social stratification. People could now earn their livelihood
as merchants or craftsmen. Some people also benefitted more from the
changing economy than others, so that incipient inequalities in wealth came
into evidence, suggesting the rise of a class structure.
Of course, there also emerged competition among the various communities
in the Nile Valley for land resources and control of trade routes. In addition, by
the third millennium, when most of the basic agricultural and industrial
processes were in place, the peasant farmers were producing approximately
three times as much food as they themselves could consume (a level rarely
reached by any other pre-industrial society). This gave rise to the surplus
needed to support an elaborate political structure. Between 3200 and 2900
BCE, the rulers of Upper (Southern) Egypt conquered Lower (Northern) Egypt
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and created a unified country, installing themselves as the absolute temporal
and religious rulers of a strong and powerful centralized state. This led to the
establishment of the First Dynasty in about 3000 BCE, the first of thirty
dynasties that made Egypt the “land of the Pharaohs,” and that finally ended in
332 BCE with the Greek conquest.
The results of the political unification were momentous in a number of
different areas. In the first place, it produced social and economic growth,
which in turn led to revolutionary changes that ensured ancient Egypt's place in
world history as one of humankind's greatest cultural achievements. A
demographic revolution transformed the size of the population from the
thousands to the millions. The growth of the population and the development of
the state served to produce even greater specialization and also a growing class
structure. This meant that Egyptian society was increasingly complex and
capable of producing and consuming a broadening range of goods and services.
Out of the dynamics of this rapidly evolving society emerged the architecture,
writing, accumulation of knowledge, extensive trade, and other related
developments that were to be the hallmarks of Egyptian culture for the next
3,000 years. But there was also a tremendous social imbalance, for at the top of
society was a ruling nobility and a god-king who lived off the productivity of a
large serf population. This static hierarchy was to be yet another hallmark of
ancient Egyptian civilization.
While cultural continuity was one of the hallmarks of ancient Egyptian
civilization, the Egyptian state during the era of the Pharaohs did have several
distinct periods. The period prior to 3200 BCE is known as the Predynastic Era
and covers the time of political organization. By the onset of the Archaic Period
(3200–2900 BCE) there were two states, Lower Egypt and Upper Egypt, which
in turn became unified into a single state. In the Archaic Period, we see the
evolution of a new dogma in which the king (or Pharaoh) came to be
considered a god, not a human, who reigned over humans. Unification set the
stage for the Old Kingdom (2900–2280 BCE), which witnessed the full
flowering of Egyptian culture. The culture then, having established itself,
stifled further innovation. For example, some of the most impressive pyramids
of the entire 3,000 years of the Pharaonic era were built in the middle years of
the Old Kingdom. The Old Kingdom also saw military expeditions and trade,
especially to the upper Nile, although the First Cataract marked the
southernmost limit of the state's direct political control.
By the end of the Old Kingdom, however, impoverishment and disintegration
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set in. An explosion of feudal disorder, with anarchy, social chaos, and civil
war, ushered in the First Intermediate Period (2280–2060 BCE). Ultimately, a
new dynasty was able to gain control over the entire country and launch a new
great period of national development known as the Middle Kingdom (2060–
1785 BCE). Egyptian control now extended farther south along the Nile,
coming to rest at the Second Cataract in Nubia. As shall be discussed further
below, it was during this era that lower Nubia became, for a time, an integral
part of Egypt as Egyptian activity outside its own borders increased.
The Middle Kingdom gave way to the Second Intermediate Period (1785–
1580 BCE). This period was marked by the growing existence of a large Asiatic
population in Lower Egypt, as can be seen in the names of some of the
Pharaohs of the Thirteenth Dynasty. These Asiatic immigrants became known
as the Hyksos. By 1700 BCE, they had conquered much of the Delta region.
For the first time in their history, the Egyptians found themselves under foreign
rulers. Such a humiliation challenged their long-standing belief in their
supremacy over other peoples and their sense of security under their gods. The
Egyptians ultimately rebounded, however, and undertook a 150-year war of
liberation to free themselves from the Hyksos. Out of this struggle emerged the
New Kingdom (1580–1085 BCE).
The era of the New Kingdom was a time of political and military expansion,
as Egypt established a far-reaching empire. Egyptian armies moved into Asia as
far as Lebanon and Syria and controlled the upper Nile as far as the Fourth
Cataract. The Egyptian presence in Nubia, for instance, can be seen in the great
rock-cut temples at Abu-Simbel in Lower Nubia which Pharaoh Ramses II built
after 1300. Around 1250 BCE, however, the New Kingdom began a period of
gradual decline due to external invaders and internal ills such as labor troubles
and inflation.
About 1085 BCE, the dynasties again began to consist of foreign-born rulers
who seized the Egyptian throne. One of them, the Twenty-Fifth, came from the
thoroughly Egyptianized state of Kush to the South. When this dynasty seized
control of Egypt in the mid-eighth century BCE, it thus was foreign in terms of
its origins but also very Egyptian in its outlook. Within sixty years, an Assyrian
invasion forced the Kushite rulers back to Nubia, where they and their
successors ruled for many centuries. The Assyrians were in turn driven from
Egypt with the help of Lydia and Greek mercenaries, who established yet
another dynasty (the Twenty-Sixth). Persian invaders founded another dynasty,
which in turn was over-thrown by a local dynasty that, with its successors,
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ruled Egypt free of foreign control for about sixty years. Another Persian
invasion in 341 BCE, followed by that of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE,
brought a final end to the era of the Pharaohs, an era that had begun nearly
3,000 years earlier. As a footnote, Egypt would not again be under indigenous
rule until Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser and his colleagues established a new
Egyptian government in 1952.1
The Middle Nile

To the south of Egypt in modern-day Sudan lay the Nubian or middle Nile,
the area running north from the confluence of the White and Blue Niles to the
First Cataract. This region came under the pervasive influence of Egypt, as the
discussion of the Kushite Dynasty (the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty) has already
indicated. However, the middle Nile also stands out as a major landmark of its
own in the history of ancient Africa. The institutions of sacral chiefship that
were to blossom forth in the divine kingship of Egypt appear to have originated
in the Sudanic Nile before spreading northward into Egypt. Somewhat after the
establishment of the Old Kingdom, the Kerma Kingdom emerged along the
Dongola Reach of the Nile and continued in existence until the New Kingdom
established imperial control of the region. After the indigenous political hiatus
of the New Kingdom era, Kush emerged. With its capital first at Napata then
farther south at Meroë, Kush had a political history that stretched for nearly
1,500 years, from approximately the tenth century BCE into the fourth century
CE. The underlying cultural history is of even greater length, originating with
the early agricultural developments in the region. Nubia, then, stands not
simply as an offshoot of Egyptian civilization but as an ancient civilization in
its own right that was developed by the indigenous middle Nile population.
Geographical location and environmental factors shaped the history of the
middle Nile as much as they did for Egypt. As with Egypt, Nubia could not
have existed without the Nile, but in this instance, it was not as bountiful as it
was farther north. The series of rocky swift rapids that constituted the six Nile
cataracts greatly hindered navigation, the river corridor was at places so narrow
or rugged as to prevent farming, and the surrounding environment was one of
the most extreme on earth. Thus, while it was the water and the soil of the
middle Nile that brought and sustained the region's population, human
settlement could not be as continuous or as dense as it was in Egypt, nor could
river-borne communication be as continuous as in Egypt. In fact, the cataracts
led to overland roads cutting off the bends, so that the middle Nile civilization
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was not as solely focused on river transport as was the case for the lower Nile.
Indeed, a whole regional overland network emerged both within the Meroitic
state and linking it with more distant regions. Such a development was lacking
in Egypt because of the unsurpassed transportation system offered by the Nile.
Egypt heavily influenced Nubia, as has already been noted. By the middle of
the Old Kingdom period, it had become the most important foreign field for
Egypt, with the First Cataract as the boundary. Under the Middle Kingdom
(2060–1785 BCE), lower Nubia to the Second Cataract became an integral part
of Egypt. The occupation, though, seemed to be largely commercial and
military in nature. The era of the New Kingdom (1580–1085 BCE) brought a
new relationship between Egypt and the middle Nile. No longer was the middle
Nile a trading zone beyond the frontier (as under the Old Kingdom), or a region
of fortified trading posts denoting a permanent military as well as commercial
presence (as under the Middle Kingdom). The Egyptian presence was now one
that was overwhelmingly cultural as well. Egyptian control extended to Napata
at the Fourth Cataract and perhaps as far south as Meroë. The boundary
between Egypt and Nubia, for all practical purposes, was nearly obliterated. By
the end of the New Kingdom, Nubia and Kush had developed as a base for the
control of Egypt itself. And this was, indeed, what happened late in the eighth
century BCE with the emergence of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty.
The collapse of the New Kingdom (1085 BCE) led to a retreat of Egyptian
power from the area, but Egypt left behind a thoroughly Egyptianized society in
its place. Indeed, Nubia now became one of the last strongholds of the old faith
and culture of ancient Egypt. A process of unification of the middle Nile began,
which by 750 BCE had united the region from the Second Cataract to beyond
Meroë, forming the kingdom of Kush with its capital at Napata. Its
Egyptianized kings then took over Egypt itself as the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty and
tried to resurrect the older Egyptian traditions. Driven out of Egypt by the
Assyrians in 663 BCE, and then defeated in 591 BCE by an Egyptian invasion
that sacked the capital of Napata and established a garrison at the Second
Cataract, the Kushite kings retreated farther up the Nile to establish a new
capital at Meroë.
Meroë was located deep in the Sudan south of the Atbara-Nile confluence.
Rainfall agriculture and pastoralism were possible outside the Nile Valley and
contributed significantly to the subsistence base. Overland trade routes spread
out from the main towns on the Nile, so that commerce no longer focused so
exclusively on the river. Also, it was the site of one of Africa's early significant
129
iron industries, due to a plentiful supply of iron ore and of wood to make
charcoal used in smelting. Meroë continued to thrive, with imposing buildings,
large towns, and the like, and it was well known far beyond its borders. Indeed,
Herodotus, the “father of history,” writing in the fifth century BCE, described
Meroë as a great city, and other Greeks and Romans also wrote about it.
For a while, Meroë's culture remained uncompromisingly Egyptian, but
gradually isolation from the north and the earlier decline of the old Egyptian
culture itself began to leave its mark. For instance, by 500 BCE or so, the
written language began to shift away from Egyptian hieroglyphs. What was
taking place was the steady displacement of Egyptian cultural influences by an
indigenous culture at times tempered by contacts coming from other directions.
In the early centuries of the Christian era, Kush entered into a final decline, a
fate that the Mediterranean world was also facing. Finally, in the early fourth
century CE, the neighboring state of Axum, located in the northern Ethiopian
highlands, conquered Kush and totally destroyed the kingdom that had once
flourished at Meroë.

Egypt and Kush were but the earliest indigenous states on the African
continent. Other significant states were to develop throughout much of the
continent. For example, the origins of Axum, which defeated Meroë, dated
back to at least as early as 500 BCE. In the broad savanna regions, far to the
west of the Nile Valley in the area of the upper Senegal and upper Niger Rivers,
major states began to emerge within the first few centuries CE. By 750, Ghana,
known as far as Europe for its abundance of gold, was a powerful entity. It was
to be succeeded by Mali around 1200, with Songhai supplanting it in turn in the
fifteenth century. Mali and Songhai are remembered for their institutions of
learning at Senkore (Timbuktu), Djenne, and Gao between the thirteenth and
sixteenth centuries.
To the south, in the forested regions of what is now western Nigeria,
urbanization and the development of states had their start among the Yoruba by
the late first millennium CE. By the thirteenth century, the site of Benin, center
of a state that remained powerful until the late nineteenth century, known for its
early experiments with republicanism, rotational monarchy, and primogeniture,
and famous for its bronze sculpture, was already occupied. A series of cities,
which were the focal points of small states, began to appear on the East African
coast by the eighth century CE. As noted below, they reached a point of
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development by the 1330s such that the renowned world traveler, Ibn Battuta,
could describe the principal coastal town, Kilwa in southern Tanzania, as “one
of the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world.” South and west
of Kilwa in the eastern highlands of modern-day Zimbabwe, a site known as
Great Zimbabwe, which contained massive stone structures, was the capital of a
major state from about 1250–1450.
The vast number of African states existing before the European arrival and
conquest of the continent cannot be adequately covered in this limited space.
However, brief mention of other significant states is warranted. Dahomey,
which flourished in West Africa until conquered by the French during the
nineteenth century, is remembered for the absolute power of its rulers and by
the fact that women shared civilian and military responsibilities with men. The
Ashanti Confederation, on the other hand, emerged during the seventeenth
century out of the initiative of Osei Tutu, who was able to loosely unify the
Akan people of present-day Ghana using the royal stool as the symbol of unity
of the “nation” and the sacredness of its ruler. Before the British conquered it
during the nineteenth century, the Ashanti Confederation successfully fought
them on the battlefield.
The Bunyoro and Buganda kingdoms in East Africa, which developed
between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, were noted for their elaborate
investiture rituals, for control of the ivory trade, and for patronizing the arts.
There were other kingdoms scattered throughout Africa, such as the Mossi
kingdoms of Upper Volta (four kingdoms occupying 30,000 square miles, with
more than one million inhabitants prior to European conquest) and the Fulani
Muslim Kingdoms of Futa Toro and Futa Jalon in Senegal, governed by a
council of elders (alfas) who elected a king. The Lunda Empire in Zaire, which
rose during the seventeenth century, had developed a complex but well-
structured system of popular representation and administration of justice and
tax collection before European arrival. Kanem-Bornu, a Muslim state (800–
1893) located between the Nile and the Niger, prospered from the trans-Saharan
trade in salt, dried fish, gold, kola nut, and cloth, and survived many Fulani
incursions.
One should note the Sokoto Empire created in present Northern Nigeria by
Usuman Dan Fodio at the start of the nineteenth century. Sokoto resulted from
the unification of several Hausa states that had arisen during the fifteenth
century—Kano, Zaria, Katsina, and Gobir—and survived the cultural onslaught
of British imperialism, while the Yoruba kingdoms of Oyo and Ile-Ife
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distinguished themselves in their trading skills, warfare, and artistic talent. In
East Africa, the cosmopolitan city-states where the Swahili culture emerged
became the envy of the Portuguese and other European powers following
Vasco da Gama's voyage to India in 1497–1498. In Mogadishu, Zanzibar,
Pemba, Brava, Mafia, Sofala, Mombasa, Malindi, and Mozambique Island,
Africans, Persians, Arabs, Indians, and Europeans traded actively in items such
as ivory, cloves, gold, silver, animal skins, carpets, cloth, guns and gun powder,
incense, and myrrh. In Southern Africa, the Zulu kingdom that emerged in 1818
with Shaka as its first king has been well documented for its advanced military
strategy and its resistance to British and Boer imperialism.
These kingdoms were, in most cases, societies that political scientists have
labeled as “state societies.” There were other societies, however, conveniently
called “stateless societies,” which had no chiefs or kings, no centralized
structures or governments, and where decisions were made by groups of elders,
by the entire community, or by a council specifically selected for that purpose.
Among these stateless societies stood the BaMbuti, the Tiv, the Nuer, the Ibo,
and the Amba.
The arrival of Europeans, beginning in the fifteenth century, the subsequent
introduction and rapid expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and, later,
European imperialism, ultimately resulted in the partition of Africa among the
European colonial powers during the nineteenth century. Partition frustrated
indigenous political and economic development, stifled initiative, and led to
chaos and much suffering.
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Summary
Only some of the more significant early African states have been mentioned.
They clearly differed from one another as they also differed from the states in
the Nile Valley, existing as they did in a wide range of environments, in
different geographic locations on a vast continent, and spread across several
millennia. Yet, they also shared important features in common. Above all else,
they showed the potential of the people of Africa to take full advantage of the
specific environments in which they lived. As such, they were a logical stage in
human development on the continent. The examples of Egypt and Kush, which
were examined in some detail, illustrate how human potential could work itself
out in a specific context. When the environment was as highly favorable as that
of the Egyptian Nile, then truly great achievements were possible. The
environment of the middle Nile was not so favored, but human society and
culture also made significant advances there.
In conclusion, this chapter stresses five major points: (1) that the physical
environment always plays a crucial role in determining the course of human
development, but that, over the course of time, humans (as in Africa) have, with
increasing frequency, been able to alter both the physical environment and the
way that it impacts their societies; (2) that Africa is a vast continent of great
human and geographic diversity, containing in turn a great diversity of human
societies and cultures; (3) that the African continent was the cradle of
humankind, not only for the earliest ancestors of humans but also of modern
human beings, who began to emerge perhaps as early as 300,000 years ago; (4)
that Africa was in the forefront of two developments that were crucial in
enabling human society to advance to more complex stages—food production
and metallurgy; and, finally, (5) that the early states in Africa were indigenous
in origin and demonstrated the ability of Africans to develop and master the
potential of the differing environments of the continent.
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1. Discuss the ways the diversity of the African physical and ecological
environment has affected the types of human societies that emerged on the
continent.
2. What were the various stages in human evolution from their earliest origins
on the African continent to their modern status?
3. Why did states not evolve in Africa out of hunting and gathering societies?
4. What were some of the basic features of the states that emerged in the Nile
valley? How does one explain some of the differences that came to exist
among them?
5. Having studied in some detail Egypt and Kush, what would be some of the
questions one should expect to be answered if one were to study some of the
other early African states in greater detail?
134
References
J. F. Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowder (eds.). Historical Atlas of Africa.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Samuel Aryeetey-Attoh, et al. Geography of Sub-Saharan Africa. 3rd ed.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009.
Lawrence Barham and Peter Mitchell. The First Africans: African
Archaeology from the Earliest Toolmakers to Most Recent Foragers. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Graham Connah. African Civilizations: An Archaeological Perspective. 3rd
ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Christopher Ehret. The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800. 2nd ed.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.
Toyin Falola (ed.). African History Before 1885. Durham: Carolina
Academic Press, 2000.
Erik T. Gilbert and Jonathan Reynolds. Africa in World History. 3rd ed. New
York: Pearson Education, 2011.
Robert Stock. Africa South of the Sahara. 3rd ed. New York and London:
Guilford Press, 2012.
1. On the scholarly controversy over Egypt and Afrocentricity, see Chapter 2.
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4
Transatlantic Slavery and the

Underdevelopment of Africa
Agya Boakye-Boaten
136
Introduction
“In everlasting memory of the anguish of our ancestors. May those who
died rest in peace. May those who return find their roots. May humanity
never perpetuate such injustice against humanity. We, the living, vow to
uphold this.”
(Plaque at the Cape Coast Castle)
In 1452, when Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull (special letters or
chapters issued by the pope) Dum diversas, which gave the king of Portugal the
right to reduce any “Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers” to perpetual
slavery, the fate of Africans was sealed. This document, Dum diversas,
provided the legal and divine legitimacy for the enslavement and the
colonization of Africans. In 1455, Romanus Pontifex, another papal bull was
issued, which reaffirmed the domination of the world by Europe. These
documents and the actions that followed provided the pretext for the conquest,
colonization, and the genesis of the peculiar institution called slavery. The
European expansionist adventures in Africa completely altered the course of
Africa's evolutionary processes through the destruction of indigenous
knowledge systems and robbed the continent of the manpower resources
needed for its development.
The dawn of European modernity was, in fact, the beginning of Africa's
destruction. Europe, in the early fifteenth century, was recovering from the
Middle Ages and the Crusades, so with improved maritime technological
advancements, Europeans embarked on expeditions in search of food and
conquest of new lands (John Henrik Clarke, 1998). As Europe was
experiencing a period of Enlightenment, otherwise known as the Age of Reason
(1685–1815), Africa was under the carnage of the European savagery of
slavery. As a result, unlike the other continents, Africa underwent an
unexpected period of stagnation in population growth and advancement. The
decimation of Africa's population interrupted its growth and the capacity to
advance its political, social, and economic institutions, leading to
underdevelopment.
This chapter explores the destructive encounter between Africa and Europe
through the often-called “peculiar institution” of slavery and how that led to the
underdevelopment of the continent of Africa. For over 400 years, starting from
the fifteenth century, millions of Africans were forcibly uprooted from their
137
communities, shackled and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas
under some of the most unimaginable inhuman conditions. African civilizations
were destroyed in the process, and Europeans imposed their Christendom
cosmology and epistemologies. This disruption of Africa's natural evolutionary
process through enslavement caused, in the words of known historian Walter
Rodney “These people [Africans] to tame and harness nature—a battle which is
at the basis of development.” Africa was not a blank slate as Europeans have
long claimed. Dr. J. B. Danquah in his book, United West Africa (Africa) at the
Bar of the Family of Nations, wrote:
By the time Alexander the Great was sweeping the civilized world with
conquest after conquest from Chaeronia to Gaza from Babylon to
Cabul: by the time this first of the Aryan conquerors was learning the
rudiments of war and government at the feet of philosophic Aristotle;
and by the time the first Athens was laying down the foundations of
modern European civilization, the earliest and the greatest Ethiopian
culture had already flourished and dominated the civilized world for
over four centuries and a half. Imperial Ethiopia had conquered Egypt
and founded the XXV Dynasty, and for a century and half the central
seat of civilization in the known world was held by the ancestors of the
modern negro, maintaining and defending it against the Assyrian and
Persian Empires of the East ... Rome was nowhere to be seen on the
map, and sixteen centuries were to pass before Charlemagne would rule
in Europe.
Europeans discounted the rich civilizations and cultures of Africa, and
pursued an expansionist ideology, which was founded on racial superiority,
designed to dominate and destroy its pristine culture through the slave trade and
colonization. As Adu Boahen wrote in 1971:
On the balance then, politically, economically, and socially, the
European presence and activities in Africa during the second period
were virtually unmitigated disaster for the Africans. By 1700 all the
great hopes that had been conjured up during the earlier phase of
exploration had turned sour.... By 1700 Europe had leaped forward
technologically and socially but Africa and its Black people had
become paralyzed and impoverished, a tragedy from which they still
have not recovered.
While the literature and the commentary about the slave trade abounds, its
lingering effects often get marred in historical revisionism. This chapter
138
discusses some of the historical underpinnings of the slave trade and explores
the effect that still reverberates in Africa and its peoples. Specifically, the
chapter is divided into three segments: (1) the underlying factors of the
transatlantic slave trade; (2) the nature of the transatlantic slave trade; and (3)
the effects of the transatlantic slave trade on the development of Africa.
Major terms and concepts: slave trade, transatlantic, Middle Passage,
triangle slave trade, underdevelopment, epistemology, New World,
Amerindians, Indentured servants, epistemicide, internal slavery.
139
The Portuguese were the first to traverse the Atlantic coast of Africa in
search of new trading routes and goods. Armed with the divine mandate of the
papal bulls, Dum diversas and Romanus Pontifex, for a long time the
Portuguese dominated the West African coastline. By 1460, the Portuguese had
reached Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) by 1471. They
named the place Gold Coast because of the abundance of gold in the area. By
1472, Portuguese sailors and adventurers working for the monarchy had landed
on the islands of Fernando Po and Sao Tome. However, only in 1475 did they
achieve a major maritime milestone when they crossed the Equator. By 1488,
Bartolomeu Dias had sailed to the southern tip of Africa, naming it the Cape of
Good Hope. Subsequently, in 1498, Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama was the
first to sail through the Cape of Good Hope, and with the help of some
Africans, reached the shores of Calicut in southwestern India. This was
significant in two ways. First, Europe now had unlimited access to the mineral-
rich African societies, and second, had broken the Arabs' monopoly on the
trans-Saharan trade, which granted Europeans access to goods from the Far
East. This was particularly critical because Europeans wanted to avoid the
payment of import duties and other levies to Arab middlemen. Additionally,
Europe's land access to the Far East was limited when the Ottoman Turks
conquered Constantinople, which brought an end to the Byzantine Empire in
1453.
On the other side of the global divide were the Spaniards, who embarked on
a similar mission to find an alternate route to the Far East. Their argument was
that, if the world was indeed round, then they could sail westward to India.
Christopher Columbus, an Italian sailor, who had failed to convince King John
II of Portugal to fund his voyage, turned to the Spanish monarchy, King
Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who agreed to finance his expedition. Thus, on
August 3, 1492, Columbus and his crew embarked on an epic voyage from
Palos, Spain, with three ships, Santa Maria, Pinta and Nina. A month later,
Columbus and his crew arrived at the Bahamas and thought they had reached
mainland China. In December 1492, they disembarked in Cuba and Hispaniola
(Haiti) and mistakenly identified the islands as Japan.
Columbus was followed by Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian explorer, who
was believed to have reached parts of South America. The “New World” was
named America in honor of Vespucci. As adventurous as these colonists were,
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none of their expeditions landed them in the Far East. In 1513, Vasco Núñez de
Balboa was the first European explorer to cross the Isthmus of Panama and
reach the Pacific Ocean. In his expedition were 30 Africans who helped clear
the roads across the isthmus (John Henrik Clarke, 1998). These new
expeditionary findings challenged Columbus' assertions that he had reached
part of India, but indeed, the so-called “New World” was a part of a different
continent.
It is also important to point out here that Europeans were not the first and
certainly not the only people to have sent expeditions across the Atlantic Ocean
to the “New World.” In his book, They Came Before Columbus, Guyanese
scholar Ivan van Sertima maintains that Africans had been traversing the
Atlantic Ocean long before Columbus. He postulated that:
They were from ‘warm countries.’ They were ‘those who return.’ They
were often extremely black men who used to trade numerous objects.
This was how the Indians used to describe the Mandingos whose one
trader caste luxuriously dressed ended up becoming the supplier to the
south and Central America's markets 80 years before Christopher
Columbus arrived. Those traders contributed to build temples in
America, married native women, brought a contribution to the rise of
the Aztec civilization. They enriched the Native American spirituality,
which roots are essentially of African, and introduced by the first black
inhabitants of America.
According to John Henrik Clarke, the first Africans who made it to the New
World were not enslaved, they were free people. Furthermore, Clarke maintains
that Africans participated in expeditions with the Spanish. These early Africans
to the New World brought with them skills such as iron smithing, leather work
knowledge and production, and carpentry.
The discovery of new lands meant new opportunities for commerce and
industry. Sugar by now had become an important commodity. With the
restricted access to goods, including sugar, as a result of the fall of
Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire, finding alternative trading opportunities
had become imperative. Thus, by the latter part of the fifteenth century,
Europeans had commandeered lands in the Caribbean and the Americas. The
Portuguese had occupied Brazil and the Spaniards Hispaniola. The new lands
provided the Europeans the perfect conditions for setting up sugarcane
plantations, the raw material for the production of sugar, and other crops
including cotton and tobacco. Soon, however, they realized that the plantations
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required massive amounts of labor. Immediately available at the time were the
Amerindians and indentured servants from Europe.
Unfortunately for the conquistadores and the traders in slaves, the
Amerindians were not a very consistent labor source due to the high levels of
mortality resulting from the harsh working conditions and diseases that may
have been brought to the area by the Europeans. The diseases included yellow
fever, smallpox, influenza, bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, and malaria.
These newly introduced diseases, coupled with conflicts with the Europeans,
drastically reduced the Amerindian populations. Indeed, some scholars have
characterized the causes and effects of the decimation of the Amerindian
population as genocide. Equally challenging were the conditions faced by the
European indentured servants. Due to their unfamiliarity with the weather
conditions of the tropical environment, they were also plagued with high
mortality rates. Thus, replacing the Amerindians with the indentured servants
from Europe was not a prudent economic option.
The success of a European economic enterprise in the New World was
predicated on access to cheap labor, and since the Amerindians and the
indentured servants had proven to be unreliable labor sources, the newcomers
had to devise alternate sources. With the critical demand for labor, Africa
became the choice for filling the labor needs. From their experience from the
enslavement of a few Africans in the Canary Islands, Madeira, and Sao Tome,
the Portuguese perceived the Africans as being stronger, more adaptable to the
tropical weather conditions, and less susceptible to the debilitating diseases that
had decimated the Amerindian population. The decision to use Africans to
fulfill the labor needs of European plantations in the New World proved to be
the fatal transformation that changed the development trajectory of Africa, as
shown below.
By 1441, the first African captives, numbering 235, were taken directly to
Portugal. The first known slave market, Mercado de Escravos, was established
in Lagos, on the Algarve, Portugal's southernmost province. The enslaved
Africans arrived to an audience that included Henry the Navigator, who
believed that he and the Portuguese monarchy were saving their souls. As a
result, by 1450, the Portuguese were well established in the importation of
Africans and had secured licenses from the Spanish authorities to supply
African captives to the Spanish colonies. Around 1520, they shipped about 250
Africans directly from Lagos, Algarve, Portugal, to Santo Domingo in the New
World. This experimentation with African captives as labor replacement
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worked. This new development, coupled with advances in maritime technology,
gave the Portuguese an advantage in the shipment of Africans to be enslaved,
and set the stage for what John Henrik Clarke refers to as the “African
Holocaust.” The Portuguese held on to this monopoly of trading in Africans till
about the 1600s, when other Europeans joined in. The initial numbers of
Africans sold and enslaved by the Portuguese were small. For instance,
between 1450 and 1500, the number of Africans imported by the Portuguese
ranged between 500 and 1,000 a year. However, the numbers grew
exponentially when other Europeans, including the Dutch, the English, the
French, the Spanish, the Danes, and the Swedes, started dealing in Africans as
commodities. They built castles and forts all along the African coast, which
served as enclaves for protecting themselves from each other and for holding
African captives.
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Slavery is the condition in which a human being owns another human being,
considered property, and stripped of all rights as other free peoples. As
property, slaves were considered to be chattel, which meant they could be
bought and sold at will. For over four centuries, the relationship between
Africans and Europeans was built on the foundation of total subjugation of
Africans by the Europeans. However, Africans were not slaves until they were
shipped to other parts of the world controlled by Europeans. According to
Walter Rodney (1972), all shipments of Africans were to markets controlled by
Europeans for the benefit of European capitalism. Since Africans were not born
slaves, but free people, we will refer to captive Africans as enslaved and not
slaves. With respect to Africans enslaved by Europeans, slavery made them
mere objects deprived of their humanity and subjected to some of the most
despicable and inhuman treatment ever recorded in human history.
The concept of slavery is as old as the history of humankind. Some form of
slavery had always existed in most modern human societies. One of the earliest
references to slavery can be found in the Laws of Hammurabi, which codified
Babylonian life c. 1750 BC. With three classifications of social statuses, the
enslaved were the third category. An enslaved person in Babylon could own
property and even marry. Indeed, in the case where an enslaved male married a
free woman, the child born to the union was free.
Greek city states, such as Sparta and Athens, also depended largely on forced
labor. The helots, for instance, were state owned serfs. They came under the
rule of Sparta when their land was conquered. As such, they were confined to
servitude, enjoying only limited rights: They could neither be freed nor be sold.
They simply worked for their Spartan masters. However, helots could own
some limited property. Athens also practiced slavery, and most of the enslaved
persons worked in the mines under very tedious conditions and had no rights.
Some form of slavery was also practiced in Africa. In North Africa, for
instance, slavery was common along the Sahara Desert and in the Sahel, or the
fringes of the desert. Similarly, slavery was practiced around Western Sahara,
Algeria, and Morocco, as well as among the Berbers. The Tuaregs, who
inhabited south of the Sahara, also engaged in slavery. The Egyptians, the
Ethiopians, the Somali, and the Sudanese in the North Eastern region of Africa
also practiced some form of slavery, and so was the case among many West
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African societies. For example, the Asante of present-day Ghana, the Wolof of
Senegal, the Mende and Temne of Sierra Leone, and the Vai of Liberia all
owned slaves. In Central Africa, the Duala of Cameroon, the Bapende Luba and
Lunda of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Lozi of Zambia also
allowed some variation of a system of slavery. The Buganda state, the
Nyamwezi, and the Chagga peoples in East Africa are also known to have been
engaged in enslaving others. In Southern Africa, the Chokwe of Angola, the
Sena of Mozambique, and the Ngoni of Mozambique and Malawi all seem to
have had practiced one form or another of slavery.
The reasons for internal African slavery were varied, and yet not unique from
what they were in other parts of the world. Slave labor was needed for
agriculture and trade industries, as well as administrators and conscripts for the
military. Others were used as domestics, while some served as personal
assistants to wealthy merchants and royals. An important feature of internal
African slavery was the type of relationship that existed between the enslaved
and their owners. Since African societies are built on kinships, which are the
foundation of the social structure, many allowed the integration of the enslaved
into the kinship system through consanguinity, adoption, and marriage. For
instance, among the Asante, irrespective of the status of the parents, no child
was born a slave. In North Africa, the Tuaregs and the Berbers integrated their
enslaved into their kinship system and regarded them as family (Derrick, 1975).
It is also clear from studies conducted over the decades that integration of the
enslaved into families was widely spread among many African ethnic groups.
How were the “enslaved” treated in African societies? No doubt, any form of
enslavement cannot be rationalized. The very idea that a human being was
owned by another human being will also have a sobering effect. However, like
in Sparta and Athens, the enslaved in pre-colonial Africa were accorded some
rights, including the right to be housed, fed, and clothed. In Zanzibar, for
example, the enslaved were allowed to marry, bear children, and own land, and
were given time to work on them. The Asante of Ghana used the term Akoa,
which referred to a wide variety of servitude roles. The Akoa was not to be
maltreated, and punishments were meted out to those who maltreated them,
especially when this resulted in death. The Asante saying, Akoa a onim som di
ne wura ade (A slave or a servant who serves well inherits the property of
his/her owner), encapsulated the relationship between the master and the Akoa.
It is important to note, as well, that in many African societies, slavery was not
an eternal condemnation. The concept of an enslaved person in pre-colonial
Africa as chattel or property was alien and not an acceptable and widespread
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practice. The enslaved had some legal rights, and owners, except the chief or
king, did not have absolute control over them. This meant that the enslaved had
opportunities for social mobility. For instance, the Sena of Mozambique, the
Kerebe of Tanzania, the Mende of Sierra Leone, and the Kongo of Central
Africa made provision for the affranchissement or redemption of their enslaved
(Miers and Kopytoff, 1979). The Asante of Ghana are also known for according
the reasonable affranchissement of the enslaved. Security at the Asantehene's
(King of the Asante) palace was provided by enslaved people. Indeed, the
Asante have another saying—Obi nkyere obi ase (one does not disclose the
origins of another person)—that is, disclosing a person's origins could result in
the possibility of uncovering slavery as part of the lineage.
There were also opportunities for political mobility for the enslaved. In some
communities, the mobility was dependent on the status of the owner. For
example, among the Mende of Sierra Leone, an enslaved person could hold
political office, and in some instances, even become a chief. Similarly, the
enslaved in New Calabar, Nigeria, could become heads of households. In fact,
many customary practices required that the enslaved persons be treated
humanely. As such, an enslaved person always had the opportunity to run away
in situations of maltreatment at the hands of the owner. Interestingly, among the
Asante, an enslaved person could appeal to a deity to intervene on his/her
behalf to avert hash treatment from the owner. They could also swear an oath
on a person, who would be obliged to answer the case of the oath, often time
accompanied by a fine. Thus, the various avenues of redress at the disposal of
the enslaved persons allowed for their humane treatment.
It is also important to note that slavery had a power dynamic to it. The ability
to enslave another human being derives its power from multiple sources,
principal among them being class, race, and gender. It is plausible to say that
the dynamics of African slavery were a class-based system. Here, class could
also be equated with ethnicities. For example, the Asante people rarely held
other Asante as slaves. In other words, a person who shared the same language
and other cultural traits, including religion and customary practices, would be
difficult to control and be classified as a slave. In addition, a person with a
lower social status within the same ethnic group could be a servant, but that
hardly qualified him/her as a slave. Consequently, it was always easier to
enslave an outsider. Indeed, the main sources of supply of enslaved people for
the Asante were other ethnic groups, usually defeated at war. Acquisition of the
enslaved through warfare was a common method in most pre-colonial Africa. It
was widely understood that the conclusion of a war meant the prisoners of the
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vanquished were taken as slaves by the victors. Stronger states also entered into
tributary agreement with weaker states, which included supplying slaves to the
stronger rivals.
The relationship between pre-colonial African slavery and economics is also
worth exploring. Slavery in pre-colonial Africa existed in two forms, either as a
minor feature of the society or as an institution well integrated into the social
fabric. In cases where slavery was minor, most of the enslaved individuals were
owned by the very wealthy and limited to performing domestic chores.
Contextually, enslaved women could even marry free men, which changed their
status within the family and the society. However, with slavery as an
institution, the varied functions of the society depended on slave labor. For
instance, in societies with well-established centralized political systems, slave
labor was needed in the agricultural and mining sectors. This was the case
among the Asante, who needed slave labor for their gold mines. Whenever the
family farm holdings became too large to handle, slave labor was often
required.
There is no doubt that internal African slavery altered some of the social
dynamics in some societies, but that pales in comparison to the devastating
effect of the transatlantic slave trade on Africa and Africans. Conversely, the
kind of slavery Europeans introduced in Africa was nothing compared to the
African system of indentured servitude.
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The beginning of a conversation on transatlantic slavery always starts with
two discourses: the number of Africans involved in the obnoxious trade and the
extent of African involvement in the trade. While these are legitimate points,
often lost in the discussion is the extent of destructiveness of the trade and its
lingering effects on Africans both in the continent and the diaspora. Walter
Rodney (1982: 96) maintains that:
In order to whitewash the European slave trade, they find it convenient
to start by minimizing the numbers concerned. The truth is that any
figure of Africans imported into the Americas which is narrowly based
on the surviving records is bound to be low, and because there were so
many people at the time who had a vested interest in smuggling slaves
(and withholding data). Nevertheless, if the low figure of ten million
was accepted as basis for evaluating the impact of slaving on Africa as
a whole, the conclusions that could legitimately be drawn would
confound those who attempt to make light of the experience of the rape
of Africans from 1445 to 1870.
While the numbers debate may be intriguing to some, more attention should
be focused on the actual experiences of the Africans who were subjected to
cruelties of the transatlantic slave trade.
Before we launch deep into the discussions of the experiences of Africans
and the nature of the transatlantic slave trade, we need to highlight this very
important point: Besides the brutality associated with the human trade, there
was the dehumanization of the African people, who, reduced to the status of
non-humans, chattel, and property, maintained a commercial value. This
dehumanization paved the way for the cruel types of treatment, which had
characterized medieval Europe, to be repackaged for Africans as captives. So,
why were Africans and not the Arabs or the Berbers enslaved? There may be
two reasons: One was the geographical proximity and the European need for
labor in the Americas. After an unsuccessful experimentation with the
Amerindians and indentured European servants, as mentioned earlier, West
Africa proved to be the closest source of labor. The second reason had to do
with race and racism. Scholars put out that the epistemological foundation of
Europe's interactions with Africa was built upon racial superiority. Europeans
had no value for Africa's knowledge systems and, for them, difference meant
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inferiority. Since Europeans perceived themselves White and Africans Black,
the distance between the White slaver and the Black enslaved was justification
enough to warrant the dehumanization of the African. It was against this
backdrop that the transatlantic slave trade began.
The transatlantic slave trade started in the fifteenth century and lasted
through 1870. The majority of Africans forcibly transported across the Atlantic
Ocean were destined for plantations in North America, Central and South
America, and the Caribbean. The largest number of African captives was
shipped to the Portuguese territory of Brazil. To date, as a result, Brazil has the
highest number of people of African descent outside the continent of Africa.
The unprecedented human trade involved four continents. Europe was the
source of financing the slave trade, and the market base for raw materials.
Africa was the labor source, and North and South America provided the land
for the plantations. Crops produced were cotton, sugarcane, indigo, tobacco,
and rice. After the Portuguese successful experiment with the plantation system
in their West African territories of São Tomé and Príncipe and Madeira, the
Americas became the new frontier for expansion.
The initial mode of acquisition of African slaves was forced capture. For
instance, Gil Eanes, trained by Henry the Navigator, was the first European to
forcibly capture Africans to be enslaved. In 1444, an expedition led by Gil
Eanes Lançarote had attacked a village of Berber fishing people. At the end of
the raid, several Africans were killed and others captured to be enslaved. This
incidence was captured by De Zurara (1899: 66, 1960: 99, 1981), who wrote:
And at last our Lord God, who giveth a reward for every good deed,
willed that for the toil that they had undergone in his service, they
should that day obtain victory over their enemies, as well as a guerdon
and a payment for all their labour and expense; for they took captive of
those Moors, what with men, women, and children, 165, besides those
that perished and were killed (pp. 120–121).
Similarly, in 1562, Englishman John Hawkins sailed from England and took
about 300 African captives to the West Indies. However, because the forced
capture of people was expensive, unreliable and dangerous, other strategies
were employed, including raiding and kidnapping. Slave raiders armed with
guns and other advanced weaponry laid ambush close to farms and river bodies
and kidnapped mostly women and children. The captives were held together at
the neck with sticks and chains to prevent them from escaping. Depending on
where they were captured, which was mostly the hinterland, they trekked by
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foot, which took from a few days to sometimes months to get to the “castles”
located along the coast, to be held for their eventual shipment to the Americas.
The success of the slave enterprise was largely as a result of two factors. One
consisted of European slavers finding African collaborators who would play the
role of middlemen. Initial European acquisition of African captives was
restricted to raiding the inhabitants of the coastal areas. Others were through
deceit and theft. European sailors would invite naive Africans on board their
ships and, unbeknownst to the Africans, sail them away. However, with time,
coastal inhabitants became savvy and started organizing defense forces against
European raids. With force no longer being a viable option, Europeans resorted
to economic inducements, such as offering manufactured goods in exchange for
captives. African middlemen often embarked on raids into the hinterland,
usually with weapons supplied by the Europeans. The second factor was inter-
ethnic conflicts, which the Europeans exploited by supporting one group over
the other, thus heightening the enmity between rival groups. The viciousness of
the conflict determined the numbers of captive prisoners who were then sold to
the Europeans. This is not to say that rivalries and hatred among different
ethnic groups were nonexistent. The point is that, while conflicts have always
been a part of all human societies, the exploitation of differences was
exacerbated by the incentivization coming from the Europeans.
Thus, conflicts were waged not only for necessity, but also as an economic
incentive. While the role of Africans in the obnoxious trade, especially in well-
established states, should not be minimized, it should not be overemphasized
either to diminish the role played by the Europeans. As Walter Rodney again
states:
Many guilty consciences have been created by the slave trade.
Europeans know that they carried on the slave trade, and Africans are
aware that the trade would have been impossible if certain Africans did
not cooperate with slave ships. To ease their guilty consciences,
Europeans try to throw the major responsibility for the slave trade on to
the Africans. One major author on the slave trade (appropriately titled
Sins of Our Fathers) explained how many white people urged him to
state that the trade was the responsibility of African chiefs, and that
Europeans merely turned up to buy captives—as though without
European demand there would have been captives sitting on the beach
by the millions! Issues such as those are not the principal concern of
this study, but they can be correctly approached only after
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understanding that Europe became the center of a world-wide system
and that it was European capitalism which set slavery and the Atlantic
slave trade in motion (p. 82).
Therefore, on one hand one may ask if it was, indeed, a trade, where were the
benefits to the Africans? On the other hand, there is no question as to the
benefits the slave trade accrued to Europeans. As a result of the slave trade, the
population of Africa, together with its culture and history, suffered immensely.
While Europe was gaining from the productivity of African captives, slave
traders were replacing them with cheap alcohol and consumable goods of no
value.
Following capture, Africans were kept in the slave dungeons at the various
castles along the West African coast. In Ghana alone, about 28 such castles
existed along the coast. Further along the West African coastline, one off the
coast of Senegal in Goree Island and another along the Gambia River in
Gambia had been built. Similar sites existed in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Benin
and Togo. Cape Coast Castle in Ghana was an important entrepot, which
epitomized the gross indignity suffered by African captives at the hands of the
Europeans. The site was constructed as a trade lodge by the Portuguese in 1555.
In 1563, the Swedish captured Cape Coast and rebuilt it with wooden
structures. Subsequently, around 1663, the Danes seized power from the
Swedish and reinforced the old edifice with stones. While the Dutch also
occupied the castle for some time, the British took control over it in 1664, and
by 1700, it had been transformed into a full British fortress, which also housed
the British governor.
When captives arrived at the castles, they were branded with hot irons with
initials of the “owners” or the company that had acquired them and separated
by gender. Whereas the male dungeon in the Cape Coast castle could hold
about 1,000 captives at a time, the female section had a capacity of about 500.
The dungeons were poorly ventilated, and the captives were shackled and
cramped, with no space to lie, and fed just enough to keep them alive. Captivity
in the dungeons lasted up to three months, with no provision of water and
sanitation, forcing the captives to stay in their waste till they were ready to be
shipped. As a result, diseases were rampant and the mortality rates high.
Women and girls were subjected to rape. Any of the European slavers could
select a female captive, cleaned her up, and then proceed to rape her with no
impunity. Thereafter, she was returned to the dungeon to await her fate on the
middle passage. Women who resisted were physically punished and confined in
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small cells that had no windows, resulting, for some, in death by suffocation,
the same fate being experienced by mutineers, who were confined to similar
windowless cells.
As expected, the dehumanizing conditions continued on the slave ships. This
league of the odious journey across the Atlantic Ocean was known as the
Middle Passage, where the captives were lined up, shackled, and led to the
waiting ships. The conditions on the ships were no different from those in the
dungeons. To maximize space, captives were packed tightly still in shackles.
The ships that carried them were referred to as “Guineamen,” identifying the
origins of their human cargo, with such names as Fortune, Rio, and Mayflower
Antigua, just to name a few. The duration of the voyage took anywhere from
four weeks to three months depending on the origin and destination. For
instance, British and Dutch voyages took anywhere between two to three
months to sail from the coast of West Africa to the Caribbean.
The crew on each voyage included the sailors, physicians, merchants, and the
captives. The sailors were in charge of ensuring a successful voyage. The
physicians were at hand to mitigate losses of the human cargo and the crew of
the ship. The merchants were burdened by the responsibility of ensuring that
their investments were protected. Due to the poor conditions under which the
captives were kept, many succumbed to diseases. There are accounts of sharks
following slave ships in anticipation of the remains of the dead captives that
were summarily tossed overboard or those who committed suicide by jumping
off into the ocean to their deaths. Some captured Africans believed that they
would be cannibalized by the Europeans, a belief given credence as none of the
previous captives ever returned.
Others were just resolute and decided that they were not going to allow their
enslavement and would therefore mutiny on the ship. About 485 of such acts of
resistance by Africans against the slave ships' conditions and the crews have
been recorded and include 93 instances of attacks from the shore by apparently
“free” Africans against ships or longboats and 392 cases of shipboard revolts by
slaves (Richardson, 2001). The captives were fed two and sometimes three
times a day in their holds through the hatches. Alive and healthy captives meant
better profits for the merchants, so the crew did all it could to ensure the
precious “cargo” would arrive in conditions that could maximize the profit. In
instances where captives went on hunger strike, the ship crews had a device
known as spectrum oris, which was used to forcibly open the mouths of the
captives to be fed a diet that included rice, cornmeal, and boiled types of millet.
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As a result, the conditions on the ships have been described atrocious. Olaudah
Equiano, a freed enslaved person, thus described the conditions in the ship:
The stench of the hold, while we were on the coast, was so intolerably
loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for anytime, and so
some of us had been permitted to stay on deck for fresh air, but now the
whole ship's cargo were confined together, it became absolutely
pestilential. The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate,
added to number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had
scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocating us. This produced
copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respirations
from the variety of the loathsome smells, and brought on sickness
among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the
provident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. The deplorable
condition was aggravated by the galling of the chains, now became
insupportable; and the filth of necessary tubs, into which the children
often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of women and the
groans of the dying, rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable
(quoted from Gate, 1987: 35).
The Middle Passage not only physically destroyed the captive Africans, but it
also completely negated their humanity and reduced them to a subhuman status
only worth an economic price. One may have to ask: What was the economic
prize for such human callousness? Indeed, the economic incentive was ample
justification for such cruel treatment of a human being at the hands of another
human being. In fact, that was the essence of the triangular trade.
The so-called Triangular Trade, which started in the early seventeenth
century and lasted till the latter part of the eighteenth century, was a link
between three geographical areas, Europe, Africa and the Americas. This
extensive trade involved the movement of finished goods from Europe to
Africa, which were then exchanged for African captives, and was referred to as
the Outward Passage. The African captives were then transported to the
Americas, the second league of the trip, which was properly called the Middle
Passage. Here, the captives cultivated the lands to obtain raw materials, which
were then shipped to Europe and manufactured into finished products. This last
phase of the trade journey was referred to as the Inward Passage. The
Triangular Trade was so lucrative that it has been considered to have been the
engine of Europe's industrial growth. Obviously, the major beneficiaries of the
Triangular Trade were Portugal, Spain, England, The Netherlands, Sweden,
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Denmark, and Germany. To name a few, the destinations for most of the
African captives in Europe were Lisbon and Lagos in Portugal, Bristol in
England, and Nantes and La Rochelle in France.
Once in North America, captives were carried to North and South Carolina,
Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, coastal Georgia, Mississippi, and other places, from
where some were sent to the Dutch West Indies and Dutch Guyana. While the
British sent most of their captives to Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, St. Kitts,
Grenada, Dominica, British Guyana, Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago, and St.
Vincent, the French held theirs at St. Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and
French Guyana. In contrast, the Spanish carried their captives to the colonies of
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and all of what is now known as Latin America, and the
Portuguese shipped theirs mainly to Brazil. In terms of numbers, whereas the
destination with the largest proportion of captives, about 46 percent, was the
Portuguese colony of Brazil, the British territories received about 22 percent
and the Spanish about 12 percent of the human cargo. The Dutch Caribbean
accounted for about 4 percent, while North America received about 3.7 percent
of the total number of the African captives. Less than 1 percent of African
captives were sent to Europe. As a result, while Europe was rapidly growing, a
different story of utter devastation was emerging on the African continent. So,
how did slavery underdevelop Africa?
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The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Africa's
Underdevelopment
The impact of the peculiar institution of slavery on the underdevelopment of
Africa should be contrasted with that of Europe and North America. It was
stated earlier in the chapter that, if the slave trade was indeed a trade, then there
must be evidence of some mutual benefits on both sides of the traders.
Unfortunately, this apparently was not the case, as slavery disrupted Africa's
demographics and destroyed the continent's potential for advancement. Simply
put, Africa was grossly underdeveloped by the trade in humans. According to
many scholars, particularly Rodney, underdevelopment is not a result of lack of
development. Rodney states that:
underdevelopment is not absence of development, because every people
have developed in one way or another and to a greater or lesser extent.
Underdevelopment makes sense only as a means of comparing levels of
development. It is very much tied to the fact that human social
development has been uneven and from a strictly economic view-point
some human groups have advanced further by producing more and
becoming wealthier.
The disparities in wealth accumulation between Africa and Europe resulted
from the latter's exploitation of the African continent, which lost a substantial
amount of its labor force through the trade. The preference for younger able-
bodied slaves, including women and children, was adversely consequential in
the reproductive processes of the continent. To quote Walter Rodney once
again, although it is challenging to accurately account for the total population
lost due to the slave trade, he points nevertheless to the fact that, from the
fifteenth century on, global population “showed constant and sometimes
spectacular natural increase; while it is striking that the same did not apply to
Africa.” Rodney further claims that the slave trade had a direct causal effect on
Africa's population stagnation during the period of natural global population
growth. That being the case, the issue of Africa's population stagnation had an
adverse effect on its development. Healthy, able bodies, knowledgeable
Africans, who would have contributed significantly to the socio-economic
growth of the continent, were permanently lost to the slave trade. Since the
manpower needed for the development was lacking, the result was the collapse
of many cottage industries. While ethnic conflicts incentivized by the slave
155
trade meant that more energy was dedicated to making war than towards socio-
economic advancement, the resulting instability meant that many lands had to
be abandoned, thus disrupting farming patterns. As a result, many parts of
Africa could not undergo an agrarian revolution, which would have most likely
led to an industrial revolution as experienced in Europe. The late Africanist
historian Basil Davidson wrote:
As African production for exports became a monoculture in human
beings ... for Africa itself [it] was strictly non-productive; for African
slave dealers, it was the sale of consumer goods for the raw material of
slave labor.... There was no creative marriage of cultures, no passage of
ideas, no sharing of wealth or achievement. To Europe the trade with
Africa was always an enrichment and this enrichment could and did
lead Europe into new and more productive forms of society and
government.
Furthermore, one must point out, the negative impact was not only economic
but also political. Due to slave raids and inter-ethnic conflicts, political
institutions remained fragmented and systems of governance evolved around
the trade in humans rather than around systems that harnessed cohesion and the
development of institutions for stability. Nunn (2008) finds that the slave trade
had a negative long-term effect on Africa's economic performance. His
preliminary evidence suggests that the legacy of the slave trade operated
through increased ethnic diversity and underdeveloped political structures.
Other studies on contemporary African political and economic systems support
the claim that ethnic diversity and underdeveloped states have contributed to
Africa's poor economic conditions. Though ethnic diversity should not be
perceived necessarily as bad, yet, in the case of the discussed pre-colonial
conditions, the natural societal evolutionary process of assimilation could not
occur due to the slave trade, which notoriously thrived on ethnic fragmentation.
One of the most insidious effect of the slave trade was the destruction of
Africa's epistemological foundations. The demographic disruptions also meant
the destruction of knowledge systems, which proved to be even more
consequential. Indeed, by the time the European imperialist machinery was
repackaged and deployed as colonialism, Africans had neither response nor
common or relevant strategy of resistance. In such a context, one might say that
the slave trade decimated the anchor of African societies, namely, its systems of
knowledge. Thus, the slave trade was not only genocidal, but also
epistemicidal. Africa's story indeed does not start with slavery. Before the
156
Europeans, there was Ethiopia and Egypt, which Chancellor Williams (1974),
called “Ethiopia's older daughter,” in reference to the influence of Ethiopia on
Egypt. As shown in chapter 3 of this volume, the Africans had also established
great empires, which included Ghana, Mali and Songhai, the Timbuktu
metropolis becoming the intellectual center of the latter's empire. As a result,
the first university, established in Sankore around the fifteenth century, became
an intellectual hub that attracted scholars from many parts of the world.
This is the story of Africa that is often told in obscurity to fit a Eurocentric
narrative of the continent as a blank slate and a people with no contributions to
world civilizations. The slave trade and the subsequent colonial intervention by
Europeans caused a cataclysmic decline in African intellectual foundations and
set up an asymmetric and exploitative relationship between Africa and Europe.
The destruction of the existing indigenous knowledge systems has been
identified by Grosfoguel to have happened four times in the course of world
history, which he called the “Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th
Century”: (1) the conquest of Al-Andalus, which was the expulsion of Muslims
and Jews from Europe; (2) the conquest of the Indigenous Peoples of the
Americas started by the Spanish and continued by the French and the English;
(3) the creation of the slave trade that resulted in millions killed in Africa and at
sea and the further dehumanization of the enslaved in the Americas (considered
by many as a third genocidal knowledge conquest); and (4) the killing of
millions of Indo-European women mostly through burning at the stake as
witches because of the knowledge practices that were not controlled by men
(Grosfoguel 2013). These historical episodes continue to reverberate in many
indigenous and non-Western societies, including Africa, where their
development still operates within the shadows of European imperialist
domination.
157
Summary
A full grasp on slavery must start with the conceptualization of it as an
institution. Slavery, in some form or another, has always been part of our
human history. However, enslavement of Africans by Europeans started when
they began expanding to other parts of the world. European imperialist
expansion during the fifteenth century, which was sanctioned by Pope Nicholas
V, was the genesis of an epic encounter between Europeans and Africans that
transformed the continent and its peoples and altered the course of world
history. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to explore the coastline of
West Africa. The capture of Ceuta in 1415 cemented Portugal's claim to Africa
and paved the way for other European conquests and control of Africa and
Africans. Europeans were in search of new routes to Asia after the fall of
Constantinople to the Ottomans, who restricted their access to Asia, especially
through heavy taxation. While the Portuguese expeditions along the west coast
of Africa opened up a new frontier and a maritime route to Asia, they opened
up, as well, new trading opportunities, most critically, in gold and other goods.
Tragically, the legitimate trade in goods eventually ended in the trading of
Africans.
For over 400 years, Africans were captured and sold to Europeans to be
shipped to plantations in the New World. Although there was internal slavery in
many African societies, important differences existed between the European
and the African forms of slavery. The treatment of the enslaved in pre-colonial
Africa varied and depended on the slave master and the relationship between
him and his slave. In contrast, the characterization of Africans as living
commodities dehumanized them, and justified the brutality associated with the
slave trade. As shown here, African captives were considered to be property
and were completely stripped of all their humanity. After capture, enslaved
Africans were branded and held in deplorable conditions in the coastal
dungeons before they were shipped to their various destinations in the New
World through the Middle Passage. The Middle Passage, infamous for its
dehumanizing conditions under which African captives were shipped to the
New World, has been characterized as the most tragic and barbaric forced
migration in the history of humanity.
The Triangular Trade, which started in the early part of the seventeenth
century and lasted till the late eighteenth century, was a link between three
geographical areas, Europe, Africa and the Americas, and remained both
158
exploitative and destructive. According to Clarke and many other scholars, the
Catholic Church initiated a genocidal process through Spanish and Portuguese
adventurism, which was taken over by the Protestant Dutch and English, who
vastly expanded the institution of slavery. This fed the so-called industrial
revolution, ushering Africa into an exploitative relationship with Europe. Most
scholars are convinced that Africa's underdevelopment is directly linked with
the transatlantic slave trade because it disrupted the continent's socio-cultural,
political and economic evolution. With an estimated, some say, 50 million
Africans forcefully uprooted and shipped to the New World, Africa
experienced debilitating demographic stagnation, precipitating in a short time
its overall decline.
This chapter also argued that, closely associated with the genocidal process
of Africa was the process of epistemicide, or the annihilation of the existing
indigenous African knowledge systems. Since Africans were considered
inferior and people without civilization, the systems of knowledge that had
evolved from the beginning of our humanity were all destroyed. African
knowledge systems such as those developed in Egypt, Ethiopia, Kush, Ghana,
Mali, and Zimbabwe, and such cities as Timbuktu and Djene, were no match
for the destructive and arrogant European epistemologies.
Finally, it must be said, the history and consequences of the transatlantic
slave trade are as relevant today as they were when the European slave trading
on the continent of Africa came into being. To forget about this vital part of our
history, which continues to shape our world today, is to negate the gallantry of
those brave souls who perished and the strengths of those that survived the
unprecedented brutal trade in humans. One must remember, however, that the
slave trade does not define Africa and Africans, either at home or abroad, and it
is not the beginning of Africa's history. Yet, it must serve as a reminder of the
collective responsibility we have to uphold our human values. The underlying
reasons for slavery, which include capitalism, an inordinate love for material
goods, and an uncontrolled search for profit at all cost, still hold true for the
estimated 27 million people who, according the United Nations, are currently
enduring some form of enslavement in Africa, in Asia, and other parts of the
world. This is the reason why we should learn to not repeat the mistakes of the
past. In sum, knowing what and why the transatlantic slave trade happened is
even more imperative today.
159
1. Discuss the underlying factors for European expansionism in the New
World.
2. Describe the Middle Passage and how it related to the dehumanization of
Africans.
3. Internal African slavery was different from European African slavery. How
so?
4. Discuss how Africa was underdeveloped by slavery.
5. What do you think was the role of the Church in the early European
expansion and the beginnings of the Triangle Slave Trade?
160
References
Mohamed Alpha Bah. “Legitimate Trade, Diplomacy, and the Slave Trade,”
in Mario Azevedo (ed.). Africana Studies: A Survey of Africa and the
African Diaspora. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005, pp. 71–
90.
Lerone Bennett, Jr. Before the Mayflower. Chicago, IL: Johnson Publishing
Co., 1975.
Adu Boahen. “The Coming of the Europeans (c.1440–1700).” The Horizon
History of Africa. New York: McGraw Hill, 1971.
John Henrik Clarke. Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust:
Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism. Buffalo, NY: Eworld INC,
1998.
Basil Davidson. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown,
1961.
J. Derrick. African Slaves Today. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.,
1975.
Paul Lovejoy. The Ideology of Slavery. SAGE Publications, 1981.
Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff. Slavery in Africa: Historical and
Anthropological Perspectives. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1977.
Joseph Miller. Way of Death. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press,
1988.
Nathan Nunn. “Historical Legacies: A Model Linking Africa's Past to Its
Current Underdevelopment.” Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 83,
1 (2007): 157–175.
David Richardson, “Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic
Slave Trade,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 58, 1 (January
2001): 69–92 (“New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade”).
Walter Rodney. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C.:
Howard University Press, 1982.
David E. Stannard. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 11–18.
Ivan Van Sertima. They Came before Columbus. The African Presence in
Ancient America. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 1976.
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5
Diaspora Africans and Slavery

Raymond Gavins &
Marsha J. Tyson Darling1
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Introduction
Pioneer scholar W. E. B. Du Bois gives us a compelling description of the
modern black diaspora. “Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote,
and Milton sung; and through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives
wound to the sea amid the bleaching bones of the dead,” he stated in The Negro
(1915), “for four hundred years the sharks followed the scurrying ships; for
four hundred years America was strewn with the living and dying millions of a
transplanted race; for four hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands
unto God.” This essay will focus primarily on the several centuries of the slave
trade that transported millions of Indigenous Africans across the Atlantic Ocean
to the lands often called the “New World” by European explorers. In fact, the
so-called “New World” was inhabited by Indigenous peoples of color who
lived in the Caribbean and the Americas for millennia prior to contact with
European explorers. Enslavement of Africans did not begin with the Atlantic
slave trade, as a larger and longer in duration slave trade of captured Africans
into the Mediterranean world existed and constituted African enslavement in
the Mediterranean world of Islam in Muslim societies (see John Hunwick and
Eve Troutt Powell).
While this article explores what happened that created an African diaspora
which provided the labor power to fuel the Atlantic economy's emergent
capitalism, the question we will begin with is why was there a sustained
European intrusion into Indigenous peoples' lands and a subsequent devastating
impact on Indigenous peoples and their plant, mineral, and metallurgy
knowledge systems? Why were Indigenous Africans, Amerindians, and First
Nation peoples of the Americas pulled into a centuries-long and downwardly
spiraling vortex of conquest, genocide caused by gross violations of their
human persons, population decimation caused by diseases, enslavement, and
expropriation of the very land on which they had lived for centuries? And, why
do so many of the descendants of Indigenous peoples remain marginalized and
oppressed in the predominantly white settler societies in which they live today?
People have encountered each other for centuries, usually peacefully,
through trading activities, and violently, through warfare. As people have
interacted one with another, those engagements have been often influenced by
powerful ideas that have provoked deeply transformative social changes. Living
within a settler society like the United States, it is easy to overlook that the very
land that we stand on and all of North, Central, and South America, the
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Caribbean in the Western Hemisphere, and Australia and New Zealand have
been taken from other peoples in the name of “discovery.” We speak easily,
and sometimes proudly, of Columbus' discovery of the New World because the
language of “discovery” and the greatness it suggests in creating something for
us to learn about in classrooms leaves little room for alternative understanding.
But, “discovery” has served as erasure or belittlement of Indigenous peoples
and much of their knowledge systems. Indigenous peoples, including the
enslaved Africans, were slaves, “units of production,” chattel who produced the
commodities that made Europeans and Americans invested in slavery wealthy
and powerful.
The Age of Discovery that we have inherited was created by a pervasive
physical domination of Indigenous peoples. Ideas and doctrines dating to the
past five centuries have necessitated and normalized expropriation and
ownership of everything belonging to Indigenous peoples—including their very
persons. The Doctrine of Discovery was created by a series of papal bulls and
by Western European monarchies seeking to explore and lay claim to the
territories occupied by others, and to capture and subdue their persons and
confiscate their possessions. The doctrine, by force of longevity, is now rooted
in international law, and the actions it has shielded have been responsible for
establishing the religious, legal, and physical authority for the transatlantic
slave trade, the assault on and decimation of Indigenous peoples, and the
expropriation of their lands, labor, plants, metals, religious beliefs, and
knowledge production. The Doctrine of Discovery is firmly rooted in the legal
systems of white settler societies, including the American secular legal system.
What is the Doctrine of Discovery? In the fifteenth century, as European
explorers sailed to unfamiliar lands, a series of papal bulls issued by Catholic
popes provided sanction and opened the way for white Christian explorers
financed by Western European rulers to explore, conquer, and subdue, reduce
to slavery, and even vanquish all non-Christians they encountered as they
journeyed to unfamiliar places in search of profitable trade routes and new
sources of wealth. Consequently, the charters that provided authority in a world
ruled by religions, the subsequent body of laws in secularized white settler
nations that furthered and currently maintain continued domination of
Indigenous peoples, and the actual behaviors and social practices of
subordination and enforced dependency of Indigenous peoples have come to be
known in their impact in our world as the Doctrine of Discovery (see Miller,
Ruru, Behrendt, and Lindberg; Maaka and Andersen).
164
The Doctrine of Discovery was formulated first by the Roman Catholic
Church and the monarchs of Portugal and Spain; the monarchs of England, the
Netherlands, France, and others asserted their interests subsequently. The
doctrine was used as the basis of laws governing contacts between Europeans
and non-Europeans, and Christians and non-Christians. The doctrine's embrace
of a mandate to spread European laws, religion, and culture that served as the
foundation for the Doctrine of Discovery dates to the Medieval Period. Pope
Urban II issued the papal bull Terra Nullius, which translated refers to “empty
land.” The Catholic Church in its power as the supreme moral authority in
Europe in an age when it ruled by asserting itself as the representative of God
on Earth gave Terra Nullius to Europe's Christian kings. The edict asserted the
right of Christian monarchies to undertake “discovery” and ownership of non-
Christian lands and everything therein of wealth building value. As non-
Christian peoples dwelled on what the papacy and Christian kings and princes
deemed “empty land,” they too were to be “discovered” and brought under the
authority of the monarchies and the Catholic Church (see Miller, LeSage, and
Escarcena).
The Doctrine of Discovery received renewed papal attention once Portugal
and later when Spain sailed westward into the Atlantic Ocean, landed, and
claimed for themselves the lands that are today called the Canary Islands, the
Azores, Cape Verde, and Madeira. The Doctrine of Discovery and its relevancy
for forcing an Indigenous people to labor for Christian overlords seeking wealth
outside of their home boundaries was foremost when Portugal established
sovereignty over the land and the peoples of the Canary Islands. By the early
fifteenth century, Portugal oversaw the rise of profitable sugar cultivation on
the islands. Continuing the search for riches and trade routes to the East in the
1430s, the Portuguese arrived off the coast of West Africa to begin a trading
center. Having defeated the Moors at Ceuta in North Africa, the Portuguese
began a quest for “discovery” and conquest along the West African coast,
having reached Senegal in 1435, Cape Bojador in 1443, Sierra Leone in 1446,
Guinea in 1455, and the Congo in 1481 (see Williams). Arguably, in 1441, the
Atlantic slave trade began when Portuguese explorer Antao Goncalvez
kidnapped 12 Africans from a market on the Guinea Coast and presented them
as a gift to Prince Henry the “Navigator” in Portugal, noting that there were
many more where those Africans came from. Pope Alexander VI's Bull of
January 1455, Romanus Pontifex, had granted Portugal “exclusive rights” in
West Africa, when in fact the Portuguese had already been planting their flags
along the West African coast for some years prior to receiving the papal bull
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(see Russell-Wood).
On January 8, 1455, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, Pope
Nicholas V issued another papal bull Romanus Pontifex that authorized
Portuguese King Afonso to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue
all Saracens and pagans whatsoever ... to reduce their persons to perpetual
slavery”; and further, to seize all of their property (see Davenport). In 1472, the
Portuguese, who by then had been in the islands off the West African coast and
in places along the African mainland for decades, began slave trading African
peoples in Benin. Anticipating the interests of rival European rulers, by 1481
the Portuguese built the first of the “slave factories” in Elmina on the Guinea
Coast and through aggressively pursuing a greedy trade in African human flesh
jump-started the formation of what became known as the Atlantic World
Economy (see Russell-Wood).
Following Portugal's lead into the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Spanish,
Dutch, English, French, and for a time the Swedish, Danish, and the German
Kingdom of Bradenburg captured and traded African peoples into the
Transatlantic Slave Trade, thereby establishing sites of “discovery” that
suppressed millions of Indigenous peoples. Columbus sailed to the Caribbean,
was greeted by Indigenous peoples and in short order asserted a claim of
discovery and sovereignty over them, claiming the Caribbean islands already
inhabited by Indigenous peoples the lawful possession of the Crown of Spain.
Spain then quickly requested papal approval of Columbus' “discoveries,” and
any future discoveries, and on May 3, 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the
papal bull Inter caetera I, which accorded to Spain exclusive rights to the lands
Columbus had laid claim to in the New World (see Williams; Gibson).
According to scholars of the period, the population of Hispaniola fell from
250,000 persons to 50,000 within the initial 20 years of Spanish colonization;
the decimation was caused by gross violations of the Indians' persons, and by
their lack of immunity to diseases carried by the European conquerors. We
should understand what many scholars have provided hard evidence for,
namely that in the New World the decimation of the Tainos, and other
Caribbean, Central American, and South American Indians, and other
Indigenous peoples constitutes a holocaust (see Miller, Lesage and Escarcena,
836–37; Gibson; Williams; Dunbar-Ortiz; Maaka and Andersen).
The Atlantic Triangular Trade created vast fortunes for those European
monarchs who held slave-trading monopolies, and for those involved
financially in the slave trade, and plantation production of profit-making
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agriculture-based commodities (sugar, tobacco, cotton, coffee, indigo, and to a
lesser extent rice). The slave trade furnished Europe with the capital that fueled
capitalism's growth and wealth generation for white peoples in the West and in
Asia and Australia in the East, the formation of financial institutions to fund the
slave trade, the creation of European colonial empires, and eventually even the
Industrial Revolution. Therefore, in the Atlantic Ocean Economy in the West,
and in the Asian Lands Economy in the East, the European Doctrine of
Discovery amassed a momentum that was unstoppable after the fifteenth
century (see Kupperman; Williams; Lindsay; Wesseling).
The series of edicts codifying Christian European rights over all non-
Christian peoples, the Doctrine of Discovery, its intentions, and the spirit and
letter of its edicts constitutes an ideological tour de force that has undergirded
the legal relationships between many nation states and Indigenous peoples all
over the world for at least the past five centuries. At its root the Doctrine of
Discovery created the Atlantic world economy with its racial slavery and the
expropriation of the metal, mineral, and plant wealth and knowledge production
of Indigenous and Peoples of Color. The Doctrine of Discovery functioned as
Christian religious imperialism in that the doctrine applied only when Christian
nations came into contact with non-Christian peoples; Indigenous peoples could
not travel to areas inhabited by white Christians and claim their lands for
themselves. In sanctioning European discovery and legal ownership of all lands
not owned by other European nations, an assumption prevailed that Indigenous
peoples could not own the land or their persons because they were not
Christians (see Ojibwa).
Elsewhere, the “discovery,” conquest, and subjugation of Indigenous peoples
in the North Atlantic, and the kidnapping, enslavement, and transporting of
Indigenous Africans to the British North Atlantic colonies created empire
building after England, The Netherlands, France, and Spain sent explorers and
then settlers to what was taken from Indigenous peoples and became the United
States and Canada. By that time the Doctrine of Discovery presented a
sustained momentum of its own without relying on religious authorization;
even Russia pressed a discovery and conquest agenda. It is also important to
note that the Protestant Reformation emboldened European Protestant rulers
whose embrace of Protestant Christianity in their actions did not necessitate the
approval of the Catholic Church. In defying the pope's edicts and the wishes of
neighboring European monarchs, Protestant Christian monarchs launched
themselves into the Age of Discovery and embraced the Doctrine of Discovery
as their own mandate. To confiscate Indigenous lands and either massacre or
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drive Indigenous peoples onto reservations, the assault on North Atlantic world
Indigenous peoples by European colonial leaders and later American settlers
was grotesque and sustained (see Pagden, 63–80).
When Thomas Jefferson served as Secretary of State in 1792 he asserted that
the Doctrine of Discovery extended to the new federal republic from its origins
in Great Britain's “discovery” and sovereignty to the United States. Decades
later, several years before pursuing Manifest Destiny by declaring war against
Mexico, the political and judicial leaders of the United States of America wrote
the Doctrine of Discovery into American law in order to deny land rights to
Indigenous peoples. In Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) a landmark, precedent-
setting Supreme Court decision that is still used against Indigenous litigants,
Chief Justice John Marshall writing for a unanimous Court insisted that the
United States should not recognize any land titles obtained from Indigenous
peoples prior to the nation's independence. The Doctrine of Discovery remains
firmly anchored in American secular law at this moment (see Newcomb;
Dunbar-Ortiz; Miller, Ruru, Behrendt, and Lindberg; Maaka and Andersen; and
see, City of Sherrill v Oneida Indian Nation of New York (2005)).
It is important to note that white skinned Europeans began in their
exploration of the lands beyond their borders to meet and assert dominion over
brown, black, and beige peoples in the name of discovery, sovereignty, and
conversion to Catholicism. Prior to the Atlantic slave trade, the concept of
“race” in European intellectual circles embraced an ideal including all of
humanity (despite Europe's long internal history with religious intolerance
towards the Jews, Roma, and Animists who lived within their own borders).
The idea of “race” took on decidedly different interpretations as barbarous
physical subjugation either drove some Indigenous peoples to extinction in the
Caribbean or created a body of slave law that used “race” to distinguish the
characteristics of the enslaved African peoples who were pushed into
intergenerational (perpetual) enslavement in the New World (see Augstein;
Fredrickson; Mills).
Still later, when Protestant Christians entered the slave trade they initially did
so with no regard for religious conversion of the Africans or the Indigenous
peoples they dominated. For instance, where the Catholic Church posited that
the slave had a soul that with baptism belonged to the Catholic Church, the
Protestants who became the dominant slavers in North America argued that the
slave was chattel like an animal and had no soul; consequently, baptism was
irrelevant. It was not until the second half of the seventeenth century that
168
Protestant slaveholders in the North Atlantic British colonies were coerced by
anti-slavery advocates into petitioning the English king to allow the baptism of
enslaved Africans. The king responded allowing the baptism of the enslaved,
while asserting that such acts would not alter their chattel status. Hence, at
exactly the same time as Europeans began claiming greater freedoms for
themselves in their home countries, they instituted exploitative forced work
systems for the Africans they “discovered,” even when they baptized those
persons as Christians (Bernasconi and Lott; Higginbotham).
Major terms and concepts: African diaspora, Doctrine of Discovery,
Amerindians, indenture, “Slave Laws,” “Black Codes,” Maroon colony, “salt
water” slaves, “Seasoning,” Manumission, “money crops,” proslavery clauses,
slave resistance, Haitian Revolution, Cotton Kingdom, “task system,” “Black
Belt,” “peculiar institution,” First Emancipation, slave compensation, extended
family, Africanisms, “invisible institution,” Abolitionist Movement,
Underground Railroad, general emancipation.
169
In 1492, a half-century after the Portuguese began trading enslaved Africans
into nations of the Mediterranean basin, Christopher Columbus claimed
“discovery” of the Caribbean for Spain. In 1500, Pedro Alvares Cabral claimed
Brazil for Portugal. Spanish explorer Juan de Ponce de León landed on the
coast of North America in 1513, while Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the
Isthmus of Panama and reached the Pacific Ocean. By 1519, Hernán Cortés had
disembarked in Mexico with an army that through arms and the spread of
diseases unfamiliar to the indigenous population overran the Aztec Empire.
These events linked Africa, Europe, and the New World; areas of the
Caribbean; and North and South America, with the approximately 12.5 million
captive Africans taken from Africa, 10.8 million of whom escaped death and
survived the Middle Passage from 1441 to 1888. Death claimed many lives
during the Middle Passage. Death rates were astronomical on slave ships until
1750, owing to malaria, yellow fever, measles, smallpox, hookworm, scurvy,
and dysentery; at least one-third of all Africans taken from west coast of Africa
perished during the Middle Passage (see Sowande M. Mustakeem). Captive
Africans were taken from eight regions today identified as Senegambia, Sierra
Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Republic of Benin, southwestern
Nigeria, southeastern Nigeria, Cameroon, West Central Africa, and Southeast
Africa.
The destinations of African captives: 43% were taken to Brazil, another 44%
of the enslaved were taken to the English, French, and Spanish colonies in the
Caribbean to cultivate sugar and coffee, 7% of captives were taken to the
mainland South American colonies, only 4% lived their lives in the British
North Atlantic colonies, and 2% of captives remained in Africa. Further
numerical data reveals the following specific data on the destinations of
enslaved Africans: British North America—500,000; Spanish Caribbean, North
and South America—2,500,000; British Caribbean—2,000,000; French
Caribbean—1,600,000; Dutch Caribbean—500,000; Danish Caribbean—
28,000; Portuguese Brazil—4,000,000; and Old World (Europe)—200,000 (see
Lisa A. Lindsay).
The monarchs of many Western European nations participated in the slave
trade, specifically Portugal, Spain, England, France, the Netherlands, Denmark,
and Germany. Royal families recruited other elites and established “chartered”
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companies (early corporations) that promised a monopoly of profits related to
the company's slave trading activities. The stock issuing financial ventures
established to dominate the slave trade by Western nations were named The
Royal African Company; The Royal French Guinea Company; Company of
Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa; The Dutch West Indies Company; The
Danish West Indies Company; The French West Indies Company; The Senegal
Company; The Swedish African Company; The Havana Company; The
Virginia Company; The Hudson Bay Company; The Guinea Company; Casa
dos Escravos (Lisbon); The German Kingdom of Bradenburg; and The South
Seas Company.
Building on Africans' forced migration and bondage in the Western
Hemisphere, this chapter discusses the evolution, nature, and destruction of
slavery in the North Atlantic colonies that became the United States.
Racial slavery spread with the white conquest of the New World, where
mining and labor-intensive cash crop agriculture required a massive
exploitation of laborers. The biggest portion of exploited labor came from the
conquered Aztecs, Incas, and other Indigenous Peoples (Amerindians) who fell
to European firearms. During the first century of white-red contact, Indigenous
peoples were also decimated (from a population of 100,000,000 to 10,000,000)
by white-borne diseases like malaria, measles, and smallpox. They slaved in the
gold and silver mines of South America, while often attacking their captors and
escaping in familiar terrain. As the Amerindians perished in lowland and
coastal areas, the conquerors brought white “indentured servants” and black
slaves to replace them. Servants earned their transportation by a contract of
indenture to labor for a term of several years, routinely seven. By 1650, some
849,000 whites (Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, and Dutch), compared
to 384,000 captive blacks, inhabited the Americas. Better wages in England and
Europe, however, reduced supplies of cheap servant workers so white colonists
imported more and more captives from Africa, swelling the enslaved
population.
Colonists emphasized the advantages of doing so. For example, blacks could
be held in perpetuity. Runaways, because of their black skin, would be
recognizable among whites. Blacks were considered cannibals and “pagans”
(worshipers of ancestors or tribal gods). The rules of Christian conduct did not
include such “heathens.” Presumed mentally inferior but physically superior,
Africans could be disciplined harshly, and the brutal treatment meted out to
Amerindians and enslaved Africans went largely unreported on back in
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European social circles. Furthermore, white colonists began to invent myths
and stereotypes about the captive Africans in their midst; African populations
were believed to be immune to tropical diseases, tolerant of inclement weather,
and inexhaustible. When African death rates soared in the Caribbean, whites
ignored the reality that many Africans were being worked to death by the
demands placed on their life force; this was particularly the case in areas where
whites drove the enslaved hard to maximize profits from sugar cultivation (see
Williams).
Slavery anchored merchant capitalism; it's labor intensive manpower fueled
the colonies' economies. Sugar cane was the major crop of the Portuguese in
Brazil. Regions of Bahia and Pernambuco in the north and Rio de Janeiro in the
south produced the bulk of it. By the 1580s, Brazil was the chief sugar producer
and in turn made the 1600s “the century of sugar.” Tobacco and sugar cane
were cultivated in the British Caribbean (Barbados, Jamaica), as were coffee
and cotton. Such crops necessitated strong backs and hands and Atlantic slavers
supplied them, preferring to capture African males more so than females. The
enslaved were abused and severely overworked. The historian Basil Davidson
quotes a British eyewitness in the Dutch West Indian colony of Suriname
whose comment applied to other places as well. “Plantation mortality was so
high, he found, that the ‘whole race of healthy slaves, consisting of 50,000, are
totally extinct once every twenty years.’” Few slave owners cared as long as
they made money. Profit had become their sine qua non. The slave trade
escalated and the physical deprivations that the enslaved endured intensified as
the European appetite for sugar and tobacco exploded and commodity prices
for those items soared.
Even as it framed cultural exchanges between Europeans, Indians, and
Africans, slavery was dehumanizing. Interracial sexual contacts generated
groups of mestizos (European-Indian), mulattoes (European-African), and
mustees (African-Indian) in all areas of the hemisphere. In the Spanish and
Portuguese domains, the Catholic Church sought “to mitigate the evils of
slavery” by teaching the humanity of the slave. But slaves faced harsh
conditions—frequent flogging, unhealthy clothing, poor diet, and insufficient
housing. Bondwomen were exposed to rape and, despite the hardships of
childbirth and mothering, labored with men in the fields. In many colonies the
blacks outnumbered whites. “Black Codes,” such as the French Code Noir of
1685, were intended to restrict slaves' mobility (by requiring passes), to crush
rebelliousness (by hanging insurgents), establish intergenerational slavery (a
black or mulatto child born to an enslaved woman followed the status of its
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mother regardless of whether the father was also enslaved or a white man), and
to enforce white supremacy (by forbidding assaulting, disobeying whites) (see
Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg). Indeed, as time passed, by the nineteenth
century white colonists established an internal slave trade in a number of
countries in the Americas (see Johnson, 2004).
Many of those enslaved accommodated under threat of physical violence or
food deprivation, but records show that many resisted. White laws revealed
persistent angst about rebellious slaves, usually males (females were unwilling
to leave their children behind) who ran away intermittently. Some instigated
bloody insurrections that took white lives and instilled fear. In 1620, Santo
Domingo fugitives created a Maroon colony (refuge for enslaved rebels) and
started three uprisings. When the British captured Jamaica from the Spanish in
1655, numerous enslaved blacks fled to the mountains. Once there, they
repeatedly attacked or robbed plantations and retreated to their mountain
refuges. Also, we have evidence that there were 493 known slave revolts on
Atlantic slave ships destined for the New World—contrary to the carefully
crafted myth of the docile slave invented by whites who supported slavery (see
Eltis).
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Resistance and Rebellion: A Recurring Response to
Oppression
Major Caribbean Slave Revolts:
1700–75; Maroon Wars, Jamaica
1795–96
1735–36 Tackey's revolt, Antigua & Barbuda
1760 Tackey's revolt, Jamaica
1791–1804 St. Domingue/Haiti Revolution and wars (the enslaved destroyed
the invading armies of France, Spain, and Britain)
1795–97 Fedon's rebellion, Grenada
1816 Bussa's rebellion, Barbados
1823 Demerara revolt, Demerara
1831–32 Baptist war, Jamaica
Major North American Slave Revolts:
1626 Bacon's Rebellion, Virginia
1712 Slave plot, New York City
1739 Stono Rebellion, South Carolina
1795/1811 Pointe Coupee slave rebellions
1800 Gabriel Prosser's revolt, Virginia
1822 Denmark Vesey's insurrection plot, South Carolina
1831 Nat Turner's revolt, Virginia
Slavery's development in the Caribbean islands greatly shaped North
American slavery. Both systems fed raw materials, commodities, and capital
into Britain's manufactures. The bulk of the enslaved transported to the thirteen
seaboard colonies controlled by the king of England originated in the
Caribbean, which provided the first ports of call for slave ships and received a
third of North America's agricultural produce until 1815. On island plantations
the new or “saltwater” enslaved underwent “Seasoning,” which happened in
two ways: by placing newcomers with enslaved veterans to learn work routines,
and by a “breaking in” regimen. “Breaking in” involved overwork, torture, and
sometimes death. Bondsmen and women succumbed to whipping and disease
as well. Many were killed fleeing their tormentors and the white patrollers who
were hired by slaveholders to scour the countryside looking for runaway
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captives.
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Black bondage in the British colonies that became the United States spanned
two and a half centuries, far more than the 153 years since the Thirteenth
Amendment to the US Constitution decreed freedom from slavery. Slavery
evolved in the colonial period, continued during the American Revolution,
expanded throughout the South following the invention of the cotton gin, and
became the single largest contributor to the nation's Gross National Product
(GNP) between 1830 and 1860. More than any other activity yielding profit, by
the first third of the nineteenth century, the enslaved and the commodities they
produced—especially cotton—were the most valuable contributors to wealth
building in the nation (see Johnson 2013). In The Half Has Never Been Told,
Edward E. Baptist argues that slavery created a veritable empire in America:
“From the 1790s to the 1860s, enslavers moved 1 million people from the old
slave states to the new. They went from making no cotton to speak of in 1790
to making almost 2 billion pounds of it in 1860. Enslaved African Americans
built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways
both obvious and hidden” (p. xxiii).
Long before the British settled at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, Africans
came to North America. In 1526, about 400 Spaniards with 100 slaves arrived
on the coast of the Cape Fear River. But their settlement failed due to famine,
internal strife, and a slave uprising. Survivors decamped for Santo Domingo,
even as the rebel slaves fled among the Amerindians. Enslaved Africans
serviced subsequent Spanish expeditions, helping to settle St. Augustine,
Florida, in 1565. In 1584, the British planted a colony at Roanoke Island, but in
1591 rescuers found the site deserted. Sir Francis Drake's fleet, carrying 300
Amerindian and 200 African prisoners, rescued settlers around 1588, but during
that rescue the Amerindians and Africans escaped.
Succeeding generations of Africans would not escape as readily. In 1619,
two white Virginians, Governor George Yeardley and Abraham Pierson, a
merchant, purchased all twenty captive Africans held onboard the White Lion, a
ship that docked in Jamestown in exchange for corn and supplies. According to
records, once among the white colonists, the Africans (seventeen men and three
women) worked as servants on the large plantations that both men owned. At
that time Jamestown was one of the few colonies that had not legalized slavery,
as the plantation owners worked the blacks like servants. Indentured whites
customarily got freedom dues (clothes, and a few acres of land) after
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completing their work terms. White servants were also able to assimilate and
prosper, but this pattern began to elude the “black indentured servants.”
Deemed different in ways that suggest the emergence of racist thinking,
beginning in 1639 blacks were forbidden to possess firearms.
Virginia's pioneer Africans and their posterity thus had a bleak future. There
were only 23 of them among 2,000 whites in 1623, as June Purcell Guild
explains. The black population grew not only by births, but also by the
importation of captured Africans, totaling 300 in 1649. Before the middle of the
seventeenth century racism emerged; black servants in Virginia were
considered subhuman, and they met with harsher discipline and served longer
indentures. White prejudice targeted them, as was the case in 1640 when a
judge rendered a decision regarding John Punch. John Punch, a black man, ran
away with two white men from their indentured service on a plantation in
Virginia. The trio were captured and returned to stand before a judge who
ordered all three men flogged. Further punishment by the judge required the
two white men to serve some additional time, but they were to be released once
their work obligations were fulfilled. But, when the judge directed his attention
to the additional punishment for John Punch, he ordered him to serve the
plantation owner for the remainder of his “natural life,” with no opportunity
ever for freedom. Clearly, by 1640 John Punch's “race” determined the legal
treatment he received. Scholars note this point as evidence of the different and
unequal treatment—the emergence of racism and the condition of lifelong
servitude for blacks in Virginia (see Higginbotham).
Statuses of “negroe” and “slave” soon overlapped, even while Anglicans had
begun to evangelize blacks. In 1641, Boston colony authorized slavery in the
Bill of Liberties. But, white plantation slaveholders who appointed themselves
as the Virginia House of Burgess led the way by creating a body of “slave law”
that served as the template for other colonies. In a matter of a few decades,
colonial slave law established several important objectives: the enslaved were
to be branded as the chattel property; the children of enslaved women were
never to be free, regardless of paternity; slavery was to be intergenerational as
the status of slave passed through one's mother; slaveholders were to exercise
“absolute authority”—the power to maim or kill without penalty or prosecution;
baptism was never to alter the status of “slave”; and, slave codes and runaway
slave laws were to be strictly enforced (see Higginbotham).
In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process, federal judge
and legal scholar A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. located the legislative statutes by
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which colonial slaveholders crafted a “racial” slave society. In 1662, Virginia
ruled “that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only
according to the condition of the mother.” Freedom was denied to Christianized
blacks in 1667: “It is enacted and declared by this grand assembly, and the
authority thereof, that the conferring of baptism doth not alter the condition of
the person as to his bondage or freedom.” Blacks comprised 2,000 taxables or
five percent of inhabitants in 1671. Both in 1670 and 1682, the legislature
authorized that “all persons of non-Christian nationalities thereafter coming
into the colony, whether they came by sea or land and whether or not they had
been converted to Christianity after capture ... were slaves for life.” Maryland
passed a similar statute in 1663.
North America was a closed society. Some revisionist historians argue, as
does Gary B. Nash, “that slavery in Spanish and Portuguese America was never
as harsh as in Anglo-America nor were the doors to eventual freedom so tightly
closed.” Revisionists contend that Africans had religious protections and
frequently commingled with whites in Brazil and Cuba. The enslaved could
achieve manumission (liberation from slavery) in Venezuela, form autonomous
enclaves, and become valued members of the larger society. The enslaved in
British America, by contrast, “lost all of their rights” and were “treated as mere
chattel property.” Britons disdained slave manumissions, enacted anti-
miscegenation statutes, insisted on intergenerational enslavement through black
women's wombs, and despised the free black caste, so argues Ibram X. Kendi
in his magnificent volume Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History
of Racist Ideas.
The number of blacks in North America increased steadily in the 1600s.
Slavery advanced through Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, into
New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New England—covering
a broad landscape. By the century's end, there were nearly 25,000 enslaved
Africans and Creole American-born blacks, largely male and perhaps a tenth of
all colonists. Southern regions domiciled the largest proportion of the enslaved.
Large plantations dotted the Chesapeake, Tidewater, and Low Country.
Producing “money crops,” the enslaved worked on satellite farms or quarters in
squads (tobacco) and by assigned tasks (rice, indigo). Owing to a warmer
climate and willful neglect, masters' maintenance expenses were minimal.
Fewer of the enslaved were used in the middle colonies of New York, New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Their farms were usually small, except in
plantation locations along the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. Northerners
utilized comparatively few of the enslaved in their region's business and
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commerce. Enslaved blacks were least numerous in New England, where
family farming prevailed. In 1700, New Englanders held fewer than 1,000
enslaved blacks, many of them in households of well-to-do merchants.
The black presence grew steadily in the eighteenth century. The greatest
numbers of Africans arrived between 1721 and 1780, when a decreasing male-
female imbalance permitted them to build families and become self-
reproducing. In 1708, Virginia counted 12,000 black slaves and added over
1,000 a year thereafter. In 1743, the colony recorded 42,000 captive blacks; by
1756 it reported 120,000. The population was almost evenly divided between
blacks and whites in 1775. South Carolina's white and black races were
numerically even in 1708. Yet, by 1765, South Carolina tabulated 40,000
whites and 90,000 blacks. The black majority endured brutal repression.
Bondage fueled the Atlantic slave trade still further. Between 1715 and 1750,
some 2,500 enslaved Africans were imported annually. The annual importation
of captives averaged 7,500 in the 1760s. Economic expansion was clearly
wedded to this trafficking, as the profits generated by unpaid slave labor served
to create a slaveholding aristocracy whose wealth rivaled that of European
elites. The trafficking in African flesh persisted in spite of the Declaration of
Independence, which, capturing the spirit of the Enlightenment Movement,
defined liberty as an “inalienable” human borderlands by the late 1780s (see
Allen). As a matter of fact, the 1787 United States Constitution supported black
enslavement in five sections of the document: Article 1, Section 2; Article 1,
Section 8; Article 1, Section 9; Article IV, Section 2; and, Article IV, Section 4.
Among the pro-slavery issues that the noted paragraphs addressed were: that
the new republic's Constitution shielded the slave trade from intrusion until
1808, sheltered black enslavement via the three-fifths compromise (affirmative
action for the master class) that used black men bodies to establish white
political representation in Congress, provided for apprehending slave runaways,
and collected slave importation taxes to provide funding for the federal
government's role in suppressing slave insurrections (see Wiecek; Goldstone).
The engine fueling slavery in the United States was the Industrial
Revolution, especially its cotton market, which created the Empire of Cotton
(see Johnson). Demand by overseas and New England textile industries, plus
the invention of the cotton gin in 1792, made the South cotton's leading
supplier. This quickened slavery, despite soil exhaustion in parts of Maryland
and Virginia, as it crisscrossed the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and ushered in
the Cotton Kingdom. It spurred the removal of probably 1.5 million enslaved
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blacks from the Upper South to the Lower South by 1850. Consequently,
despite the 1808 federal ban on the foreign slave trade, illegal importing and
domestic trading of slaves escalated. Even though most northern states
outlawed slavery or chose to gradually emancipate enslaved blacks, many
northern merchants, banks, insurance companies, and mill owners were deeply
immersed and complicit in American slavery (see Farrow, Lang, and Frank).
Domestic traders clustered in Maryland and Virginia (sites of a slave
surplus). After 1815, firms in Baltimore, Alexandria, and Richmond sold the
enslaved at prices ranging from $350 in Virginia to over $500 in Louisiana.
Prices averaged $1,000 in Virginia and $1,500 in Louisiana by 1860. Local
newspapers advertised slave auctions, escapes, and arrests. Auction blocks,
jails, pens, and coffles were universal sights. Some traffickers profited by hiring
out or renting blacks. Others specialized in transport by coffle, flatboat, or
wagon. Belying the stereotype of their docility, many of the enslaved wore
neck, hand, or foot irons lest they should abscond. Chastised and flogged for
disobedience, they were sometimes maimed for resisting separation especially
from kin.
Planters abetted “slave breeding.” Some Virginians did so to offset losses
from exhausted soil and falling prices. Thomas R. Dew, professor of moral
philosophy at William and Mary College, described Virginia in 1832 as “a
negro raising state.” Between 1830 and 1860, it sold “nearly three hundred
thousand [slaves]—almost the whole of her natural increase” (see Kenneth M.
Stampp). One planter told northern visitor Frederick Law Olmsted that his
bondwomen were “uncommonly good breeders,” their babies being “worth two
hundred dollars” the moment they “drew breath.” Coaxed by rewards like extra
rations and habitually raped, many enslaved black females “became mothers at
thirteen and fourteen years of age,” and many birthed more than ten children.
Every infant a black woman birthed was enslaved and saved the slaveholder the
expense of purchasing another black person. Enslaved women worked as
reproducers and field workers, a double duty labor requirement, that often took
a toll on their health and nursing ability; infant mortality in the slave quarters
was very high.
The enslaved shouldered the Southern economy, making Southern
slaveholders among the fifth richest group of men in the world. The enslaved
population increased from about 700,000 in 1790 to 3.2 million in 1850 and
reached 4 million by 1860. In 1850, approximately 500,000 of the enslaved
resided in towns and cities. Over 2 million were cotton cultivators. Others of
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the enslaved cultivated corn, tobacco, rice, and sugar cane. Usually, whip-
wielding white overseers and black drivers watched cotton and sugar cane
cultivation worker “gangs.” The average slave toiled from daybreak until dark,
typically on a farm. Rice producers adhered to a “task system.” It set the slave's
daily work (so many rows to hoe or drain) and rewarded its completion. To wit,
an enslaved man or woman could finish their task by midday, then leave the
field to tend their garden plot or pursue other self-help activities that did not
violate the slaveholders' rules. Besides shouldering the burdens of fieldwork,
the enslaved did a plethora of manual jobs and services. They worked in heavy
industries—timber and construction; gold, coal, salt, iron, and lead mines; iron
furnaces and tobacco factories; cotton presses and sawmills; road, railroad, and
shipbuilding. Enslaved men also performed skilled crafts like blacksmithing
and carpentry, and some black women made quilts.
A white minority dominated slaveholding, traditionally in the South's “Black
Belt.” Known for its black soil, cotton, and black-majority counties, this vast
region swept through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama,
Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. One tenth of the
region's white families owned enslaved blacks. Of all slave-owning whites,
some 10,000 owned 50 or more slaves per family; 3,000 possessed 100 or more
slaves per family. About three-fourths of whites had no familial or ownership
ties to slavery. The “typical” white Southerner was a yeoman farmer and a non-
slaveholder, but white skin accorded him significant social and psychic
benefits. He may have been poor, barely better off materially than the members
of the small free black caste that lived in his state, but he was white.
Slavery functioned principally: (1) to maintain a forced labor arrangement,
using coercion and terror; (2) to perpetuate a caste structure of masters, non-
slaveholders, slaves, and free blacks; and (3) to regulate race and class
relations, using racist ideology to justify black subordination and white
deference. Free blacks were allowed to own slaves and many did so to ransom
or protect kinfolk. However, some elite free blacks (a minuscule number) did so
for profit (see Kende).
White masters routinely maltreated slaves. For example, by isolating the
house slave from the field hand, the master attempted to weaken slaves'
solidarity. While the master's informant against field hands normally was a
loyal domestic slave, they did not give scores of plots away, even as they were
surely aware of the conspiracies. The enslaved suffered extreme privation, yet
they shared resources to subsist. They also invented strategies to mask their
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feelings, survive, and fight back. Their quarters consisted of a single or double
row of cabins near the overseer's house. Ordinarily, a slave cabin was drafty,
unfurnished, and overcrowded. Field hands regularly went barefooted and
ragged, even in the winter. The enslaved received weekly rations of hominy and
cornmeal, sometimes with fatback bacon or salt pork. So they hunted, fished,
and tended small gardens to provide supplemental food.
Legally, the slave was a chattel. The enslaved could not be parties in
lawsuits, except indirectly when a free person sued on their behalf. They could
offer testimony in court only against other blacks. The enslaved were forbidden
to enter agreements for exchanging goods and services. Nor could they own
property by law. Their marriages had no legal standing. But laws safeguarded
the master's interests. For instance, states assessed severe penalties for theft or
arson by the enslaved. When a slave was executed for a capital crime, states
ordinarily paid the owner a slave compensation amount from tax revenues.
Owners decided if and when to hire out or sell the enslaved. Used as collateral
for loans, the enslaved could be taken by creditors instead of cash payments.
Slave families often would be severed and sold to liquidate a master's estate.
Southern planters dreaded the idea of black freedom. During the First
Emancipation in the North (1780–1846), they decided to outlaw manumission.
Lower South states such as Alabama and Georgia outlawed it in the early
1800s, declaring freedmen to be a menace to those who were enslaved. The
border state of Maryland avoided such a declaration but insisted that
manumitted blacks must not become public charges when they were old or sick.
In the Upper South, both Virginia and North Carolina mandated that
manumitted blacks leave these states or be re-enslaved. Owners could still
manumit slaves and relocate them to a free state by will, but this code was
repealed in the 1840s and 1850s. Violators risked prosecution and expulsion.
The enslaved comprised an oppressed lot. They were imprisoned on
plantations, unless given permission to leave. Any white person could arrest a
slave, particularly one traveling without a pass or “freedom papers.” Forging
papers and possessing a firearm were felonies. Nor could the enslaved visit
whites and free blacks or receive them as visitors. It was unlawful to teach the
enslaved to read and write. They were never to strike whites, an offense
punished by lashing or worse. Humane masters let the enslaved worship on
their own, travel, trade, hunt with guns, or hire out. Some even allowed the
enslaved to learn and to live autonomously. These benevolent acts were limited
and overwhelmed by rampant inhumanity.
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Armed force and slavery reigned side by side. Every county maintained a
patrol to prevent the enslaved from congregating, arming, or revolting. All adult
white males had to serve. The patrols as a rule depended on the poorer whites,
which resented wealthy masters and their slaves. States did not regulate
plantations or convict masters for abusing slaves, who were, said the Chief
Justice of the US Supreme Court in 1857, “so far inferior that they had no rights
that the white man was bound to respect” (see Henry Steele Commager).
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Culturally, enslaved blacks bridged two worlds. Torn from their motherland,
called by the poet Countee Cullen “women from whose loins I sprang when the
birds of Eden sang,” they became strangers in America. Cullen saw himself as
“one three centuries removed from the scenes his fathers loved.” The enslaved
were mainly of West African origin in the Gold Coast, Bight of Biafra, and
Congo-Angola subregions. Yoruba, Akan, and Bokongo were among the
largest of their many tribes or ethnic groups. Africans and Creoles (American-
born slaves) invented ways to communicate, cooperate, and resist. They braved
oppression by methods that varied from accommodation and conformity to
defiance and insurgence. Their resilience under adversity is hard to imagine
today.
Slaves were complex, “a troublesome property.” Supposedly childlike and
obedient, they resorted to running away, malingering, sabotage, theft,
poisoning, arson, and fighting. They endured and opposed domination,
indirectly and directly. Facing brutal subjugation, the mass of bondmen and
women took “the middle ground, in which conformity is often a self-conscious
strategy and resistance is a carefully hedged affair that avoids all-or-nothing
confrontations” (see James C. Scott). Many masters insisted that slaves were
contented. But we must ask: why was slave society an armed camp? Why codes
and compensations? Why overreact to rumors of insurrection? Why suppress
freedom of thought? What an ex-slave termed “yearnings to be free” frightened
and provoked slaveholders.
Africans so yearned for freedom during their captivity. In Africa, mostly the
war prisoners of better-armed tribes, they were traded to European traders.
Captives chanted songs expressing their sadness and suffering. They also
committed suicide, fought openly, or otherwise rebelled. Their blood streaked
the caravan routes from the interior to the coast. Rebellions broke out in
holding pens or barracoons, in the dungeons of slave forts, at loading docks,
and aboard ships on the Gambia River and Atlantic Ocean. Their transatlantic
“middle passage” lasted three to four months, with 25–40% of slaves dying
from illnesses, mutinies, and suicides. Survivors clung to native customs or
Africanisms, like naming children by the days of the week to remember time
and place. Affirming themselves, the enslaved rebelled in Columbia (1550) and
Brazil (1630).
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The enslaved in North America drew on that African heritage for affirmation.
African “feasts and burials” were common. After watching a slave funeral in
colonial Virginia, one Briton observed: “They sing and dance and drink to the
dead his new home, which some believe to be in old Guinea” (see June Purcell
Guild). At this solemn ritual they could share memories of home, plan to flee
and hide among the Amerindians, or conspire to revolt. In any case, black
gatherings troubled whites. As early as 1644, the Virginia assembly passed a
resolution “concerning the riotous and rebellious conduct ... of Negroes.” It
resolved in 1680 “the frequent meeting of considerable numbers of negro slaves
under pretense of feasts and burials is judged of dangerous consequence.”
Freed blacks, meantime, aspired to get ahead. On Virginia's Eastern Shore,
some prospered as artisans, buying tracts of farmland and servants of both
races. They were parties in contracts and lawsuits. Anthony Johnson owned 250
acres and therewith was qualified to vote. Manumitted around 1635, Johnson
then acquired land and livestock in Northampton County. As his herds
multiplied, he bought a dozen black and white laborers. His home and
plantation burned in 1653, but he petitioned the court for tax relief. Granting it,
the justices excused Johnson's wife and two daughters “from paying ‘Taxes and
Charges in Northhampton County’ ... for ‘their natural lives’” (see T. H. Breen
and Stephen Innes). Other free black landowners included Benjamin Doyle, 300
acres in Surry County; John Harris, 50 acres in New Kent County; and Phillip
Morgan, 20 acres in York County.
Bondpeople persevered. They forged an Afro-American “slave culture”
grounded in an extended family. Parents, children, grandparents, other blood
relatives, and fictive kinpeople formed help and nurturing networks (see
Herbert G. Gutman). They hid their aspirations from whites. In candle-lit cabins
Africans and Creoles agreed, disagreed, negotiated, and conspired to be free.
They partnered in the fields, creating pidgin languages not understood by
slaveholders. Slave communities gave them sanctuary from auctions and toil, a
space in which to socialize. They chose leaders, practiced mutual aid, and
taught job skills and coping strategies to their children. Through oral traditions
(African trickster tales), folklore narratives, and work songs, they instilled
values of pride, sharing, and solidarity (see Lawrence W. Levine).
Christianity was a vital source of black aspiration and inspiration. Hundreds
of the enslaved converted during the southern sweep of the “Second Great
Awakening,” a massive revival begun in the 1790s. Methodists and Baptists,
who welcomed poor folk, attracted large numbers of slave converts. Enslaved
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blacks made Christian faith and worship their “invisible institution.” They
worshiped at “hush harbors,” secluded clearings in gullies, ravines, or woods.
In towns they congregated in church houses. Revivals and Sunday services
were “occasions for socializing, news gathering, and picnicking as well as for
prayer” (see Albert J. Raboteau). Black exhorters and preachers told the faithful
about the gospel of liberty. Worship featured testifying, ring shouts, and
spirituals. The spiritual “O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of
Canaan” meant not only deliverance in heaven but also freedom on Earth.
Learning, too, was a stepping stone to liberation. The bondman and woman
who could read and write were shining lights in the community. His master's
wife taught the young Maryland slave Frederick Douglass. “The argument
which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire
me with a desire and determination to learn,” Douglass recalled later. “In
learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as
to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both” (see
Michael Meyer). Masters impeded attempts to educate blacks but knew that
training could make them more profitable. Scores of bondmen were trained in
skilled crafts and industries, including metallurgy and woodworking that their
forebears brought from Africa. Such skills diversified slaves' labor (many were
hired out) and nurtured their autonomy.
Christian missions promoted slave literacy and salvation. In 1620, the
English clergy pledged to ameliorate the plight of those “in bondage beyond the
seas.” This ministry was intact a century later when Thomas Bray founded the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. An arm of the
Anglican Church, the society raised funds, trained teachers, and opened schools
for Amerindians, the enslaved, and free blacks in Charleston, Savannah, and
parts of Georgia. Quakers embraced and energized this cause. Between 1764
and 1785, they launched a Virginia mission school and trusteeship to train
blacks for manumission. Presbyterians took similar steps. They sponsored John
Chavis, a free black Revolutionary War veteran, at Princeton Seminary in the
1790s. Chavis rose to be a prominent minister and schoolmaster to whites and
free blacks in North Carolina until 1831, when the state's slave code silenced
black preachers.
Literacy and slavery were incompatible, of course. Education was denied to
enslaved Africans and Creoles because it could inspire freedom. The educated
slave contradicted masters' caricatures of a dissembling “Sambo” or “Mammy.”
Harriet Ann Jacobs, an enslaved literate North Carolina woman, personified the
186
contradiction. Taught to read and sew by her mistress, she defied a licentious
master by hiding from him for seven years before fleeing to the North. Her
narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861),
showed black ideals of dignity and self-determination. Still, authorities
suppressed dissident slaves, for whom there was no mercy. Rape and murder of
whites, arson, and conspiracy were punished by execution. From 1705 to 1865,
Virginia sentenced thousands of the enslaved to whippings or other corporal
punishment, deported at least 983, and put 1,237 to death (see Philip J.
Schwarz). Owners of executed slaves were compensated.
Slaves authored an enduring tradition of struggle. Generations sang “O
Freedom, O Freedom over me; and before I'll be a slave I'll be buried in my
grave and go home to my Lord and be free.” In 1712, New York City
authorities burned thirteen at the stake, hanged eighteen, and deported eighty
enslaved blacks for torching buildings and killing nine whites. Fear prompted
the assembly to impose a heavy tax on slave imports. Elsewhere, in South
Carolina bondmen killed three whites in 1720. In 1730, a bondman revealed his
brethren's plot to capture Charleston. Under pretense of holding a “dancing
bout” in St. Paul's Parish, blacks gathered together, ready to seize arms, but the
militia defended the armory. Most of the rebels were killed and a few escaped.
The Stono Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina incited white panic across the
South. Led by African-born Jemmy, about twenty enslaved black men marched
toward Spanish Florida, beating drums, burning houses, killing white people,
and adding recruits. While they camped, a white posse ambushed and killed
most of them.
The “inalienable rights” of the American Revolution forecast gradual
emancipation in the North amidst widening slave unrest in the South. Many of
the enslaved ran to the British lines as Lord Dunmore's Proclamation promised
freedom to them. Patriot masters manumitted many of the enslaved. Probably
100,000 slaves of British Loyalists and American Patriots were freed by flight,
manumission, and evacuation with the British Army at the war's end. Others
bolted into Canada or to Florida among the Amerindians. Those blacks were
inspired who learned of the slave rebellion in the French colony of St.
Domingue. Also known as the Haitian Revolution, it began in 1791. Headed by
Toussaint L'Ouverture, the enslaved rose up against the whites and won their
freedom in 1793 and independence by1804. Numerous slaveholders embarked
for Cuba, New Orleans, Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore. France
abandoned military plans to reclaim St. Domingue (renamed Haiti) and
consented to a US purchase of Louisiana. The advent of an independent black
187
republic, “the child of a revolt, had an emboldening effect on the slaves in the
United States” (see Benjamin Quarles).
Major slave conspiracies in the United States developed under the leadership
of Gabriel Prosser in Richmond (1800), Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South
Carolina (1822), and Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia (1831).
Gabriel's conspiracy morphed on the plantation of Thomas Prosser, a few miles
from town. Emulating the rebels on St. Domingue, he and 110 bondmen made a
vow to fight for liberty or death. They planned to capture the armory and
strategic buildings, believing that 50,000 slaves would join the battle. But one
slave told his master; a fierce storm arose on the target date and the federal
cavalry decimated them. After speedy trials, Gabriel and three dozen of his
brethren died on the gallows. Vesey purchased his freedom in 1800 with
winnings from a lottery. An exhorter in the local African Methodist Episcopal
(AME) Church, he had been to St. Domingue and, like Toussaint, wanted to
liberate his people. Accordingly, he set a judgment day against slaveholders.
Insurgents planned to take over and torch Charleston. Then, after seizing all
ships, they would sail to the West Indies. But a spy disclosed the plot and
caused a bloody backlash. Authorities hanged Vesey alongside thirty-four
others and deported thirty-seven to slavery in the Caribbean, which was known
to be harsher. Laws were enacted to ban free blacks from entering the state, to
close Charleston's AME Church, to silence black preachers, and to prohibit
slave importation. Turner's insurrection happened within seventy miles of
Richmond and incited widespread fear. A mystic and lay preacher, he exerted
great influence over his peers. So, on a divinely appointed night, he and his
followers invaded plantations, killing sixty whites before militias retaliated.
Militias killed more than a hundred blacks. Turner, thirteen enslaved men, and
three black freemen were tried and hanged.
Resistance escalated. The enslaved purchased and stole freedom. Using
earnings from hiring out, a craft, or vending, many paid their owners' asking
price. North Carolina slaves Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley and Lunsford Lane
liberated themselves and family members by “bill of sale.” Frederick Douglass,
Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Tubman escaped, like 100,000 others between 1810
and 1850. Some of the enslaved fled slavery on their own, but most received
help from black and white conductors and stations on the fabled Underground
Railroad. Perhaps 40,000 fugitives traveled through Ohio alone. Fugitive and
narrator William Wells Brown saw them “running from under the stars and
stripes, and taking refuge in the Canadas; ... some leaving their wives, some
their husbands, some leaving their children, some their brothers, and some their
188
sisters” (see Paul Jefferson). They represented an estimated loss of $30,000,000
to slaveholders, who demanded stricter federal enforcement of the Fugitive
Slave Act (1850). Most bondmen, women, and children could not escape, but
they longed to break their shackles. Earlier slave uprisings forecast abolitionist
John Brown's aborted insurrection at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
189
Accelerated by the activism of African Americans and their allies, events
sweeping from the 1830s to 1861 sharpened conflict over the “peculiar
institution.” The outcome was Southern secession, the Civil War, the
destruction of slavery, and the constitutional emancipation of four million black
folk, freeing “a larger number of slaves than lived in all other New World slave
societies combined” (see Ira Berlin et al.). Early efforts to ameliorate and
contain slavery set the stage for those consequences. Opposition to bondage
was deep-rooted, with the enslaved and free blacks playing critical roles in
organized antislavery.
Religious dissenters were crucial. As the enslaved hoped and masters feared,
a few religious groups condemned slavery as immoral. Quakers helped to lead
the cause. They ceased slave trading and, by the 1760s, slaveholding. Forming
an abolition society in 1775, the Quakers supported free black petitioners and
runaway bondmen during the Revolutionary War. In the North, ill suited for a
slave economy of scale, the First Emancipation had begun. A gradual process,
it lasted until 1846. Vermont authorized abolition in 1777; Massachusetts and
Pennsylvania in 1780; New Hampshire in 1783; Rhode Island and Connecticut
in 1784; New York in 1799 and 1827; and New Jersey in 1804 (see Arthur
Zilversmit). At the same time, with passage of the Missouri Compromise,
Congress barred slavery in the territory north of the Ohio and east of the
Mississippi Rivers.
Antislavery societies seized the moment. They publicized slavery's injustices
and strengthened their ties to British abolitionists such as Olaudah Equiano,
whose influential Narrative traced his journey from kidnapping in Africa at age
eleven and New World bondage to buying his freedom. “Tortures, murder, and
every imaginable barbarity and iniquity, are practised upon the poor slaves with
impunity,” he asserted. “I hope the slave trade will be abolished” (see Robert J.
Allison). Antislavery societies assisted runaways, provided schooling for
blacks, and, at times, promoted colonization of freed blacks, and mobilized
through their churches, clubs, and fraternal orders. Like shipbuilder Paul Cuffee
of Westport, Massachusetts, many free blacks were back-to-Africa pro-
colonizers.
However, sailmaker James Forten of Philadelphia rejected colonization
because it would remove free from unfree African Americans. Frederick
190
Douglass counted himself among the anti-colonizers. Anti-colonizers were the
larger and more militant group. Airing “the contagion of liberty” born of Haiti's
independence, they demanded abolition of slavery and denounced the American
Colonization Society (ACS). Founded in 1816, ACS enlisted rich slaveholders
among its members and established the African colony of Liberia (1821). The
anti-colonizers also monitored congressional debates on the Missouri
Compromise (1820), which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a
free state, easing sectional tension even as abolitionism grew. By 1827 it
consisted of 154 organizations, dozens of them black. Freedom and slavery
were antithetical, abolitionists argued, widening the North-South divide. They
challenged America to insure liberty to all.
Abolitionists were increasingly outspoken: “Remember Americans, that we
must and shall be free,” warned North Carolina-born free black Boston resident
David Walker, in Walker's Appeal, which Southern legislatures suppressed (see
Charles M. Wiltse). Walker excoriated ACS colonizing, arguing that “America
is more our country than it is the whites'—we have enriched it with our blood.”
Invoking “a God of justice,” he called upon the enslaved to wage a violent
revolt. African emigration and individual manumission were like telling “a man
whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm,” declared William Lloyd
Garrison, a white Bostonian and publisher of The Liberator, the leading
abolitionist journal. “I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with
moderation” (see Truman Nelson). He vowed “no union with slaveholders.” In
1833, two years after Nat Turner's rebellion and the year Parliament approved
compensated emancipation in the British West Indies, Garrison and other
radicals founded the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS). It not only
accepted women and blacks into membership, it also crusaded for immediate
and uncompensated emancipation. Within a decade AAS distributed a million
pieces of literature, chartered 1,350 branches, and recruited 250,000 members,
Frederick Douglass being one of the most outstanding.
The movement exacerbated intersectional politics. When disputes about
moral suasion versus political action split Garrisonians, opponents vilified them
as “abolition tyrants.” Activists such as Douglass still were the conscience of
1840s and 1850s third parties—Liberty, Free Soil, Republican—while the
stirring orations of abolitionist Sojourner Truth or the freedom lawsuit of the
enslaved Dred Scott intensified the “irrepressible conflict.” To Southern
planters, John Brown's raid and 1860 election of a free-soil Republican
president confirmed the North's scheme to dominate the Union. They opted to
protect their region and slave property and retain the ability to expand slavery
191
westward by seceding from the Union.
Secession, the cornerstone of the Confederate States of America, ignited the
Civil War. “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be
extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended,”
explained President Abraham Lincoln. He proposed to disturb neither existing
slavery nor the domain of free labor but to preserve the Union. But
abolitionists, as Douglass put it, envisioned “the complete and universal
abolition of the whole slave system” (see Gary B. Nash et al.). The enslaved
prayed that they were on the verge of “being free.” An ex-slave woman
remembered “the whisperings among the slaves—their talking of the possibility
of freedom.” Vindicating her, the Union defeated the Western world's most
powerful planter class and forced emancipation.
Emancipation involved the interplay of the enslaved's initiative and Union
strategy. Masters were upset as so-called docile slaves ran to Union lines,
almost 30,000 by 1862. Called “contrabands,” thousands more came, worked
for wages, and helped prod Lincoln and Congress to confiscate Confederates'
slaves; to emancipate the enslaved in the District of Columbia and allocate
funds for colonizing them; to authorize recruitment of black soldiers; to secure
diplomatic recognition from England and France (neither recognized the
Confederacy); and, after a major victory on the battlefield, to declare the
Emancipation Proclamation (1863). Though it exempted 800,000 slaves in
Union-loyal Border States, Lincoln called it “an act of justice, warranted by the
Constitution upon military necessity.” As news of his words “forever free”
spread, slaves' defections rose. Black enlistments in the Union Army and Navy
totaled 200,000. Still, most blacks were not liberated until the final defeat of the
Confederacy and adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
Freed people provided abundant evidence of their expectations. They
undertook “a dress rehearsal for Reconstruction” in missionary and government
experiments. In the Union-occupied Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia,
among other places, they embraced free labor arrangements. They grasped the
opportunity to earn wages and acquire land; to attend schools and worship in
their own churches; to reunite slave families and develop black institutions.
These experiences deepened their commitment to self-help and empowerment.
In 1865, they hailed General William T. Sherman's Field Order Number 15,
distributing Confederate lands to 40,000 freedmen, women, and children in
forty-acre lots. Although the measure was rescinded, they fully expected “that,
in short, we be dealt with as others are—in equity and justice” (see Thomas R.
192
Frazier). With that hope, they determined to struggle for equality in modern
America.
193
Summary
Underlining the above discussion is the importance of a theoretical approach
emphasizing cultural encounter and fusion. New World slavery constructed a
crucible of interaction between Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans. In the
Caribbean and South America, as in the British North American colonies and
eventual United States, red, white, and black peoples interacted in slave-based
societies where whites exercised racial hegemony.
The hemispheric perspective provided in this chapter considers Africans' and
African Americans' experience in and contribution to those multiracial
interactions. Scholars continue to explore the encounters, but no longer in terms
of whether Africans were stripped culturally and then acculturated. As
illustrated in Joseph E. Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American Culture (1990),
they focus on the provenance, retention, and fusion of African culture in the
Americas. Portia K. Maultsby, Beverly J. Robinson, and Robert L. Hall explore
West African music, folklore, and religion in slaves' history. John E. Philips
demonstrates that African retentions influenced the making of white America's
customs (like cooking) and institutions. Slave Culture (1987) by Sterling
Stuckey traces Africans' resilient values and worldview.
This chapter points to the Doctrine of Discovery's role in setting European
monarchs on the path of domination of indigenous peoples in Africa, the
Caribbean, the Americas, and Australia and New Zealand, and it emphasizes
the evolution, character, and destruction of black bondage in the colonies and
states that became the United States. Prior to the large-scale importing of
Africans, whites did not hesitate to enslave the New World's indigenous
peoples. As the Amerindians battled and escaped from the white conquerors,
millions died in European-borne epidemics of malaria, measles, and smallpox.
White servants also were too few to supply the mines and fields, so employers
turned to Africa. Considered subhuman but robust, easily identified by their
ebony and brown skin, African laborers were held in intergenerational
servitude. Touted as an inexhaustible source of labor, they were the “final
solution” to whites' labor problem in the New World and North America after
1619.
Slavery proved to be most profitable in the American South, creating an
Empire of Cotton that extended to international markets. Enriching owners of
especially cotton, but also tobacco, indigo, and sugar plantations, it chained
194
generations of Africans and their descendants to a yoke of unpaid labor. The
numbers of the enslaved on the mainland increased slowly not only by natural
birth rate, but also by the slave trade increasing imports annually to 1650.
Within a half-century there were about 25,000 enslaved Africans and
American-born Creoles in British North America (nearly a tenth of the total
population), and more than four million by 1860. In northern colonies,
including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, farms were
generally small and the numbers of the enslaved minimal. Indeed, businessmen
viewed slave labor as an obstacle to commerce and industry. In 1700, New
Englanders owned fewer than 1,000 of the enslaved, and many of them were
houseworkers. Plantations dominated the Chesapeake and southern Low-
Country, enslaving tens of thousands. Enslaved South Carolinians outnumbered
whites 90,000 to 40,000 in 1765 alone. The enslaved were deemed essential to
the planters' wealth and to the culture of white supremacy.
Black captivity lasted in spite of the Declaration of Independence, which
defined liberty as an inalienable human right, and the US Constitution (via the
three-fifths and other clauses). Slaves were classified as chattels; legally, they
could not sue, own property, make contracts, marry, or learn to read and write.
They could travel only by permission. Slavery's cruelty was palpable in the
courts: when a bondman was executed for a capital crime, the state
compensated his slaveholder.
Denying the humanity of Africans and African Americans, slavery served
three major functions: to maintain forced labor, commonly by brutalizing
enslaved men and women; to sustain a caste order of masters, non-slaveholding
whites, the enslaved, and free blacks; and to regulate race and class relations,
using racism to enforce black subordination and white deference. Slavery thus
evolved through nearly 250 years as an economic, political, and social
superstructure that perpetuated planter domination, white supremacy, and black
subjugation in the United States.
Culturally, the enslaved straddled two worlds. Uprooted from Africa, yet
retaining many of their native traditions, they experienced subjugation and
isolation in America. Captive blacks responded with resilience, entwining
African survivals and American realities. Their responses varied on a
continuum from abject acquiescence and passive resistance to confrontation
and insurgency. The organized antislavery movement owed its effectiveness to
individuals, groups, and organizations, white and black, from colonial times. It
burgeoned during the American Revolution and First Emancipation, as well as
195
in the national crisis of Southern secession, war, and the Emancipation
Proclamation. It foreshadowed the Thirteenth Amendment, which ensured
slaves' general emancipation, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
that laid the foundation for racial equality and participation in democratic
processes.
196
1. Forced displacement and isolation proved to be central mechanisms in New
World enslavement of Africans. What are some other factors that explain
why they were enslaved?
2. On the North American mainland, how and why did African slavery become
so important in Southern colonies and states?
3. By what means did African American slaves seek survival and liberation?
4. Slaves and free blacks' actions propelled the issues that culminated in the
Civil War and Thirteenth Amendment. Do you agree or disagree? Provide
evidence for your position.
5. Annually, thousands of Americans visit the African diaspora landmark on
the Island of Gorée, Dakar, Senegal. Discuss pros and cons of having a
national slavery monument or museum in America.
197
Glossary
Abolitionist Movement: Biracial antislavery crusade (1831–1865) pursuing
immediate abolition without compensation to masters.
African Diaspora: Dispersion of Africans throughout the world from ancient
to modern times, mainly by slave trading and slavery; emphasis on
transatlantic trade and its consequences in the Western Hemisphere (1441–
1888).
Africanisms: Beliefs and customs of African origin; enabled slaves and free
blacks to create African American culture and establish themselves as an
integral part of a varied cultural mix in the Americas.
Amerindians: Indigenous peoples of the Americas; their civilizations and
kingdoms thrived before the arrival of white colonists.
Black Belt: Region stretching through densely black counties from Virginia
to Texas; center of cotton production and the antebellum slave system.
Black Codes: Laws regulating slaves and free blacks in slave colonies and
states.
Cotton Kingdom: Expansion of cotton cultivation and slavery in the Lower
South (1800–1860) along with the US textile industry.
Extended Family: Adaptation of African kinship; connecting the nuclear
slave family to blood and fictive kin (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins)
in order to form a supportive network—locally and between plantations.
First Emancipation: Gradual freeing of slaves in northern states (1780–
1846) by constitutions, courts, and legislatures.
General Emancipation: Thirteenth Amendment (1865), emancipating all
slaves in US states and territories.
Haitian Revolution: The 1791 overthrow of slavery on the French island of
St. Domingue culminating in independence (1804); fearful of its influence
on slaves, the US refused to recognize the black republic until 1862.
Indenture: Servant's contract to work a fixed number of years for
transportation and upkeep.
Invisible Institution: Black religion under slavery; slaves' conversion to and
hidden practice of Christianity.
Manumission: Formal release of the slave by the slaveholder, usually in a
deed or will.
198
Maroon Colony: Rebel slave community, typically in a remote or hazardous
area.
Money Crops: Sugar, coffee, tobacco, corn, indigo, wheat, rice, and cotton
were major ones; required intensive labor; their marketing helped to
propel capitalism and slavery.
Peculiar Institution: Moniker for slavery in the American South; system of
unfree labor, racial caste, and master-class domination; context of African
American culture, agency, and freedom struggle.
Proslavery Clauses: Article I, sections 2, 8, 9, Article IV, section 2 of the
US Constitution, legalizing slavery.
Saltwater slaves: New imports of enslaved Africans in the transatlantic
slave trade.
Seasoning: Slavemaking on plantations; work routines, breaking the will of
new slaves.
Slave Compensation: Market price of an executed bondman or woman,
payable to the master; allocated from tax revenues of the colony or state.
Task System: Incentive-based labor practice started on rice plantations;
slaves who completed assigned tasks could leave the fields by mid-
afternoon to help themselves.
Underground Railroad: South-to-North support networks for runaway
slaves; some runaways authored narratives and became abolitionist
leaders.
199
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203
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1. This revised chapter was done by Dr. Marsha Darling in view of the passing of our
colleague Dr. Raymond Gavins in 2016.
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6
European Exploration and Conquest

of Africa
Mario J. Azevedo
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Introduction
The following chapter discusses the reasons why Europeans became
interested in Africa in the aftermath of the slave trade, the strategies they used
to divide and conquer the continent beginning in 1884–1885, and how they
managed to maintain an exploitative rule on the continent until the 1960s and
1970s. Although the historicity of colonial rule is indisputable, analysts' views
about the motives that led the Europeans to conquer Africa by force during the
nineteenth century differ. While some tend to stress only economic motives as a
corollary to the industrial revolution in Europe, others point to the
preponderance of nationalist reasons among the nation-states of Europe that
regarded overseas empires as symbols of national grandeur.
Some experts, including economist Joseph Schumpeter, have even viewed
imperialism as an “atavism” or as an irrational but irresistible historical
tendency on the part of any state to attempt to conquer alien peoples and lands.
Most scholars, however, claim that to understand Western imperialism in
Africa, one must analyze Europe, country by country, and that economic,
nationalist, cultural, and religious factors, as well as “scientific” curiosity,
played a role. According to them, therefore, no single theory can adequately
explain European activities in Africa during the period 1885–1960. On
colonialism, Africanists are still debating the nature of direct and indirect rule,
its policies, and its effect upon the Africans. Recent scholars, however, have
shown more interest in the African response toward colonial rule and its
policies, with the objective of perhaps rewriting or reinterpreting the history of
the continent following the introduction of colonialism.
Major terms and concepts: Slavery, slave trade, colonialism, imperialism,
exploration, Berlin Conference, effective control, indirect and direct rule,
assimilation, association, paternalism, warrant chiefs, “scramble” for Africa,
“mission civilisatrice,” and “burden of empire.”
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As the viability of the slave trade began to wane in European circles due to
the abolitionist and evangelical movements, and as a corollary to the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries overseas voyages initiated by Portugal, and then Spain,
France, Britain, and Holland, Europeans almost suddenly turned their attention
to the geographical configurations of the continent during the nineteenth
century: its rivers, lakes, mountains, fauna, and game; its ethnography, and the
state of its cultural advancement; as well as the wealth of its economic
resources. The first impetus came in 1788 from the African Association in
England, also known as the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the
Interior Parts of Africa. This association, which survived until 1815, was
created by wealthy British men precisely to achieve the goals outlined above.
The association sent several explorers to Africa, Mungo Park being one of the
earliest and most successful. The sensational accounts of his travels in the
Gambia and Niger Rivers region in 1795 intrigued many other European
adventurers and missionaries throughout Europe.
Detained against his will by Africans, Park was able to escape his captors
and returned to Europe in 1797, relating stories that were generally
uncomplimentary of the African authorities and their people whom he
considered to be inferior to the Europeans. However, even though he looked
down upon everything African, he was impressed by the effective government
structures Africans had maintained particularly along the West coast.
Subsequently, the British government itself became interested in his exploits
and sponsored and protected with armed men his expedition to the same area, to
solve the disputes of the incipient colonial empires over the mouth of the Niger.
Taking with him gifts and enough food provisions, Park embarked on his
journey to Africa in 1805. As he navigated the Niger River, Park was attacked
by African warriors, and, to escape death, he allegedly jumped into the river at
a narrow point and drowned on the rapids at Bussa. His death did not deter
others, however, and a number of more explorers crisscrossed the continent in
search of similar sensational stories for European audiences, government
bureaucrats, business investors, and curious missionaries.
David Livingstone, a Scottish member of the London Missionary Society,
humanitarian, and medical doctor, left England in 1840 (at the age of 27) and
travelled across Southern and Central Africa three times from 1851 until his
death in Africa in 1873, thus becoming the most celebrated European explorer.
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Unlike Park's accounts, Livingstone's writings show both great sensitivity
toward African suffering and respect for African traditions. Between 1854 and
1855, British explorer Richard Burton, although seriously wounded, travelled
through Somalia and Ethiopia to reach Lake Tanganyika, Dahomey, and the
Cameroon coast. John Hanning Speke (1827–1864), propagator of the Hamitic
theory about the curse of black people as descendants of Ham for seeing his
father naked, and Burton's companion at one time, travelled with James Grant,
and proved, during a second expedition, in 1861–1863, that Victoria Nyanza
was the major source of the White Nile. Prior to his expeditions in Africa,
Speke was commissioned in the British army in India in 1844. The intrepid
explorer died in England in 1864 of a shot from his own gun, which has made
some experts think that he committed suicide. In 1864, Samuel White Baker
happily reached Lake Albert. Other explorers followed the pioneers.
In 1871, Henry Morton Stanley, working for the New York Herald in search
of Dr. Livingstone (who was presumed dead or lost), reached Ujiji,
Tanganyika, where he found the missionary alive, but sick, memorializing the
two men's hand-shake when the visiting-rescuer, Stanley, uttered these words:
“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” In subsequent years, Stanley returned to Central
Africa on behalf of King Leopold II of Belgium for whom he carved, often
through fraudulent and forced treaties and war, the Belgian Congo (now the
Democratic Republic of Congo), in 1876. He also visited Lake Victoria and the
Kingdom of Buganda and followed the Zaire (Congo) River from its source to
its mouth. However, this was not his last venture. In 1886, Stanley embarked on
another mission, known as the Emin Pasha Relief, to find German zoologist and
botanist Eduard Schnitzer in Sudan, who, to protect himself, had assumed the
name of Emin Pasha. A war in Sudan forced Pasha to move to equatorial
Africa, where he was found by Stanley. Stanley had then lost half of his
caravan from death, disease, deadly enemy attacks, and hunger. Pasha,
however, refused to leave. A major disagreement with Stanley followed,
causing a major rift between the two. Records show that Pasha was well, well
dressed, and clean, some observers writing that he was “smoking a three-year-
old cigar.” Eventually, the two reconciled and ended up at Bagamoyo, a port
city in present Tanzania, in 1889.
In 1873, Englishman Verney Lovett Cameron became the first European
explorer to cross Africa from east to west. While German explorer Heinrich
Barth working for Britain (1850–1852) explored Western and Central Sudan,
German geographer Gerhard Rohlfs crossed the Atlas Mountains in Morocco,
eventually reaching Libya, Chad, and Ethiopia. Joseph Thompson visited Lakes
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Nyanza and Tanganyika in 1879–1889, crossed Maasailand (1883–1884),
reached Central Sudan, and Southern Morocco, and explored the Zambezi
River basin. At the same time, German missionaries John Kraft and John
Rebman, members of the Church Missionary Society, became the first
Europeans to see the highest mountain in Africa, Kilimanjaro (19,000 feet
high), in 1848, and recorded their encounter with the Chagga people on the
mountain's slopes. Present-day Northern Nigeria and Lake Chad, among others,
were visited by Major Dixon Danham and Captain Hugh Clapperton (the only
one to reach Kano and Sokoto, where he was received by Sultan Bello) between
1821 and 1825, after crossing the Sahara Desert from Tripoli. Between 1820
and 1827, at the age of 16, French explorer Auguste Rene Caillie (1899–1839),
after learning to speak Arabic, travelled to West Africa and remained a few
months in Senegal and Sierra Leone disguised as an Egyptian, becoming the
first European to reach Timbuktu, from where he proceeded, across the desert,
to Morocco, and back to France. However, while in West Africa, Caillie had
run out of money and the Governor of Saint-Louis in Senegal no longer offered
him assistance. Luckily, he accepted an invitation by the Societe de Geographie
de Paris to reach Mali and explore the cities of Dejene and Timbuktu, the most
important and most dangerous destination. He is known as the only explorer
that returned from Timbuktu alive! In 1830, Caillie published three volumes of
his stay at Djene and Timbuktu, titled Journal d'un Voyage a Temboctou et a
Jenne dans l'Afrique Centrale. He died at the age of 39 from tuberculosis in a
small town in Western France where he was born. He was such an adventurer
that he had only 60 francs in his pocket when he began the adventure into
Africa. Of course, his writings memorialized the city of Timbuktu that he came
to love so much.
Many other adventurers, such as Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who travelled
to the Congo (later Congo-Brazzaville) under French auspices, and Portuguese
Alexandre Serpa Pinto (who crossed Central Africa from Angola to Pretoria,
South Africa, in 1877) scattered throughout the continent of Africa, most of
them supported by European governments and such scientific societies as the
Geographic Society of Paris, the Geographic Society of Lisbon, and Leopold
II's International African Association.
Lesser explorers include Paul du Chaillu, born in France in 1835, but raised
by his French father in West Africa. As a result, he also spoke the local
languages, and he is remembered mostly from his encounter with the so-called
“pygmies,” or the Aka and Baka of Central Africa, whom he befriended and
respected for their gentleness and kindness to visitors like him. He is said to
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have been the first European to meet them. Cecil Rhodes may also be
considered an explorer, although his travels were limited to what is South
Africa and Zimbabwe today, as he focused his attention on the gold mines and
the expansion of the British Empire in that part of the world. Interestingly,
diamonds in the region were spotted in 1867 by a 15-year-old boy by the name
of Erasmus Jacobs, who saw one in the form of a shiny rock, which a know-it-
all neighbor took to Hopetown. The shiny rock became then an item of interest
to the secretary in the Cape Colony, and subsequently sold to the governor of
the Cape. Rhodes became prime minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to
1896. In 1888, he built De Beers Consolidated Mines (diamond) corporation
and became deeply involved in the causes of the Boer War of 1899–1902. We
might as well note the travels of Mary Kingsley, born in England in 1862, but
left alone when both her parents died in 1892. At the age of 30 then, Kingsley
decided to explore West Africa and study what was called “witchcraft,” juju, or
fetish by the Europeans, African religion, and other African cultural
manifestations. She zeroed in on what she called “twin-killing,” the practice
that was associated with the birth of twins, who had to be killed in such areas as
Nigeria, on the pretext that it was the will of the ancestors, according to her
written account, because the mother was adulterous in her communion with the
demons and spirits. Her writings worsened European views of Africans, and
quite often Kingsley was not welcome at gatherings where she had to speak
upon her return to England. Eventually, she journeyed back to Africa as a nurse
during the 1899–1902 Boer War.
Overall, the so-called age of exploration proved to be a period of excitement
and novelty for the Europeans (and not for the Africans who knew their
continent), as they established new contacts and satisfied their cultural
curiosity. Several conclusions can be made of the age of exploration, as the
period 1788–1885 has been called. Although explorers, such as Heinrich Barth
and Livingstone, were humanitarian at heart, most had travelled to Africa for
cultural and scientific curiosity as well as for profit. As Robert Rotberg puts it
in his Africa and Its Explorers (1973), most of the explorers were “infected to a
great degree with the microbe of prejudice” and almost all posed as “explorers
first, geographers second, natural scientists third, and humanists last.” As a
result of their strong ethnocentrism, their accounts were, by and large,
derogatory to Africans—notwithstanding the fact that they could never have
completed their assignments were it not for the hospitality of the Africans who
provided them with the information they needed, housed, fed, and protected
them, and showed them the route to their next destination. The following
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popular quote in William Harvey Brown (1970: 3) summarizes the comments
the explorers conveyed in their lectures and writings as they returned home:
As we steamed into the estuary of Sierra Leone on November 18th, we
found Africa exactly as books of travel had led us to anticipate—a land
of excessive heat, lofty palm-trees, gigantic baobabs, and naked
savages. At five o'clock we dropped anchor at Free Town, called, on
account of its deadly fevers, the “white man's grave.” Immediately, our
vessel was surrounded by boats filled with men and women, shouting,
jabbering, laughing, quarrelling, and even fighting.... Without exception
it was the most confusedly excited and noisy lot of humanity I have
ever seen.
As one studies the age of exploration and scramble for Africa, the following is
clear: Virtually none of the European explorers would have survived or
succeeded without the help of the Africans. Every exploration that succeeded
was a result of the cooperation of ordinary Africans in the region, chiefs, kings,
military, and influential individuals, such as priests and knowledgeable
entrepreneurs. As Globe correspondent Dane Kennedy's study of explorers
Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke revealed, these two strangers
to Africa were intent on finding the source of the Nile in June 1857—a trip of
100 miles that began from Bagamoyo, part of present Tanzania. However,
throughout their travels, the assistance of the Sultan of Zanzibar and of others
was critical, to say the least. The Zanzibari Sultan, for example, provided the
two with 100 guides plus porters, while he himself made available to the two
white strangers eight soldiers, and a letter of laissez-passer for safe passage
across the sea and the mainland frontier, with a man carrying the Zanzibari flag.
So it was with most of the other explorers scattered over the continent. In 1977,
Melvin E. Page, in a review of Donald Davidson's book, where the author
characterized the exploration of Africa as a “transition from the age of slavery
to the age of partnership,” disagreed with the conclusion because true
partnerships were never established, even though the reviewer noticed over 100
major African figures associated with every explorer.
Clearly, the explorers' adventures became sources of a wealth of information
about Africa's geography, cultures, and the degree of African advancement and
technological conditions, as well as the continent's resources (rubber, cotton,
coffee, iron, gold, diamonds, palm and peanut oil, ivory, fish, and animal
skins), of which all could enhance the European “industrial revolution.” Thus,
through their activities, European explorers unwittingly paved the way for the
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eventual conquest of Africa, initiated formally at the Conference of Berlin in
1884–1885. It must also be noted that most of the explorers alerted the
European community to the continuation of slavery and the slave trade on the
continent, practiced mainly by Arabs or African Muslim authorities in Western
and Central Africa (at such places as Chad and Sudan) and in North Africa.
This concern became part of the General Act of the Berlin Conference, which
urged the colonial powers to eradicate the vestiges of the trade in human beings
in their newly acquired territories. Proving the dictum that knowledge is power,
Europeans then embarked on subjugating the peoples they had just
“discovered.”
To the African, however, the explorers were non-entities and, by and large,
they remained ignored in the places they visited. Indeed, they did very little to
expand African knowledge of other parts of the continent and did not contribute
significantly to the expansion of commerce which, at the time, was already
relatively extensive. Consequently, as Rotberg stresses, almost no explorer is
remembered in oral traditions. Rotberg further notes of the African attitudes
towards the new visitors:
The explorers were worthy bearers of tribute and, conceivably,
representatives of powerful monarchs, but, with one or two exceptions,
they created no sensations and were received with (sometimes impolite)
curiosity and affection of a kind usually reserved for visiting men of
commerce. The least powerful were occasionally mistreated, robbed,
and bullied. All were made to experience the sense of their inferiority.
In a sense, therefore, insofar as the Africans were concerned, the explorers were
like a footnote in the history of their lives, even though most consorted with
men and African women, engaged in drug use, drank profusely, and were at
times violent (see Yohannes, 2000; Knnedy, 2013). In the long-run, however,
the explorers made a difference.
Until 1884, Europeans had not formally divided Africa among themselves,
although, as early as the sixteenth century, some governments had claimed
spheres of influence and economic and political monopoly over certain areas.
Thus, France, for example, as early as the eighteenth century, had considered
Senegal, Gabon (1849), Algeria (1830), and Tunisia (1881), as her domain,
while Britain claimed Sierra Leone (proclaimed a Crown Colony in 1808), the
Cape Colony in South Africa, the Gambia area, Lagos (annexed in 1861), the
Gold Coast (declared a colony in 1874 after long and fierce fighting with the
Ashanti Confederation), and Egypt (made a protectorate by force in 1882).
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Whereas, on the one hand, Leopold II of Belgium had, since 1876, maintained
brutal economic control over the Congo (recognized by the other European
powers in 1884 as the “Congo Free State”), the Portuguese, on the other, had all
along claimed that Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, São Tomé e Principe,
and Guinea-Bissau had been a part of their colonial empire since the fifteenth
century. By 1884, several European powers became keenly interested in
colonial acquisitions in Africa as sources of raw materials and cheap labor, as
pawns of diplomacy, and as outlets for national frustrations. In an attempt to
prevent conflicts that could eventually lead to wars among themselves,
European governments agreed to formalize their territorial wishes and to
partition Africa at the Berlin Conference, hosted by the chancellor of unified
Germany, Otto von Bismarck, between November 1884 and February 1885.
Attending the conference were delegates from 14 nations who agreed on the
following terms as guidelines for the peaceful division of Africa: (1) proof of
effective control of a territory (through an army of occupation, demonstrable
treaties with African kings and chiefs, or a proven local administrative
apparatus); (2) free trade and free navigation on the Congo and Niger basins
(then contended areas for international trade); (3) a vigorous campaign to end
slavery and the slave trade in one's territory; and (4) recognition of the right of
all Christian denominations, regardless of national origin, to open missionary
outposts in the future colonial territories.
As a result of the conference (at which Africans were not represented), from
1885 to 1905 Africa was divided into some 25 or so small colonies, quite often
carved in European capitals without regard to cultural links among the people
conquered. Instead, rivers, lakes, and mountains were used as boundaries, with
the lion's share of the boot going to France and Britain, followed by Portugal (5
colonies), Germany (4), Spain (3), and Italy (Eritrea, Italian Somaliland, and
Libya, the latter annexed in 1911–1912). Only Liberia, which remained
protected by the United States, and Ethiopia (except for the period 1935–1941,
when it was annexed by Benito Mussolini), escaped colonial conquest.
Learning of the impact of the Berlin Conference, Africans in some areas
violently opposed the loss of their sovereignty and land. Wars of resistance
erupted in Dahomey, Chad, and Madagascar, against the French; in Angola,
and Mozambique (until 1917), against the Portuguese; in Tanganyika (the Maji
Maji Rebellion of 1905–1907 being a good example) and South-West Africa
(the Herero revolts), against the Germans; in the Gold Coast, against the
British; and in Northern and Southern Rhodesia (during the 1890s), against
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Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company. The Italians were defeated by
the Abyssinians (Ethiopians) at Adowa in 1896, while Sudanese Muslim
nationalists, known as Mahdists, fought against the British and the Egyptians
from 1881 to 1899. In these wars of resistance, Europeans often suffered heavy
casualties, but ultimately their superior military technology and lack of
concerted and sustained resistance proved fatal to Africa's independence. By
the 1920s, Europeans had, for all practical purposes, “pacified” the whole
continent. In the end, therefore, in most instances, Africans had to surrender,
simply because of the superior military capabilities of the newcomers. As
Professor Jim Jones explains it:
Advances in firearms, particularly developments with the repeating
rifle, machine gun and lightweight artillery, enabled smaller military
units to defeat larger numbers of opponents, further reducing the cost of
conquest. Improved steam engines gave steamships larger capacities by
requiring less space for fuel, while railroads extended the French
European commerce beyond the coasts.
However, African resistance to the forced conquest of their homeland cannot be
underestimated. In the case of the French in West Africa, for example, for
almost 40 years they could not penetrate and subjugate the hinterland, beyond
Medine town in the Upper Volta River Valley, due to the fierce resistance they
had encountered right from the beginning from rulers such as the well-known
Samory Toure, who had, as Professor Jones continues, “created an empire by
employing smiths to manufacture guns, using Islam as a unifying ideology and
making an alliance with ‘the business community’ of long distance traders.”
Finally, it must be said that the issue of Africans' assistance to the health,
life, and success of the explorers on the continent has not received due attention
in the literature and needs further study because without them, few of the
strange travelers to Africa would have survived. The interesting question is:
Why did the “scramble” for Africa occur in the 1880s and later rather than
during the earlier period of European contact with Africa? While a group of
historians emphasize economic reasons, some stress nationalistic motives, and
others refuse to advance a theory of a single cause to explain this
unprecedented imperialist frenzy about Africa. Those who stress economic
factors usually repeat a modified version of the thesis developed by John
Hobson in his Imperialism: A Study (1902), derived mainly from his 1902 study
of the Boer War (1899–1902). Hobson, a British laissez-faire economist,
claimed that Europe had industrialized itself during the nineteenth century,
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through a process that required expanded raw materials, new markets for goods
resulting from overproduction, and investment for the surplus capital
accumulated by successful businesses and factories. The implied (hardly
proven) assumption of most economic theorists has been that capitalism cannot
regenerate itself, and that its profits tend to decline over the years, leading to its
eventual demise. Essentially, this is also how the followers of Karl Marx tend
to explain European imperialism. Hobson, however, maintained that, while
capitalism was by nature democratic, imperialism was anti-democratic, and that
the latter resulted from the former's “financial” problems (usually resolvable).
V. I. Lenin, on the other hand, called imperialism “the highest stage of
capitalism.” He wrote:
Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the
dominance of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in
which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in
which the division of the world among the international trusts has
begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the
great capitalist powers has been completed.
Marxists and neo-Marxists have continued to blame the bourgeois capitalists
for the evils of imperialism, predicting its demise and the political and
economic take-over by the proletariat, a phase that would lead the world to
socialism and then to communism, the perfect stage in man's economic and
social evolution.
Other analysts, on the contrary, note that economic motives for imperialism
cannot apply to countries such as Portugal, Spain, and Italy that had
experienced little industrialization at the time. These scholars prefer, therefore,
to explain the European desire to build vast overseas empires as a way to ensure
national greatness and survival in a competing world, as was the case of
Portugal. Accordingly, France's major preoccupation was to regain its lost
prestige resulting from the defeat of Emperor Napoleon III at the hands of the
Germans in 1870, and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. The unification of Germany
in 1870–1871 worsened French fears that their nation would be reduced to a
minor power as Spain was. This is the reason, these theorists note, why France
was willing to annex even the poorest areas in Africa—Chad, Mali, Mauritania,
Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and Oubangui-Chari (now Central African
Republic).
This is also the argument presented by American historian Carlton J. H. Hays
who, while not denying the influence of capitalists in the imperialist frenzy,
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maintained that “basically the new imperialism was a nationalistic
phenomenon” and that “in the last analysis it was the nationalistic masses who
made possible and who most vociferously applauded it and most constantly
backed it.” A similar thesis was held by Nicholas Mansergh, British historian,
who wrote that “The rulers of Europe thought primarily in terms of political not
economic advantage,” preoccupied with a continental balance of power.
Accordingly, those espousing the nationalistic theory like to trace imperialism
back to the year 1870 (rather than 1884), which marks France's defeat and the
beginning of German unification. While scholars advocating economic motives
consider the second industrial revolution of the 1870s as the most important
landmark, those stressing diplomacy see the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885
as crucial to the understanding of the phenomenon.
Harvard historian William Langer, skeptical of the claim that imperialism
was a result of capitalism, argued, instead, that psychological factors must be
taken into account. He noted, for example, that most European investment did
not go to the colonies but to America and Australia, and that investment returns
were not encouraging to those who invested in the colonies. Consequently, he
praises economist Joseph Schumpter, mentioned earlier, who defined
imperialism as “the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited
forcible expansion” and maintained that capitalism was intrinsically anti-
imperialistic.
Recent analysts, however—political scientist Hanna Arendt being one of the
most widely known exponents—tend to consider a combination of economic,
nationalist, and religious factors, as well as (scientific and cultural) curiosity, as
the reasons why Europe partitioned Africa at the time it did. This is also how D.
K. Fieldhouse argues, for example, when he concludes in his Problems and
Perspectives in History: The Theory of Capitalist Imperialism (1967) that
“there is only one possible way to explain the phenomenon of imperialism: to
begin by studying as fully as possible the general forces operating within
Europe [the perimeter] and in other parts of the world [the periphery] and
assess each particular case of annexation as a special problem.” He then goes
on to say that:
In some cases economic motives may seem to have predominated; in
others political or idealistic motives. But the sum of these multiple
investigators is the nearest the historian can come to achieving a general
explanation of the tendency of Europe to expand after about 1870.
Anything more comprehensive will almost certainly be misleading.
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R. E. Robinson and J. A. Gallagher (both British historians) in their Britain
and the Partition of Africa (1961), developed the periphery approach earlier
and essentially argued that strategic reasons, particularly for Britain, played the
major role. The importance of India and South Africa, they claimed, dictated
British expansion in Northeast and East Africa, in spite of the fact that British
businessmen favored West Africa. It appeared, at that time, that Egyptian and
South African nationalism threatened British interests in Asia. This forced
Britain to occupy Egypt in 1882, to fight the Boer War from 1899–1902, and to
approve the annexation of the Rhodesias by Cecil Rhodes during the 1890s. To
Robinson and Gallagher, therefore, capitalism was not at the forefront of the
imperialist frenzy. In fact, they add, imperial expansion took place where
expectations of profit were least, namely, in East Africa. The debate has
underscored the complex nature of imperialism and exposed the shortcomings
of single causal explanations.
Interestingly enough, the partition of Africa occurred without causing a
single war among the colonial powers—a credit to the Berlin Conference—at
least insofar as the strategy of the planners and the participants of the
conference was concerned, namely, a need to divide the continent without
resorting to force against one another. Two instances, however, brought some
powers to the brink of war in their colonial disputes and are worth mentioning.
One was the Fashoda incident that took place between September 18 and
November 3, 1898, when a French expeditionary force (of 7 French and 120
African soldiers) under Captain Jean Baptiste Marchand and a sizeable Anglo-
Egyptian force under General Sir Herbert Kitchener, fighting in Sudan (while
building a railroad up the Nile simultaneously), met and tensely faced each
other on the banks of the Nile River near Fashoda (presently Kodok), and
almost fired shots at one another. Both forces were vying for the control of the
Nile and Sudan and for influence in Egypt. Kitchener ordered Marchand to
retreat, which the latter did in humiliation on November 3, 1898, because the
French government was not in a position to fight a war at the moment. As a
result, Marchand's forces had no chance of winning a skirmish no matter how
insignificant. Eventually, on March 21, 1899, the French renounced all claims
over any territory along the Nile and settled, instead, for unproductive desert
areas near present Chad.
The second incident resulted from a dispute between Portugal and Britain
over Mashonaland and the Shire River in 1899, following the annexation of the
Macololo people by Portuguese explorer Serpa Pinto. The British, who
considered the area to be theirs, delivered a threatening ultimatum to Lisbon on
217
January 11, 1899, to which the Portuguese capitulated immediately. In the end,
the two colonial powers ratified a treaty settling the boundaries among
Mozambique, Nyasaland, and Southern Rhodesia on June 11, 1891, but the
capitulation, which brought down the government of Luciano Castro in Lisbon,
was and still is viewed by the Portuguese as one of the worst examples of
humiliation they have ever suffered. Diplomacy, therefore, along with the
incipient colonial armies that were too small and thinly scattered throughout the
continent of Africa, contributed to the peaceful nature of the partition among
the conquerors but not between the conquerors, the Europeans, and the
conquered, the Africans.
218
Conquering and pacifying the Africans was one thing. Governing and thus
transforming them, however, for the benefit of the European colonial powers,
was another. Until 1884, Europeans had only maintained limited involvement
(and had not interfered) in African traditional life and had secured only
“informal rule,” slightly felt in matters of religion and aspects of political life,
regulated by mutual treaties or by limited wars sometimes won by Europeans
and other times by Africans, the British and the Ashanti Confederation wars
being a good example.
In order to achieve total control after 1884, Europeans attempted to devise
the most appropriate colonial policies that civil servants and Africans in
responsible positions in the territories would have to abide by. British official
policy, devised by Lord Frederick Lugard, Nigeria High Commissioner (1900–
1907), became generally known as “indirect rule.” Starting from the premise
that African cultures were incompatible with British traditions, Britain believed
that, unless African political structures and institutions were somewhat
preserved and local Europeans acted as advisors and assistants to the African
authorities, the colonial system could not work. The traditional chiefs and kings
in power, therefore, had to be maintained at all cost, ethnic loyalties and
traditions governing marriage and land, for example, allowed to continue, and
the use of African languages, even in the few Western schools in the colonies,
permitted, all of which would guarantee the success of the colonial experiment,
ensure everlasting peace, and require the use of fewer financial resources.
The French and the Portuguese, in contrast, stressed the premise that all men
were born equal and that what made them different was education and non-
segregated living patterns. Both colonial powers held the view that Africans, as
a matter of principle, should undergo “assimilation” and thus qualify to become
French or Portuguese citizens. Hence, the Portuguese and the French divided
the colonized population into assimilated (assimilés, in French, and
assimilados, in Portuguese) and indigenous. However, such policy, if applied,
would have required a greater infusion of white administrators and civil
servants to replace, whenever possible, African authorities, force the Africans
to learn how to speak French or Portuguese, practice a trade or profession, and
adopt European cultural traits. Due to criticism, the French, prior to African
independence, preferred to use the word “association”—a policy designed to
attempt to fuse Africans and Frenchmen in a multiracial society, with much
219
internal autonomy for the colonized. The basic notion of assimilation, however,
remained the cornerstone of French policy throughout the colonial period in
Africa.
The other colonial powers vacillated between direct and indirect rule. The
Belgians are known to have used a type of direct rule called “paternalism.”
They viewed Africans as children who had to be taught and told everything by
the Europeans and, with the collaboration of the Roman Catholic Church, be
given only the rudiments of primary education. Hard physical work, in the form
of rubber and cotton collection for concessionaire companies in the Belgian
Congo, government projects, cash crop cultivation, and porterage, were forced
on the Africans by the colonial agents. The Germans also adopted direct rule
whenever possible, without assimilation, with the sole purpose of making the
Africans produce crops for the colonial master on large plantations and build
roads and railroads. The Italians and the Spaniards had no clearly defined
colonial policies but they, too, made the Africans work from dawn to sunset.
Thus, despite the apparent differences, colonial powers in Africa had the
same objectives, adopted similar strategies, and achieved the same results: the
exploitation of Africans primarily for the benefit of the mother country and the
European colonial settlers. However, every European power was interested in
“modernizing” the Africans and making them more Europeanized to facilitate
the exploitation of the local resources. They all established an army, a police
force, and a network of informants to maintain law and order and crush any
possible rebellion. They all forced the Africans to pay taxes in cash (most often
in the form of head or household taxes), which mostly benefited the European
population. Considering the Africans to be naturally lazy, the French, the
Portuguese, the Belgians, the Spaniards, and the Germans introduced forced
labor. Although the British officially claimed to be against it, they indirectly
forced the Africans to work to earn the cash that would enable them to pay
taxes.
As a result of these policies, the educational levels of Africans under any of
the colonial powers were not very different prior to 1945. Although the British
encouraged maintenance of cultural traditions, educated Africans in their
colonies were not very different from those from other colonies in their
personal and social class outlook, and most admired European culture and were
eager to live abroad. In fact, indirect rule worked only where the Africans had
strong governments prior to conquest, and mostly on the local level, because all
colonies were under governors and civil servants appointed by the metropolitan
220
colonial office. Consequently, recalcitrant kings and chiefs were always
removed forcefully or eliminated and replaced by more accommodating
individuals. In the British colonies, the appointed authorities, known as
“warrant chiefs,” had no traditional legitimacy. In fact, British colonials were
so obsessed with maintaining law and order along their ethnocentric tradition
that they forced such people as the Ibo and the Maasai, who never had chiefs, to
have one.
The official colonial policies provided the Africans a differing status, at least
on paper, within the colonial context. The British always considered the
Africans “subjects” and never citizens of the empire who could have
representation in Parliament. The French and the Portuguese viewed the few
assimilated Africans as “citizens,” enjoying all the rights of European citizens,
who, by law, could not be discriminated against, and had representation in the
metropolitan National Assembly (although, in Lisbon, the representatives of the
colonial people remained white Portuguese citizens). The Belgians, on their
part, wished neither to make the Africans “citizens” nor to educate them
beyond primary school. Those who completed primary schooling were known
as “evolués” (the evolved ones), who were neither European nor totally
African. It would be inconceivable, however, that the Germans, who racially
despised even other Europeans on the continent, would have attempted to make
the Africans “citizens,” lifting them from the inferior beings they were in the
eyes of the colonial administrators.
Overall, one ought to bear in mind that, throughout the colonial period, the
losers were the African masses, regardless of the colonial system under which
they lived. All colonial systems were meant to benefit the Europeans; they
segregated and discriminated against the Africans; they exploited their subjects
economically; and they established, instead, small colonial “dictatorships”—a
situation that basically continued until the 1960s. Thus, the French “mission
civilisatrice” (civilizing mission) or the British “altruistic” claim of the “burden
of empire” turned out to be nothing more than subjugation, exploitation, and
oppression.
221
The overall political, economic, social, and cultural impact of colonialism in
Africa is still being debated in academic circles. One can say, however, that it
was profound. Politically, the traditional state systems were superseded forcibly
by new political entities bringing together diverse ethnic and linguistic groups
—the colonies—which later became the new states of Africa. Stateless societies
were, at first, compelled, contrary to their tradition, to accept the authority of
one man and later forced to be fused with the colonial state. Until the coming of
independence, traditional authorities had either been kept in their positions, as
was the tendency in the British colonies, or replaced, as was more customary in
the French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial territories. In most cases,
however, African authorities, while deprived of their legitimacy before their
own people, received further powers and were backed by their own police
forces, which made them extremely vulnerable in their areas because they were
seen as tools of colonialism. Their new responsibilities included collecting
taxes, recruiting manpower for forced labor and the military, and enforcing the
cultivation of certain cash crops in their region.
In every colony, political expression of any kind against the colonial regime
was strictly forbidden until the post-Second World War period. Although in the
British colonies, some Africans were appointed to the governor's legislative
councils and, in the French colonies, chosen as delegates (députés) to represent
their homelands, colonized people did not participate in the decision-making
process prior to 1945. In the Portuguese colonies, for example, Europeans
represented Africans in Lisbon, while in the Belgian, German, and Italian
territories African representation was never a concern of the administrators.
The issue of taxes and cash crop cultivation has already been mentioned. By
and large, however, taxes did not benefit the Africans, and the cash crops made
the newly carved territories dependent on one or two commodities (e.g., coffee,
tobacco, tea, rice, cocoa, and rubber), which, following independence, became
a source of problems when Africans made an attempt to diversify the economy.
Furthermore, international fluctuation of consumer goods prices and resulting
crop prices made African economies more vulnerable to external forces, and the
emphasis on exports overlooked the real needs of the Africans. Major business
enterprises (banks, commercial houses, shipping, and mining, for example)
remained in the hands of Europeans or Asians (Lebanese, Syrians, Pakistanis,
and Indians), a trend that continued even following independence. Before the
222
1960s, little capital was invested in Africa and the concessionaire companies
such as the British Royal Nigeria Company, the Societé Comerciale de l'Ouest
Africain (in French West Africa), and the Mozambique Company secured
monopolies over the cultivation and export of such products as cotton and did
little to assist the Africans or develop the regions where they operated. Quite
often, the concessionaires contributed little to local taxes.
It should also be noted that emphasis on exports favored the processing of
raw materials abroad, thus depriving the Africans of industrial plants. Railways
and harbors were built but only to facilitate the export of goods from a
productive area to European plants and markets. In general, until the 1940s,
Africans remained a large reservoir of cheap labor for the government, the
European companies, and the enterprises of Asian expatriates. Socially,
colonialism increased intercommunication and commercial links on the
continent, helped establish new cities and towns, and provided the first
“modern” educational opportunities and health facilities. However,
opportunities were available to only a few—to certain ethnic groups, to wealthy
Africans, and to sons (and sometimes daughters) of traditional authorities—a
process that resulted in the emergence of an elite that was more European than
African in outlook. The migrations to the cities by young men and women
deprived the villages of the necessary workforce to sustain the family, thus
imposing more responsibilities on village women. The lure of the city—
education, health, jobs, and good living—was often an illusion which
contributed to poverty, despair, slums and ghettos, prostitution, and crime.
During this social transformation, individualism began to replace African
communalistic traditions, although voluntary associations initiated by co-ethnic
and co-regional African individuals emerged in many colonies, especially in
West Africa.
By design as well as from adverse circumstances, colonial administrators did
little to alleviate the suffering of the Africans, and, up until the 1940s, very few
schools had been built to educate the colonial subjects or assimilated citizens.
Invariably, emphasis was on primary education to train interpreters, auxiliaries
or assistants, teachers, and catechists (for the Christian missions). Thus, for
example, up until 1918, in French West Africa, only the École Normale
William Ponty (in Dakar) provided meaningful education to the few Africans
selected to attend and become teachers. In fact, by 1909, there were only 190
primary schools throughout French West Africa, with 1,000 students enrolled.
The British did not do any better, although Fourah Bay, in Sierra Leone,
founded by missionaries in 1814, had become a teacher and missionary training
223
college by 1827. After 1918, some of the Fourah Bay College graduates
received further academic training in Britain.
In the health area, initially, health facilities were designed to serve the
European population. This pattern changed after World War I, particularly in
the French and British colonies. By 1936, for example, the French had trained
185 African doctors for their West African colonies, and, by 1938, Nigeria and
Ghana had 14 and eight doctors, respectively. Campaigns against sleeping
sickness, yellow fever, leprosy, plague, malaria, and other tropical diseases
were underway particularly after World War I, and, in places such as
Cameroon, Chad, and the Gambia, some Africans benefited from these efforts.
Overall, however, the effort was too little and the problems enormous, and thus
the majority of the Africans virtually remained untouched by Western
innovations.
Culturally, the introduction of Christianity resulted in thousands of converts
and the further erosion of African traditional practices such as polygamy and
the concept of the extended family, which till then had been a protection against
age, adverse social changes, and natural calamities. Christianity did, however,
train many Africans in its schools, some of whom became lawyers, teachers,
and leaders of the new nationalist movements, but it also caused severe
psychological and social dislocation, eloquently described by such African
literary men and women as Chinua Achebe in his Things Fall Apart and Arrow
of God.
Africans were never, of course, simple onlookers, who peacefully accepted
colonial domination. Throughout Africa, prior to 1945, there were wars and
revolts, strikes, and demonstrations, refusals to work for colonial administrators
and serve in the army, and several attempts at organizing parties to fight
colonial oppression and repression. The National Congress of British West
Africa (founded in the Gold Coast in 1920 with Casely Hayford as its first
president) and the Young Kikuyu Association (founded by Harry Thuku in
Nairobi in 1921) were two examples of such organizations. However, power
and control over the colonial apparatus were overwhelming, and only in the
aftermath of World War II did Africans begin to pose a greater threat to the
very foundations of the colonial state.
224
Summary
The demise of the slave trade and slavery helped the Europeans to develop a
new interest in the African continent, clearly manifested in geographical and
cultural curiosity, which led to the age of exploration at the end of the
eighteenth century and shortly thereafter. The travels and the resulting accounts
by explorers such as Mungo Park, David Livingstone, Richard Burton, and
Heinrich Barth removed some of the mystery about Africa and exposed its
political weaknesses but revealed the continent's hidden resources. As Europe
experienced the industrial revolution (1760–1914), capitalists needed precious
raw materials to feed their factories and machinery as well as new opportunities
to invest surplus capital and new markets to sell their goods. The extreme
nationalism of the European nation-states resulted in several wars in Europe
during the nineteenth century, forcing countries such as France, defeated by the
Germans in 1870 (who also annexed Alsace-Lorraine and made them a part of a
new unified Germany), to look for empires overseas as a way to redress
national humiliation.
Portugal, Italy, and Spain, which were not sufficiently industrialized and
therefore remained weak powers, combined the economic and nationalistic
factors (fearing a loss of their old empires), and looked for further opportunities
overseas to restore or maintain their imaginary greatness and national pride.
Pressure from businessmen, traders, scientists, and missionary societies (as was
the case in Germany), as well as from humanitarians who wished to see
Africans “civilized” and saved from their supposedly barbarous ways and
“backward” governments, compelled European powers to agree to hold the
Conference of Berlin in 1884–1885, following which they divided the continent
among themselves, initiating the period of formal empires. Whereas, until then,
they had concentrated their settlements and activities along the coast, now
Europeans ventured into the hinterland of Africa, attempting to impose their
colonial rule and policies everywhere, primarily to benefit their own
metropolitan and settler populations.
Europe's desire to maintain colonial rule promoted the development of major
colonial policies: indirect rule, officially applied by the British, whose aim was
to rule Africans by using African institutions on the local level (the truth of the
matter is that indirect rule was racist and applied earnestly only in areas where
African leaders had been strongest prior to conquest, such as in Northern
Nigeria and Buganda); and direct rule, which manifested itself as assimilation
225
in the French and Portuguese colonies and as paternalism in the Belgian Congo
(as well as in Rwanda and Burundi following World War I). Although the
remaining colonial powers preferred direct rule, quite often circumstances
forced them to use indirect rule, economic productivity always being their
primary concern. More importantly, however, all colonial policies were
intrinsically racist.
Thus, in spite of the existence of different colonial models, however, the fate
of the Africans was not fundamentally different, particularly among the non-
educated majority, which was miserably exploited through taxes, forced labor,
military service, and cultivation of certain export crops. It is clear, however,
that the greatest impact of colonial rule occurred along the coast, where
Europeans, until the end of World War II, succeeded in introducing an
administrative structure of their own and their flag, built administrative centers
to conduct civil service, and a few schools, created a police force and an army
of officers who played more than a military role and created strategic economic
networks, and, eventually, roads and railroads leading to the ocean in order to
facilitate the export of commodities to Europe.
In the hinterland, such as in Northern Nigeria, Northern Cameroon, Northern
Chad, Northern Côte d'Ivoire, and Northern Mozambique, where Islamic states
were well organized and strong, the European conquerors left the systems
almost intact. The difficulty in travel, the hostile climate, and the fierce
resistance of the Muslims to the “white infidels,” as they used to call the
Europeans, forced colonial agents to cooperate with the traditional authorities.
It can be accurately said, therefore, that colonial rule often had to “adapt” to
political realities rather than “dictate” its own policies in the African upcountry.
226
1. What motivated European exploration of Africa during the nineteenth
century and what was its impact upon Europe and Africa?
2. Why did the Conference of Berlin take place at the time it did and not
earlier? What was its effect upon Europe and Africa?
3. How did Africans react to the partition of their continent?
4. Explain the various colonial policies in Africa and how they affected the
African people.
5. If you had to choose one among the various colonial policies, which would
you consider the worst of all? Explain.
6. Which do you consider the most damaging explorer(s) to the reputation of
Africans during the age of exploration?
227
References
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Institute of European History, 2011 (see ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/Europe-
and-the-world/European-encounters). Retrieved 12/31/2017.
Hanna Arendt. Imperialism. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
Adu Boahen. Topics in West African History. London: Longmans, 1969.
Paul Bohannan and Philip Curtin. Africa and Africans. Prospect Heights, IL:
Waveland, 1988.
William Harvey Brown. On the South African Frontier: The Adventures and
Observations of an American in Mashonaland and Matabeleland. New
York, NY: Negro Universities Press, 1970; London: Sampson Row, Marstan
and Company, 1899.
Basil Davidson. Modern Africa. London: Longmans, 1987.
Pierre Ernie. L'enfant et son milieu en Afrique noire. Paris, France: Petite
Bibliotheque Payot, 1972.
D. K. Fieldhouse. The Colonial Empires from the Eighteenth Century. New
York: Delta Book, 1965.
__________. Problems and Perspectives in History: The Theory of
Capitalist Imperialism. London: Longmans, 1967.
Murray Greene. “Schumpeter's Imperialism—A Critical Note.” Social
Research, An International Quarterly of Political Science, Vol. XIX
(December 1952): 453–463.
Carlton Hays. A Generation of Materialism, 1871–1900. New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1941.
John Hobson. Imperialism: A Study. London: George Allen and Unwin,
1902.
John Iliff. The African Poor: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987.
E. Jefferson. History of African Civilization. New York: Delta Book, 1972.
Jim Jones. “Europe and Africa in the 19th Century,” 2010
(http://courses.wcupa.edu/jones/his312/lectures/19thcent.htm), Retrieved
12/31/2017.
Dane Kennedy (Correspondent). “Behind Africa's Explorers, Muslim
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Empires, Egypt, and Zanzibar Rode 19th-Century European Expeditions
to Profit.” Boston Globe, February 24, 2013.
William Langer. “A Critique of Imperialism.” Foreign Affairs, vol. XIV
(October 1935): 102–115.
V. I. Lenin. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. New York:
International Publishers Co., 1939.
Nicholas Mansergh. The Coming of the First World War: A Study in the
European Balance. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1949.
Dan Morrison. The Black Nile: One Mans' Amazing Journey through Peace
and War on World's Longest River. New York, NY: Viking Publishers,
2010.
R. E. Robinson and J. A. Gallagher. Britain and the Partition of Africa.
London: Macmillan, 1961.
Walter Rodney. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC:
Robert Rotberg. Africa and Its Explorers: Motives, Methods, and Impact.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.
Joseph A. Schumpeter. Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy. London and
New York: (revised first in 1943), Taylor Francis, George Allen & Unwin.
Donald Simpson. Dark Companions: The African Contribution to the
European Explorations of East Africa. New York, NY: Barnes and Noble,
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Harrison Wright. The New Imperialism, Analysis of Late Nineteenth-Century
Expansion. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1961.
Fabian Yohannes. Out of Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of
Central Africa. Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 2000.
229
7
The Quest for Equality: From

Reconstruction to Obama
230
Introduction
This chapter explores the values, attitudes, behaviors, challenges, and
achievements that have focused and defined Black American progress from the
period immediately following the Civil War—generally referred to as the
Reconstruction Era—to the legacy left by the election and re-election of the
nation's 44th president, Barack Obama. Black American efforts to promote
economic, political, and cultural self-reliance are identified and delineated as
the cornerstone foundation of an evolving Black American ethos. This chapter
also identifies the ideology of white supremacy as a significant factor in the
evolution of a white separatist “race consciousness” that has, throughout the
period of time under consideration in this chapter, generated opposition to
Black American equality and social progress. Consequently, the following
analysis also explores the emergence of a Black American protest tradition,
dating from resistance to captivity and enslavement, to ongoing efforts to
promote the exercise of civil rights.
Historians of the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries differ
in their perceptions of how to present Black American life and culture. Some
historical scholarship emphasizes the impact of white values, institutions, and
actions on African-American choices, attitudes, and behaviors. While
scholarship in this tradition identifies many of the difficulties Black Americans
have encountered in their direct efforts for a meaningful and enfranchised
citizenship, the perspective in these works often emphasizes white activity and
Black passivity. Blacks are depicted as static, passive, and totally victimized,
while whites, though acting out views of white race supremacy, are seen as
initiating, active, and totally in control. In contrast, other scholarship
emphasizes Black American creative initiative and self-help, self-
determination, resistance to discrimination and persecution, and the positive
attributes and endeavors that Black Americans have pursued, even while
indicating the obstacles and struggles that Blacks have confronted in their
attempts to realize a first-class citizenship. Much of the scholarship in this
tradition explores the impetus for creative self-help in Black communities, and
the tensions that emerged and developed within Black American communities
to define strategies for social change, as well as the obstacles from outside the
culture of being a Black American.
This chapter places Black Americans at the center of their own experience.
Essentially, that is to say, that Black American history from 1865 to the present
231
is a narrative rendering of Black struggle, self-help progress, Black creative
initiative, Black accommodation, Black protest struggle, Black militancy, and
Black survival. Indeed, the complexity of Black folks' lives must be understood
to have entailed a long-standing commitment to self-help, mutual aid, and
benevolence, initially against the backdrop of their involvement in a strident
anti-slavery movement, and later against the backdrop of Black peoples'
struggles against racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression.
Major terms and concepts: Quest for self-determination, Black American
protest tradition, Emancipation, the betrayal of Reconstruction, constitutional
amendments as reforms, forty acres and a mule, franchise and elective political
participation, civil rights and a desire for literacy, white resistance to Black
progress, disfranchisement, landmark court decisions, cultivation of Black male
and female leadership to serve post-Emancipation needs, cashless debt
peonage, migration, separate and unequal, state's complicity in undermining
Black American economic and political development, the Harlem Renaissance,
Blacks in the military, the Civil Rights Movement, Affirmative Action, the
Great Society, Black Arts Movement, Black elected officials, New Right
conservative backlash, reparations, Afrocentricity, health and disease in Black
communities, Hurricane Katrina, Black feminism, immigration, gay and lesbian
Blacks, election and re-election of Barack Obama.
232
Reconstruction: Education, Leadership, and the “Negro”
Movement
Against the backdrop of the Civil War years, with its outcome of
emancipation from enslavement, Black Americans eagerly engaged in their
pursuit of liberty, justice under the law, political equality, economic
development, the acquisition of literacy, mutual self-help, and nation-building.
The process of developing self-reliant Black American communities was and
continues to be fraught with a number of complexities and challenges. Most
notably, white racial opposition has, over time, generated significant opposition
to Black American self-reliance and self-determination. Although the evolution
of a self-help consciousness predates the Reconstruction years, emancipation
from slavery served to expand the options and possibilities for Black
Americans to engage in activities on a scale unprecedented in the antebellum or
pre-Civil War period. This chapter explores the Black American quest for self-
help and meaningful social development by examining the goals, activities, and
setbacks that exist in the historical record.
By the end of 1865, three-fourths of the nation's state legislatures had
accepted the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, making
the abolition of slavery and emancipation national in scope and irreversible.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution dramatically altered the
Constitution and the prevailing understanding of the responsibility of the
federal government to Black American men and women living in individual
states. Southern states had previously enjoyed unfettered privileges and rights
with regard to the legal and political rights of their enslaved and free Black
populations, especially in their ability to shelter and justify chattel slavery, and
further to arbitrate and enforce the absence of any rights and privileges not only
for enslaved Black Americans, but also, increasingly, for the populations of
varying sizes of free Blacks. With the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress
mandated that the legal rights of Black Americans to liberty and equality under
the law were fundamentally more important than the rights of states to hold
captives of African descent in slavery. Thus, the abolition of slavery also
brought about a sweeping reinterpretation of the relationship between
individuals, states, and the national government.
While congressional and presidential changes on the national level were
received with approval and appreciation, it was also true that Black Americans
233
had themselves long agitated for the demise of slavery. A long and persistent
effort to abolish slavery characterized the efforts of both free Blacks as well as
those free and enslaved who labored to strengthen the effectiveness of the
Underground Railroad. Indeed, in mentioning the anti-slavery movement, one
should remember the existence of a rather substantial free Black population,
committed to slavery's demise, which lived in the South. According to
historians of the period, as many as 250,000 free Blacks lived and worked in
the cities and towns of the antebellum South. The existence of productive and
viable Black communities that predated Emancipation proved vital to anti-
slavery efforts, as well as to efforts to facilitate the adjustments freed Black
American women and men undertook as they embraced their emancipation
freedom.
Reconstruction, or the reconstitution of economic, political, and social
relations in the South, proved a complex and complicated undertaking. White
Southerners, having gone to war to preserve a way of life that included holding
more than 4 million Black people in chattel slavery, wanted to begin again,
with as little deviation from the antebellum norm as possible. Whites had used
chattel slavery to order and define the economic, political, and social
relationships between the two races, principally in the South, but also, by
extension, in those areas of the country where the negative treatment accorded
free Blacks often derived from the racism set into motion by white people's
perceptions of Black potential and status as a consequence of slavery. For white
Southerners, eradicating slavery meant eliminating the justification basis for the
disparate treatment of Black men and women.
Almost all white Southerners strongly opposed accepting Black Americans
as equals. Almost overnight, white paramilitary terrorist groups like the Ku
Klux Klan that operated outside the law sprang up to physically harass and
persecute Blacks and progressive whites. In addition to extra-legal attempts to
intimidate and deny legal, political rights and economic opportunities to Black
Americans, racist white Southerners persistently engaged in efforts to further a
racial definition of existence that cut across class and gender lines. For instance,
where working class organizing to improve agricultural working conditions
might have appeared a rational alternative to the absence of any organized self-
interest efforts, white race supremacy propaganda in the South effectively
distanced most working-class whites from any willingness to see their class
interests as similar to those of Black agricultural workers, or tenant farmers.
Black Americans had waited a long time for an end to slavery and for the
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opportunity to move toward citizenship, political participation, and economic
development. Black newspapers and bulletins, letters, petitions, and testimony
before congressional committees are only some of the primary sources that
provide ample historical documentary to the intensity and commitment of Black
American thought and action. Black Americans pressed and lobbied to obtain
the same rights and opportunities accorded white Americans. As such, Black
Americans have been actively involved in promoting the exercise of civil rights
from the years following the Civil War right through to this day. Significantly,
Black American efforts and achievements in promoting civil rights reform have
always benefitted all other Americans, even as the quest for justice, due
process, protection under the law, liberty, and the pursuit of first class
citizenship have emerged as the centerpiece of social protest movements moved
along principally by Black women and men.
Black Americans actively sought involvement in influencing congressional
decision-making in the months preceding the Freedmen's Bureau Act of 1866,
ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution in
1867 and 1868, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and 1873, and the anti-Clansmen
Act (Third Enforcement Act) of 1871. It is clear from primary sources and
secondary accounts of the period that Black Americans and progressive whites
moved the Congress, the Republican Party, and organizations like the Union
League to legislate and promote radical changes in the ordering of legal,
political, economic, and social institutions in American society.
Where Black Americans did not have legal and political rights, the
Fourteenth Amendment defined citizenship and the rights and responsibilities
of states and the federal government in their respective relationships to
individual rights. Where Black Americans did not have meaningful legal
protections from the excesses of vagrancy laws and Black codes enacted by
Southern localities, Congress enacted a Civil Rights Act on March 14, 1866,
and passed it over President Johnson's veto on April 6 and April 9. Where
Black Americans did not have the ability to involve themselves in political
elections and legislative proceedings, the Fifteenth Amendment gave voting
rights to half of Black American adults by granting the franchise to Black
males. Where the Democratic Party in the South identified itself with the
ideology of white supremacy, the Republican Party and the Union League
reflected Black political aspirations and interests.
It is important to note the activist efforts of Black Americans and the
advocacy efforts of those who worked on behalf of progress for freed persons
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and the nation using moral persuasion, appeals to democratic ideals, morality,
and rational business sense in their appeals for assistance to the newly
emancipated Black Americans. Many were concerned that, without financial
equity, land, the vote, legal rights, and protections Black Americans would
continue under the austere conditions imposed by angry Southern whites, who,
having lost the institution of chattel slavery, sought to replace it with vagrancy
laws, Black codes, and, later, with grandfather clauses, restrictive state
constitutions, poll taxes, requirements that Black voters recite verbatim sections
of the U.S. Constitution, and all-white primaries.
It bears placing Black American activism and the work of advocates in the
context that governed the day by remembering that the vast majority of Black
Americans were poor, landless, and illiterate. The primary goals of Black
American men and women were: (a) the acquisition of land (40 acres and a
mule), (b) inclusion into racially segregated and exclusionary labor unions as a
vehicle for upward mobility and economic stability, (c) the vote as a means to
acquire political representation, and (d) the acquisition of literacy as a vehicle
for intellectual development and artistic achievement. While the promise and
opportunity of Reconstruction was ripe for restitution to a people aggrieved by
two hundred and forty-five years of captivity and enslavement, no
compensation or restitution was awarded to Black Americans. Indeed, in an
economy driven by property relations as the basis for the acquisition of wealth,
the absence of a homestead for Black families severely restricted the ability of
Black Americans to protect the freedoms granted through Emancipation.
History makes clear that, without the land reform that was called for by many,
Black Americans called themselves free, but found themselves financially
dependent on the very Southern whites who wanted to return the South as
nearly as possible to slavery days.
Historians refer to the absence of an economic program to benefit Black
Americans and the resulting disfranchisement, physical violence—e.g.,
lynching, raping, emergence of a debt peonage system called the crop-lien
system, sending Black men into the convict labor system (slavery by another
name), the use of Black male prisoners in state-run chain gangs, and the
removal of federal troops and marshals (to enforce the constitutional
amendments and statutory laws) from the South, as the betrayal of
Reconstruction. Although revisionist American historiography asserts that
Black Americans were freed with few, if any, financial resources, one ought to
keep in mind that, for quite some time, historians sympathetic to the Old South
and its racial credo argued that Reconstruction was a failure because Blacks,
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northern white “carpetbaggers,” and Southern white “treasoners” nearly ruined
the moral, financial, and political order that had shaped the South. These
historians, Ulrich B. Phillips for example, concluded that slavery had been good
for Blacks and the South, and furthermore, that the emergence of the legal and
extralegal means to return the South to white control were justified means to
bring about a resurgence of “white civilization.”
The disparity between the possibilities of the post-war years and the reality
were quite stark reminders to Black Americans that racism occupied a central
place in American thought and action. While Black Americans made steady
progress toward employment, entrepreneurship, the acquisition of land, and
institution building—churches, lodges, clubs, schools, colleges, and
universities, sororal and fraternal orders, burial and life insurance companies,
and philanthropic and mutual aid societies—the constraints imposed by a
virulent racial segregation and exclusion from receiving those opportunities
afforded to whites, limited Black economic development and employment, as
well as access to education, the ballot, quality land, credit, and other financial
options and opportunities. A noted historian has compared the process of
racially segregating Blacks from opportunities to participate in democracy and
development as analogous to the creation of apartheid in South Africa.
Although aggregate population statistics belie an important overall
demographic difference in the two countries, Professor George Frederickson
correctly identifies the role of white racism in establishing two separate
societies, predicated on inequality, injustice, and lack of economic
opportunities and financial options.
According to the U.S. Census of 1870, there were approximately 4,880,009
Black Americans, accounting for 12.7 percent of the total U.S. population.
Importantly, there were many counties in the South where the concentration of
enslaved Blacks had far outstripped the numbers of whites in those counties
during the antebellum period. A number of those counties remained
predominantly Black in the post-war period, and the physical intimidation and
forced disfranchisement of large numbers of Black men foreclosed the potential
for a democratically elected leadership that would have represented Black as
well as white interests.
History records a brief period of Black male electoral participation and
public office holding in the Reconstruction period. Black majority
demographics meant the election of Black men to office holding. Voter
registration under the provisions of the Reconstruction Act of 1867 produced
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Black American males as a majority of the electors in South Carolina, Georgia,
Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In addition, some counties and
states were demographically dominated by large numbers of Black Americans.
For instance, 78,982 Black American males and 46,346 white males registered
to vote in South Carolina. Likewise, 60,167 Black American males and 46,636
white males registered to vote in Mississippi. According to noted chronicler
Peter Bergman, 10 counties in South Carolina and 33 out of 61 counties in
Mississippi had a majority of Black male voters.
The preponderance of Black American male voters in Mississippi elected
then Alderman Reverend Hiram R. Revels to the State Senate in 1870; in the
same year, Senator Revels was elected to fill an unexpired seat as a U.S.
Senator. Likewise, majority Black male voters in Mississippi counties elected
U.S. Senator Blanche K. Bruce (1874), who was the only Black male during
Reconstruction to actually serve a regular term in the U.S. Senate. Finally,
Black voters from Adams County Mississippi elected John R. Lynch to the
State Legislature, where he became Speaker of the House. Active in the
Republican Party, Lynch later served terms in the U.S. House of
Representatives from 1873–1877, and again from 1881–1883. There was also a
combination of eager Black male voters and white males who voted for the
Republican and not the Democratic Party. While historians often refer to the
voting conduct of Black Americans and whites, it should be remembered that
women were ineligible for suffrage until the passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920. Even so, in Southern
states Black women's voting aspirations went no further than Black males—
neither exercised their voting rights until passage and enforcement of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The gains accrued to Black Americans during the years in which Black men
exercised their right to the franchise included the institution of public schools,
often appearing for the first time in areas of the South. However, as eager as
Black Americans were to participate in representing and furthering their own
development by participation in electoral politics, a virulent white racism,
combined with growing indifference to violations of the law and the
Constitution in the South, swept away the progressive changes begun in the
region. Within a few years, the ideology and practice of white supremacy again
dominated the operation of state and county development especially in the
South. In such a climate of white racial hysteria, Black Americans were
disfranchised from their rights under the law. White Southerners rewrote the
laws, ignored civil rights legislation, or denied that Black Americans were ever
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the subject of the law. The result was the complete segregation of white and
Black society, with virtually all the resources for development maintained to
promote separate and unequal development favoring whites only.
It is often said that law follows social custom. The Supreme Court in 1896
ruled exactly as racist whites in the country desired. The opinion of the Court in
Plessey v. Ferguson was that America consisted of two nations, separate in all
matters. Mandating what racist whites were already instituting as racial
segregation, and unequal resource allocation and economic development, the
Court insisted in its written decision that Blacks and whites would be separate
and equal. Racism is never equal, and so progressive people in the nation
watched as Black Americans were systematically legally stripped of their right
to a first-class citizenship. By the turn of the century, large numbers of white
Americans had repudiated and denied the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, meaning that Black
American development was abandoned by most of white America. Decades of
Black American self-determination and protest had already preceded the
Plessey decision; now, the institution of Jim Crow segregation narrowly
confined Black expression and visibility.
Black Americans were forced to do what no other group in America, except
indigenous peoples, had been forced to do, namely, to aid and assist white
development, while receiving little, if any, assistance in developing their own
communities. Much of the economic development—that is, industrial,
manufacturing, scientific and educational, as well as banking progress—and
philanthropic assistance from wealthy white industrialists and financiers went
directly to assist and develop white communities. In addition, all branches of
government aided and assisted in creating “a white man's country,” where tax
revenues and government-approved wage differentials and social welfare
assistance was distributed in accordance with the prevailing acceptance of the
ideology of white supremacy.
In essence, development in America has never been race neutral. From the
earliest days of the Republic to the present, development has, with rare and
short-lived exceptions, meant that the resources of local, state, and federal
systems of government, and the fruits of private industry, have always served
and abetted white development. Other than the short-lived attempts to improve
the opportunities and rights enjoyed by Black Americans during the early years
of the Reconstruction era, there has only recently (since the 1960s) been any
attempt to pursue race-specific development policies and programs that
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emphasize the development of human potential in Black American,
Amerindian, Hispanic/Latino(a), and Asian communities. The issue of
sustainable development for people of color, therefore, is an underutilized
development strategy for the country and an unrealized aspect of the
expectations of citizenship for Black Americans and other people of color in the
United States. It is precisely because of the disparity between the historical
evolution of development advantage and opportunity for whites, and the under-
development, disadvantage, and exclusion from opportunity, that the Black
American protest tradition is so important a tool or measure for effective and
sustainable social change.
Historically, with far fewer resources, and the disparate distribution of public
funds, the majority of Black Americans in the South were locked into a cashless
debt peonage system, denied their right to representative government—elected
through the right to vote—and denied access to an equal education even when
their numbers exceeded that of white students in Southern school districts. In
classic studies of the development of education in the South, Professor Louis R.
Harlan's Separate and Unequal (1969), and Professor James D. Anderson's The
Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (1988), two noted historians
examine the evolution of racial separation and inequality in schooling for Black
American children across the South, from the years following the Civil War
until well into the twentieth century. Both scholars credit Black American and
some northern white teachers who relocated to the South, Black and white
philanthropic institutions, and individuals with the dedication, struggle, and
achievement responsible for Black American progress in acquiring literacy.
Literacy rates for Black Americans showed a steady and committed increase.
According to census data, 18.6 percent of Black Americans were literate in
1870; in 1880 Black American literacy rose to 30 percent, and by 1890, fully
42.9 percent of Black Americans were literate. However, it is important to note
that acquiring literacy for Southern Blacks remained a serious challenge, and
historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), then as now, have served
a vital role. Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker Taliaferro Washington,
Hampton Institute (now University), Fisk University, Howard University,
Bennett College, Spelman College, Morehouse College, Meharry Medical
College, and many others have, for decades, provided both intellectual,
philosophical, scientific, theological, agricultural, industrial, and medical
training for Black Americans. Institutions of higher learning functioned as both
centers of teaching and research, and as centers for leadership training. Some of
Black America's most prominent leaders and thinkers have been the product of
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Black colleges and universities.
Booker Taliaferro Washington was born to a Black woman whose legal
status as chattel (the personal property) of a white man also determined the
status of all children born to her. As such, Booker T. was born enslaved on a
plantation in Virginia in 1858. In his adult years, Booker T. Washington
attended school at night while working in West Virginia's coalmines. Later, he
enrolled at Hampton Institute, graduating in 1875. After some years of teaching
at Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., and Hampton Institute, Booker T.
Washington was asked to organize a school at Tuskegee, Alabama. Initially
working with a $2,000 budget, Washington rapidly developed the new school,
emphasizing industrial training, which led Tuskegee students to construct forty
of the Institute's buildings over the course of twenty years. In those years,
Washington gathered a reputation for being a moderate on matters relating to
Black American involvement in the struggle for political and social rights.
Indeed, Booker T. Washington made his position on the subject of Black rights
in America very clear in his 1895 speech at the Cotton States Exposition, held
in Atlanta, Georgia. Referring directly to his kinsfolk, Washington called for
Blacks to “cast down your bucket where you are,” and work to develop and
build the South.
Seeing the intense poverty in which most Southern Blacks lived,
Washington's approach traded employment and the possibility of economic
self-reliance against the pursuit of political and social rights. Washington was
as aware as anyone that the white initiative to disfranchise large numbers, if not
all, Black Americans living in the South was well underway. In fact, historians
believe that Washington's accommodationist position might have contributed to
white perceptions that they would meet little organized resistance against their
attempts to disfranchise Blacks. It has also been suggested that the austere
actions of the Supreme Court against Homer Plessey of New Orleans in its
landmark 1896 decision to legalize the establishment of a racially segregated
society, predicated on the very racial inequality that was already so evident,
drew cover from Washington's Exposition Speech. In his vision of an
economically self-reliant Black population, Washington called on Blacks to
accept the conditions in the South, because, as he suggested in his speech,
whites were friends to Black people.
Washington's position as an educator and prominent spokesperson in the
Black American community was expanded to include his influence amongst
whites because of his accommodationist posture, which brought him immediate
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approval from whites around the country. Although a number of Black
American men and women—W. E. B. Du Bois, scholar, activist, and editor of
Crisis magazine; William Monroe Trotter, outspoken editor of the Boston
Guardian; and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells (and other Black women)
whose writing and public speaking later contributed to the formation of the
Black Women's Club Movement—disagreed with Washington's position, for
still others, Washington's visibility identified him as the national Black
American leader.
Washington was very concerned about promoting economic self-reliance
amongst Black Americans and, in 1900, he organized the National Negro
Business League. Beginning in about 1899, he also embarked on an impressive
career as a published writer, authoring a number of books: his autobiography,
Up from Slavery (1901), The Future of the American Negro (c. 1899),
Character Building (1902), Working with the Hand (1904), Tuskegee and Its
People (1905), Putting the Most into Life (1906), Life of Frederick Douglass
(1907), The Negro in Business (1907), The Story of the Negro (1909), My
Larger Education (1911), and The Man Farthest Down: A Record of
Observation and Study in Europe (1912).
Throughout the decades, Black Americans have expressed a strong desire to
participate fully in economic, social, and cultural development in participatory
democracy, giving rise to committed Black American male and female
leadership. Singular in their emphasis on progress for Black people, Black
America leaders have differed not so much in their objectives or even goals, as
much as on their strategies, methods, and means. Frightful and threatening
challenges faced those Black American men and women who took the business
of leadership seriously. Where Booker T. Washington identified himself with
“accommodationism,” one of his fiercest critics was an accomplished scholar,
teacher, writer, activist, and statesman named W. E. B. DuBois.
In addition to being a contemporary of Booker T. Washington, and one of
Washington's most articulate critics, Du Bois rose to a level of national and
even international leadership. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868,
just after the demise of slavery, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois later
graduated from Fisk University, receiving a B.A. degree in 1888. Still later in
his early adult years, Du Bois is recognized as having been the first Black
American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University. To his credit, Du Bois
entitled his dissertation The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the
U.S.A.: 1638–1870. Not only would Du Bois distinguish himself as a scholar
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and writer, undertaking the research for the highly regarded Atlanta Studies that
emphasized Black self-help and self-reliance, but, over the course of many
years, he was seen developing his activism on behalf of Black Americans. This
occurred initially through the Niagara Movement, later through his efforts to
build and strengthen the NAACP (founded in 1909), and still later, through his
support for Pan-Africanism and independence movements in Africa.
Throughout his adult lifetime, W. E. B. Du Bois advocated on behalf of the
exercise of full legal, political, economic, and social rights for Black
Americans. In addition, Du Bois became identified with the theory of the
“talented tenth,” which related to the expectation that the most talented Black
Americans, who became accomplished and successful, would accept the
responsibility to provide financial and intellectual leadership for an emerging
Black American people. DuBois' self-determination vision was widely
respected.
If Booker T. Washington feared white reprisal to the point of avoiding public
condemnations of lynching, Ida B. Wells became one of this nation's most
outspoken and effective anti-lynching crusaders. Ms. Wells, raised in humble
circumstances, would in her adult years work exceedingly hard to be able to
buy an interest in Free Speech, a publication that she used to give voice to
pressing social justice issues. Wells is perhaps best known for her willingness
to use her position as a journalist to publicize the physical atrocities committed
primarily against Black men. Ida B. Wells repeatedly called on the entire nation
to demonstrate concern and outrage for the gross violation of human and civil
rights practiced as mob violence, often with the consent, involvement, or
knowledge of law enforcement officials. Indeed, if Ms. Wells had any doubts
about the dubious circumstances surrounding other reported lynch mob victims,
the grotesque murder of Thomas Moss, a hard-working Memphis businessman
and long-time personal associate of hers, crystallized for her an understanding
of lynching as a means of culling and destroying alpha Black males. For Ida B.
Wells, Moss's brutal slaying reflected the degree to which prominent whites in
Memphis sought the social control of local Black people's activities. By killing
Black entrepreneurs and leaders, many powerful whites across the South—who
instigated the white lynch mobs—sought to sabotage Black economic and
institutional development.
While highly respected by the Black American community, Ms. Wells'
advocacy sometimes encountered denial, justification, and ambiguity from the
whites she approached witha condemnation of lynching. Often the white press
accused Black men of raping white women, and such reports almost always
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linked the lynching of Black men with allegations of white female rape. So
accustomed were whites to viewing Blackmen through racist stereotypes of
bestiality established as one of several defenses of slavery, that it must have
been nearly impossible to reckon the actual instances of Black male violence
against white women. According to the research that Wells published in a study
that she authored on lynching, only about a third of the 728 Blackmen lynched
over the course of ten years had even been accused of rape. Black women's
historian Paula Giddings notes that Wells discovered that most of the Black
men, women and children lynched were murdered for “incendiarism,” “race
prejudice,” “quarreling with Whites,” and “making threats.”
Equally disturbing for Wells and other Black women was the widespread
stereotype of Black American women as promiscuous and immoral. The
stereotype derived from the misogynist treatment of Black women during
slavery. Where allegations of rape against white women blurred the tendency of
whites to murder prosperous or civic-minded Black men, allegations of sexual
immorality by Black women blurred or obscured the rape of young Black girls
and Black women by white men. So widespread was this practice that Southern
folklore recounts how white men were thought to have come of age if they had
raped a Black woman. Wells, often at risk of being physically harmed, or of
becoming one of the Black women raped or lynched by white men, continued a
persistent activism against lynching and the rape of Black females.
Just as Ida B. Wells distinguished herself in working to define a moral
standard for humane conduct on the issue of human rights violations, there
were other Black women whose voices were raised on behalf of the Black
family, Black children, and always on the place of women's issues in the
formulation of Black American efforts at race improvement and nation-
building. The Black women who wrote on pressing issues of the day and spoke
publicly on a wide range of topics almost always concerned themselves with
issues of racial and gender improvement. In reflecting on the work and writings
of Black women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, like Anna Julia
Cooper, it is clear that their words and actions were in keeping with the
tradition of Black American female activism and leadership embodied in
women like Maria Stewart, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Sojourner Truth, and
Harriett Tubman from earlier in the nineteenth century.
The tradition of Black American women's self-help and protest is well
documented. Dating from the antislavery movement, Black American women
actively resisted and struggled against the institution of slavery. Black
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American women were also actively involved in organizing and supporting the
mutual aid and benevolent societies that were so crucial to familial and
community survival and institutional growth in free Black communities in the
antebellum period. The demise of enslavement brought the promise of racial
betterment to a new high, and Black American women, long accustomed to
hard work, sacrifice on behalf of others, and persistent protest against the
violence that whites inflicted on Black people, articulated an impassioned
commitment to see Black people become increasingly self-reliant. Throughout
the first two decades of the twentieth century, they persistently struggled to
acquire the franchise as a basic right of citizenship. In addition to suffrage,
access to education, and civil and human rights, Mary Church Terrell,
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Ida B. Wells, Jane Edna Hunter, and Mary McLeod
Bethune (founder of Daytona Educational and Industrial Institute for Training
Negro Girls, later Bethune College), were among the Black women who
committed themselves to an important self-help movement, the Black Women's
Club Movement: organizing the Colored Women's League in 1892, New Era
Club in 1893, the National Federation of Afro-American Women in 1895, the
National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, the Working Girls'
Home Association in 1911, and the National Council of Negro Women in 1935.
Activist Black women believed their work would empower Black women, and,
by so doing, increase the power of Black people's self-reliance, self-
determination, and social development.
Black Americans have a long tradition of raising and cultivating the
leadership necessary to articulate issues, pose solutions, and find remedies. For
as long as Black Americans have trod the soil in America, they have created a
leadership to articulate their aims and achievements. Historically, the Black
Church has served as a pivotal and unique institution in the United States, for it
is a religious and spiritual institution, even as it is a social and political
institution. The Black Church has served the spiritual needs of Black
Americans and has been a major philanthropist in Black American
communities. It has also been one of the institutions most responsible for
training and providing a haven for emerging Black American leadership,
particularly those men and women whose lives are documented testimonies to
their insistence on struggling to improve human and civil rights for Black
Americans. In this manner, the Black Church has facilitated the emergence of a
Black American protest tradition.
In addition to a protest tradition, an emphasis on acquiring literacy and
formal education, exercise of the franchise, access to land ownership, emphasis
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on employment as a path to entrepreneurship, the development of mutual aid
and benevolent assistance and philanthropic giving, and the development of the
Black Press, Black Americans have developed an artistic tradition that reflects
Black history and culture. The Harlem Renaissance, an outpouring of Black
American artistic and literary achievement, encompassed the “New Negro”
Movement of the 1920s. The movement produced a heightened racial
consciousness, and it visibly represented and depicted Black Americans in
humanistic ways.
In the introduction to his classic book, The New Negro, Dr. Alain Locke
described the “New Negro” Movement as having “inner objectives” and a
“newness” that emphasized philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of Black
life and culture. Significantly, literary and artistic themes and images arose with
a new fervor during the Harlem Renaissance against a backdrop of decades of
the emergence and evolution of a distinctly Black American nationalism. Alain
Locke, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countee P.
Cullen, Claude McKay, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina W. Grimke, Arna
Bontemps, Arthur A. Schomburg, Nella Larsen, and Dorothy West were among
the writers who gave renewed significance to the ideals, aspirations, and
accomplishments of Black Americans.
As images of racial pride and themes of racial solidarity served as a backdrop
for the Harlem Renaissance, the persistence of efforts to further the progress of
Black Americans remained in the forefront of political action and economic
growth and development during the decade of the twenties and beyond. The
evolution of self-help strategies and efforts to promote self-reliance has
remained a constant component of Black American social, political, and
economic movements to this day. Where the artistic community endeavored to
portray a myriad of images that defined brownness in a creative and positive
manner, Marcus Garvey called on Black Americans to recognize common
shared goals. Garvey, who continued in the nineteenth century Black nationalist
tradition of emigration from the United States to Africa (advocated by Black
Americans Paul Cuffee and later Martin Delany) founded an organization based
in New York City and pursued emigration. Born into a large family in Jamaica
in 1887, Marcus Garvey was active as a political reformer from an early age.
After apprenticing as a printer in Jamaica, Garvey turned his attention to
political activism, founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA) in 1911. After largely unsuccessful attempts to expand the UNIA in
Jamaica, Marcus Garvey immigrated to the United States, where the UNIA
became tremendously successful. In 1917, he started The Negro World, a
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newspaper devoted to discussions of Black self-help and self-reliance. Garvey's
appeal to Black Americans gained strength steadily, as the UNIA organized
over thirty chapters. Most popular was Garvey's call for a “Back to Africa”
Movement, which steadily gained supporters, despite his untimely incarceration
for two and one-half years for alleged mail fraud.
Garvey's and Du Bois' popularity might be better viewed not only in the
context of an increasingly visible cultural revival, and the continuation of an
articulate Black nationalism, but also against the backdrop of significant
demographic changes underway throughout the first several decades of the
twentieth century. Historians and demographers alike note the dramatic
redistribution of Black Americans, from the South to the North, as in large part
responsible for many of the major shifts in Black economic, social, and political
behavior.
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Economic recession, the boll weevil, white violence, disfranchisement, and
the lack of legal rights and near absence of educational and economic
opportunities prompted widespread Black emigration from the South. On the
other hand, opportunities to earn a cash wage for factory jobs in the North, and
to participate in the institutional, political, cultural, and social life of
predominantly northern Black communities, somewhat more sheltered from
white violence, appealed to many Black Americans.
Scholars characterize the mass exodus of Black Americans from the South to
the North in the early decades of the twentieth century as the Great Migrations.
Although generally welcomed by Blacks already living and working in northern
or Midwestern urban cities, the arrival of Black migrants from the rural South
was resented by many whites. Beliefs about white supremacy that often
convinced white workers Blacks had no right to jobs desired by whites served
to prompt white physical violence. Frequent and destructive race riots almost
always instigated by whites often scarred both towns and the urban landscape.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Black Americans confronted dejure
legal segregation in the South, and de jure segregation in the North. For quite
some time, a number of scholars have argued inaccurately that Black people
experienced de facto segregation (deriving from individual prejudices, the
behavior of private institutions like real estate companies and banks, and
income inequality) in the North. To be sure, each of these powerful barriers to
Black people using land purchasing and home ownership to help build wealth
as whites did in fact existed to create a tradition of barring Black people's
upward mobility. But, in a path-breaking new book, The Color of Law,
Professor Richard Rothstein has meticulously documented the de jure (by law)
discriminatory laws and policies, including explicit racial zoning in the North,
enacted by local, state, and the federal government starting in the 1920s. The
current racial segregation that confines Black people into old, decaying
communities where they cannot possibly build the accumulating wealth that
whites build in the suburbs is the consequence of decades-old laws and policies
that institutionalized the racial hierarchy we see in cities and suburbs across the
country. Rothstein's book is important because it puts the federal government's
laws and policies on the hook so to speak for the patterns of racial segregation
that we see in communities like Ferguson and Milwaukee. Consequently, nearly
everywhere Black people experienced residential segregation enforced by
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whites, separate and unequal schools, income inequality, political
disfranchisement, poor or nonexistent access to health care, escalating white
violence (as the KKK even had sizeable chapters on Long Island, New York,
and in Connecticut), and unequal access to employment and small business
development assistance.
Black Americans responded to the oppression and limited options with
protest, resistance, and creative initiative in the form of the self-help efforts of
Black-run businesses—grocery and general merchandise stores, funeral homes,
barber and beauty shops, doctor's and dentist offices, emotional and psychic
healers, boarding houses, food preparation shops and restaurants, catering
businesses, carpentry and masonry services—and parallel institutions such as
schools, colleges and universities, churches, banks, insurance and realty
companies, art galleries, music studios, and newspaper and book publishing
companies. Nearly all of the above mentioned self-help activities reflected
Black people's quest to uplift themselves; one routinely heard Black men and
women refer to themselves as a “race man” or a “race woman.”
At the same time that many sought their expressions of self-help in
employment opportunities, and where possible, start-up businesses, Black
Americans consistently articulated a desire to participate in the rights and
responsibilities of American citizenship. Nowhere is the paradox that
confronted Black American men and women more clearly evident than in the
willingness to support and serve in active duty in America's wars for world
democracy and peace. Indeed, for many decades Black Americans often fought
for liberties and freedoms seldom extended to them at home in America.
The fact of a civil war, two world wars, and several major military
excursions dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the present has pressed
first Black American men and then later Black American women into military
service on America's behalf. Despite a second-class legal, civil, political, and
social status, Black Americans have fought in all of America's wars and
displayed valor and a commitment to destroy the institution of slavery during
the Civil War. The movie Glory celebrates the famed 54th and 55th
Massachusetts Negro Regiments of the Union Army. In addition, one notes that
the Union Army's 1st and 3rd Louisiana Negro Regiments, 9th and 11th
Louisiana, the 1st Mississippi, and the 1st North Carolina Negro Regiments
distinguished themselves in very difficult battles.
All total, 186,000 Black American men fought as combat troops in the Civil
War, while another 200,000 served in “service units.” Of the Blacks who
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served the Union Army, 93,000 were from the Confederate South, 45,000 came
from the Border States, 34,000 joined from the New England area, and 12,000
came from the West. Noted for their courage, Black American men also fought
in America's wars for expansion, or “manifest destiny.” Hardly were Black men
themselves freed from enslavement, but that an opportunity to prove their
patriotism pressed them to fight against First Nation indigenous peoples, whose
treaties with white men were consistently broken or ignored.
The use of Black soldiers in the 9th and 10th cavalry and the 24th and 25th
infantry marked the escalation of military excursions against Amerindians.
Black American men also found themselves fighting against other people of
color, whose experience of racial and cultural oppression mirrored the extent to
which the ideology of white supremacy dominated America's actions. Manifest
Destiny in the 19th and 20th centuries meant territorial expansion on behalf of
capitalism and the ideology of white supremacy. Little wonder then that
America's wars for expansion have brought relatively little change in the denial
of civil rights that Blacks and other Americans of color confront. If annihilating
Amerindians on the frontier secured Manifest Destiny at home in America, then
militarily overwhelming people fighting for their liberation in the Philippines
and Cuba during the Spanish-American War (1898) helped to secure
imperialism abroad.
World War I began in 1914 in Europe, and the United States entered the war
against Germany in 1917. Although Black Americans were 10.7 percent of the
U.S. population, 13.1 percent, or 350,000 Black men served in America's war
effort. As before, Black troops fought in segregated units of the military—in the
92nd and 93rd Divisions. Having won honors and medals for bravery, Black
troops returned to America to confront race riots, racism, lynching, Jim Crow,
disfranchisement, and the other aspects of America's second-class citizenship
that had come to characterize the underdevelopment of Black communities in
the name of white supremacy.
Blacks enlisted in military service again for World War II (1941–1945),
when fascism threatened to engulf Europe and the rest of the world, rendering
the world unsafe for people of color. Paradoxically, while America's leadership
called on the Black American community to purchase war bonds and enlist in
support of the war effort following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor
Naval Station, America's domestic policies of legalized segregation and the
unequal distribution of the nation's public resources for community, business,
and institutional development—separate and unequal—required persistent and
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vigilant opposition from civil rights activists and organizations. Despite
questions and a concern for the treatment of Blacks enlisting in the branches of
the United States military, the majority of Black Americans supported the war
effort. By war's end, Harry Ploski and Ernest Kaiser observe in “Black
Servicemen and the Military,” in The Negro Almanac, 700,000 Blacks had
served in the Army, 77,592 in the Air Force, 165,000 in the Navy, 17,000 in the
Marines, 5,000 in the Coast Guard, and 4,000 Black women in the WAGS and
the WAVES.
Sensing the intensity of Black disdain for “separate and unequal,” longtime
activist and organizer Asa Philip Randolph challenged America's white
leadership to remove the barriers that held segregation in the armed services in
place. Threatening to mobilize a 300,000-person March on Washington in
1948, Randolph pressured President Truman to issue Executive Order 9981,
which barred segregation in the armed services. Randolph and his supporters,
acting in the tradition of direct action protest, moved the country forward
decisively in the 1940s, mounting an effective protest campaign against Jim
Crow segregation and its accompanying exclusion of Black Americans from an
equitable share in America's abundance. The work to advance civil rights for
Black Americans continued against the backdrop of the Korean War and later
the Vietnam War, where by 1968, 44,867 Blacks had served in the Army, 3,609
in the Navy, 8,883 in the Air Force, and 8,657 in the Marine Corps.
While fighting wars abroad for freedom, Black Americans have waged a
struggle for civil and human rights at home in American cities, towns, and
countryside. Key Black institutions have long spearheaded the ongoing efforts
of many people to promote civil rights. At issue has been the enforcement of
existing law and creation of new statutes and court precedents. The National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has for one
hundred years been in the vanguard of efforts to use the law and the courts to
affect positive reforms for Black Americans. The National Urban League,
organized in 1911, has been instrumental in providing leadership and
innovation for Black communities. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a
Black trade union organized by Randolph in 1925, promoted the interests of the
thousands of Black men who worked as Pullman Coach Porters on racially
segregated trains in America.
However, by far, the most impressive efforts to realize civil rights for Black
Americans came about as the result of the combined efforts of many individuals
and organizations such as the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality
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(CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the Urban
League, the National Negro Women's Clubs, and radical Black Nationalist
organizations. These activist groups organized around Black people's insistence
on producing a social protest movement aimed at establishing a new moral
order, legitimized by the creation of new laws and statutes, and buttressed by an
insistence on legal and moral enforcement of existing laws, statutes, and
protections of civil and human rights in America.
Out of the struggles for civil and human rights, out of the tradition of
engaged activism and social protest against inhumane treatment, and out of
centuries of self-help business development, organization and institution
building, and philanthropic giving to charitable causes, the Civil Rights
movement emerged. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was not a “new
movement,” as some would suggest, but rather a part of an historical
continuum, which has come to characterize those actions desirable, and most
often necessary, for Black Americans to realize some meaningful measure of
participation in democracy. The measures of Black American participation have
almost always been linked with the nature of treatment accorded them as
human beings and as citizens. The struggle to be accorded treatment as human
beings was the struggle to end chattel slavery and its accompanying deprivation
and denial of human rights, let alone civil rights. The antislavery and
abolitionist efforts of the nineteenth century were effective in forcing
Americans to confront the inhumanity of the enslavement of millions of
Africans and their descendants.
The struggle to advance civil rights is inextricably linked with efforts to
clarify and promote human rights. Even before the Civil War had irrevocably
altered the status of enslaved Africans, a morally bankrupt ideological defense
of slavery had ambitiously carved out intellectual territory that contributed to
the diminution of civil rights for Blacks. The emergence of pseudo-scientific
dogma and propaganda in the 19th and 20th centuries contributed significantly
to the role that “scientific” racism would play in American society. Racism had,
in fact, infiltrated all aspects of American society, from social relations to the
evaluation of what constituted knowledge and science.
Decades of defending the economic interests of those men whose wealth and
privilege had derived from the kidnapping and exploitation of millions of
African men and women produced an intellectual and scientific climate in
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white America sharply divided on the issue of human rights for Black
Americans. There were white men of means who used their wealth and
education to promote white supremacy against the presumption of Black
American inferiority. In their writings and speeches, concepts were presented as
discourses on oppositions. Although in time these discourses would reveal far
more about the evolution of dualist thought in European history than any innate
truism about non-European peoples, Black Americans and Amerindians were
nonetheless debased and oppressed by white society's preoccupation with an
emphasis on opposites, instead of cultural parallels or similarities.
Where Europeans were viewed as human, capable of sentience, intelligence,
and divine guidance, pseudo-sciences and scientific racism cast Black
Americans and Amerindians as inhuman, bestial, dumb, incapable of
intelligence and civilization, cursed, and ungodly. It is praiseworthy that such a
dichotomy is now understood to represent distorted oppositional European
images of the “other,” instead of any genuine insight into the nature and true
culture of Black Americans or indigenous peoples. While this insight is now
clear, many people believed and internalized the racist teachings they were
exposed to, including some of the very people who were victimized by it.
Hence, lest the effort had to be unceasing to abolish slavery, an ongoing effort
to expose the racism inherent in so much of the intellectual and pseudo-
scientific discourses of the day has been underway throughout the past two
centuries.
Therefore, although there is a tendency in the current climate of discussion
about the meaning of civil rights to associate the quest for civil rights with the
acquisition and use of political rights and the social status that derives from
utilizing political involvement and activity as the basis for economic and social
advancement, it is wise to remember that the struggle for civil rights has also
entailed the challenge to confront and transform racist ideas and concepts,
values, and teachings embedded in the humanities, social disciplines, and life
sciences. Indeed, it has been the influence of racist dogma into the very portals
of knowledge, religion, science, and the structures and operations of the state
that has required such persistent attention to the eradication of racism and
sexism and the elevation and reaffirmation of civil rights.
In this century, the large-scale coalition movements on behalf of collective
bargaining, civil rights, and affirmative action have also had to confront the
tenacious beliefs that have for so long served as the biological justification for
the racial and sexual advantages accorded males of European ancestry. Indeed,
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while the story of the labor movement entails a discussion of collective
bargaining, it is also the case that, with few exceptions, it is replete with the
racial exclusion of Black men and women.
It is precisely because Black Americans have been significantly responsible
for raising a consciousness of principled action as it relates to concepts like
equity, justice, fairness, equality, and freedom that an agenda for social action
in America has progressed forward. Significantly, their agenda has included an
insistence that laws mirror principled concepts, that principled concepts be the
basis for the actions of the state(s) toward citizens, and that citizens be
responsible for fashioning the state into an entity that adheres to principles,
laws, and a neo-platonic basis for moral conduct. Furthermore, because Black
Americans have sought to actualize participatory democracy, the ongoing
nature of civil rights activism has characterized the conduct and behavior of key
institutions and leadership in the Black community. Perhaps more than
anything else, most Black Americans have viewed participatory democracy as
being about inclusion in the structures and operations of government, societal
institutions, and economic development; so much so that an inalienable right to
inclusion was a fundamental issue in the emergence of the recent Civil Rights
Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Direct action campaigns assumed a pivotal significance in the efforts of
Black Americans to reform the separate and unequal doctrine that everywhere
denied their civil rights. In the tradition of Black leaders like Asa Philip
Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Marcus Garvey, James Farmer, the Race-
Relations Secretary of the Quaker-Pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, joined
by students from the University of Chicago, organized CORE in Chicago in
1942. The Congress of Racial Equality early on forged a coalition with
progressive whites that helped bring about the non-violent integration of long
racially segregated restaurants in Chicago. James Farmer was strongly
influenced by Mahatma Gandhi's non-violence and passive resistance
teachings. While CORE shared similar goals and objectives with the NAACP,
it was among the critics of the NAACP's emphasis on legalism. As an
alternative, CORE's strategies for affecting progressive social change included
sit-ins, the standing line, and the Freedom Ride, as tactics to eradicate
discrimination and racial segregation, and encourage the growth of cooperative
communities.
In October 1942, three CORE members were refused service at racially
segregated Stoners Restaurant in Chicago's Loop. In the year that followed,
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CORE devised effective measures for breaking the stranglehold segregation
held on people's lives. Initially, CORE sent interracial groups to Stoners
seeking seating and service. When they were refused, CORE began leafleting
patrons and moved to a strategy in which 65 persons, including 16 Blacks,
undertook sit-ins, first outside, then inside Stoners. Finally, Stoners acquiesced,
and CORE celebrated a strategically well-orchestrated non-violent
demonstration for racial justice.
Two years later a Black woman named Irene Morgan, with the assistance of
the NAACP, successfully sued the state of Virginia in Morgan v.
Commonwealth of Virginia (1946) for the treatment she received when she
refused to move from the front of a Greyhound bus in Richmond. CORE
organized and sent an interracial group on the First Freedom Ride.
Significantly, the first Freedom Riders, unlike successors, namely the Freedom
Rides of 1961, bypassed the deep South, thereby avoiding the violent reactions
of Southern whites intent upon upholding racial segregation.
To be clear, racial segregation meant the exclusion of Blacks from access to
opportunities, goods, and services. Some historians, as pointed out earlier, have
likened America's rigid system of racial segregation to South Africa's apartheid
system. There are indeed many historic parallels, for certainly segregation in
America had the same purposes and goals as apartheid in South Africa—that is,
the use, expropriation, and exploitation of Black resources, with the intention of
giving as little as possible to assist Blacks in their own development. In
America, white people took the best of everything for themselves, usurped a
disproportionate amount of public revenues for white institutions, wrote
disparate and unjust laws based on the presumption of the inferiority of people
of color, and interpreted and executed the letter of the law differently across
racial lines.
However controversial its emphasis on legalism as a mechanism for social
reform has been, the NAACP (particularly under the capable and adept
leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston and later Thurgood Marshall as the
director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund) persistently endeavored to bring
about legal redress and reforms. Its efforts in the late 1930s and throughout the
1940s and 1950s also helped pave the way for racial justice. Whether the
NAACP was directly involved in arguing a case before the court, its
commitment to legalism meant that people perceived the Legal Defense Fund
as actively in support of legal redress and remedy. Cases in point include
several major court victories in addition to Morgan v. Commonwealth of
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Virginia that helped bring America closer to racial and sexual equality. In Lloyd
Gaines v. University of Missouri (1938), the court ruled that the State of
Missouri was obligated to admit Blacks to the all-white state university
graduate school, if no all-Black professional graduate school existed. Then, in
Congressmen Arthur Mitchell v. U.S. Interstate Commerce (1941), the court
required that Pullman accommodations be provided for Black Americans.
Again, in a landmark case originating in Texas, Smith v. Allwright (1944), the
court ruled that “white primary” laws were a violation of the Fifteenth
Amendment to the Constitution and, as such, white primaries were declared
unconstitutional.
Following closely on the court's strike against white primaries was still
another blow at segregation. In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the court ruled that
states could not enforce racially restrictive covenants in real estate. Again, in
1948, in Perez v. Lippold, the court ruled that anti-miscegenation laws were a
violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1950, in Sweatt v. Painter, the court
required the all-white University of Texas Law School to admit Herman
Marion Sweatt because the all-Black law school, consisting of “three small
basement rooms in an office building eight blocks from the University of Texas
Law School,” was unequal and inadequate. These are but a few of the landmark
court cases that, along with advocacy and activist based social protest efforts,
influenced the course of social reform in America, particularly in the 1940s.
Each of these court cases struck a death blow towards the demise of the
Plessey v. Ferguson (1896) Supreme Court decision that legitimized an
apartheid system in America and paved the way for the ideology of white
supremacy to be codified in law as well as social practice. Oliver Brown et al.
v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas was the most far reaching of the
Supreme Court decisions in the twentieth century, as it built on the success and
progress of each previous progressive landmark court decision. In Brown the
Supreme Court unanimously ruled school segregation unconstitutional,
declaring that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Without
question, the Court's decision aided Black Americans in their quest to realize
equality of opportunity.
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Although Irene Morgan's treatment by Greyhound and her legal actions
against the bus company that had demanded she move to the back of the bus
did not mobilize a massive grass-roots level, direct-action social protest
movement, Rosa Parks' treatment and actions in December 1955 effectively
triggered a mobilization and grassroots-level activism for civil rights
unparalleled in America's history. Beginning as a bus boycott in the wake of
Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to move to the back of the Cleveland Avenue bus
in Montgomery, Alabama, the protests quickly grew. The efforts that produced
the Montgomery Improvement Association and that propelled to leadership the
young minister of Dexter Street Baptist Church, the Reverend Martin Luther
King, Jr., went full circle in launching a 381-day bus boycott that was effective
in eliminating segregated seating. Significantly, the boycott would transform
the very nature of civil rights activism, even as a movement—arising out of a
tradition of a self-help and protest continuum—pushed forward in pursuit of
goals and objectives long cherished and long overdue.
If the ability of Black Americans to gain the rights long denied them in law
and social custom constitutes a Great Awakening for American society, then
the Montgomery bus boycott produced a Southern-based protest movement and
a civil rights leader who would indelibly change the course of Black American
and American history. In 1955, the Interstate Commerce Commission forbade
segregated buses and waiting rooms for passengers travelling interstate in
response to the NAACP's legal efforts. In the midst of the Montgomery bus
boycott, in the winter of 1956, the Reverend King, the Reverend Ralph
Abernathy, and 87 others were indicted on charges of conspiring to orchestrate
a boycott. In the same year, the NAACP took the case to federal court, and, in
November 1956, the Supreme Court declared bus segregation ordinances
unconstitutional. The effectiveness and success of the bus boycott and the
visibility that accompanied judicial victories, press conferences, sermons, and
speeches, increasingly focused attention on the movement's most forceful and
enigmatic leader, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and was
educated at Morehouse College, Crozier Theological Seminary (ordained in
1947), and Boston University, where he earned his Ph.D. Martin Luther King,
Jr. shared in common with James Farmer and Bayard Rustin (one of the
founders along with Reverend King and Stanley Levinson of the Southern
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Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC]) a firm grounding in Mahatma
Gandhi's teachings on non-violent direct action. During his years as the leader
of the movement, King was thoroughly involved in all aspects of the
movement. So clear was his commitment to the liberation of the human spirit
from oppression that King was celebrated as an international spokesperson and
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1964.
As the civil rights activities of the movement expanded beyond Montgomery,
the SCLC, an interracial organization committed to equality and full
citizenship, sought to network and enhance civil rights protest actions around
the country. The activities and actions of the movement's leadership captured
the essence of non-violent philosophy and direct action protest. Ella Baker,
previously a field secretary of the NAACP, joined SCLC at its inception in
1957 to mobilize and organize mass meetings. By 1958, she had established
SCLC's Atlanta office, where she served as the executive secretary. King,
Abernathy, Baker, and others noted the increasing involvement and militancy
of college students in civil rights protest activities.
In February 1960, four college students at North Carolina A & T College, in
Greensboro, initiated a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter. The
students employed tactics CORE had used with success. Rapidly, the student-
inspired sit-in movement spread through the South and was accompanied by
read-ins, wade-ins, and kneel-ins. Just after the start of sit-ins in Greensboro, 40
students from Fisk University initiated a sit-in at a Nashville, Tennessee,
Woolworth lunch counter. At a landmark meeting of students, held on the
campus of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960, the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was created to give
structure and provide support and coordination to the student movement for
civil rights. Although Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ella Baker both attended the
student meeting and the SCLC donated monies to help offset the cost of the
meeting, the student membership of SNCC insisted on remaining an
independent organization although they agreed to work with the SCLC. SNCC,
under its first elected chair (the same Marion Barry who would later serve as
mayor of the nation's capital city), set out to raise monies and coordinate
student activities in the South. So ambitious and committed were student
protest activities in the South that a chronicler of the student movement
estimates that over 70,000 Black and white students participated in sit-ins by
1961. Importantly, the jail-in movement began in 1961 when students arrested
in Rock Hill, South Carolina, declined to pay fines and requested jail sentences.
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The second Freedom Ride took place in 1961. Organized by James Farmer
and other CORE members, and joined by the SNCC, an interracial group
departed from the nation's capital en route to New Orleans to test the Interstate
Commerce Commission's orders to integrate interstate travel facilities. For
many Americans, the plight of the Freedom Riders emerged as a compelling
issue when the media presented graphic, visual coverage of the brutal attack by
white men and women at a bus station in Alabama. The intensity of the attack
on the riders and the burning of the Greyhound bus they rode symbolized the
white South's escalating resistance to written and interpreted law and moral
persuasion. Nonetheless, the SNCC, the SCLC, and student and activist groups
across the country continued the sit-ins, boycotts, and jail-ins, designed to
challenge and eradicate separate and unequal segregation of public facilities.
Building on the legal strength and moral force of the sit-in movement and
freedom rides, the SNCC, the SCLC, and others next moved to promote voter
registration and voter participation in local, state, and federal elections. Civil
rights advocates turned their attention to working in areas of the South where
Blacks had been prevented from exercising their constitutional right to vote.
When Black Southerners attempted to register to vote, they were often met with
economic or physical opposition. Civil rights activists learned that the reality of
white violence victimized anyone intent upon changing racially maintained
injustice. Three civil rights workers (Michael H. Schwerner and Andrew
Goodman, both white men, and James E. Chaney, a Black man) were brutalized
and murdered by whites in Mississippi in 1964. In the very next year, 1965,
more white volunteers were murdered: Viola Liuzzo, a housewife who had
come South compelled by her conscience, was shot in the head because she
transported people who had come for the Selma March; Jonathan Daniels, a
seminary student, was killed while performing voter registration work; and the
Reverend James Reeb was clubbed in the head and killed as he left a Black-
owned restaurant. And, in many places in the South where civil rights activists
worked the blood of Black men ran from their bodies as they were murdered.
Yet, some would say that there had always been white violence aimed at
intimidation, even against the young and harmless. In 1955, Emmett Till, age
fourteen, was visiting Mississippi from Chicago on summer vacation. Till was
abducted from his uncle's farm one night, brutally beaten, and shot through the
head by white men who were then quickly acquitted in a trial that made a
mockery of the judicial system. Still later, in 1963, white supremacists bombed
the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four Black American
children and injuring over 20 people one Sunday morning.
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It seemed as if each advance was met with pain—inflicted either by illegal
white terrorist violence or by the betrayal and disappointment of the federal
government's delayed or inadequate protection of citizens engaged in civil
rights activities. Clearly, it must have been difficult for civil rights activists to
maintain a commitment to non-violent social protest in the face of intense white
violence. And yet, despite the killings, beatings, job firings, tenant evictions,
and many other illegal and immoral violations, the movement continued
pressing for enforcement of: (a) existing constitutional provisions for Black
American entitlement and enfranchisement, and (b) existing and proposed civil
rights legislation aimed at the protection of liberties and the eradication of
discrimination and oppression.
Legislation and legal victories continued reinforcing the social
transformation that was at hand in America's communities. Direct-action social
protest and mass demonstrations were effective tactics for change. The March
on Washington, organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin in August
1963, brought 250,000 people together in support of the movement. Martin
Luther King, Jr. addressed the movement's supporters, from the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial, with an impassioned speech that reflected his measure as the
movement's visionary: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and
live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident;
that all men are created equal.” Empowered by the movement's moral clarity,
zeal, and effectiveness, civil rights activities intensified in the South. By the
mid-1960s, an important shift was underway in the movement. When Stokley
Carmichael, a student at Howard University and a field worker for the SNCC,
was elected chairperson of the SNCC in 1966, he began to call for “Black
Power” within the SNCC and the movement. In the following year, H. Rap
Brown, national chairperson of the SNCC, articulated and intensified Black
Power activities.
Increasingly, Black Americans outside the South also challenged decades of
de facto and de jure segregation. Historians record the boycott of Chicago
schools by 220,000 Black children in 1963 to protest the segregationist policies
of school Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis as symbolizing the movement's
expansion in to northern, midwestern, and west-coast cities. As Black
Americans in the South were seeking fundamental human and political rights,
many others in urban areas like New York, Chicago, Washington, Detroit,
Philadelphia, Oakland (CA), and Los Angeles had left the South behind in the
earlier waves of migration north and west from the South. Though faring better
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than when they lived in the South, millions of Blacks in northern cities
remained poor and powerless; even when they exercised the civil rights they
had struggled to effect change in the North. Throughout the decades of the
twentieth century, the expansion of Black northern communities has created a
leadership that addressed urban Black issues.
Malcolm X (1925–1965) was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska.
Having completed only the eighth grade, Malcolm X was largely self-taught,
later becoming a Black Muslim and joining the Nation of Islam. In 1964,
Malcolm X, recognized as one of the most powerful spokespersons on behalf of
empowerment for Blacks, founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a
nationalist organization. His speeches before thousands revealed the manner by
which Western education and information distorted and denied the realities of
African and Black American history. He called for the creation of
organizations, institutions, schools, programs, research, and scholarship that
would redress the deliberate mis-education of Black Americans as a first step
toward self-acceptance, personal empowerment, and nation building. Malcolm
mirrored the sentiments of many who were strongly influenced by the
nationalist liberation movements underway in Africa in his insistence that out
of a Black identified positive self-image came the strength and cohesiveness to
build new realities for Black American progress.
Urban Black communities intensified cultural and political activities,
generating a leadership that reflected the many issues that needed articulation.
The Black militancy that emerged as the Black Power Movement promoted
positive self-image and Black input into the formulation of solutions for the
many issues and problems confronting Black communities. The Black Panthers,
organized in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland,
developed a ten-point program that was strongly influenced by Stokely
Carmichael's call for Black Power and by the effective organized mechanisms
used by the SNCC. As the Black Panthers were effective at mobilizing a
significant following especially in urban areas blighted by poverty and police
brutality, in 1967 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover outlined a new
“counterintelligence” (COINTELPRO) operation that effectively sought to
infiltrate and neutralize the Black Panthers. Other voices of militancy were
Gloria Richardson of the Cambridge Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and
Cecil Moore of the Philadelphia NAACP.
Urban inner city riots, arising from the despair, anger, and powerlessness that
oppressed most Blacks, erupted in scores of American cities in the 1960s.
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While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most far reaching civil rights bill
ever passed, the differences between the letter of the law and the time and
persistence it would take to implement and enforce its measures was still
unknown. The act's provisions dealt with: (a) prohibiting discrimination in
public accommodations—desegregating public facilities, (b) strengthening
voting rights and protecting citizen access to participation in federal elections,
(c) prohibiting discrimination in education, (d) prohibiting discrimination in
federally funded programs, and (e) prohibiting discrimination in employment
and establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (in
Blumberg, Civil Rights: The 1960s Freedom Struggle).
In addition, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was ushered through a joint
session of Congress by President Lyndon Johnson one week after the massive
civil rights march of 40,000 people from Selma to Montgomery. The act
banished poll taxes and literacy tests and required federal registers to register
Black American voters. The impact of legal and civil rights activism was
clearly discernible; no court cases were needed. Within a year, over 50 percent
of the population of the South registered to vote. As the movement peaked in
the 1960s, activists continued civil rights activities by challenging the right of
the right-wing of the Democratic Party to represent the Southern states,
particularly because Southerners controlled eleven of the sixteen committees in
the House of Representatives. In Mississippi, one of the movement's most
forceful and eloquent leaders, Fannie Lou Hamer, articulated the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party's challenge to the Democratic Party leadership at the
National Democratic Party Convention.
It has been several decades since the movement's peak in the 1960s, which
produced unprecedented advances. Civil rights activists and the legal enactment
and enforcement effectively dismantled racial segregation in public
accommodations. The federal government expanded its powers to protect the
civil rights of Black Americans. Blacks, in unprecedented numbers, exercised
their right to enfranchisement by voting and developed a sophistication and
assertiveness likely to sustain their continued efforts to remedy the still
unfulfilled promises of equality and justice. Many, many Black Americans have
participated in the processes of legal enforcement of existing laws, and made
gains in education, employment, and housing.
However, the ill effects of 245 years of enslavement, 100 years of Jim and
Jane Crow segregation, discrimination, and disadvantage could not be resolved
and remedied in so little time, and so much remained to be done. Enforcement
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resources at various federal agencies and offices charged with investigating
violations and pursuing compliance sometimes faltered and did not match the
enforcement mandate. Also, because residential segregation proved to be linked
with school segregation, efforts to desegregate schools confronted an enormous
challenge in dealing with strategies to effect school integration, and thereby
dismantle separate and unequal education.
While the movement made it more difficult for political leaders to ignore
civil rights, the white racial backlash that fueled conservative victories in the
late 1960s put civil rights advocates on notice that liberal changes would be met
with growing resistance. In the main, conservative federal administrations have
given civil rights a low priority. The record of the Supreme Court on race and
rights has produced mixed results. In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board
of Education (1971), the Court approved of busing as a tool to achieve school
integration. The Court's ruling on Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971)
addressed the issue of workplace discrimination by placing the burden on
employers to prove the relationship between hiring criteria and a job applicant's
qualifications. In the 1970s, Affirmative Action programs emerged as the
remedy for employment and workplace discrimination. The term “Affirmative
Action” was developed in 1965 when President Johnson issued Executive
Order 11246 which prohibited discrimination by firms doing business with the
federal government. Johnson's order gave federal agencies, namely, the Labor
Department, a directive to investigate and take “Affirmative Action.”
Affirmative Action, initially an enforcement measure, also suggested
standards and protocols, and was in time validated by federal courts. Most
Black Americans supported Affirmative Action efforts, because, in many cases,
it represented a challenge to the protocols and practices established by decades
of white male control over hiring criteria and employment qualifications.
Affirmative Action was defended as a remedy for past discrimination and
disadvantage experienced by racial minorities and women. Many Black
Americans benefitted from the Affirmative Action programs developed by
government contracting and private industry. Clearly, political leadership at the
national level, corporate interest in enlightened social responsibility, and the
continued activism and advocacy of civil rights organizations contributed to the
survival of Affirmative Action as a tool for social transformation.
Affirmative Action has had its detractors—those who have argued that
Affirmative Action constitutes “reverse discrimination.” Spurred on by the
Supreme Court's decision—in Regents of the University of California v. Allen
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Bakke (1978)—that the university had violated the equal protection clause of
the Constitution and Bakke's civil rights, opponents of Affirmative Action
celebrated. But many agreed with Justice Thurgood Marshall's assessment that
the civil rights act and the equal protection clause had been designed to
dismantle America's dualistic and separate racial caste system and to remedy
the continuing effects of previous discrimination. Many rightly feared that the
Equal Protection Clause would be used as a weapon to shield white privilege as
it is protected by the practice of white supremacy, thereby blunting the short
period of commitment that employers—and, in Bakke's case, a medical school
—were willing to make to eradicating the systematic underdevelopment of
Black Americans caused by enslavement, disenfranchisement, separate and
unequal segregation, and inequality.
Along with greater enforcement of existing federal statutes, revision of
racially prescriptive state laws and enactment of progressive and forward-
looking legislation designed to promote and protect human, civil, and legal
rights provided significant measures toward participatory democracy. Likewise,
the bold and innovative measures embodied in Affirmative Action objectives
and goals produced concrete, if not large-scale economic change. Many
believed that several hundred years of enslavement, followed by legal,
economic, and political disenfranchisement, followed still by legalized and
unequal segregation could be redressed in the few short years following the
movement. Still many others understood that the progressive changes brought
about by the movement created another opportunity for Black Americans to
assert self-help and self-determination, particularly in the political arena.
Between the passage and enforcement of the Brown decision and the
emergence of Affirmative Action efforts to alter discrimination in the
workplace, some Black Americans significantly altered their material, political,
and social standing in America. Unquestionably, by pulling the specter of
legalized segregation down, Black Americans spearheaded the removal of the
greatest barrier to access, and hence participation in American society. At stake
were concepts of significance, such as the right to an equitable share of
society's bounty in exchange for the responsibilities of citizenship. But there
were also economic, social, and political matters of pressing importance, and
material matters like the right to vote, the right to literacy, and the economic
and political pay-offs those rights bring.
Even by 1980, in Fullilove v. Klutznick, the Supreme Court validated
programs that made a place for “minorities” (including women). In the 1980s
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President Reagan insisted that Affirmative Action be used only for actual
victims of discrimination. But, a majority of the justices on the Court saw
things differently and for a few years insisted that Affirmative Action retain a
proactive dimension—Local 93 of International Association of Firefighters v.
City of Cleveland (1986), Local 28 of Sheet Metal Workers v. EEOC (1986),
U.S. v. Paradise (1987), and Johnson v. Transportation Agency of Santa Clara
County (1987). Relatively short lived, the government's commitment to
proactive as well as damage control Affirmative Action wavered as by the end
of the decade in Richmond v. J. Croson and Co. (1989) the Court ruled that the
Fourteenth Amendment does not support set-asides for minority contractors.
Later, in Adar and Constructors (1995) the Court ruled that a congressional
mandate for a 10% minority set-aside was unconstitutional. Still later, a change
of view in the Court in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) determined that the
University of Michigan Law School was right to use a racial preference
standard to diversify its student body.
Most of the urban poor missed out on the opportunity wagon that offered
some measure of vertical social mobility access to primarily middle-class Black
Americans. The intense inner-city riots in Watts, Newark, and Detroit in 1965
demonstrated the anguish, despair, and anger impoverished urban Black folks
experienced, as nearly one-third of Black households lived below the poverty
level (compared to just under eight percent of white households). Black
unemployment was double white unemployment. The intensity of the riots
made it apparent that civil rights laws alone were not enough to reach and
change deeply entrenched inner city poverty. In 1968, a presidential
commission came to the same conclusion in its published report. The Kerner
Commission Report pointed to white racism as the cause of the riots as it
warned that America was “moving towards two societies, one white, one
Black.” News of a racially divided apartheid state was hardly news to Black
folks.
Already in place prior to the riots and the Kerner Commission's Report, an
unprecedented federal intervention into what had become two separate societies
emerged as President Johnson's vision of the “Great Society” with its War on
Poverty, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. In the aggregate, during his
presidency Johnson responded to the groundswell of pressures coming from the
most disadvantaged in America by enacting the Medicare Program, government
aid to all levels of education, Head Start, Upward Bound, Volunteers in Service
to America (VISTA), and Community Action Programs (CAPs). But, the
staggering cost of the Vietnam War at approximately $140 billion undermined
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the availability of resources for the Great Society at home.
In the wake of the increased personal, organizational, and institutional
agency stirred up by civil rights activism, Black artists poignantly expressed
their quests and visions for Black liberation. The Black artist and their art
emerged as the centerpiece of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), with Imamu
Amiri Baraka, founder of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre (1965), Sonia
Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, James Baldwin, Lorraine
Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Miles Davis, Thelonious
Monk, Pharoah Sanders, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Stevie
Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, The Last Poets, Ossie and Ruby Davis,
Romare Bearden, and many others opening a way to bridge the personal
aesthetic with the political and cultural. The Black Arts Movement linked
decades of Black cultural renaissances predating the 1960s with the decade's
Black Power, nationalist, and revolutionary fervor.
The place where knowledge is mined and minds are shaped, academia did
not remain outside the struggle for an accountability that fueled institutional
transformation. It was the Black Student Movement (BSM) that in the late
1960s actualized a vision of Black Power in instigating and prompting the
creation of Black Studies programs at predominantly white colleges and
universities around the country. Black Studies programs infused the study of
and research about people of African descent and other people of color,
including those living in the global South, into a previously Eurocentric
curriculum. As time passed all graded levels of learning have been and continue
to be transformed and made more accountable to reality by including the study
of people of African descent as active subjects, not passive objects on the stage
of history. It really is important to sit with the profound if at many times painful
changes prompted by Black Americans and their progressive allies as their
thought and action transformed American society; it truly was a Great
Awakening.
The historical record reveals that significant social transformations—
especially those that elevate the condition of Black folks—which cut against
the grain as significantly as the Civil Rights, Black Arts, and Black Student
Movements, are met with a backlash sooner or later. The issue is not whether as
the decade of the 1960s closed, a conservative, white backlash—the response to
the dramatic changes underway in American society—fueled the election of
Richard Nixon on his promise to restore law and order. While Nixon was
impeached by the actions of his own hands, Black Americans were busy getting
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a living and changing the political terrain of especially the South by using the
Justice Department's enforcement of their right to vote to elect Black men and
women to public office-holding. Not since the early years of Reconstruction
had Black folks in the South exercised such constitutional rights unfettered by
white violence. While many persons had paid dearly for the rights exercised by
a Black electorate by the 1970s, no one missed the fact that the enforcement
provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made it the most powerful and
effective twentieth century civil rights legislation ever enacted. The power of
Black ballots meant that Blacks were elected to local, state, and congressional
level office-holding; while there were a small number of Black elected officials
when the National Black Political Convention met in Gary in 1972, by 2001
there were 9,101 Black men and women public officeholders in the nation
according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
White backlash deepened in the decades following the progress of the Civil
Rights Movement as various conservative coalitions attempted to dismantle or
curtail Great Society commitments. Dating from the 1970s, this New Right
lodged itself in the Republican Party, electing and maintaining leadership of the
executive, and by its appointment of federal judges, the judicial, and for much
of the time the congressional levels of national governance. Viewed from the
perspective of the poor who were and are disproportionately Black American,
the ascent of the New Right meant a collapse of federal support for civil rights,
and the diminution of social services programs. Poor inner city communities
were destabilized by this abandonment of rights oriented programs and
services. The recent New Right ascent has included the appointment of middle-
class professional Black conservatives who support an ideological agenda that
has proffered the conservative notion that the lack of government support for
social development is good, and that everyone should be able to make if they
just work hard. Putting a Black face on attempts to rationalize betrayal and
abandonment has not muted the pain, it has only diffused the discourse about
why only poor people of color are the only ones who should be ready to go it
alone (the middle class and elites have the tax code and other meaningful and
important institutional financial supports to lean on).
By January 1985, the nation celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday
despite conservative resistance. In 1986, after a decade of anti-apartheid
activism, spearheaded by Randall Robinson (founder of TransAfrica), the
Congressional Black Caucus, ever growing in its strength and influence, led
congressional colleagues in enacting a trade embargo against apartheid South
Africa. Within five years Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and the
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African National Congress (ANC) was allowed to legally function in South
Africa. Apartheid collapsed, paving the way for the creation of Africa's most
successful democracy. Later in 2000, Randall Robinson published The Debt:
What America Owes to Blacks and joined with high-profile colleagues in a
series of challenges that echoed back to the ideas about reparations to people of
African descent who endured captivity and enslavement (James Forman's Black
Manifesto in 1969).
Black intellectuals and artists kept their eyes on the prize, advancing
essential discourses about culture, identity politics, community, resistance,
nationality, and self-determination. Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, August
Wilson, Henry Hampton, Bob and Ziggy Marley, and Molefi Kete Asante
among others transformed literary canons, documentary filmmaking, and
musical expressions, and Afrocentricity advanced cultural interpretations of the
centrality of Black people's African cultural as opposed to Eurocentric
influenced past.
While there was much to commend about President William Jefferson
Clinton's engagement with issues near and dear to Black Americans, saving
food stamps, creating empowerment zones that generated jobs and economic
activity in cities and rural areas, taxing higher income Americans, in 1996
Clinton caved into pressure from Republicans in control of both houses of
Congress. New Right conservatives advocated a “Contract with America” and
shortly before his second term reelection Clinton signed the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, thereby ushering in
dramatic welfare reform that among other things ended federal assistance to
poor children. According to a report published in The State of Black America,
2003, entitled “Race, Gender and Welfare Reform: The Need for Targeted
Support,” by Walter Stafford, with Diana Salas, Melinda Mendez, and Angela
Dews, largely voiceless in America's political arena, the very poor,
disproportionately women and children, dropped off the bottom into painful
desperation (according to the 2000 Census 30.9% of Black children were living
in deep poverty compared to 9.4% of white children). As poverty deepened,
drugs and crime increased, the disparity between Black and white health and
wellness widened, and rates of communicable infections increased, especially
HIV rates. Also, racial incarceration rates continued accelerating in a criminal
justice system that has historically engaged in the disparate and unequal
administration of justice, particularly towards Black men.
Even in the eye of the storm swirling around Black people's lives, voices
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emerged—some not previously heard—expressively articulating personal
agency, collectivity, meaningful vision, focus, cultural renewal, resistance, and
self-determination. Long inextricably connected with all of Black people's
struggles—indeed, holding up one-half of the sky—Black women's voices have
in recent decades called forth and asserted “feminism is a Black thing” (bell
hooks, 1995). In the formation of the National Black Feminist Organization
(founded by Eleanor Holmes Norton and Margaret Sloan in 1973), and the
Combahee River Collective (founded by Barbara Smith and others in 1974)
both founded in the Black Power Era, and the Black Feminist Caucus of the
Black Radical Congress (founded in 2000), Black feminists have sought “to end
sexism, sexist oppression, and oppression” (hooks, 2000, p. 1). Working to
advance Black women's personal agency, the well-being of Black families, and
the self-determination of Black communities, increasing numbers of Black
women have come to articulate a standpoint that reflects a reality of multiple
and intersecting discriminations, including racism, sexism, classism,
discrimination based on sexual orientation, ageism, and discrimination based on
disability. Importantly, Black feminists understand that Black women are not
already “liberated,” and whether Black women name their experiences
Womanist, Black Feminist, or Afrocentric Feminist there is much work to be
done to resist the corrosive effects of intersecting discriminations (see the
Andrea Hunter and Sherrill Sellers, The National Survey of Black Americans
(NSBA) on the feminist attitudes of Black women and men).
The fusion of civil rights reform and the ethos of Black self-determination
derived from the Black Power Movement have opened avenues of expression
for marginalized gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Black Americans who
have increasingly given voice to the discrimination and marginality they
experience. Though always a part of the Black community, LGBTQ folks are
now more visible as they seek a place of respect in American society at large,
but especially in Black families, institutions, and communities.
As of the 2000 Census, Hispanic Americans became the nation's largest
racial/ethnic minority, easing Black Americans from their historic role as the
largest racial/ethnic minority in the country. The United States is a settler
nation, occupied over time primarily by people who have come from other
shores. With the exception of the indigenous population and Americans
descended from captive Africans, everyone else is either an immigrant or is
descended from immigrants. As such, immigration can be understood to have
added many different peoples to the nation. It has always been a contentious
issue as nativist influences have fanned the flames of fear and distrust
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concerning who should and should not become an American. Race and
ethnicity have always played a role in immigration access and restriction, as
immigration restriction frequently targeted people of color in the twentieth
century. However, in 1965 Congress enacted the Hart-Cellar Act, which eased
racial restrictions and opened the door for increased numbers of people from
the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and South America to migrate to the United States.
The numbers of Black people from the West Indies and Africa have increased
substantially and left an indelible mark on the cultural meaning of “Blackness.”
In 2005 Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,
killing more than 2,000 people. Majority Black New Orleans was hit
particularly hard, and the nation watched as those in the federal government
most responsible for helping abandoned the tens of thousands of people who
were too poor to flee. Literally left to make it in whatever way they could—
betrayed, many thousands sought refuge wherever they could find it, in the
Superdome and Convention Center. Many caring individuals, churches, relief
organizations, and companies stepped up where government was missing,
delivering food, clothing, water, and medical assistance. Volunteers from
around the country travelled to New Orleans and transported thousands to safe
places in other cities; places where shelter, jobs, and new lives waited.
In the midst of the worst financial crisis—irresponsibility in the financial
services and banking industries, collapsing real estate market values, heavy
mortgage foreclosure loses for millions of Americans, business closings,
joblessness and the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression,
and 47 million Americans without health insurance, a hardworking, optimistic
United States senator, Harvard-trained constitutional lawyer and community
activist, a Black man—Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the
United States. Running on a platform that engaged America's many challenges,
Barack Obama accomplished something few older Black Americans ever
thought they would see in their lifetimes.
Importantly, Barack Obama was not the first Black American candidate to
seek the nation's highest office. Having earned experience in Congress,
Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm threw herself into the race for the
Democratic Party's nomination in 1972. Twelve years later and again in 1988,
the Reverend Jesse Jackson, seasoned by his many years at the heart of the
Civil Rights Movement, entered the presidential race seeking to represent the
Democratic Party's bid to unseat New Right Republicans. Identified through
issues that impacted Black communities and cultivating and supporting Black
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community empowerment as central themes in their campaigns,
Congresswoman Chisholm and Reverend Jackson were wildly popular in Black
communities but only mildly supported in white communities. Also, Reverend
Jackson lost ground to the New Right's effective use of the “race card” in
American electoral politics. While reactionary individuals and groups
attempted to use the “race card” to derail Senator Obama's presidential
aspirations, he astutely dodged that and many other political bullets in part by
building cross racial alliances, organizing the youth vote, insisting that
Americans pay attention to the real issues dragging so many folks down, and
representing himself in terms of his biracial, not just Black heritage. Between
occupying the White House, seats in Congress, appointments to the Supreme
Court, the Office of Secretary of State and the Attorney General, governorships,
and a small number of the senior leadership positions at Fortune 500
companies, Black Americans are finally changing the leadership tapestry in the
United States.
A timeline of Barack Obama's measure as an intellectual and his ascent to the
presidency is useful: in 2000 as George W. Bush was finally elected president,
Bobby Rush (the former Black Panther) defeated a young Barack Obama's bid
for the House of Representatives; in 2002, Obama delivered a speech entitled
“What I Am Opposed to Is a Dumb War” in Chicago; in 2004, Obama was
elected to the United States Senate and delivered a keynote address at the
Democratic National Convention entitled “The Audacity of Hope”; in 2008, in
the midst of a global financial meltdown, Obama was elected president of the
United States and infused those listening to his messages with a message of
hope and needed persistence and perseverance—he presented several landmark
speeches: “Yes, We Can,” the New Hampshire Primary Concession Speech, “A
More Perfect Union,” Speech at the National Constitution Center, “Change
Happens,” his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention, and
“This Is Your Victory,” his election night victory speech, and promised to
stabilize the nation's economy; in 2009, Obama articulated a commitment to “A
New Era of Responsibility” in his first Inaugural Address and quickly set about
surrounding himself with advisors and appointments who were charged with
creating solutions intended to stabilize financial markets. The outcome of
President George W. Bush's attempt to shore up the economy was the Troubled
Asset Relief Program (TARP); its price tag was $70 billion and it was a rescue
package for financial institutions, particularly banks, and loans to General
Motors and Chrysler to save them from going out of business. While big
business got a check to bail it out of the hardship of the Great Recession,
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unemployment increased, mortgage foreclosures skyrocketed, and many
businesses failed; TARP failed to help the millions of everyday Americans who
were falling into a financial void created in large measure by the financial
institutions TARP was bailing out. Obama's response was the creation of The
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 that provided $814
billion in expanded unemployment, tax cuts and incentives, and social welfare
benefits.
In 2009 President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and delivered a
lecture entitled “A Just and Lasting Peace” in Oslo. In 2010, Obama signed into
law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which
sought to re-regulate the financial sector. Also in 2010, Obama signed a health
care reform bill even as Republicans (including Tea Party ultra nationalists)
gained seats in the U.S. Senate and a majority of seats in the House of
Representatives and opposed his proposal; from that point much of what
Obama proposed was rejected as racist, and ideologically reactionary forces in
Congress went to great lengths to oppose the man and his message. But, in
early 2010, Obama sought to restructure the health care system with passage of
the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Immediately, the Tea Party
Movement adversaries mobilized to oppose Obama, accusing him of attempting
to impose socialism or communism on Americans. The consequence was that
President Obama was often curtailed in his leadership efforts; Obama used
executive orders (numbered from 13489–13764, dating from January 2009 to
January 2017) to manage the affairs of the government and to undertake
initiatives that Republicans in Congress opposed, including preventing the
deportation of some youth immigrants in 2012.
In 2011, President Obama ordered all U.S. military out of Iraq, and he also
ordered the seizure of Osama bin Laden, head of Al Qaeda in his compound in
Pakistan; bin Laden was killed by U.S. Special Forces. In the same year,
Obama authorized gays and lesbians to serve openly in the nation's Armed
Forces. During the run-up to his reelection, President Obama enjoyed
historically high approval ratings on the eve of his being re-elected to a second
term in 2012. Obama's second Inaugural Address, “We, the People” reflected
his belief in the possibilities of America as he called to us to embrace our
democracy as an enduring creation by the people, for all of the people. In 2014,
Obama created the My Brother's Keeper Program at the White House as Black
youth mobilized #Black Lives Matter in response to escalating police violence
against unarmed Black men. In 2015, President Obama appointed Loretta
Lynch as Attorney General of the United States, making her the first African
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American woman ever appointed to the position. In 2015, President Obama
commenced diplomatic relations with Cuba. He also signed the Ledbetter Fair
Pay Act that helps combat pay discrimination against women; signed the Hate
Crimes Prevention Act, making it a federal crime to assault someone based on
their sexual orientation; and boosted fuel efficiency standards for cars, thereby
helping the environment.
President Barack H. Obama has become a pivotal figure in American history.
His many achievements designate him as one of the most transformative
leaders the nation has ever had. Obama has compared himself to Lincoln, trying
to govern a nation in crisis: The Great Recession, two wars, civil turmoil as
lone gunmen walked into schools, theatres, a church, and a nightclub and
murdered people in cold blood; mounting racial tensions as Black communities
protest increasing police violence, especially against unarmed Black men,
women, and children; and, other major issues bearing on our society. Obama's
legacy is one of achievements towards strengthening democracy against great
odds. President Barack Obama, an African American man who sought to be the
change we seek to see in America, was America's president, president of “We
the People,” as in his farewell address delivered in Chicago in 2017, he noted
that “It falls to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our
democracy.... Because for all our outward differences, we all share the same
proud title: Citizen.”
In conclusion, in the long struggle to be treated as first class citizens in the
America built in large measure by the sweat and blood of Black people's
ancestors, there is much unfinished business. Much more needs to be done as
there are many more Black Americans who remain locked in poverty, and,
hence, in need of greater participation in the nation's economic development.
Black communities have long protested the excessive use of police force in
Black communities. In recent years the very troubling pattern of police violence
against unarmed Black men has ignited Black protests in many areas of the
country, giving rise to the Black Lives Matter Movement. At the same time, the
longtime prison reform advocate Angela Davis, and more recently Michelle
Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness, and Kahlil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of
Blackness, are signaling an alarm about the runaway escalation of incarceration
of Black and Brown men and increasingly women. They point to the gross
disparity between population numbers and racial incarceration rates, pointing
out the historic patterns of the criminal justice system criminalizing blackness.
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Unprecedented numbers of Black Americans can now vote, and Blacks
elected as city council members, mayors, governors, senators, representatives,
and other recognized public officials across the country attest to the increasing
viability of Black empowerment. The next challenge of forging business and
economic development strategies is already at hand. As more Black Americans
use the access that has come with the victories of the Civil Rights Movement to
further their options and alternatives, it bears remembering that the Black
community as a whole needs to care for all its members. There is a mandate
that has arisen out of the collective experiences of struggle for economic self-
determination and human and civil rights, which requires that Black Americans
shape the individual experience so that commitment to a whole community as a
collective entity sustains the ongoing struggle for inclusion and access.
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Summary
In recent decades, scholars of Black American Studies have been challenged
to reconsider the ideological perspectives that shaped much of the scholarship
on Black American history in the past. Black Americans have insisted on the
inclusion of perspectives that emphasize their efforts to promote self-help and
self-reliance, instead of perspectives that deny or trivialize initiative and
creativity. Black American values, attitudes, behaviors, and achievements more
regularly serve as the focal point for scholarship, which offers an assessment of
Black American historiography. Black American inspired institutions and
organizations emerge as viable, useful efforts to promote self-determination and
development. In such scholarship, Black American resistance and antipathy to
enslavement is clearly identified, as are attempts by Black Americans to forge
new opportunities and possibilities in the aftermath of the Civil War. Hence, a
responsible rendering of Black American history brings to light and explores
both a Black self-help heritage and a Black protest tradition, even as it
identifies white opposition to Black progress and self-determination.
As Black American activity and not passivity is exposed, the enormity of
what Black Americans have accomplished becomes clearer. Significantly,
Black Americans have been principally responsible for their own
empowerment. By so doing, they have been the catalyst for human and civil
rights activism in this country at large. In essence, because the Black protest
tradition has focused on securing rights under the law, every positive gain for
Blacks has meant a positive gain for America's other ethnic/racial groups, and
for participatory democracy. Black American women and men have persistently
struggled to achieve justice, inclusion in economic development, and political
equality.
Black Americans have faced tremendous challenges in their quest to realize a
first-class citizenship. The betrayal of the Reconstruction era made the
acquisition of post-Civil War goals virtually impossible. Nearly 4.5 million
Black American men and women were emancipated with no compensation for
their or their ancestors' 245 years of unpaid laboring. Without money,
education, land, or access to unions and jobs, the vast majority of Black
Americans confronted unparalleled obstacles; only indigenous peoples in this
country confronted a more destitute reality. The ideology of white supremacy
dominated many white people's thinking in the South and in many places in the
North as well. The emergence of white terrorist hate groups like the Ku Klux
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Klan threatened the livelihood and life-blood of individual Blacks. Between the
1860s and 1960s, over 5,000 Black men, women, and children were lynched in
America. Black men were systematically excluded and disenfranchised from
the right to exercise their Fifteenth Amendment right to vote in the South, as
were Southern Black women excluded from their Nineteenth Amendment right
to vote. It took nearly 100 years of protest and struggle to bring the Voting
Rights Act and federal enforcement of that law into existence.
By far, the most pervasive and destructive oppression Black people
experienced in the aftermath of enslavement was the legally sanctioned creation
of an apartheid system of racial segregation and subordination in the form of
racially separate and unequal nations of people on one soil. Segregation meant
that white people expropriated only for themselves quality education,
technology, union industrial and manufacturing jobs, health care innovations,
philanthropic giving, segregated religious worship services, status and rank in
the military, elective enfranchisement as the basis for democratic participation,
paths to entrepreneurial growth via access to bank credit, and legal and civil
rights protection under the law.
Ida B. Wells and many other African Americans who came to adulthood
during the tumultuous decades following the Civil War (1865–1917) created
and promoted an ideology of racial uplift that pursued an important ideal of
democratic inclusion, equal rights, and collective advancement for all Black
people. Self-help and public service to the welfare of all Black people were
core beliefs guiding Wells' view of her mission in life. Kevin K. Gaines, a
National Humanities Center Fellow, has noted that “race uplift” “was a call to
elites to embrace ideals of self-help and service to the race in building
educational, reformist social gospel churches, civic, fraternal/sorority
organizations, settlement houses, newspapers, trade unions and other public
institutions whose constructive social impact exceeded the ideological
limitations of uplift” (formerly at
http://www.nationalhumanitiescenter.org/teacherserve/racialuplift.html).
Even as Black Americans have pressed for human and civil rights, they have
consistently fought in America's military excursions. Indeed, as Black
Americans helped make the world safe for democracy, they were often unsafe
at home. Even what had been home underwent a transformation as the great
migrations of Black Americans from rural areas of the South to the urban areas
of the North and Southwest changed the demographic racial landscape of
America. Since early in the twentieth century, the Black experience, as it is
276
sometimes called, has increasingly become an urban experience. The Southern-
based Civil Rights Movement, one of the “great awakenings” of the twentieth
century, effectively used massive direct action protest to bring down de jure
segregation and to call attention to gross violations of the civil rights of Black
Americans. The movement forced the country to confront the reality of
legalized economic, political, social, and cultural disparity in the richest nation
on Earth.
In reflecting on the decades following the Civil Rights Movement it is clear
that it served as a catalyst for other ethnic/racial movements for civil rights.
Many white women later active in the women's movement learned how to
effectively challenge unequal treatment while activists in the broad-based
coalition fashioned during the movement. Unprecedented numbers of Black
Americans now vote, and interventions like Affirmative Action have made a
positive difference when and where they have been welcomed as a remedy for
past and even continuing racial discrimination and disadvantage. Urban social
movements have also challenged any residual de jure and continuing de facto
segregation that has characterized life in northern cities. And, in the tradition of
enigmatic Black American leadership, elected Black leaders have tried with
varied success to implement measures that strengthen Black business
development, as the next necessary step toward Black economic development is
furthered. Black Americans have accomplished significant progress in just over
144 years since the end of enslavement. While there is still a long road ahead,
and many obstacles, much that is empowering and good has been attained and
should be remembered and celebrated.
277
1. What issues were important to Black Americans during Reconstruction?
2. Trace the significance of Court rulings and legislation in effecting changes in
the status of Black Americans.
3. Define and trace Black American efforts to promote self-reliance and self-
help initiatives.
4. Identify and discuss Black American male and female leadership since the
late 19thcentury.
5. Discuss the impact of white opposition to participatory democracy for Black
Americans.
6. Identify the contributions Black Americans have made to military wars, and
discuss the paradox of fighting for democracy abroad but being deprived of
civil rights at home in the United States.
7. Identify the role of Black people in creating and sustaining the recent Civil
Rights Movement.
8. Identify key Black institutions that have fostered self-help, mutual
assistance, charitable giving, and Black Nationalism.
9. Assess the changes that have taken place in the collective experience of
Black Americans since Emancipation.
278
References
African American Newspapers: Publishers of Black self-help newspapers in
the mid-nineteenth century: The North Star, The Christian Recorder
(AME) 1846, emigrationist Mary Ann Shadd Cary (publisher of the
Provincial Freeman), The Alienated American, 1852, Star of Zion (AME
Zion), 1867, American Baptist, 1880, The State Journal, 1883,
Philadelphia Tribune, 1885, Washington Bee, 1888, Houston Informer,
1892, Baltimore Afro-American, 1892, Des Moines Bystander, 1894,
Indianapolis Recorder, 1895, and The Colored American, 1899, used
ideas to enable and empower Black emancipatory efforts.
Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010.
James Allen. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa
Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000.
James D. Anderson. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Peter M. Bergman. A Chronological History of the Negro in America. New
York: Harper & Row, 1969.
Douglas A. Blackmon. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of
Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor
Books, 2008.
Rhoda Lois Blumberg. Civil Rights: The 1960s Freedom Struggle. Boston:
Twayne Publishers, 1984.
Clayborne Carson, et al. (Eds.). A Reader and Guide: Eyes on the Prize:
America's Civil Rights Years. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.
Jonathan Chait. Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and
Created a Legacy that Will Prevail. New York: William Morrow, 2017.
Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (eds.). Sisters in the Struggle:
African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement.
New York: New York University Press, 2001.
Michael D'Antonio. The Legacy of Barack Obama: A Consequential
President. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2016.
Reginald Daniel and Hettie V. Williams (eds.). Race and the Obama
Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multicultural Union. Jackson,
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MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2014.
E. J. Dionne, Jr. and Joy-Ann Reid (Eds.). We Are the Change We Seek: The
Speeches of Barack Obama. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Philip Dray. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black
America. New York: Random House, 2002.
W. E. B. Du Bois. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Athenaeum
Books, 1970.
Michael Eric Dyson. The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics
of Race in America. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2016.
George W. Frederickson. White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in
American and South African History. New York: Oxford University Press,
1981.
Paula Giddings. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on
Race and Sex in America. New York: Wm. Morrow & Co., 1984.
Nicholas Guyatt. Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented
Racial Segregation. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
Louis R. Harlan. Separate and Unequal. New York: Athenaeum, 1969.
Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, Jr. (Eds.). A Common Destiny:
Blacks and American Society. Washington: National Academy Press,
1989.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Righteous Discontent: The Women's
Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993.
Joy James. Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American
Intellectuals. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Daniel Kato. Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Steven F. Lawson. Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in
America Since 1941. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.
Leon Litwack and August Meier (Eds.). Black Leaders of the Nineteenth
Century. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Alain Locke. The New Negro. New York: Athenaeum Books, 1968.
Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin (eds.). Black Women in Nineteenth-
Century American Life. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
280
Linda O. McMurry. To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Kahlil Gibran Muhammad. The Criminalization of Blackness: Race, Crime,
and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard
Gunnar Myrdal. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern
Democracy. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1944.
Donald G. Nieman. Promises to Keep: African-Americans and the
Constitutional Order, 1776. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Harry A. Ploski and Ernest Kaiser (eds.). “Black Servicemen and the
Military Establishment,” in The Negro Almanac, 2nd ed. New York:
Bellweather, 1971.
Richard Rothstein. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our
Government Segregated America. Live Right Publishing Corporation,
2017.
Jacqueline Jones Royster. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-
Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900. Boston: Bedford/St.
Martin's Press, 1997.
Harriett A. Washington. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical
Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.
New York: Harlem Moon, 2006.
Ida B. Wells. U.S. Atrocities. London, 1892.
Kidada E. Williams. They Left Great Marks on Me: African American
Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I. New
York: New York University Press, 2012.
Amy Louise Wood. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in
America, 1890–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2009.
281
8
The African Experience in the

Caribbean: Continuity and Change
Lomarsh Roopnarine
282
Introduction
The Caribbean has received less academic attention than other regions in the
African diaspora. The focus has been overwhelmingly on the African diaspora
in the United States and Brazil. This is unfortunate and surprising since out of
the 11,000,000 Africans who were transported from the continent to the
Americas (North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean), an estimated
4,000,000 of them went to the Caribbean islands (Thomas 1997). The
Caribbean is the only place in the African diaspora where Africans are a
majority population. Africans in the United States, Brazil, and elsewhere in
Latin America are a minority population. The Caribbean is one of the few
places in the African diaspora where Africans have retained substantial African
ancestry or have merged African and European social characteristics to form
new religions, languages, and identities. The Caribbean has experienced more
racial mixing than many other places in the African diaspora. The Caribbean
island of the Dominican Republic is the most racially mixed place in the
African diaspora. The Caribbean, Haiti specifically, was the first place where
people in the African diaspora resisted slavery successfully and formed an
independent black republic.
Until recently, the Caribbean was the only place where descendants of
African slaves became Nobel Prize winners (Arthur Lewis and Derek Walcott
from St. Lucia). The Caribbean was also the first place where descendants of
African slaves became presidents and prime ministers. (President Barack
Obama is the first black president of the United States, but he is not a
descendant of slaves.) Brazil and Latin America are yet to have a black
president, although Hugo Chavez of Venezuela had some African ancestry. The
Caribbean is the only place in the African diaspora where black women have
become prime ministers (Eugenia Charles of Dominica and Portia Simpson
Miller of Jamaica). The following chapter examines three broad themes in the
African Caribbean experience. The first theme is geography, slavery, and
emancipation. The second theme focuses on the attempts Africans have made
towards better working and living conditions through labor movements and
decolonization of the Caribbean. The third theme addresses some social issues
such as African-Caribbean languages and religions. The final section
summarizes the main points of the chapter.
Major terms and concepts: Differences and similarities between Africans
in the Caribbean and the United States, African majority in the Caribbean,
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geographical and linguistics divisions of the African-Caribbean, slave society
and resistance, marronage, African leadership, Creole languages, and African-
Caribbean religions.
284
The Caribbean comprises a series of islands stretching from the base of
Florida in an arc to the northeastern shoulder of South America. Belize in
Central America, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana in South America as
well as the rim-land regions (countries in Central America: Mexico, Guatemala,
Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, and in South
America: Colombia and Venezuela, which border the Caribbean Sea, are also
part of the Caribbean, and Brazil). These regions are included because they
have had a long historical relationship with the islands in the Caribbean through
European imperialism and colonialism. Recently, Caribbean communities
abroad or the Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America have been
considered part of the Caribbean. The geography of the Caribbean can be
simplified into four main geographical regions: (1) mainland and rim-lands of
Central America and Northern South America; (2) Bahama Islands; (3) Greater
Antilles; (4) Lesser Antilles (see map in Appendix A).
These dispersed Caribbean lands were occupied by indigenous groups of
people such as Arawaks or Tainos, Caribs, Borinquen, Lucayos, Ciboneys, and
Guanahatabeys. Although they engaged in warfare among themselves, they can
be described as people who sought to accommodate rather than conquer nature.
They had a fairly stable way of life until the arrival of Europeans from the late
fifteenth century onwards. Within a short time, the Europeans conquered and
mobilized the native population to work in the mines and fields. The result was
devastating. An estimated ninety percent of the native people died from
European enslavement, new diseases, and warfare. To substitute this slave
labor, the European colonizers turned to Africa. Africans were taken mainly
from the ranks of war captives, debtors, and persons guilty of various criminal
and social offences. Unknown numbers were also kidnapped. Africans were
taken from a myriad of ethnicities, including the Ashanti from Ghana, the
Yoruba from southwestern Nigeria, and the Mandingo from Senegal. Their
journey to the Caribbean was one leg of the triangular trade or the slave trade,
which started in Europe, continued to West Africa, then across the Atlantic
Ocean to the Caribbean and back to Europe. Ships were loaded with various
goods in Europe, and then they sailed to West Africa where they were traded
for slaves, who were then transported to the Caribbean. The slaves were then
sold to the Caribbean planters, the ships were loaded with tropical products, and
then they sailed back to Europe. This pattern started in 1518 and continued for
285
three centuries until the slave trade was officially abolished in 1807 but
continued illegally until 1870. The most notorious part of the slave trade was
the journey between Africa and the Caribbean—the Middle Passage. Poor
treatment, poor ventilation, overcrowding, and diseases combined to create
havoc on slave ships bound for the Caribbean (Martin 2013: 58–67). The
average death rate during the Middle Passage was around 15 to 20 percent
(Rodney 1982: 96). An estimated 1.5 million Africans died during the Middle
Passage (see Taylor 2006).
The Africans who survived the Middle Passage were doctored (oiled to look
appealing to buyers) and sold according to healthy looks, not family-
orientation, to various plantations. This plantation environment was rigidly
organized. The most attractive residential areas were occupied by European
plantation personnel, normally with a great house on top of a hill overlooking
the entire plantation system. The Africans occupied the slave quarters in the
agricultural areas, which were made up of sugar plantations and auxiliary fields
(crops, food for the plantation, timber needs of the plantation, pastures for
animals) and industrial buildings (windmill, treadmill, water mill, and steam
mill, boiling and curing house, storage sheds, and distillery house) where sugar
was made. The sugar plantations dominated most Caribbean islands, and they
ranged in size from about fifty to several thousand acres. The average size was
a few hundred acres. African slaves performed various tasks on the plantations,
from weeding to planting and harvesting the fields.
The busiest time was during the harvest season, when the ripened canes were
ready to be cut during the first half of the year. The work days were long.
Slaves began work at daybreak and continued, with a half-hour breakfast break
and two-hour mid-day break, until sunset. Additional chores, such as feeding
animals, were performed during the mid-day break, and additional work at
night was often required during the harvest season. The impact of slavery on
African lives was enormous. Their personal lives were severely affected by
harsh labor, inadequate nutrition and health care, violation of personal and
family dignity through sexual molestation, separation of family members, the
prohibition of marriage and various cultural and economic activities. The death
rate of African slaves was very high—from 15 to 20 percent every year—and
especially high among children and in the first three years of slaves' arrival.
Cuba, for instance, imported about 700,000 slaves from 1761 through 1870 but
in 1877 about 480,000 remained (Rogozinski 1992: 138).
Africans used any means necessary to resist and reject slavery. Slave
286
rebellions began in Africa and during the Middle Passage and were frequent in
the Caribbean. On every island in the Caribbean, there was at least one serious
rebellion (see Craton 1985). Resistance and rebellion took the form of overt and
covert actions. The former were observable forms of resistance, such as
destroying plantation property, killing owners, and engaging in outright revolts
and rebellions. Not all of these actions led to freedom for the enslaved. Many
slave rebellions were suppressed by the more powerful plantation management.
Some slave revolts, however, were successful. The best known are the slave
revolts on Haiti (1804) and on St. Croix (1848). Revolts in these islands led to
the overthrow of the white plantation system. Covert rebellions were concealed
acts of resistance that included injuring plantation animals, “going slow” or
working inefficiently, damaging machinery, faking illness, and burning
canefields. These were milder but equally effective forms of resistance aimed at
settling personal injuries or defying planter rule to achieve total freedom.
Another form of resistance was marronage—Africans escaped from the
plantations and formed independent communities. Maroon communities existed
in slave societies from North, Central, and South America to the Greater and
Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. Wherever and whenever slavery existed, there
was maroon resistance (see Thompson 2007). There were two forms of
marronage: petit and grand. Petit marronage was a temporary desertion of
slaves from plantation life, while grand marronage was a permanent escape
from the plantations. In the grand independent maroon communities, maroons
were called different names in different regions in the Americas: Palenques in
the Spanish Colonies, Quilombos or Mocambos in Brazil, Maroons in the
British Colonies, and Maronberg in the Danish Colonies. In French Guiana and
in Suriname the maroons were called Bush Negroes. There were other less
known names such as Rancherias, Ladeiras, Mambises, Magotes, Cumbes, and
Manieles (Roopnarine 2010; Price 1996; Campbell 1988; Hall 1985).
Slave rebellions certainly contributed immensely to the collapse of slavery in
the Caribbean. Other people and movements in Europe and Africa, however,
helped to precipitate and finally achieve the abolition of slavery. Apart from the
slaves, the first people to speak and campaign against slavery were abolitionists
from various Christian denominations and Quakers. They spoke and
campaigned on moral grounds, helped to internationalize the horrors of slavery,
and eventually placed pressure on the Caribbean planter class to free their
slaves. They argued that the black slave should be seen as a human being and a
brother. A small group of black abolitionists known as the Sons of Africa
played a key role toward abolition slavery. The most notable was Olaudah
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Equianoa, an ex-slave, who traveled widely and spoke and wrote about his
personal experience with slavery. Philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and Montesquieu also spoke out against slavery.
Encouraged by the Enlightenment movement sweeping through Europe, they
argued that the black slave should be treated humanely and that their
opportunities for progress should not be prevented by slavery. Slaves too
should enjoy the benefits of liberty and equality. The institution of slavery was
also attacked from an economic point of view. The main argument was that the
entire plantation system would be better served if the slaves were paid because
slaves would have the resources to take care of themselves and relieve the
colonial government from financial obligations such as defending forts in
Africa, feeding and housing the slaves, and paying for medical costs. Moreover,
as sugar production fell in the Caribbean after the American Revolution, so did
the dependence on slave labor. An independent United States was able to trade
with other colonies rather than be restricted to the British West Indies.
Parliamentary forms and motivations from public officials and intellectuals also
contributed to the emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean. Eventually, Britain
abolished slavery in 1834; Sweden in 1847; Denmark in 1848; France in 1848;
Holland in 1863; and Spanish Puerto Rico and Cuba in 1873 and 1886,
respectively.
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Post-Emancipation Caribbean: Labor Movements and
Decolonization
Emancipation did not resolve the problems of the newly freed African
population. Living and working conditions improved marginally. The planter
class continued to have control over the laboring population through complex
labor regulations and programs. British colonies implemented the
apprenticeship system (1834 to 1838); the Danish West Indies, the Labor Act
(1849 to 1879); the Dutch West Indies, the apprenticeship system (1863 to
1873); and Cuba, the Patronato (1880 to 1886). In some colonies, including the
British and Danish, compensation was given to planters for the loss of their
slaves. The British planters, for example, received twenty million pounds. The
motive behind the post-emancipation labor regulations and programs was to
retain cheap labor on the plantations as long as possible. The consequence was
that a majority of blacks continued to experience a low economic status,
exclusion from political power, and substandard conditions in housing, family
life, education, and health care. Subsequently, in some islands, the working
class black population rebelled against post-emancipation unjust conditions.
Black Jamaicans erupted in the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 while black
Virgin Islanders rose up in the Great FireBurn Rebellion of 1878. Some newly
freed blacks responded to their post-emancipation situation by establishing free
villages with an independent peasantry.
This was more noticeable in British Guiana and Jamaica, where free blacks
pooled their resources and bought abandoned sugar plantations. In the smaller
Leeward Islands, the newly freed blacks engaged in sharecropping or metayage.
However, some blacks chose to migrate from the planters' dominant
environment to urban areas and to other Caribbean islands. British Guiana and
Trinidad, places with large expanses of land, received black migrants from the
densely populated islands of the Lesser Antilles. British Guiana received about
20,000 black migrants from Barbados and other islands in the Lesser Antilles.
This pattern of intra-regional migration continued during the post-emancipation
period and in the twentieth century. From about 1850 to the 1910s, over
130,000 blacks from Barbados, Jamaica, and the Lesser Antilles went to build
railways in Central America, the Panama Canal, and to work on the banana and
coffee plantations. From about 1900 through the 1930s, blacks from the eastern
Caribbean islands and Haiti went to work on the sugar plantations in Cuba and
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the Dominican Republic. From the 1920s, skilled blacks went to work in the oil
refineries, construction, domestic services, and the tourism industry in Aruba.
In recent times, blacks from the poorer islands have migrated to North America,
the British Virgin Islands, St. Maarten/St. Martin, the Bahamas, and the
Cayman Islands to work in tourism and construction. Thousands of blacks from
the Caribbean have also migrated to their colonial mother countries in Europe
and even back to Africa (Richardson 1995; Marshall 1982).
By the 1900s, only Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba were
independent nations in the Caribbean. Despite some growth in cultural
nationalism based on Negritude and Pan-Africanism, the majority of the black
working class in these countries faced enormous obstacles to personal and
familial progress and development. They were affected by political and
economic instability that emerged from internal political rivalry, corruption,
high debt, U.S. intervention, the Great Depression, neo-colonialism, and
foreign domination of the economy. The working-class blacks in Haiti were
locked in poverty, suffering, and segregation. Afro-Cuban blacks were not
better off. However, many blacks did not simply accept their deplorable
conditions. In Cuba, for example, Afro-Cubans under the leadership of Antonio
Maceo fought to end slavery, to end the criminalization of their culture and
religion, and to end racial discrimination. Similar deprivation and resistance,
rooted in dismal economic conditions, occurred and erupted in the rest of the
colonial Caribbean. “Low wages, high unemployment, high inflation and an
inflexible, insensitive colonial administration fueled the passions of discontent
that frequently erupted into general riots” (Knight 2012: 212). In the absence of
elected officials in government, the black working class formed associations
and labor unions. In the United States Virgin Islands, working-class blacks, led
by Hamilton Jackson, the Black Moses of the Virgin Islands, fought for
workers' rights and civil liberties. In the British Caribbean, a proliferation of
labor unions emerged on almost every island. There was in Antigua, the
Antigua Trades and Labor Union; in St. Kitts, the St. Kitts Workers' League; in
Jamaica, Bustamante Industrial Trade Union; in British Guiana, the Guiana
Industrial Workers' Union; and in Barbados, the Barbados Workers' Union. By
the Second World War, these labor unions transformed themselves into
political parties led, usually, by one persuasive black orator with a charismatic
personality to voice grievances and push towards decolonization. Barbados
produced Grantley Adams; Jamaica, Norman Manley; Antigua, Vere Bird;
British Guiana, Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan; St. Kitts, Robert Bradshaw;
Dominica, Edward le Blanc and Eugenia Charles; and Trinidad, Eric Williams,
290
among others. Some of these leaders were educated in Britain and were
influenced by the British Labor Party, especially the Fabian/Socialist wing.
Other leaders were home-grown populists. Despite this difference, these leaders
had one common goal: to dismantle colonialism in their respective islands (see
Bolland 1995; Lewis 2004).
The decolonization efforts in the British Caribbean coincided with other
international events. The first is that Western developed nations were willing to
engage in decolonization gradually after the Second World War because
soldiers in the British Colonies fought the Axis nations. Moreover, Articles 1
and 55 of the United Nations Charter stated that nations, like Great Britain,
should allow colonies to be independent. The second is that by 1947, India had
gained its independence. This was significant to the peoples of Africa, Asia,
and the Caribbean because previously Britain had granted independence only to
predominately European nations like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and
South Africa. The granting of independence to India meant that non-European
people could now rule themselves or hold out hope for the possibility of doing
so. By the 1950s, some African nations had already gained or were fighting for
independence from their mother countries. The third is that the Caribbean
islands had become an economic liability to Great Britain. Profits from the
islands were limited. The question was not if Great Britain would grant
independence to the British Caribbean but rather how and when. Great Britain
thought that their Caribbean islands were too small and economically weak to
become independent, and the best option for independence was to form a
federation. After some hesitation, the leaders of the British Caribbean agreed to
a federated form of government. The British West Indian Federation (1958–
1962) consisted of ten islands: Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Grenada, St. Kitts-
Nevis-Anguilla, Antigua, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Montserrat.
The federation was, however, stillborn, mainly because of disputes over inter-
island migration, federal taxation, and common import tax. Some Caribbean
leaders also had a parochial and insular mentality. Jamaica and Trinidad
seceded from the federation. The remaining eight islands, which became known
as the “Little Eight,” tried to salvage some form of a West Indian Federation,
but this too failed. Subsequently, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became
independent in 1962, Barbados in 1966, and the other islands entered into an
Associated Statehood with Britain. Except for Montserrat and Anguilla, these
islands eventually became independent in the 1970s and early 1980s.
291
Social Issues: African-Caribbean Languages and
Religions
One of the unique features of the Caribbean is the multiple languages that
emerged during three centuries of colonization. Except for the native
Amerindian languages in Guyana and Dominica, all the current languages in
the Caribbean were either imported or resulted from the mixing of many
languages. The Spaniards imported Spanish to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the
Dominican Republic. The French followed suit in Haiti, Martinique,
Guadeloupe, and French Guiana. The Dutch did the same thing in Suriname,
Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao and in a number of smaller islands in the northern
Caribbean. The British also imported English to Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad,
and Barbados and to a number of other islands in the Lesser Antilles. The
Danes imported Danish to the now United States Virgin Islands, but its usage is
irregular. Only a minority of people use the Danish language in the United
States Virgin Islands. A similar pattern occurred with the Swedish language in
the now French Saint Barthélemy. During the centuries of slavery and into the
present, European languages have been perceived to be the standard or “proper”
language and have been used in government, formal education, and commerce.
African-Caribbean people have therefore been exposed to these European
languages, and as a consequence, a large percentage of the African-Caribbean
population is familiar with the European-introduced language in their
respective lands. The usage of these European languages, however, varies
according to social class. Upper- and middle-class Africans in the Caribbean
tend to have a better command of these languages, mainly because of exposure
to the educational system.
Creole is most commonly spoken in the Caribbean. A Creole language in the
Caribbean combines the languages of people from European and Western
African backgrounds. Subsequently, there are in the Caribbean, French-Creole
(Patios, Kweyol), English-Creole (Pidgin, Jamaica Talk, Bajan, Crucian), and
Dutch-Creole (Papiamentu and Sranan Tongo or Taki Taki). These Creole
languages were not always derived from the official language of the mother
country. For instance, Sranan Tongo is spoken in Dutch Suriname, but it is
derived from English. These languages, over time, have become more African-
Caribbean than European. Some of these Creole languages have become
extinct, such as the Dutch Creole in Berbice, Guyana, and Negerhollands in St.
292
Thomas, United States Virgin Islands (see Sabino 2012; McDonald & Ian
Robertson 2006; Christi 1996; Highfield 1981).
The Creole language has much significance for African people in the
Caribbean. For many, it is their first language, which expresses a native
sensibility. Caribbean Africans use Creole in daily conservations, and in some
places it is encouraged and supported in the public elementary and secondary
schools, which believe Creole to be the rightful language of instruction. Some
islands, like Haiti and the Netherland Antilles, have allowed Creole to be the
official language of instruction in schools. Some politicians, artists, and talk
show hosts use Creole regularly. However, the Creole language is yet to find a
niche in many Caribbean islands. It is often marginalized and stigmatized in the
educational system, in the judicial system, in the economic system, as well as in
the media (Roopnarine 2010: 797). Standard languages are often preferred.
Like Caribbean languages, Caribbean religions are also diverse. Christianity,
Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Creole, and a host of other religions are practiced
in the Caribbean. In modern times, Africans have embraced many of these
religious faiths. However, the focus here is to analyze African-Caribbean
religions or African-derived religions. African-Caribbean religions have the
strongest connection with Africa over any other aspects of the African
experience in the Caribbean. These religions have survived the suppressive
conditions of slavery and colonialism alongside the acculturation process of
retention, syncretization, and reinterpretation (Simpson 1978: 61). These
religions function like other major religions in the world. They foster social
solidarity by uniting the believers and bringing them together to perform
various rituals. They also are used to answer perplexing questions of life as well
as to maintain social control. They also provide psychological and sociological
support in times of crisis, such as when coping with death, illness, tragedy, and
feelings of powerlessness (Henslin 2002: 343).
There are five categories of African-Caribbean religion. The first category is
neo-African religions, in which African religious beliefs and practices were
merged with Christianity during slavery: Vodou in Haiti; Santeria in Cuba, the
Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico; and Shango in Trinidad are examples of
neo-African religions in the Caribbean. The second category is ancestral
religions, which have retained fewer African traditions and are derived from
Protestantism brought to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century; beliefs and
practices revolved around ancestral worship, spirit possessions, and speaking in
tongues. Convince and Kumina in Jamaica, Orisha in Trinidad, Garifuna in
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Belize, Big Drum Dance in Grenada, and Kele in St. Lucia are examples of
African ancestral religions in the Caribbean (Simpson 1978: 95). The third
category is the revivalist religions that were brought from the United States to
Jamaica and then spread to other Caribbean islands by the Protestant movement
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The revival religions are a
combination of Protestant beliefs and African culture. They were a revival in
the sense of emphasizing religious awakening and enthusiasm but not in the
sense of restoring the customs of ancient culture (Simpson 1978: 112). They
include Revival Zion and Pocomania in Jamaica, the Shouters and Spiritual
Baptist in Trinidad, and the Shaker and Streams of Power in St. Vincent
(Desmangles, Glazier, & Murphy 2003: 264).
The fourth category is Spiritualism, that is, a religious practice that revolves
around healing and the reading of one's life, including a range of problems,
through mediumship or shamanism. The medium believes that the world is
made up of mainly spiritual substances, and therefore answers to problems are
sought by summoning, interrogating, and manipulating the spirits of the dead.
Spiritualism is generally practiced privately between the client and medium,
and it is seen in Myalism in Jamaica and Espiritismo in Puerto Rico (Simpson
1978; Desmangles, Glazier, & Murphy 2003: 264). The fifth category is a
religious-political movement that developed in the early twentieth century that
addresses the oppressive social and economic conditions that emerged from
years of slavery, colonization, neo-colonialism, and foreign domination.
This religion is called Rastafarianism and Dread and is found in Jamaica and
most islands in the Caribbean with a sizable African population. Founders of
the Rastafarian religion were influenced by their knowledge of the Jamaican
orator, Marcus Garvey, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA) that fought for freedom, justice, equality, for Africans to move back to
Africa, for a new gospel of racial pride, and for the relief of Africans from
racism and imperial domination. The basic Rastafarian doctrines are (a) the
black man is a reincarnation of the ancient Israelites who were exiled to the
Caribbean because of their transgressions; (b) the white man is not only wicked
but also inferior to the black man; (c) the situation of Africans in Jamaica is
hopeless; (d) Ethiopia is Heaven; (e) Haile Selassie is the living God; (f)
Africans in the Caribbean will return to Africa; and (g) the black man will in
the future enslave the white man (Simpson 1978: 126). The basic practices of
Rastafarianism are retreating from the material world of Babylon, wearing the
hair in dreadlocks, smoking the holy weed (marijuana), dressing in knitted
tams, leather or grass sandals, and eating ital foods (vegetation diet). The main
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colors of the Rasta are red, green, gold, and black. They generally form tribes
and live in communes.
295
Summary
This chapter examines the African experience in the Caribbean from the time
they arrived in early sixteenth century to the present. In so doing, the chapter
focuses on African slavery, resistance, and emancipation as well as the post-
emancipation labor movement and decolonization. Selected social issues such
as African-Caribbean languages and religions are also analyzed. Remarkably,
despite having endured three centuries of slavery, Africans did not only
survive, but also became the majority population in the modern Caribbean.
They have achieved this unique status within the African diaspora through
persistence and resistance, coping with their lot, and defeating slavery using
various techniques without completely losing their homeland heritage. Black
leadership through labor unions and political parties has also helped Africans in
the Caribbean to achieve representation and eventually gain independence from
most of their colonial masters or mother countries. However, the attempt to
form a federation failed primarily because of insular thinking, a phenomenon
that continues to plague the African experience in the Caribbean.
The Creole languages spoken by Africans in various islands are a significant
characteristic of the African experience in the Caribbean. These languages were
formed through contact between Europeans and West Africans in the Caribbean
but over time have become associated with Africans in the Caribbean rather
than with Europe or West Africa. For Africans in the Caribbean, the Creole
language is not only one of their hybrid experiences but also their first
language, which holds a special sensibility. Creole language is used in daily
conservations and to express deep feelings. Nonetheless, only a few islands in
the Caribbean have embraced the Creole language as the official means of
communication in the educational, judicial, and social systems. Creole
languages are generally stigmatized and marginalized and pushed into a low
rank within the social circles of many Caribbean islands.
Like Creole languages, African or African-derived religions are unique.
There are five categories of African-Caribbean religions. They are essentially
hybrid religions formed from European Christianity and African religious
beliefs and practices. These African religious legacies are found all over the
Caribbean islands and vary in practices and beliefs, but they share one
similarity. They are the closest connection Africans in the Caribbean have with
Africa over any other social experiences. While Africans in the Caribbean have
already achieved much under harsh conditions, there is still much more room
296
for progress. They are struggling to achieve socio-economic development, to
reduce social ills, to eliminate poverty, to wipe out corruption, to stop the use of
illegal drugs, and to fight crime, among other issues.
297
1. Compare and contrast Africans in the Caribbean with Africans in the United
States, Brazil, and Latin America.
2. Analyze the Caribbean plantation system and show the major divisions,
discuss the work routine of the slaves, and describe slave resistance and
emancipation.
3. Discuss the methods the planters used to control labor relations in the post-
emancipation period. How did the newly freed laborers react to this control?
4. Examine the role of black leadership in the formation of labor unions,
political parties, and decolonization in the Caribbean.
5. Describe the formation of Caribbean Creole languages. What are the
advantages and disadvantages of the use of Creole languages among
Caribbean Africans?
6. List and discuss the five categories of African-Caribbean religion.
298
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9
African Nationalism: Freedom for

Men, Women, and the Nation
Maria Martin
301
Introduction
African nationalism may be defined as a movement for self-determination by
African countries. It is recognized as a struggle that spread ubiquitously
throughout the continent in the latter end of the colonial era, but it is not a
phenomenon that was produced by colonialism. Nationalism in Africa, just as
in other parts of the world that have been colonized, has been in existence since
ancient times. In periods well before colonialism, there were numerous
instances wherein African people formed bonds of solidarity based on a sense
of shared identity and defended themselves from those who sought to
overpower them. For example, in 1324–1325 when Mansa Musa, the king of
Mali, went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, the Wolof people, who were conquered
subjects of his kingdom, revolted for their freedom. The Wolof people were
expressing nationalism in that they shared a common identity and the desire for
self-governance. During the era of European colonial expansion, African
people showed and expressed dignified will and resilience in their resistance to
colonialism. According to Vincent Khapoya, in The African Experience: An
Introduction, the king of the Yao people of Tanzania said:
I have listened to your words and see no reason why I have to obey you
—I would rather die first. I do not fall at your feet for you are God's
creature just as I am.... I am sultan here in my land. You are there in
yours. Yet listen, I do not say to you that you should obey me for I
know that you are a free man. As for me, I will not come to you and if
you are strong enough, come and fetch me.
This spirit of self-determination was always a part of African philosophies of
existence as can be seen with figures such as Julius Nyerere, Partrice
Lumumba, Jomo Kenyatta, and of course, Kwame Nkrumah, who founded the
Organization of African Unity and is known as the father of continent-wide
African nationalism. These men came to power as a result of the devastation,
deprivation, and instability brought to the people of various African countries
as a result of the colonial enterprise. They sought to turn the tide of colonialism
by placing power to rule back into the hands of African people who could then
manage their resources to grow their economies and build their own
infrastructure and thus place their homelands on a path to future progress.
Although much has been written about these male nationalists, there is
comparatively significantly less written about women's nationalism, even
though many women served in nationalist armies and worked within African
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countries to build infrastructure for independent states throughout Africa.
Indeed, nationalism in Africa was as much of a gendered affair as it was a
social, economic, and political movement. The following will explore African
nationalism in the colonial era by first discussing the establishment of
colonialism, which came as a direct result of the Scramble for Africa and the
Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. This chapter will also speak to Africa's role
in World War II (WWII) and highlight some of the most notable male
nationalists of the colonial era. The role of women in African nationalist
movements in various locales in the continent is also covered with an example
of gendered nationalism from Nigeria.
Major terms and concepts: Legitimate trade, Scramble for Africa, Berlin
Conference, colonialism, WWI, WWII, Cold War, National Security Study
Memorandum 39 (NSSM 39), precursors to African nationalism, African
women's nationalism, Marxist socialism, Pan-Africanism, dualism, gendered
nationalism, women's nationalism, the Sisters, Lagos Market Women's
Association.
303
By 1880, the slave trade in the Americas, Indian Ocean, India, Europe, and
the Middle East was greatly suppressed. The trade in people was replaced by
the legitimate trade in items such as ivory, gum, cloves, beeswax, honey,
cotton, peanuts, and rubber. The colonial powers came to realize that control of
these new trade items and other resources in Africa could be very beneficial for
building economic potential and fiscal stability. In fact, most analysts and
observers are convinced that the two main reasons the European countries led a
conquest of Africa were to support their transition to the industrial age by
providing raw materials for production and to create new markets in which to
sell their manufactured goods.
Colonialism was a structured system of oppression and exploitation although
some historians argue that it had positive outcomes including development,
peace, and stability. It is important to understand that the colonial era began
after the slave trade ended. It should be noted that Africans were not in a state
of constant turmoil and debauchery prior to the beginning of colonialism. The
atmosphere was the opposite. As a result of the end of the slave trade, African
societies had actually begun to reconstitute and rebound from the devastation
and unrest they had previously suffered. The end of the trade also allowed for
such opportunities as a more equal distribution of wealth. The legitimate trade
items were those that could be cultivated or grew naturally in the wild which
made it easier for all people, even rural dwellers, to gather, sell, and trade these
items, thereby increasing their economic potential. The end of the trade in
slaves also brought an end to the conflicts, wars, and raids that supplied
enslaved persons for the trade. However, this calm ended with the
establishment of colonialism in the continent, which brought far more violence,
death, and anarchy than in the period of calm that came directly following the
slave trade period.. Fifty percent of the population of the Belgian Congo died,
along with eighty percent of the Herero of Namibia, as a result of the savage
inhumanity they suffered at the hands of Europeans. As just noted, the primary
focus of the colonial regime was to siphon resources from Africa and use its
people (as soldiers, policemen, workers, producers) for its own purposes. As a
result, many colonials did not have the peoples' best interest in mind, since their
main concern was for building an empire for their respective home countries in
Europe. With these things in mind, colonialism has undoubtedly been a
significant force in shaping Africa's past and present. Even so, it did not
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commence immediately after the slave trade ended. Two important events led
to the full occupation of various African nations by Europeans: the Scramble
for Africa and the Berlin Conference.
Many Europeans considered Africa south of the Sahara a “territorium
nullius” or no man's land prior to the end of the nineteenth century. This came
as a result of the lack of knowledge about the diverse peoples and cultures,
landscapes, and resources existing throughout the continent south of the Sahara.
This ignorance as to the vibrancy of the African interior ended when British
explorers went to travel within the region to survey it. The explorations were
funded by non-governmental organizations such as the Royal Geographical
Society and the Church Missionary Society in England. In 1849, David
Livingstone, a medical doctor, missionary, and philanthropist, explored central
Africa recording information about rivers (that could be used as trade routes)
and other parts of the landscape. He also found that the region was densely
populated when European geographers had long believed that there was only
desert. Following the death of Livingstone in 1873, another British explorer,
Henry Morton Stanley, circumnavigated the Great Lakes (Lakes Tanganyika,
Victoria, and Albert) region to record their size and shape. Stanley travelled
from Zanzibar for 999 days and 7,088 miles to find where the Congo River, the
greatest river in Central Africa, began. Around the time of Stanley's trip, French
explorer Pierre de Brazza also traveled to Central Africa. William Blake, a
Scottish naval surgeon, began an expedition of his own in West Africa for
Britain.
While these “discoveries” of populated areas of Africa's interior helped to
educate Europeans about Africa south of the Sahara, they did not push
European countries to support the colonial enterprise in the region. This
changed when gold and diamond hunters like Cecil Rhodes and imperial-
minded rulers such as King Leopold II of Belgium began to devise plans to use
Africa's resources to benefit their countries and businesses. Leopold II claimed
that he wanted to go into the Congo, later known as the Belgian Congo, to bring
civilization to the people, especially after large deposits of diamonds were
found in the River Vaal area of South Africa in 1867. The Belgian king enlisted
the help of Stanley, who had already travelled extensively in the Congo, to
secure the region for Belgium. Leopold sent Stanley to the Congo with the
resources to build three hospitals, scientific stations, and a transportation
system under the guise of philanthropy when his true intent was to begin
establishing a colony there. Pierre de Brazza realized what Leopold was doing
and was determined to reach the Congo first and found a colony for France
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before the Belgians. He arrived in north Congo and made a treaty with local
chief Makoko, which stipulated that Brazza should not help any other whites
with access to the territory. Leopold went on to send men to make treaties with
the indigenous communities within a one thousand-mile-stretch of land and, by
doing so he carved a colony in the Congo across the river from the territory
France claimed. At present, the original area claimed by Belgium is Kinshasa
and that which Brazza helped colonize is Brazzaville.
The actions of the French and Belgians began to draw the attention of the
other European powers toward African colonization. The British annexed land
in South Africa in 1877. In 1882, Britain fought France for possession of Egypt
and its territories. The Italians and French also fought over Tunisia in 1881,
when the latter invaded the country to keep the Italians out. By 1883, the
British and the French were fighting for control of territories around the Niger
River. In 1884, Germany sought to take land in Togo, Cameroon, and Namibia.
Chancellor Bismarck of Germany convened an international conference in
Berlin on Africa from November 15, 1884, to February 26, 1885. The Berlin
Conference was not initially designed to carve new boundaries in Africa but to
achieve some agreement among colonizers as to free trade and travel, rules for
claiming territories, and the task of civilizing the indigenous people through
commerce. The resulting General Act (GA) resulted from the long
disagreement between Belgium, France, and Portugal, who all wanted land in
the Congo. The GA stipulated the rules of colonial occupation, which included
the following: a functioning government would need to be set up that would
adequately address the needs of the colony; and that protected lands, later
known as protectorates (being guarded by soldiers until the colonial offices and
an administrative presence could be firmly established in the area), had to be
respected as occupied, although no formal presence was required in the region.
The GA and other regulations that came from the Berlin Conference were the
beginning of many years of devastation, theft of resources, oppression and
murder of indigenous people, and social and political re(dis)organization. After
the conference, the scramble for African land and resources among European
countries intensified in the North, West, South, Interior, and East of the
continent. It should be mentioned as well that African peoples who did not sign
treaties resisted the occupation fiercely and often waged war against the
European colonizers. Those that did sign treaties did not expect to relinquish
their rights to their land or autonomy to self-govern but, by the time they
realized, it was too late as the Europeans already had a strong presence in their
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area. This atmosphere of destruction remained for almost a century until
African nationalism turned the tide and began to successfully replace colonial
regimes.
307
Precursors to African Nationalism: WWI, WWII, and
the Cold War
During WWI, African countries turned colonies experienced much
devastation, although they had not declared war with or against anyone. The
colonial powers, who had earlier laid claim to Africa's land, brought their
conflict into their African colonies (see The Great War in Africa by Byron
Farwell). The Allies fought against Germany for control of the German
holdings in Africa (Togo, Cameroon, Namibia, Burundi, Rwanda, and part of
Tanzania), which resulted in four major campaigns. The British and French
formed whole armies of African soldiers from their colonies to support their
war efforts abroad in Europe. However, only the French introduced African
soldiers into the war in Western Europe. Historians estimate that over two
million Africans died in WWI, mostly civilians, with 100,000 troops from East
Africa and 65,000 from French North and West Africa. WWI also caused
severe destruction to Africa economically and in terms of development. The
price of all commodities rose as trade and production slowed due to the war;
poverty reached immense levels.
In WWII, the European colonial powers once again brought Africa into their
conflict. The French and British alone deployed 500,000 African troops in
WWII, with many enlisting after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935. Africa
was essential to strengthening and sustaining commodity production for Europe
during the war. The increase in rubber production and the mining of tin
imposed very harsh and deplorable working conditions for Africans. Food
prices also increased in Africa because of food scarcity (see Africa and WWII
by Judith Byfield and Carolyn Brown). The amount of food for civilian
consumption was drastically reduced, as the colonials commandeered rice,
grain, and other staples for their war effort. These high food prices further
fueled poverty by the end of the war because the war industries either slowed or
ceased to produce weapons. At the end of WWII, there was the growth of the
realization that Europe was indebted to Africans for their sacrifices toward the
preservation of European freedoms in both WWI and WWII.
The next major struggle that brought Africa into a conflict that was primarily
between the East and Western Europe was the Cold War. Following WWII, the
globe was divided into two superpowers, the East (Soviet Union) and the West
(US and NATO allies). According to John H. Hertz, in The Nation-State and
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the Crisis of World Politics, any nation-state is continually in search for
security to protect itself from the power of other nation-states in the
international arena. This fear of aggression from other nation-states causes a
cycle of measures and countermeasures between rival nations. In a word, this
development constituted the foundations of the Cold War. During this period,
the East and West developed many advanced weapons and marine and aviation
technologies, strengthened by systematic space exploration. It was this global
militarization that caused the two powers to become interested in Africa. The
continent, after all, had an expansive landmass, broad airspace, and vast
coastlines, and could be a geo-strategic location for a number of reasons,
including defense and spying. Additionally, Africa had raw material wealth
beneath the soil that could be mined and used for manufacturing weapons and
other military equipment. Morocco and Libya became sites for US military
installations because their locations on the Mediterranean coast made them key
points from which the US could defend against a possible Soviet attack before
it would reach the shores of the US. In the early 1950s, many of the military
bases of the colonial powers were placed under the control of the US and its
allies in Europe. In sub-Saharan Africa bases were set up for logistical and
strategic reasons. For example, the US built a military satellite tracking station
in South Africa and a military communications station and air bases in
Ethiopia, in addition to a naval base and radio transmission station.
As the Cold War continued, the Soviet Union was able to secure a favorable
position in Africa through exploiting the renewed African desire for self-
determination that had emerged after the two world wars. The Soviet ideology
of Marxist socialism was used to facilitate a relationship between the Soviets
and African colonies that were seeking independence. Marxist socialism
champions a redistribution of wealth that would create an atmosphere wherein
there is public, rather than private, control of resources and production,
allowing wealth to be shared. In such a system, no one group would be
alienated from the ability to build wealth or meet its needs. Marxist socialism
did appeal to some African intellectuals, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Seiko
Touré, Modibo Keita, Tom Mboya, and Julius Nyerere, who grounded their
socialist leanings in African cultural and historical traditions and articulated
what has been termed African socialism.
The Soviets used their socialist connection to Africans as leverage to coerce
the US into being more transparent with the allocation of its military and
economic aid to African colonies. The US approached African independence
movements with neutrality because its only other options were to remain
309
friendly with its European allies by supporting their colonization efforts (in
which case the US would be frowned upon by the international community as a
supporter of colonization) or to support African freedom and lose its allies that
were also engaged in colonialism. The Soviets strategically supported African
independence movements, which would allow them to be perceived by the
international community as more progressive than the West. Such a policy
would also allow them to be in closer proximity to the African territories of the
US and its allies and exert stronger influence. In this way, the Soviets pressured
the US into making a decision to either openly oppose African independence by
defending the colonial territories of their allies or to support it by denouncing
colonialism and removing its support of its allies that practiced colonialism.
Even in light of this, the Soviets only helped Africans in ways that would
advance their own objectives. Moscow capitalized off of the fact that their
interests converged with those of African nationalists as far as removing their
European rivals from geo-strategic points in the African continent. For
example, the Soviets helped to dismantle the Portuguese colonial empire in
Africa because it proved to be a decisive victory for them over their Portuguese
rivals. However, the Soviets would not substantially support the African
National Congress (ANC) in South Africa with massive military aid to achieve
independence so as not to enter into a direct conflict with the British colonial
regime in that country. Since Britain was a US ally, supporting a freedom
movement against them would elicit some type of US response, which could
spark another war between East and West. As a result, the Soviets only
supported the ANC in talks about peace and freedom in Africa while serving
their ulterior political motives. Moscow supported the South West African
People's Organization (SWAPO) in Namibia and the Movimento Popular de
Libertacao de Angola (MLPA) but it did not support Robert Mugabe's
Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) in former Southern Rhodesia
because of its connections to China. Instead, it supported Joshua Nkomo's
Zimbabwe African People's Union. In Nigeria, the Soviets sent weapons to
Colonel Yakubu Gowon to squash the Biafran Rebellion of 1967–1970.
While the East strategically involved itself in African independence, the
West claimed to support decolonization on a selective basis. The US
characterized itself as anti-colonial based on the Fourteen Points of Woodrow
Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference, in which he denounced colonialism
in 1919. However, the US did lend support to the Portuguese in its wars in
Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. The Portuguese stubbornly wanted
to maintain their colonial regime in Africa. Thus, many Africans mistrusted the
310
West because of its support of the colonial powers. Moscow realized the
contradictory nature of the US claims of anti-colonialism and supported the
view that the US was indeed an imperial nation. In fact, the Soviets had a
record of actually helping Africans to achieve freedom. The US followed a
more reactionary policy towards Africa. It would only act if prompted, and its
primary motives were to support its allies, not the Africans. For example,
Washington supported the white minority regimes in South Africa, South-West
Africa, and Southern Rhodesia in order to protect the status quo that their
British allies established to subdue the indigenous people and empower white
settlers. In the mid-1970s, when the Portuguese were overthrown by the
liberation movements, the US realized that there was no longer a white colonial
security wall for South Africa because the Portuguese had to leave
Mozambique and Angola, located to the northeast and northwest of South
Africa respectively.
With the Portuguese gone, the British were open to attack by the neighboring
countries that supported South Africa's independence. In the event that they
were invaded, the US would have had to come in to defend its British ally and
thus be involved in a war in Africa. In order to avoid this possibility and further
instability in the region, Washington began to implement measures to banish
apartheid. However, it was not until the late 1980s that the US would pass the
Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which heavily sanctioned South Africa as
a means of forcing the British to end racial apartheid. It is clear that the US
supported change in South Africa to avoid further radicalization of the region
and prevent the Soviets from intervening and achieving a favorable outcome.
During its first term in office, the administration of President Richard Nixon
completed National Security Study Memorandum 39 (NSSM 39), which
solidified US cooperation with the British in South Africa. The fact that NSSM
39 was nicknamed “tar baby” is indicative of the Nixon administration's
thoughts toward indigenous South Africans and US-Africa policy. As the
events of the Cold War Era unfolded, African people saw that peace, freedom
from colonialism and imperialism, and equality for Africa on the international
stage would only come by their hands.
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As stated in the introduction, African nationalism predates WWI, WWII,
colonialism, and the Cold War, but the type of nationalism that existed in the
post-WWII era was shaped by colonialism. Nationalism is a movement based
on the shared goals, objectives, ideals, and beliefs of the collective in
opposition to another group. When one considers the bonds of solidarity that
have existed among Africans based on kinship, culture, history, and traditions,
it becomes clear that each ethnic group espoused a strong sense of community
throughout African history. When a French captain approached the king of the
Mossi people of Burkina Faso for his land, the king told him that he knew they
wished to kill him and take his land, although they claimed they wanted to help
him to organize it. He went on to say that his country was good as it was, he
had his own merchants, and he had no need of white men. Finally, he told the
French captain that he should consider himself fortunate that his head would
not be cut off, and ordered him to leave and never return. The leader of the
Nama people of Namibia told the Germans that God had established many
kingdoms in the world and so he knew that it was no crime that he wished to
remain ruler of his land and people. These two instances are examples of
nationalism from the colonial period in that both kings described a group
identity when they said “my people” and marked territory or national
boundaries when they referred to their “land.” The king of the Mossi even
referred to a lively nationwide economic system operated by his people when
he proclaimed that he had his “own merchants.” The king of the Mossi and the
king of the Nama expressed nationalism through cultural pride and economic
self-determination in the very early colonial period. Such nationalism lasted
throughout the era of African decolonization and independence. In a broader
transnational context, one might say that Africans in each nation throughout the
continent came together in the spirit of nationalism to expel the colonial powers
based on their shared experience with colonialism.
Although nationalism in Africa was organic and had an ancient precedent,
the missionary churches that accompanied colonial regimes had a major impact
on the rise of African nationalism in the post-WWII era. Prior to any
conversation linking the legacy of nationalism in Africa to colonial efforts led
by European Christian missionaries, it is imperative to explain that Christianity
actually came out of Africa and not Europe. This has been misunderstood
because Europeans used Christianity to colonize in Africa and the Diaspora.
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However, Christianity, and Judaism as well, are indigenous to Africa. Scholars
such as Yosef Ben-Jochannan and others have documented the African origins
of the Jewish faith. It is common knowledge that Christianity came out of
Judaism. If Judaism has been identified as an indigenous African belief system
and Christianity a faith-based movement among the Jewish people, it is not
erroneous to consider Christianity as an indigenous African religion. This is
what the evidence suggests. For example, the apostle Mark was an African born
to Jewish parents in Cyrene, a city in Libya that had been occupied by the
Greeks and Romans. He went on to found the Coptic Church in Alexandria,
Egypt. One of the most important, if not the most notable, saints in Catholicism
is Augustine of Hippo, who was also an African. He was born in Hippo Regius,
a Roman-occupied city in the African kingdom of Numidia (modern-day Libya,
part of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco). He is credited with reviving the ancient
Christian faith through his writings, which became a cornerstone of Western
philosophy and Western (Roman Catholic) Christianity.
In fact, according to Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the
Mediterranean 439–700, Christianity thrived in Africa until the twelfth century,
and perhaps beyond, when the wondrous churches at Lalibela, Ethiopia, were
hewn out of solid rock. The growth of Christianity in East Africa was later
truncated by the spread of Islam but it is clear that Christianity thrived in Africa
prior to contact with Europeans during both the Atlantic Slave Trade and
colonial eras. The faith was not brought into Africa from foreign European
sources, but it emanated outward from North Africa to the Roman Empire and
from Rome to the rest of Europe beginning after the death of Jesus in the first
century AD. The Romans had strong ties to North Africa, as the North African
kingdom of Numidia helped the Romans to defeat their toughest enemy,
Carthage, during the Punic Wars. Without Numidian aid and reinforcements
there may not have been a Roman Empire because Hannibal, one of the greatest
military generals known to history, constantly outmaneuvered and intimidated
the Romans in battle. Following the Punic Wars much interaction developed
between the Romans and North Africa. As people and items traversed the
Mediterranean overtime, between the two locales, so did the Christian faith (of
course with the help of the Apostle Paul and later Christians including St.
Augustine of Hippo). Europeans later used racial rhetoric with Christian
doctrine to subdue and pacify Africans in order to uphold slavery and found
their colonial empires. However, the faith was not introduced into the continent
by colonialism primarily, although colonial influence on the spread of
Christianity in Africa in later centuries is undeniable.
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The missionary churches of the colonial era were instrumental in the
development of African nationalism because the mission schools afforded
Africans with the greater awareness necessary to challenge and critique colonial
rule. The mission schools had three main objectives. The first was to provide
the basic literacy needed to teach Africans about the religion of the colonizers
(Christianity as interpreted by the colonial culture). The second was to
introduce them to European values and social structure. The third was to
enhance the productivity of African workers without giving them the tools to
oppose colonialism. Although the mission schools introduced subpar curricula,
they did provide Africans with a greater sense of political consciousness
through offering them broader knowledge and perspectives from outside of the
continent. In central Kenya, the Kikuyu people valued education, but the
Anglican and Scottish schools proved inadequate for them, so they founded
their own schools. African parents wanted their children to have a well-rounded
education with the skills and language necessary to fight the colonials and
regain the land that had been taken from them. In 1929, Jomo Kenyatta did
exactly this as he was chosen by his people to go to England to present their
objections to land grabbing to the British authorities.
He studied at the University of London and wrote Facing Mount Kenya,
which discussed Gikuyu life and culture and the atrocities his people suffered at
the hands of colonialism. He argued for self-government for his people by
travelling and speaking to British audiences who later supported anti-colonial
opinions and supported anti-colonial organizations. Leopold Senghor, the first
president of Senegal, was also educated in mission schools in his country. He
attended the Sorbonne at the University of Paris. Senghor was an important
political figure and developer of Negritude, an ideology that supported
adherence to a common identity for all indigenous Africans. He later received
the highest honor that France could bestow on its statesmen, membership in the
French Academy. Many of the first-generation African nationalists such as
Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia), Nnamdi Azikiwe
(Nigeria), and Hastings Kamuzu Banda (Malawi) went to mission schools. The
first nationwide movement against political and racial oppression in South
Africa was led by pastors.
Along with the mission schools, another very important influence on
twentieth century African nationalism was the advent of Pan-Africanism, a
philosophy of freedom grounded in the cultural and political solidarity of all
Africans, including those who are a part of the African Diaspora. As a practice,
it was a unique phenomenon that arose among enslaved persons in the African
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Diaspora from various African ethnic groups. They were no longer able to
reformulate their original social and political structures due to the scattering of
their people throughout the West, particularly Europe. This circumstance
produced great diversity within any given population of the enslaved. However,
they were able to form a support system that was based on a common identity,
which created a cohesive community that helped them to cope with the daily
horrors of slavery. Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological
Perspective, published in 1976 by Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, theorizes
the formation of African American culture and documents the organic
development of Pan-Africanism. Mintz and Price stated that the relationships
forged on board the slave ships were the essential building block of community:
Various shreds of evidence suggest that the earliest social bonds to
develop in the coffles, in the factories, and especially during the long
Middle Passage were of a dyadic (two-person) nature. Partly, perhaps,
because of the general policy of keeping men and women separate, they
were usually between members of the same sex. The bond between
shipmates, those who shared passage on the same slaver, is the most
striking example. In widely scattered parts of Afro-America, the
“shipmate” relationship became a major principle of social organization
and continued for decades or even centuries to shape ongoing social
relations. In Jamaica, for example, we know that the term “shipmate”
was synonymous in their [the slaves'] view with brother or sister.
This suggests that Pan-Africanism, or solidarity among Africans globally,
was an organic concept that developed early on during the Atlantic Slave
Trade. Enslaved Africans were placed in a precarious situation, often called the
“peculiar institution,” wherein they dealt with degradation, poverty, exhaustion,
and abuse daily. In order to survive in this deplorable atmosphere, they had no
choice but to trust one another, build tight-knit communities, and advocate for
one another. When African peoples were brought to America, they were taken
from various parts of the continent; thus the groups they formed were
international in nature. They were able to overcome their differences to build a
new language and culture based on a shared experience. It was this framework
that succeeding generations of Blacks in the United States, whether they were
domestic or foreign, used to strengthen and support their struggles against white
supremacy.
The ideology of Pan-Africanism was developed and shaped by Caribbean
and African American intellectuals such as Edward Blyden, Sylvester
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Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey. It has two central principles:
that there is a common heritage for all African descended people, and these
people, whether in Africa or the Diaspora, are responsible for ensuring the
uplift and well-being of African descended people everywhere. Edward W.
Blyden was a child of Igbo parents. He was born in the Dutch West Indies in
1832. In 1850, he came to America with the wife of his pastor, John P. Knox.
Blyden had the intention of becoming a preacher like Mr. Knox but, when he
applied to Rutgers Theological School, he was denied admission due to “state
laws.” He was forced to travel to Liberia to attend college because of the tide of
racism in the US. Blyden theorized, wrote, and spoke about the African
identity, which he believed was shared by all African descended people.
Furthermore, he believed that it was imperative for Africans to regain their
right to govern themselves without interference. He said that no one could
understand Africans better than Africans, meaning that African peoples know
their needs better than anyone else and should therefore take precedence in
deciding how to govern and develop their nations. In Liberia's Offering: Being
Addresses, Sermons, Etc., published in 1862, Blyden spoke of the necessity of
nationalism, claiming that no people could rise to an influential position
without unity. His view of solidarity among Black people was socially
constructed to support certain socio-economic and political agendas such as the
ownership of land, which was vital to subsistence and survival. Blyden's
speech, “The Call of Providence to the Descendants of Africa in America,”
calls for African Diasporans to return to Africa unashamed and for them to help
raise the status of the continent and its people as well as take rightful possession
of the land of their forefathers and fathers. His writings set a precedent of
connecting Africans and Diaspora Africans through historical-cultural
awareness, common oppression, and the desire to live free.
Sylvester Williams (1867–1911) was a Trinidadian lawyer who helped to
advance Pan-African agendas and ideals. He was concerned with colonial
expansion throughout Africa and the evils of racism that Africans experienced
throughout the world. As a result, he called a meeting of Africans and African
descended people in 1900 to address their global issues. The main objective of
this Pan-African Conference was to “protect Africans from the depredations of
the empire builders.” The term Pan-Africanism was used at the meeting to
emphasize the common struggles and therefore the necessity of all Africans to
work together for their freedom and equality around the world.
When Williams died, Du Bois, African American sociologist, intellectual,
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and activist, continued the Pan-African movement begun by Williams. Du Bois
(1868–1963) believed that the effects of racism could not be undone without
the cultivation of a healthy self-image. In light of this, his writings highlight the
contributions of Africans to world history to establish cultural pride among
Black populations who were suffering from a misguided and negative self-
image impressed upon them by the racist stereotypes and ideals of the broader
society. His interest in Africa and the solidarity of African descended people
globally led him to revive the Pan-African movement. He rallied Africans
globally to find solutions to their issues as well as to expose and put an end to
colonial exploitation such as that in the Belgian Congo, where people were
being mutilated and tortured for refusing to work for the colonials. Du Bois was
also determined to help African veterans from WWI to receive the recognition
they deserved for their contributions to the war effort.
Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) was a prominent Black nationalist from
Jamaica. He supported the economic autonomy and psychological revitalization
of Black people through complete self-reliance. He taught that black skin was
not a marker of inferiority but a sign of greatness. His organization, the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), was founded in Jamaica in
1914. Its objectives were to establish solidarity among Black people, develop
self-love and pride among them, assist the needy, help the ethnic groups of
Africa, establish universities and schools, and better conditions for Africans
everywhere. Garvey often used slogans such as “Africa for the Africans” and
“Renaissance of the Black Race.” The UNIA had an army called the Universal
African Legion, a nurse core called the Universal Black Cross Nurses, and the
Universal African Motor Corps, and operated a fleet of ships called The Black
Star. The UNIA also published a newspaper, The Negro World, with the motto
“One God, One Aim, One Destiny.” Garvey even planned to open a settlement
in Liberia, but this never came to fruition. Both Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo
Kenyatta were heavily influenced by the teachings of Garvey.
While Garvey sought a practical program of economic and racial reform, Du
Bois strategized to bring African descended peoples together through
international conferences. The first conference in 1919 would not have been
able to take place in Paris, France, without the help of Blaise Diagne of Senegal
who was the first African to serve in French National Assembly. Diagne used
his influence to secure permission for the conference proceedings to go on.
Many countries were alarmed at the prospects of the conference. While the US
did not want the international community to learn about the lynching,
oppression, and terrorizing of its Black citizens as a result of the conference,
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Europeans did not want their brutal treatment of Africans in the colonies to be
known. The Allies of WWI did not want the conference to openly speak of the
contributions of Black soldiers for fear of offending racist white soldiers. Even
with all of these sentiments surrounding the meeting, it went on successfully
and ended with a petition to the Allied Powers of WWI (US, Britain, France,
Soviet Union, and China) to provide international supervision to the former
German colonies in Africa to transition them to independence. It also called for
the League of Nations to demand that the colonial powers stop the abuses of
Africans and ensure that their demands were being met. Further demands by the
conference were that education opportunities be provided to Africans, that
slavery and forced labor be outlawed, and that Africans be permitted to have
political participation and representation in the colonies. Subsequently, Pan-
African Conferences took place in 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945 (and two more
were held in 1974 and 1994).
The fifth Pan-African Conference in Manchester, England, from October
15th–21st, 1945, was the most important among them all. More Africans
attended than ever before. Dr. P. M. Milliard, T. R. Makonnen, George
Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Peter Abrams, and Jomo Kenyatta were in
attendance as well as many African students who were in England at the time.
However, this conference also hosted farmers, workers, trade unionists, and co-
operative societies. This conference was more radical, and its major outcome
was the resolution to fight for African self-determination by denouncing
indirect rule, racial segregation, constitutional reforms, partnerships,
trusteeships, or guardianships and all other forms designed to extend colonial
rule, which were deemed to be deleterious to the political unity of all Africans.
The conference ended with a statement proclaiming the determination of
Africans to be free and a call for them to “complain, appeal, and arraign” and
make the world aware of their condition, determined to fight for democracy and
respect. The Manchester Conference of 1945 helped to articulate the
foundational goal and ideology of African nationalism.
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The Movement Begins
African nationalism was both a practical, or on the ground, as much as an
ideological movement. It had been manifesting itself prior to WWII in many
ways such as political (parties), cultural churches, nationalist newspapers,
strikes, civil disobedience, conferences, demands, youth movements, and
uprisings. These actions produced a psychology of activism among the people,
especially the younger generations, as they mobilized for shared goals of
freedom and self-determination. The importance of African solidarity in the
post-WWII era cannot be overstated. When the colonials divided Africans and
carved out territories for themselves, they did so without any regard for the
various ethnic groups that existed in those areas for thousands of years. In fact,
it was rare for a colony to have homogenous ethnic groups within its borders.
The result of reconfiguring the homelands of ethnic group boundaries was,
oftentimes, full of tension and conflict. Nonetheless, Africans in the twentieth
century were able to come together and build communities among their diverse
ethnic groups and work with their leaders to forge a unified front and
commitment to common goals and to advance the emerging African
independence movements.
Political parties became a prominent incubator for the nationalist movement
in many African colonies. These political parties began as interest groups
comprised of educated African civil servants, teachers, lawyers, doctors, labor
leaders, and pastors. These groups were moderate and non-radical and tried to
work within the colonial system to obtain and argue for equal treatment and
human rights. The Aborigines' Rights Protection Society of Ghana, founded in
1897, was designed to ensure that the land rights of African people were
upheld. The National Congress of British West Africa was made of educated
Africans from the Gold Coast (Ghana), Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Gambia who
desired to have the right to vote. J. E. Casely Hayford, a notable lawyer, was
the head of the organization. Other political parties were born out of the various
youth movements. The Nigerian Youth Movement, originally known as the
Lagos Youth Movement (LYM), first assembled to protest the devaluation of
degrees from an African-founded college in Lagos. The college required the
same rigorous work load but could only offer diplomas because it was not
linked to or partnered with a British university. When the LYM became the
Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM), it drew membership from all over Nigeria
with the exception of the north. NYM began to build a more comprehensive
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agenda, to include protesting discrimination in legislation and demanding the
Africanization of the civil service.
Nnamdi Azikiwe headed the NYM initially but later left due to ideological
differences with other members. In 1944, he established the National Council
of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC). The Action Group was a political rival
to the NCNC led by Obafemi Awolowo. Parties in other parts of the continent
included the Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA), founded in 1946
in French West Africa, the United Gold Coast Convention, founded in 1947 in
Ghana, and the Northern Rhodesia African Congress formed in 1948. The
Tanganyika African Association (TAA), founded in Tanzania in 1929, began
with teachers and lower level civil servants, who met and discussed their
experiences. In 1954, a young school graduate, Julius Nyerere, transformed the
TAA into the Tanganyika African National Union to address the issues of the
people and fight for independence. In Kenya, small groups were formed to
protest colonial policies but were repressed. The Kavirondo Taxpayers' Welfare
Association (KWTA) was formed in the 1920s by West Kenyans to fight
against unfair tax laws. The group disbanded due to ethnic and religious
differences. Henry Thuku founded the Young Kikuyu Association, which was
succeeded by the Kikuyu Central Association that later became the Kenyan
African Union but was confined to Central Kenya by the British. During the
Mau Uprising of 1952–1956, Tom Mboya established the People's Convention
Party. The Kenyan African National Union was founded in March 1960. The
charismatic youth in African countries began to turn small moderate groups
into large-scale more radical movements.
The era of African independence ushered in by youth gave rise to nationalists
such as Kwame Nkrumah, Haile Selassie, Patrice Lumumba, Julius Nyerere,
and Alhaji Abubakar Tafewa Balewa. Nkrumah is known as the father of
African nationalism because his leadership helped Ghana achieve independence
as early as 1957, which set a precedent for freedom for other African territories
still under colonial oppression. Many North African colonies and protectorates
achieved their independence before Ghana, such as Liberia, which was founded
by freed African Americans as a free nation in 1823, Egypt (1922), Libya
(1951), Morocco (1956), and Tunisia (1956). Ethiopia has been independent
throughout its history except for short periods during early history and the
Italian invasion in 1935–1941. In terms of Ghana, Nkrumah set a precedent for
the independence era through his program for self-determination through
African solidarity. He supported the coming together of all African nations to
expel the colonials and take rightful control of their lands. He was first a part of
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the United Gold Coast Convention party, comprising many older intellectuals
who did not support his ideals. In light of this, he left to form the Convention
People's Party, which was attended by a youth majority. Nkrumah established a
campaign of “Positive Action,” which consisted of civil disobedience agitation
and massive propaganda, as well as a salute and protest songs. He believed that
Pan-Africanism was the only viable way of saving the continent from neo-
colonialism. Nkrumah wanted to create a union government for all African
states wherein they would all pull their military and economic resources
together and protect Africa's mineral wealth to keep it in the hands of the
African people. This Pan-African alliance was a goal of the Organization of
African Unity founded on May 25, 1963, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, when
Emperor Haile Selassie invited 22 African heads of state to raise the quality of
life of the African people, eradicate colonialism, and increase solidarity among
African states. Unfortunately, in 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown by a military
mutiny while he was out of the country. He lived in exile in Guinea-Conakry
and died in Romania waiting for treatment for cancer, although some believe he
was a victim of the same poison that was prepared for Patrice Lumumba.
Both Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba were socialists. Lumumba was
the first prime minister of the Congo and one of the founders of the Mouvement
National Congolais (MNC). Lumumba coordinated protests against the
Belgians and said that the Congolese would no longer be content to be treated
as monkeys in their own land. Meanwhile, the Belgian colonizers did not want
to give up control and supported the army mutiny. The Western powers,
including the US, wanted to maintain their open access to mineral wealth in the
Congo and saw that Lumumba was a direct opposition to their aims. As a result,
they came together to exterminate him. The US needed Congolese cobalt for jet
fighter planes during the Cold War. All Western nations needed uranium for
their atomic bombs and electricity (Shinkolobwe uranium from Congo was
used to make the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Larry
Delvin, a CIA operative, admitted to handling poison sent from Washington to
be put into Lumumba's toothpaste or food. The poison was designed to mimic a
central African disease so that it would appear that he died from an illness and
not from being poisoned. His exact cause of death remains a mystery, but he
was certainly murdered, and it is widely known that the Belgians sawed his
lifeless body into pieces and doused them in acid to destroy any evidence.
Much like Lumumba, Julius Nyerere was a socialist leader who built an
independence movement for his country, Tanzania. His form of socialism was
based on the socialist principles of ancient African culture. He was sworn in as
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the prime minister of Tanganyika in March of 1961, and the country became
independent in December of that year. Nyerere later beat out an opponent for
the presidency in a landslide victory of 97 percent of the vote. Upon becoming
president, he signed the Act of Union, which unified Tanganyika and Zanzibar
because he believed in the unity of African peoples as a resolution to neo-
colonial exploitation. In 1964, both countries formed the United Republic of
Tanzania. Prior to the political independence of Tanzania, Nyerere wanted to
build an East African Federation with Uganda, Kenya, and Tanganyika. In
1958, his idea came to fruition with the establishment of the Pan-African
Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa.
Its primary objective was to fight for African independence and raise the
standard of living for East and Central Africa. Nyerere believed that socialism
was inherent in African cultures historically. His philosophy was based on the
idea of an extended African family, which is based on respect for humanity
such that it was the obligation of the wealthy to help the less fortunate. This
philosophy was used to announce the Arusha Declaration inaugurated in 1967
as the blueprint for the country's development. Nyerere also sought to develop a
new political community in Tanzania with his philosophy of Ujamaa as an
opposition to capitalism. Ujamaa stipulated that all forms of production had to
be controlled by the people, or under collectivized ownership. A crucial part of
Ujamaa was the idea that self-reliance was key to avoiding exploitation through
external financial aid from the West. Education systems management was also
imperative within the Ujamaa vision to produce self-determined children.
Schools were built in rural areas and farming was a part of the daily student
activities. Cultivating the school farms taught students to be producers and to
manage their own resources. Nyerere retired in 1985 (and died in 1999).
Each of the nationalist leaders faced immense difficulties in the effort to
establish viable new nations on the continent. These founding fathers struggled
to maintain their independence from unrelenting overlords who were unwilling
to evacuate from the new African countries. They fought through internal
political conflicts sparked by the remnants of colonial regimes in their efforts to
control Africa's mineral wealth and land through neo-colonialism. These
leaders faced death by sabotage, murder, and mutiny for their demand for self-
government. Their bravery was unmatched except perhaps by the involvement
of African women nationalists.
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Gender awareness and equality were just as important to African
independence movements as were socialism and Pan-Africanism. However, this
perspective is often lost as histories of African nationalism overwhelmingly
analyze politically elite male nationalist leaders. Considering the experiences of
women adds depth and nuance to understandings of events and structures in
society. This is also true for African nationalism. Women were an important
force in African freedom struggles, and an analysis of their activism uncovers
the hidden narrative of the nationalist movement that highlights their
contributions. African women have historically had institutionalized rights to
protest any imbalances of power between men and women in society.
This means that their activism was socially sanctioned and supported. For
example, Shirley Ardener, in “Sexual Insult and Female Militancy,” chronicled
long-founded traditions of militancy exhibited by women among three
Cameroonian ethnic groups. The women in these groups reacted to insults
about women or mistreatment at the hands of husbands by going to the man's
home, beating on his hut, and singing insulting songs. If the man did not come
out and apologize and make amends, the women would tear his house down
and shame him further with specific dances and nudity. He would be fined and
would have to pay women collectively by giving them a pig. He also had to pay
the woman he insulted. Such women formed bonds based on shared ideas and
experiences of womanhood to fight against imbalance in gender relations. This
research was important in that it substantiated the fact that solidarity has long
been a tenet of African women's anti-colonialism.
In many areas of West Africa women were seen as essential contributors to
the community. This was due to the concept of dualism, which is the belief that
two equal but opposite forces must cooperate and work together to form a
coherent, efficient, stable system. In dualism there are many dichotomies such
as heaven and earth, good and bad, and men and women, but the two
complement one another and one is not greater than the other. As a result of this
belief system, women experienced rights and autonomy in political, social, and
economic arenas although their societies were not egalitarian. In pre-colonial
Nigeria, women were able to have a voice in government, they were
entrepreneurs who ran a majority of the markets, and they were also able to
build wealth that was kept separate from their husbands', meaning that they
could be financially independent. There were even female kings (queens) in
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several areas of Nigeria. The fact that women had representation in government
through the office of the Iyolade, or women's representative, and economic
rights protected by the Iyaloja, or mother of the market, ensured that their
issues were being addressed.
Filomina Chioma Steady, in Women and Leadership in West Africa:
Mothering the Nation and Humanizing the State (2005), says that mothering is
now and has long been a paradigm for female leadership in Africa. In essence,
the skills, knowledge, and wisdom required to mother someone provide the
foundations for and translate to leadership potential. She cites examples from
Diop's Precolonial Black Africa (1987) and Monges' Kush: The Jewel of Nubia
(1996), saying that women in Africa had always served in positions of power as
soldiers, rulers, queens, sole heads of state, and in the military, while Greek
women could not leave their homes without a male chaperone. Steady asserts
that female leadership is indigenous to Africa and can be manifested directly or
indirectly in the form of queens, empresses, royal lineages, queen mothers,
chiefs, and paramount chiefs. This is one of the main reasons that Africa has
had more female heads of state and parliamentarians than Western countries.
According to Steady, President Ellen Johnson of Liberia built her campaign on
motherhood, perceiving herself as mother of the nation and one who could raise
the country up from poverty and violence. She portrayed herself as a mother
who would redirect the wayward child (the nation). Nancy Steele of the
Women's Congress of the All People's Congress of Sierra Leone led a
campaign to get out the vote, saying “women give birth to men, therefore we
own them. Women are natural leaders.”
In the post-WWII era, when nationalism flourished and gender roles were
redefined as women worked in historically male industries, Africans made it a
point to support both democracy and women's autonomy. According to Susan
Geiger, African nationalists appealed to the colonial governments and argued
for self-rule in their own countries, citing progressive platforms. This was done
as a means of symbolizing their readiness to build and maintain forward
thinking nations that aligned with the principles that Europeans claimed to
adhere to. Women were not only invoked as a medium through which to show
progress or enlightenment; they were also called upon to serve when
individuals were needed to fight in war efforts aimed at forcibly removing
colonials from their colonies. Women fought valiantly in almost every
movement during independence struggles in Angola, Guinea-Bissau,
Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania, Guinea, Nigeria, and
South Africa.
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Women used the leverage that they had as soldiers and supporters of
nationalist armies and movements to build gender awareness and discuss
women's rights and needs. Not all countries approached women's issues the
same way, as there were some male African nationalists that were very
concerned with women's issues and made poignant agendas and moves towards
addressing them. Even so, women had to fight for political representation and
voting rights. This was particularly difficult in some locales, especially in
northern Nigeria, where Islamic groups denied women the right to vote until the
Federal Military Government of Nigeria decreed it a right for them in 1976.
Many women supported anti-colonial struggles as a way of removing the
obstacles to their collective progress and traditional autonomy.
In Tanzania, women's participation was important in the growth of the
nationalist movement in the former British Trust Territory of Tanganyika.
Oscar Kambona, Organizing Secretary General of the Tanganyikan African
National Union (TANU), wrote to the Fabian Society, a political think tank
supporting non-violent change of power and the spread of democracy, about the
extent to which women were a part of the Tanganyika African National Union
and its struggle for freedom and independence in 1955. He did this in response
to the questioning of the TANU Central Committee by John Hatch, the
commonwealth officer of the labor party, about the lack of representation for
women in the organization. When TANU enlisted the help of Bibi Titi
Mohamed, a semi-literate singer and dancer of a women's musical group, to
increase the numbers of women in TANU, she became a leader of women.
With her help the membership went from 2,000 in March 1955 to 7,000
between June and September of the same year. This growth helped TANU to
welcome more urban populations and therefore better address their needs as
well as raise the money necessary to pay the salaries of male leaders like
Kambona and Julius Nyerere. By 1961, Mohamed was known throughout the
country as one of the TANU leaders.
Mohamed mobilized women through organizing a campaign of
consciousness-raising. She travelled around speaking to women's groups about
the benefits of joining TANU's women's wing. According to Susan Geiger, in
“Women in Nationalist Struggle: TANU Activists in Dar-es-Salaam” (1987),
some women weighed their experiences under colonialism and the prospects of
joining this new movement: “Under colonialism we were sick at heart. People
used to be beaten like drums and taken away.... We parents would tie our
stomachs crying ‘My poor son!’... With conditions like this we felt that it was
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better to fight for our independence, whether we were killed or not.” Her
testimony portrays the brutality, cruelty, and insidiousness of colonialism. Even
during the nationalist movement, women still experienced daily oppression.
Aidid recorded one woman who described the compounded disenfranchisement
that women suffered due to gender inequality and colonialism:
The women had no say. We had nothing to say, and whatever we might
have wanted to say, we had to follow.... We had no freedom at all. We
were considered useless people. A woman was regarded as a useless
person because she was a woman. That's why we put in more effort,
after learning the saying “all people are equal,” we understood well
what that was supposed to mean and we said, “we shall see if all people
are equal; we must cooperate if this saying is to become true.”
[A woman] was like a donkey. She had to do all the work, to cook,
wash clothes, to cultivate, to pound grain, to look after children. All this
time men were out drinking. We were put inside. Let's say you were
married. You stay inside.... What is going on outside, you don't know.
You don't know what is happening in the world. So we thought that if
we didn't get it [independence] ourselves, our children would get it. But
we would work to get out of slavery.
I remember how we suffered. A person was not respected as a human
being, especially we women. When a woman passed in front of people
she had to cover herself. A woman wasn't considered a human being....
A woman was a woman. Her work was in the kitchen—to cook, to give
birth, to cultivate. There was nothing else.
Geiger asserted that Mohamed spoke to women and men about the
importance of this nationalist movement for them both:
I told you [women] that we want independence. And we can't get
independence if you don't want to join the party. We have given birth to
all these men. Women are the power in this world. We are the ones who
give birth to the world! We shouldn't feel inferior because of our
womanhood! God has planted a seed in the women. It has been in us. It
has grown. Ehee! We have given birth. All the men have fallen down.
Those you see with their coats and caps, they are from here [pointing to
herself]. They didn't come direct from their fathers by way of our backs.
Yalaa! God has given us this power. He didn't do a silly thing....
Without our cooperation we won't achieve our country's freedom.
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She mobilized women by building awareness through self-respect and
recognition of their power. The power and ingenuity of these same women
helped to sustain TANU. They donated from their resources such as pawning
jewelry and selling food. Women were the strength of the party.
The situation in Kenya was similar. Women in the Mau Mau Rebellion were
a force to be reckoned with. In fact, the British responded to their activism by
creating programs that were to entice women away from supporting the Mau
Mau. These programs were to meet two objectives. The first was to weaken the
military strength of the Mau Mau by cutting off its support among the people,
which was garnered by what the British called “the passive wing.” A better
description of them would be non-combatant forces. These non-combatant
forces would deliver important news; smuggle weapons, food, clothing, and
medicine to the guerilla army; and keep travel routes clear for new recruits who
were coming from urban and rural areas to join the Mau Mau. This was no
passive work and the British targeted women with specific programs because
they realized this as well, although they continued to view women as followers
of the rebellion who did not have any real political consciousness.
The second part of the British program was shaped around meeting women's
needs for education, health care, access to clean water, and child care as a
means of enticing them to leave the rebellion. The Community Development
Department, established in 1954, addressed these needs with its staff of
Africans and Europeans. Between 1952 and 1958, 34,147 women were
imprisoned for violation of Emergency Regulations by taking rebel oaths and
aiding forest fighters by providing guns, information, and food. Both the
nationalists and the British colonizers realized women were an essential part of
the war effort. Indeed, the women were seen as far more hardcore than the men.
In Somalia, women joined the nationalist movement in large numbers and
with the same passion as the men. Jamaad Diriye Ali, one of the Somali Youth
League (SYL) members, said “Women were there from the beginning. When it
was said that we would struggle for independence, the women joined. No one
needed to convince them.” The Italians controlled Somalia until February 25,
1941, when their WWII enemies, the British, fought them for ownership of the
area and won. However, under British Military Administration, women were
denied even the limited opportunities that men were allotted. Colonialism was
not only a system of laws, rules, and mandates. It was also a mindset that
superimposed European perceptions of women, as the weaker sex and unfit for
public life, on all functions in society. As a result of such ideology, women
327
were highly oppressed under colonial rule. For this reason, Somali women
joined the SYL. Their group, known as the Sisters, consisted overwhelmingly
of unmarried or divorced women who did not have constraints placed on their
time due to marriage responsibilities and so they could devote time to duties for
the league. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Sisters organized, recruited
new members, promoted Somalinimo or nationalist sentiment, raised funds,
collected membership fees, housed and concealed nationalists from authorities,
and participated in demonstrations. These women suffered for their support of
and activity in the SYL. They were imprisoned, tortured, and killed.
Women had a distinct form of poetry that served the function of
communication, consciousness-raising, and preserving history. These poems, or
buranbur, gave them a space to express their frustrations with their treatment in
society or other spaces. They were usually said within hearing distance of men.
According to Safia Aidid in her article “Haweenku Wa Garab (Women are a
Force)” (2011), Hawa Jibril wrote:
At the time we were fighting for our flag
Sisters, we chanted and we clapped
Till our hands and jaws got sore
Sisters, we sold our jewelry
Depriving ourselves
And donated to our League
Enriching the struggle.
She underscored women's valiant fight for nationhood, which caused them to
go without things they needed at times. In terms of jewelry, these adornments
were not just for decoration; they were a marker of status and constituted
female wealth in a system that did not allow them much independent wealth.
That women sold their jewelry was a testament to the fact that they were
beyond invested in the liberation of their country and self-determination. They
sacrificed a major outlet they had for self-sufficiency for the good of the nation.
328
Women in Nationalism or Women's Nationalism? A
Nigerian Case Study
There is an important distinction to be made between women in nationalism
and women's nationalism. It is true that, in either case, women have been very
active in nationalist organizations and have remained an essential component of
their success in removing colonial regimes from Africa. However, there is an
issue of agency that remains to be resolved so long as women are discussed as
being supporters and not progenitors of nationalist theory and practice. The
phrase “women in nationalism” describes women, whose work cannot be
diminished, that served as supporters of male-led politically elite movements.
The term women's nationalism characterizes women as independent actors in
nationalist movements who developed distinctive agendas and methods of
achieving self-determination that did not simply adapt what men were already
doing. The distinction between the two terms can be seen throughout Nigerian
women's anti-colonial protests.
One of the most incendiary and degrading colonial mandates on women
came in the form of taxation laws. The response to these decrees constituted
some of the earliest anti-colonial activity in Nigeria. There were several mass
uprisings of women against colonialism prior to the well-known Aba Women's
War. The Nwaobiala Movement (dancing women's movement) consisted of
Atta women in the Okigwe Division of Owerri Province who believed that they
had witnessed a divine birth and had been given a message from Chineke
(God). They felt it their duty to pass on this word by travelling north and asking
the chiefs to pass on the message. The women would look for the compound of
the traditional ruler and then sweep his compound (sweeping was symbolic of
purification) and perform the nwaobiala dance. The chief was expected to give
the women a goat and 10 shillings. The women traveled in bands of 50–300.
They took action against those that would not help them spread the message.
At Nnobi the women placed obstructions in the main road, burned the
market, and filled the courthouse with refuse. The district officer warned the
chiefs not to help the women but many of them ignored this admonishment.
The content of the message was a demand to return to pre-colonial social
system, especially the aspects that pertained to women. They rejected the use of
coinage, especially for dowry payments. In some areas, they demanded that
women's prostitution be stopped. They wanted fixed prices for cassava and
329
fowls and also for the roads not to be paved as this increased the flow and speed
of traffic, which caused many deaths. In the 1920s, in Aboh, Oguta, and Warri,
women (and men) raised money to send delegates to Lagos to see Herbert
Macaulay and seek advice to fight against colonial tax mandates. In Aboh, Obi
Oputa reported the people's actions to the colonials and the old women
kidnapped him and forced him to sing (presumably about what he had done) all
over town. In 1928, women of the Izzi clan in Abakaliki Division mobbed the
village leaders who accepted tax discs, which were distributed by the colonials
to show that their town had paid taxes.
The Aba Women's War in southeastern Nigeria is among the most well
known of these protests. On November 29, 1929, a man named Mark Emeruwa,
a teacher from a mission school and a census worker for the colonial-appointed
warrant chief Okugo, walked into the home of Nwanyeruwa, a woman of
Owerri Province in east Nigeria. He demanded to count the women and
livestock that were in the compound so that the household could be taxed.
According to the Commission of Inquiry Record (1930), Nwanyeruwa
protested and the following scene occurred:
He asked me to count my goats, sheep, and people. I turned to look at
him and said: “Are you still counting? Last year my son's wife who was
pregnant died. What am I to count? I have been mourning for the death
of that woman. Was your mother counted?” He held me by my throat.
One's life depends on her throat. With my two hands ... I held him also
by the throat. I raised an alarm, calling a woman.... I asked her to help
me raise an alarm.... In the meantime Emeruwa ran away. Okugo then
ordered that I should be brought before him. Then they came and
dragged me out of my house.... he said “Woman dare you assault my
messenger ...? When the District Officer comes he will take charge of
you.”
Nwanyeruwa publicly expressed her disapproval of colonial taxation of poor
women by going to a meeting of women and speaking of all that happened to
her. This caused women all over the Owerri provinces to revolt, in what
became known as the Aba Women's War, and lead mass demonstrations against
patriarchy, malfeasance, and the colonial administration. In the introduction to
The Women's War of 1929 (2011) Adam Paddock and Toyin Falola stated that:
The Women's War of 1929 has been a subject of extensive historical
debates between British imperial and African scholars. The women's
actions unified Igbo and Ibibio women against colonial rule, terrified
330
colonial officials and European traders, and captured the attention of
future generations of nationalists. Yet perhaps its most central
significance has been how Nigerian and African women used the event
as a rallying cry for increased political and civil rights ... The Women's
War lasted for little more than four weeks; however, the women's
determination and the violent end of their confrontation with the British
military led to far-reaching consequences for resistance to British
colonialism.
The far-reaching consequences that Paddock and Falola referred to were the
ensuing uprisings of Nigerian women in different parts of the country in
response to British rule.
In the southwestern area of Nigeria, where the Yoruba people are most
populous, there were also some notable uprisings; however, unlike the Aba
Women's War, these protests were organized by formal women's organizations.
The Lagos Market Women's Association (LMWA) was already very active
during the mid-1920s, although the exact founding date is unknown. Madame
Alimotu Pelewura, an illiterate Muslim woman, was the leader of the LMWA
who started as a trader of fish in Lagos. In 1910, Eleko Eshugbayi, the leader of
Lagos, recognized her as a very important figure to market women in the area.
In 1920, she was elected Alaga, leader of women, in Ereko, which was the
largest meat market in Lagos and, according to colonial record, the most
efficiently run market in the area as well. The traders at Ereko each paid a fee
into an account set up to provide lawyers and also employ two literate full-time
staff to read and write letters and interpret English for the traders when colonial
officers came to speak with them. In 1932, Pelewura was elected to the Ilu
Committee, a traditional government body in which she represented the voices
of 84 market women's representatives from 16 markets.
The LMWA vehemently opposed the taxation laws that the colonials planned
to enact on women. Pelewura associated the group with one of the largest
political parties of the time, the Nigerian Nationalist Democratic Party and its
leader Herbert Macaulay. However, she wanted the LMWA to be a pressure
group and not an outright politically charged organization. This is a theme that
is recognizable throughout Nigerian women's resistance in the colonial and
post-colonial periods. In 1932, a suspicion spread stating that the British
planned to tax Lagosian women, although the tax was not instituted until 1940.
World War II had a great impact on women's economic standing. During this
time, the British instituted the Income Tax Ordinance, which mandated that
331
women whose annual income was 50 pounds or more pay taxes on that money.
In addition, the British requisitioned foodstuffs and controlled distribution
processes in the markets in an effort to gain resources and money to support
their war effort. After assembling women and shutting down the markets in
December of 1940, Pelewura and the LMWA were able to achieve the raising
of the threshold of taxable income from 50 to 200 pounds, an amount that the
overwhelming majority of market women never achieved. She went on to
organize more militant protests against the interference of the colonials in
women's economic affairs, and many women were arrested and jailed. Upon
being bribed with a monthly allowance of seven pounds and position as leader
of gari sellers by A. P. Pullen (the creator of the food price controls), Pelewura
said that she would not ally with him even if he paid her 100 pounds a month to
“break and starve the country where she was born.” The LMWA went on to
agitate for years and was pivotal to ending the British control of food
processing during the general strike of 1945 wherein women supported striking
workers for 37 days by keeping food prices low and advocating for self-
government.
Nigerian women have had a long history of collective activism in the post-
colonial era. This solidarity among them was shaped by the dual sex system,
which gave women the opportunity to rally around issues that affected them
and the broader community. Since women could not be the heads of lineages
and did not control the highest offices in the society, there was less of a burden
of competition among them. This allowed them to continually build upon
female unity. From the examples above it is clear that Nigerian women's
activism was always communal, whether it was for women collectively in some
instances or, at other times, the broader community (including men and
children) as a whole. It is this philosophy of collective survival that informed
their activism during the nationalist movement.
332
Summary
African nationalism in the twentieth century was in large part a response to
the brutality of colonialism. Even so, it is important to remember that
nationalism existed in Africa in pre-colonial times and thus was not exclusively
tied to European imperialism. Nonetheless, colonialism brought many financial,
social, and political challenges to Africa that caused the people, youth
especially, to speak out about their desires to control their own land and
resources. African soldiers who recently returned from defending European
freedoms in WWI and WWII articulated some of these calls for self-
determination. Political organizations were created to mobilize and build
solidarity among Africans throughout the land in order to achieve their
common goals of peace and freedom. The college-level youth radicalized these
organizations, which led to the beginning of the African independence
movement. The first-wave nationalists were able to achieve great strides in
wresting control of the colonized African continent, although many of them
paid a heavy price for leading these movements.
These male leaders did not suffer alone, as women also endured great
hardship in the struggle for self-determination. Within this narrative of African
nationalism, women's work is often marginalized and unrecognized for its
impact on the development of nationalism in Africa. Their organizations
strengthened the nationalist movements and their participation in battles and
war efforts aided in Africa's victories over colonialism. When women are
considered in the narrative of African nationalism, the importance of gender
awareness and equality, in addition to national independence, in the movement
becomes clear. This was a time for women to voice their concerns and work
towards building awareness of their issues while simultaneously rebuilding
communities and participating in armed resistance for the good of the nation.
The twentieth century African nationalism was a first step to establishing peace,
freedom from colonialism, and gender equality in African for men, women, and
the nation.
333
1. What are the major influences that led to the African nationalist movement?
2. What is the concept of African socialism and how did it shape the
philosophies of popular African nationalists?
3. In what ways did African American intellectuals contribute to the
development of African nationalism?
4. What is dualism and how did this ideology in conjunction with African
women's pre-colonial activism prepare them for leadership in society and
nationalist organizations?
5. Explain the concept of women in nationalism vs. women's nationalism.
334
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10
The Pan-African Movement

Michael Williams
338
Introduction
Pan-Africanism has been one of the most fundamental experiences within the
history of the African world community. Before analyzing the historical
evolution of this movement, it is first necessary to discuss its meaning. There is
enough consensus among scholars and consistency within the movement itself
to argue that Pan-Africanism has been and continues to be the cooperative
movement among peoples of African origin to unite their efforts in the struggle
to liberate Africa and its scattered and suffering people. More specifically, Pan-
Africanism can be understood as the movement among African peoples in
different parts of the world to unite Africa and its people in an effort to liberate
them from oppression and exploitation associated with European hegemony
and the international expansionism of the capitalist system. Furthermore, Pan-
Africanism has always manifested a multi-dimensional character, which has
included the use of political, economic, religious, and cultural approaches in the
struggle to rehabilitate Africa and its people. In short, Pan-Africanism can be
defined as the multifaceted movement for transnational solidarity among
African people with the purpose of liberating and unifying Africa and peoples
of African descent.
However, during most of the twentieth century, because of its entanglement
with Western expansionism, Pan-Africanism has evolved into a variant of the
socialist movement as well. In fact, the leading advocates of Pan-Africanism
during the twentieth century espoused some form of socialism. Hence, the
broadest definition of Pan-Africanism includes both unity (of Africa and
peoples of African descent) and socialism.
Major terms and concepts: Pan-Africanism, diaspora, repatriation, African
World, Berlin Conference, Garveyism, Nkrumaism, imperialism, Eurocentrism,
assimilation, self-determination.
339
The roots of Pan-Africanism lie squarely in Africa. For too long historians,
and even Pan-Africanists themselves, have traced the movement to unite the
continent and its people to the transatlantic slave trade or, sometimes later, to
the Pan-African Conference held in London in July of 1900. This meeting,
organized by Henry Sylvester Williams of Trinidad, is often credited for putting
the word “Pan-Africanism” in the dictionary. Then, nearly two decades later,
Du Bois—who actually attended the 1900 London conference—began
organizing a series of Pan-African Congresses in 1919. The most significant of
these congresses, the fifth, was held in Manchester, England, in 1945 under the
leadership of Padmore and Nkrumah. These formal gatherings, and lest we
forget the brilliant conventions organized in Harlem by Garvey and his UNIA
during the early 1920s, represent a cherished legacy in the struggle to unite
Africa and its scattered and suffering people.
However, this was not the beginning. After all, even Williams was busy
organizing fellow Africans from different parts of the world—to give them an
independent voice in resisting the oppression that had engulfed them—into his
African Association in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. And more than
a century earlier, we have documented evidence of displaced Africans, slaves in
New England (USA), struggling to reunite with the motherland. Indeed, the
efforts of countless numbers of Africans in the diaspora to return home,
discussed below, constitutes an integral part of the Pan-Africanist movement as
well, the tragic and anomalous histories of early statehood in Liberia and Sierra
Leone notwithstanding.
Instead, it seems far more accurate to argue that the movement to unite
Africa and its people, which represents the very epitome of Pan-Africanism,
began somewhere in the long centuries before foreign invaders entered Africa
and changed its course. During this pre-invasion period in Africa, we have a
near steady progression of smaller and weaker ethnic formations being
swallowed up by, and integrated into, larger, stronger, and more developed
ethnic and regional formations as part of the process of creating huge nation-
states. This evolutionary, Pan-African process is, in fact, what the slave traders,
from both the east and the west, and later European imperialism served to
arrest. Two relatively modern and glaring examples of this process took place
amongst the expansionist empires of the Asante in West Africa and the Zulu in
Southern Africa—both of which were brutally dismantled by British
340
imperialism. But they were not the only ones. Once again, this process was
taking place in several regions throughout the continent, so much so that it
would not be difficult to argue, or to at least honestly speculate, the following:
had Africa not suffered from these external invasions, the number of nation-
states in Africa, currently, would hardly reach 10, let alone the 54 artificially
created ones we have today.
Before the invasions, the economic, political, and cultural interactions
between the various regions and peoples of Africa were characterized by
absorption, immersion, assimilation, domination, and integration. This process,
not unlike what took place in much of the world outside of Africa, was shaped
largely by the wide variety and similarity of Africa's topography and
geography, and the normal socio-cultural vicissitudes that occur when people
struggle to adapt, survive, and flourish in the physical environment and social
milieu that they meet. This same process helps to explain why pre-colonial
African cultural patterns, throughout much of the continent, share so much in
common, especially in matters relating to familial life, governance, health care,
agriculture, linguistic structure, artistic expression, and the philosophical
concepts of time, space, and being.
Although this movement in Africa was not conscious of itself, unlike modern
social movements (with their stated programs, agendas, and objectives), this
informal human activity should not cloud our understanding of where Africa
was headed: family, clan, tribe, nation, and continent, in short, Pan-Africanism
—before, that is, European imperialism fossilized Africa at the tribal stage
while balkanizing the entire continent into the factitious, fragmented, warring
mess it is today.
The struggle of Africans who had been (or whose forebears had been)
forcibly removed from their homes to reunite with Africa began in earnest
during the earliest years of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Not only did the
lyrics of songs sung by Africans during slavery, in both North America and the
Caribbean, indicate a strong desire to reunite with Africa, but even attempted
suicides often reflected their longing to return home. This rudimentary
manifestation of Pan-Africanism among enslaved Africans and their
emancipated descendants continued throughout the slavery period and for many
years thereafter, albeit at different levels of momentum and with different
degrees of success.
As would be expected, the interest among Africans in North America in
physically returning to Africa was greater among those who were most
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oppressed and most excluded from American institutions. And since lower-
class Africans in North America experienced a far greater number of injustices
than their middle-class brethren, the desire to physically reunite with Africa
was always greater among the former. This pattern of interest toward Pan-
Africanism paralleled experiences in different parts of the Caribbean as well.
The repatriation experience of Africans in the diaspora, who returned to West
Africa during the nineteenth century and established Sierra Leone and Liberia,
is often included as part of the historical development of Pan-Africanism.
However, this experience was more anomalous than congruent with the
historical evolution of the Pan-African movement. Both states became, in
effect, colonies of the West. And with the use of a class of educated, privileged,
or financially advantaged African descendants from abroad, the indigenous
African population was compelled to provide exploitable labor for European
capitalist investments. Still, the willingness of thousands of Africans in North
America and the Caribbean to return to Africa, as arranged under white
tutelage, is an indication of the sentiments for Pan-African unity among the
scattered descendants of Africa at that time. Moreover, many emigration
movements, organizations, and the leaders that emerged after the founding of
Sierra Leone and Liberia often centered their efforts towards the existence and
symbolic nature of the two states.
Contrary to the white-dominated emigration schemes of groups such as the
American Colonization Society, which transported thousands of Africans in
North America to Liberia, there were many black-controlled efforts to reunite
with Africa. This activity also represented a genuine sentiment and burgeoning
struggle for Pan-African unity. As early as 1773, slaves petitioned the colonial
legislatures of North America to be emancipated in order that they might return
to Africa. Around this same time, Africans from Jamaica who were exiled by
Great Britain to Canada were making identical requests to their European
captors. Also in the Caribbean, men such as Joseph Cinqué in Cuba and
Macandal Daaga in Trinidad led movements in the 1830s to reunite with
Africa. However, throughout most of the nineteenth century, in general, the
efforts by African descendants in the diaspora to reunite with Africa were better
financed and organized than the attempts just cited.
The New Englander Paul Cuffee, is often credited for organizing the first
serious attempt to return Africans in the diaspora back to Africa. Driven almost
as much by missionary zeal as a genuine thirst for freedom, Cuffee, had he not
died unexpectedly in 1817, might have succeeded partially in his objective
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given the enthusiasm he received from fellow blacks interested in his plans.
By 1859, Robert Campbell of Jamaica and Martin Delaney of the US
travelled together in Africa in search for land for resettlement purposes and
succeeded in signing an agreement with a Yoruba King that gave them and
their followers the rights to uncultivated land. The advent of the Civil War in
the US, however, was among other factors that prevented Delaney and
Campbell from realizing their Pan-African goals.
One year before Delaney and Campbell travelled to Africa, Henry Highland
Garnet founded the African Civilization Society, of which he became president.
While this organization, like others before it, had ambitions that reflected the
Eurocentric biases of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—which sought to
“civilize” Africa with Euro-Christianity—it also had aims that were both
militant and Pan-African. In addition to seeking to “strike the deathblow to
American slavery,” one of its major objectives in Africa was “to establish a
grand centre of negro nationality, from which shall flow the streams of
commercial, intellectual, and political power which shall make colored people
respected everywhere.” Despite his occasional vacillation, Garnet succeeded in
keeping alive the notion of reunification with Africa; still, he was unable to
implement his plans effectively, partly because of the hostility he received from
men such as Frederick Douglass in the United States, who adamantly opposed
any efforts that were inconsistent with his aspirations for black assimilation into
the North American mainstream.
During this same period, in the Caribbean and in Latin America, there were
many African descendants who sought and advocated a return to Africa in order
to assist in Africa's development. Although they mostly came as Christian
missionaries, these black missionaries had motives that were often significantly
different from their European counterparts', the latter of whom often worked in
concert with European explorers and colonizers. One of the groups responsible
for organizing this trek of black missionaries from the Caribbean to Africa was
the West Indian Church Association, formed in the 1850s. One of the most
successful products of this effort was Edward Blyden from St. Thomas, in the
Virgin Islands, who began his evolution into Pan-Africanism as a Christian
missionary. After dropping this pursuit, Blyden soon became one of the leading
Pan-African intellectuals in the African world. Throughout the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, he worked laboriously for African descendants in the
diaspora to return home. Due largely to his encouragement, many other African
descendants in the Caribbean sought to return to Africa.
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During the last decade of the nineteenth century, no one better embodied the
notion that oppressed descendants from Africa, especially in the United States,
should return to Africa in order to liberate Africa and Africans everywhere than
Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. He was a leader in the African Methodist
Episcopal Church in the United States and organized many efforts to realize his
Pan-African goals. Turner made frequent trips to Africa and constantly
promoted the idea of African emigration, which nourished the growing
disenchantment among the poorer segments of the African American
population in the United States. Poor black peasants were especially receptive
to Turner's message. Although he never succeeded in transporting any
significant number of people back to Africa, he did make a significant
contribution towards keeping alive certain fundamental Pan-African ideals.
Foremost among these was the notion that the only hope for scattered African
descendants was in building a powerful and independent nation of their own in
Africa.
While there were many other emigration efforts that took place throughout
the African world that have not been covered in this brief summary, a genuine
appreciation of this dimension of the historical evolution of Pan-Africanism
requires an understanding of several key points. First, the black-controlled
efforts never made claims on land outside or inside of Africa that required the
eventual expulsion or political and economic subjugation of indigenous
inhabitants. Second, the majority of followers of these movements belonged to
the poorer segments of the African world population, as the more economically
mobile African descendants observed with disdain. Third, in relative terms, the
number of African descendants who actually returned to Africa was never that
large, although the figures can belie the actual support that emigration schemes
received from the masses of scattered Africans. Fourth, these movements,
although never really anti-capitalist in their ideological orientation, were clearly
manifestations of a resistance to the consolidation of black suffering and white
supremacy under the growing domination of the international capitalist system.
Fifth, the movements were very influential in the historical development of
Pan-Africanism, as they became effectively interwoven with similar
movements and events that occurred in the struggle for Pan-African unity
throughout the twentieth century.
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Pan-African activity geared towards physically reuniting African
descendants abroad with their ancestral homeland did not stop after the turn of
the century. Bishop Turner continued to lead the emigration movement in the
United States during the first decade of the new century. Replacing the void left
by Turner after his death was Chief Alfred Charles Sam of the Gold Coast in
West Africa. Chief Sam generated considerable enthusiasm for his emigration
plans by travelling extensively, forming emigration clubs, and selling shares of
stock in his emigration company, the Akim Trading Company. He received his
greatest support from all-black communities in Oklahoma in 1914. Although
Chief Sam succeeded in returning a small number of followers back to the Gold
Coast, conditions in Africa—the result of British lack of cooperation and
African underdevelopment—led to disenchantment among the emigrants.
The evangelical dimension of the Pan-African struggle to return African
descendants to Africa also continued. These efforts contributed in no small way
to the radicalization of the religious leadership and laity in Africa. As a
consequence, by 1926, white missionaries—the religious embodiment of
European expansionism—grew so disquieted from the growing Africanization
and radicalization of Euro-Christian doctrines, that they organized, in Le Zoute,
Belgium, an international conference of missionaries concerned with Africa.
One of its main purposes was to prevent the return of black missionaries whose
teachings resulted in “serious disturbances” in Africa.
Although the European partitioning and colonization of Africa began nearly
two decades before the beginning of the new century (formalized at the
infamous Berlin Conference of 1884–1885), it was not completed until two
decades into the twentieth century. The Pan-African response to this bold
initiative on the part of the European capitalist powers was significant. Given
the considerable amount of communication and interaction that had already
taken place prior to the twentieth century between Africans on the mainland
and their brethren scattered abroad, it is no wonder that African descendants in
different parts of the world were able to engage themselves effectively in Pan-
African cooperation against the injustices of European hegemony during the
first quarter of the twentieth century. Several conferences, congresses, and
conventions were organized by African descendants, some even before the
twentieth century, to address the common misery and suffering experienced by
Africans under European colonial rule in Africa and African descendants living
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in the Caribbean and within the colonial metropolitan governments in Europe
and the United States. Some of the most important meetings of this type
included the Chicago Congress on Africa of 1895; the Atlanta Congress on
Africa of 1895; the Pan-African Conference of 1900 in London; the First
Universal Race Congress of 1911 in London; the Pan-African Congresses
organized or inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1919, 1921, 1923, and 1927; and
Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association conventions that
met in the United States between 1920 and 1925.
These meetings were organized and attended by outstanding Pan-African
proponents as well as other notable intellectuals, businessmen, bureaucrats, and
royalty within the African world. Although reformist in nature, the resolutions
drafted at these meetings were consistent and demonstrated an anti-imperialist
awareness; a strong desire for greater Pan-African unity and cooperation
between peoples of African descent; an aim of industrializing and advancing
Africa in particular and all African peoples in general; an effort to preserve and
regenerate Africa's most worthy cultural traditions; and a responsibility to
protect the sovereignty of Ethiopia, Liberia, and Haiti against the attacks of
European imperialist domination. It is interesting to note that, due to the
political, economic, and military hegemony of the West, all of these meetings
were held outside of Africa, despite attempts by Du Bois and others to hold
such meetings inside.
In 1914, Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement
Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) in Jamaica. He did
so, according to his own account, in order to address the wretched condition of
the African World at that time—which he observed, firsthand, throughout his
travels. Furthermore, Garvey benefitted from, and was deeply influenced by,
the Pan-African efforts of his nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century
predecessors. The impact that Garvey and the UNIA-ACL had on the African
World in general, and the Pan-African movement in particular, was
monumental. Their influence is still being felt today, in large part because of
the tremendous organizational success that characterized the Garvey
movement. With chapters and divisions of the UNIA-ACL in almost every
corner of the African World, Garveyites could boast a membership of nearly six
million. That Garveyism had a profound impact on the thinking and behavior of
millions of African descendants struggling to be free during the 1920s and
1930s is unquestionable. Even Garvey's detractors have recognized him as one
of the greatest black leaders since Emancipation. With great organizational skill
and oratorical mastery, Garvey took advantage of the frustration and
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disillusionment that peoples of African descent were feeling after the First
World War, in which they had fought and died, supposedly, to make the world
safe for democracy and to ensure the right to self-determination. Having been
denied these basic human rights for so long and experiencing greater levels of
economic penury, African people around the world, especially those in the
United States who had migrated to either southern or northern cities with the
false expectation that life would be better, placed unparalleled faith in the Pan-
Africanism of Garvey and the UNIA-ACL. And while Garvey's program,
despite its limitations, did address, concretely, many of the basic problems that
confronted the African World community, most historians and other
commentators have consistently and mistakenly reduced Garveyism to simply a
“Back to Africa Movement.” However, although emigration plans were
undoubtedly a part of the UNIA-ACL's overall strategy, its primary and
ultimate objective was to liberate and reconstruct Africa into a nation powerful
enough to liberate Africans around the world. On behalf of the UNIA-ACL,
Garvey declared:
We are determined to solve our own problem, by redeeming our
Motherland Africa from the hands of alien exploiters and found there a
Government, a nation of our own, strong enough to lend protection to
the members of our race scattered all over the world, and to compel the
respect of the nations and races of the earth.
In short, the contribution of Garvey and the UNIA-ACL to the struggle for
Pan-Africanism was unrivaled and explains the keen interest the imperialist
powers had in seeing Garvey fail. As a movement staunchly opposed to
European imperialism, the Garvey movement lionized the fundamental ideals
of Pan-Africanism in a way never before done in the long history of the
movement.
In addition to the Garvey movement, at the end of the First World War, there
emerged a number of other activities centered in Western Europe that were
significant expressions of Pan-African struggle. While some of them received
their initial impetus from the Garvey movement, these efforts, in the main, were
also a product of increased disenchantment with colonial rule that resulted from
the hundreds of thousands of black troops who returned from the war effort and
were denied the basic human rights that they had been told they were risking
their lives to defend. These expressions were manifested in the creation of
several organizations dedicated to the realization of Pan-African aims. In
London, Africans from West Africa and the Caribbean formed the Union for
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Students of African descent in 1917. A year later, also in London, the African
Progress Union (APU) was formed, with the famous Egyptian Pan-Africanist,
Duse Muhammed Ali, as one of its members. The APU's declared aim was to
promote the social and economic welfare of African peoples throughout the
world. By the mid-1920s, the influential West African Student's Union
(WASU) was established, including in its membership, despite its name,
Africans from other parts of Africa besides West Africa. Moreover, it was
concerned with other issues besides student-related ones, such as the future
advancement of Africa and African peoples throughout the world.
France, as the colonial power that had expropriated more of Africa's land
than any other European nation, was not devoid of Pan-African activity after
the First World War. In addition to its capital serving as the location of the
1919 Pan-African Congress, the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles was the
target of further Pan-African efforts. Du Bois, along with others, sought to
arrange for Africa to have a voice at this conference. Besides advocating the
establishment of a Charter of Human Rights to guide the colonial powers in
their relations with mainland Africa, they sought to affect the impending
redivision of Africa by the victorious Allied Powers along lines consistent with
their Pan-African goals. That the European powers chose to ignore these
concerns and continue pursuing their imperialist interests in Africa should not
overshadow the significance of this Pan-African attempt. Indeed, subsequent to
this, not only did Du Bois make similar requests to the newly formed League of
Nations, but Marcus Garvey and the UNIA-ACL made identical demands to
this same body.
The French-speaking African community in France created several Pan-
African organizations in Paris. Men such as Marc Kojo Tovalou Houenou of
Dahomey, founder and president of the Ligue Universelle pour la Defense de la
Race Noire, challenged the assimilationist policies of French colonialism
between the years of 1924 to 1936. Interestingly, Houenou was invited to the
1924 UNIA-ACL Convention in New York City. With the production of its
journal, Les Continents, the Ligue Universelle pursued aims that were
fundamentally Pan-African.
Also important during this period was the Comité de la Défense de la Race
Nàegre, led by Lamine Senghor from Senegal, and the Ligue de la Defense de
la Race Negre, led by Tiemoho Garon Koyate from the Sudan. These
organizations, built by French-speaking African descendants from Africa and
the Caribbean, showed great interest in the plight of the African diaspora in the
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United States, and were particularly impressed with the rise of Garveyism.
Moreover, they were more radical than the Ligue Universelle, since they
understood, and vehemently criticized, the collaboration between the rulers of
French colonialism and the French-speaking African middle class.
Consequently, they earned a considerable amount of hostility from French
governmental authorities.
The ideological radicalization of the Pan-African movement continued
during the 1930s. Led by African descendants from the Caribbean located
primarily in Great Britain, numerous Pan-African organizations were
established by committed socialists such as George Padmore and C. L. R.
James—friends from childhood in Trinidad. During the mid-1930s, James
formed the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFA). Shortly
afterwards, Padmore created the International African Service Bureau (IASB),
which was replaced by the Pan-African Federation in 1944. James and
Padmore, along with other West Indians, were joined by other notable figures
from different parts of Africa, such as Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and I. T. A.
Wallace-Johnson of Sierra Leone. Collectively, through the convening of
several meetings and the dissemination of anti-colonial writings, they were
essentially responsible for maintaining the only significant Pan-African
opposition to imperialist plunder throughout the African World. While the
ideological persuasions of this group of Pan-Africanists were diverse, they were
practically all heavily influenced by the writings of Marx and Lenin.
In 1935, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia intensified the growing anti-
imperialist orientation of the Pan-African movement. As chairman of the IAFA,
James's reaction to this crisis reflected the views of many Pan-Africanists
during this period when he wrote:
Africans and people of African descent, especially those who have been
poisoned by British Imperialist education, needed a lesson. They have
got it. Every succeeding day shows exactly the real motives which
move Imperialism in its contact with Africa, shows the incredible
savagery and duplicity of European Imperialism in its quest for markets
and raw materials.
The Italian invasion also served to galvanize the seemingly latent Pan-
African aspirations of African descendants around the world. For instance, in
different countries they organized Ethiopian support groups, raised funds for
weapons and medical supplies, boycotted Italian-produced goods, wrote articles
condemning Italy and admonishing the League of Nations, petitioned European
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colonial powers to deny Italy loans and weapons, held prayer meetings, staged
violent riots against colonial governments, and sought to join the Ethiopian
military effort against the Italian invaders. However, despite the groundswell of
popular support that this movement received from countless black communities
around the world, African peoples were still unorganized. Hence, they lacked
any significant amount of power to save Ethiopia from the clutches of European
imperialism or to achieve any other meaningful Pan-African objective.
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The end of World War II, a decade after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia,
meant the beginning of the end for colonialism proper in Africa. Factors
associated with this development had a profound impact on the Pan-African
movement. Like the Italian invasion, factors related to the end of the Second
World War stimulated the growth and development of Pan-Africanism
significantly, contributing further to its radicalization. One of the most
stimulating factors during this period was the international espousal of the right
of all people to independence and self-determination contained in the Atlantic
Charter, a document created by Great Britain and the United States. No less
significant was the fact that, once again, hundreds of thousands of black troops
from North America and the colonial dependencies in Africa and the Caribbean
had participated in this war that was supposedly fought for the democratic
ideals extolled in the Atlantic Charter. Hence, these circumstances contributed
significantly to the growing unwillingness to tolerate inequality and oppression
throughout the African World. Unlike the period following the First World
War, during the post-World War II period the imperialist powers would not
succeed in denying, at least in principle, the right of African peoples on the
continent, and soon afterwards in the Caribbean, to govern themselves. After
the wreckage of World War II, the weakened European victors were in no
position to reverse the anti-colonial movement that was gaining in strength,
especially in light of the growing socialist threat in parts of Asia and Eastern
Europe. And so it was in the context of these opportunities that the Pan-African
movement, during and after the Second World War, became stronger and more
militant.
This development culminated, to a large extent, in the Fifth Pan-African
Congress of 1945 in Manchester, England. Organized by George Padmore,
Kwame Nkrumah, and other important figures associated with the Pan-African
Federation in Great Britain, this congress symbolized in many ways the
coming-of-age of Pan-Africanism. It differed significantly from other Pan-
African meetings, conventions, and congresses in that: (1) the numerical
participation of native-born Africans was greater; (2) there was a greater ratio
of delegates who represented the organized labor of African workers and
farmers; (3) the socialist worldview clearly dominated in the discussions on the
solution to the problems facing Africa and its people; (4) the more passive and
reformist resolutions passed in previous Pan-African meetings were replaced
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with more radical resolutions (one of which did not rule out the use of force to
achieve Pan-African objectives); and (5) a strategy to liberate Africa, in Africa,
became the primary focus for the new, revolutionary Pan-African agenda.
Specifically, the Manchester Congress condemned the partition of Africa and
the economic exploitation of the continent and the lack of industrial
development, advocated a stronger stand against settler colonialism, demanded
an end to illiteracy and malnutrition, and supported the independence of
Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. It further requested the recognition of the rights
of syndicates and cooperatives by colonial powers and approved the demand
for independence by West African delegates present at the Congress and
embraced the UN Charter. That many of the participants at this historic
Congress made quite notable contributions to the defeat of colonialism proper
in Africa a decade or so later only indicates the importance of the Manchester
meeting.
One such contribution was the pivotal role Kwame Nkrumah played in the
struggle to wrest political control from the British in Ghana (in what was then
called the Gold Coast). From 1947 until Ghanaian independence in 1957,
Nkrumah led his countrymen in a Positive Action campaign of mass strikes,
boycotts, and demonstrations. The strategy used in Ghana by Nkrumah was
heavily influenced by the Manchester Congress. The British were left with no
other choice but to relinquish political power. The implications of this event for
the rest of Africa and the entire African World were astounding. With
practically every part of the African World experiencing, in some form or
another, political subjugation at the hands of powerful white nations, Ghana's
independence in 1957 symbolized, at least in the hearts and minds of countless
African descendants around the world, the beginning of a new world order.
Understanding the significance of this emerging sentiment, Nkrumah made his
famous declaration that the independence of Ghana was meaningless without
the total liberation of Africa.
It was at this juncture in the historical development of Pan-Africanism that
Nkrumah became the leading embodiment of the movement. As such, he
wasted no time in making Ghana the major citadel of the Pan-African
movement. In 1958, Nkrumah, assisted by George Padmore (his African
Affairs advisor), convened two conferences in Ghana that became historical
milestones in the struggle for Pan-Africanism. The first was a conference of
independent African states, held in April of 1958. The second was the All-
African People's Conference in December of the same year. While there were
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many important resolutions passed at these conferences, their real significance
lay in the fact that they were held on African soil. These conferences inspired
the convening of other similar conferences later held in Tunis in 1960, in Cairo
in 1961, and again, in Ghana, in subsequent years. Even the formation of the
Organization of African Unity in 1963 can be traced to the efforts of Nkrumah
to achieve his Pan-African goals for Africa. In short, until his death in 1972
(even after the 1966 coup d'état that toppled his government), Nkrumah's
theoretical and practical efforts to realize the goals of Pan-Africanism had a
tremendous impact on the world in general and the African World in particular.
The OAU is one example of this, for, although it has never measured up to
the radical demands and expectations of Nkrumah and other revolutionary Pan-
Africanists, it has provided some assistance to the Pan-African movement in
Africa over the past three decades. The OAU's mild successes have included its
contribution to conflict management, the struggle against colonial and settler
colonial rule, and economic development and cooperation. However, because
of its lack of genuine authority and control over its member states, and the
ideological disunity of Africa's leadership, its resolutions and decisions have
not been always adhered to and implemented.
In fact, the OAU, whose charter was signed by thirty African states on May
25, 1963, in Addis Ababa, was a compromise between those states which
advocated outright unification of the continent, comprising Morocco, Mali,
Ghana, Guinea, Algeria, and Libya (with delegates from Ceylon), known as the
Casablanca Group (so named after their conference in Morocco, in January
1961) and those who favored a gradual approach to unification and regional
associations or groupings. The latter have been commonly known as the
Monrovia Group (which had met in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, in May
1961). Included in the group were Somalia, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone,
Congo-Brazzaville, Tunisia, and Ethiopia, joined by the Brazzaville Group,
made up of several of the former French colonies, such as Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon,
Chad, Senegal, Madagascar, and Cameroon.
In reality, the moderates, led by Felix Houphouet-Boigny (of Côte d'Ivoire)
and Lepold Senghor (of Senegal), prevailed over Kwame Nkrumah (of Ghana),
Modibo Keita (of Mali), and Sekou Toure (of Guinea). Thus, the objectives of
the OAU were to:
Promote unity and solidarity of the African States; coordinate and
intensify their cooperation and efforts to achieve a better life for the
peoples of Africa; defend their sovereignty, their territorial integrity,
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and independence; eradicate all forms of colonialism from Africa; and
promote international co-operation having due regard to the Charter of
the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The OAU Charter made Addis-Ababa the headquarters for the Secretariat-
General and provided for a yearly meeting of the heads of state and a biannual
gathering of the foreign ministers to prepare for the meeting of the heads of
state.
The civil war in Chad, for which the organization dispatched a peace-keeping
force in 1981, the Eritrean war, the protracted fighting in former Spanish
(Western) Sahara, the Somali-Ethiopian war of 1977–1978, and the dispute
following the assumption of power by the People's Movement for the
Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in 1975 demonstrated clearly the powerlessness
of the OAU and the ideological divisions, as well as the personal ambitions, of
the African heads of state—all underscored by the lack of action by this august
body during the civil war in Liberia (which saw the intervention, not by a OAU
force but by that of the Economic Council of West African States [ECOWAS],
entirely dominated by Nigeria). Hence, the OAU consistently failed to solve
many of the major problems confronting the African continent, despite the fact
that, by 1990, its membership had risen to fifty-one countries. (The OAU's
problems were compounded by a low turnout at the meetings of the heads of
state, personal and ideological differences, external pressures particularly from
France and the United States, and inconsistency in the payment of membership
dues.) No matter its successes or failures, the OAU never evolved into any kind
of unifying vehicle or the real aim of the founders of Pan-Africanism.
The 1966 coup in Ghana was a major setback to the Pan-African movement.
However, the emergence of the Black Power movement that same year in the
United States, and later in other parts of the African diaspora, represented the
continuation and spread of the Pan-African idea. Personified best by Caribbean-
born Kwame Toure (formerly Stokely Carmichael), this radical movement was
strongly influenced by the nationalist uprisings in Africa and the work of Pan-
Africanists such as Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Frantz Fanon, and Malcolm X
(whose courageous efforts, especially during 1964, played a tremendous role in
shaping the consciousness of young activists towards a Pan-African
orientation). After exhausting all reformist means possible (during the Civil
Rights movement) to end the economic exploitation and political subjugation
experienced by African descendants in the United States, a large sector of
activists began seeing their plight as indistinguishable from that of other
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African peoples in the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. Hence, as early as 1968,
Black Power activists in the United States, as they were encouraged by
Nkrumah and Malcolm, began advocating that all peoples of African descent
were African, and that Pan-Africanism was the solution to the problems facing
the entire African World. By the 1970s, the Black Power movement was clearly
manifested in the ideological and organizational development of young black
radicals in the Caribbean, Western Europe, and South Africa. As in the United
States, it soon transformed itself into a variant of Pan-Africanism.
In the United States, the generative effect of the Black Power movement
continued unabated, with several Pan-African formations established during the
early 1970s. The African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) was one
important formation during this time. However, the most significant of these
was the founding of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) in
1972, shortly after Nkrumah's death. The A-APRP was created by African
descendants from different parts of the world who were committed to practicing
the Pan-African ideas of Nkrumah, i.e., Nkrumaism (since Nkrumah himself
had called for the formation of an A-APRP in 1968). Its original founders
included, among others, Black Power advocates such as Kwame Toure and
Willie Ricks, and Nkrumah loyalists such as Lamin Jangha of the Gambia.
During the 1980s, several events, some of them tragic, had a significant
impact on the Pan-African movement. Before the tragedies began, the birth of
the Pan-African Revolutionary Socialist Party (PRSP), which split from the
All-African People's Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) in 1983, represented the
further development of Pan-Africanism in the creation of another Nkrumaist
organization. Its newspaper, The Nkrumaist, was one of the few Pan-African
publications, since Garvey's The Negro World, fifty years ago, that attempted to
speak to and for the entire African World. However, Sékou Touré's sudden
death in 1984 and the subsequent right-wing coup and regimes in Guinea, have
meant a significant loss to the movement because of the late president's
dedication to the Pan-African cause. Other similar and decisive events that have
damaged the Pan-African movement have been the assassinations of presidents
Maurice Bishop of Grenada (and the dismantling of the Grenadian Revolution)
in 1983 and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso in 1987. As committed Pan-
Africanists, their deaths deprived the Pan-African movement of potential and
badly needed land bases on which the Pan-African movement could have been
better coordinated and consolidated. In the 1990s, other centers and sources of
Pan-African activity emerged in different parts of the African World. The
heightened level of struggle to end apartheid in South Africa was, perhaps, one
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of the most fertile locations for the development of Pan-Africanism. However,
the eventual dominance of the African National Congress (ANC), with its
moderately reformist policies over the past two decades, has done very little to
fire the enthusiasm for Pan-African activity in that part of the continent.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, new Pan-African developments
began to take shape in the face of the continued inefficiency of the OAU.
Spearheaded by the late Libyan leader, Mummar Al Qaddafi, and influenced by
the growing strength of the European Union, a call for the creation of an
African Union (AU) was made at the 36th meeting of the OAU in Lome, Togo,
in July of 2000. By July 2002, in Durban, South Africa, the AU was formally
launched. Designed to respond to the challenges faced by globalization and to
enhance the pace of African development, African heads of state and
government formalized their effort to speed up the process of African
continental integration. Some of the main features of the AU include the
establishment of an African Central Bank, an African Monetary Union, an
African Court of Justice, and a Pan-African Parliament.
However, while the AU seems to be an improvement from the erstwhile
OAU, problems remain. There has been, for instance, very little effort to
educate the masses of African farmers, workers, and youth about the imperative
of African unity. In short, in the villages, towns, cities, and campuses where the
concept of African unity must take root, nothing is being done to foster its
development amongst the millions of people who must bring it into fruition.
Furthermore, certain internal flaws in the constitutional structure of the African
Union serve to detract from the realization of genuine African unity. For
example, Article 3b of the AU constitution lists as one of its objectives “to
defend the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of its member
states.” Hence, like the OAU before it, the AU is in some ways serving to reify
the balkanization of Africa.
Furthermore, despite the constant challenges of the AU to contribute to
Africa's security, stability, and development, it continues to remain ineffective
in the face of ever-increasing problems around the continent. Recent conflicts
in Côte d'Ivoire and Libya (and in other parts of the continent in the not-too-
distant past) reinforce this fact—with foreign troops, including American,
French, British, and NATO, still being relied upon to settle intra-African
disputes. In fact, even a small army in the tiny Republic of São Tomé e Principe
can—as the 2003 coup makers there proved—defy the existence of the AU as
have other coup makers since then. So far, the modalities for an African
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Union's intervention force are very weak, including the AU's “Standby Force.”
Ambiguity also remains vis-à-vis a common front against international
terrorism (usually defined in terms of violent, anti-West Islamic
fundamentalism); some member states, such as Kenya, favor the US
administration's preemptive war to topple governments that are unilaterally
declared the “axis of evil” and the assassination or “elimination” of their
leaders. Others maintain a defiant stance but are unable to voice it openly,
making their statements and policy on terrorism and the appropriate approach
to deal with it utterly ineffective. Therefore, the new AU fervor
notwithstanding, the jury is still out. In short, Pan-African advocates should not
be surprised if the new organ, formed by the same company of African elites
who have failed Africa and Africans for centuries, turns out to be just the old
OAU in disguise.
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Summary
In sum, Pan-Africanism has been a multifaceted movement that has
undergone many changes and has experienced much development. However, it
has not yet met its ultimate objective of unifying and liberating Africa and its
people along the path of socialist reconstruction. There are a number of reasons
that account for this fact, not least of which includes the manipulations and
intransigence of imperialist domination, especially in its neo-colonial phase of
development. Another significant and related factor is the failure of Pan-
African organizations to build the type of unity among themselves that is
necessary to achieve the objectives of Pan-Africanism. In other words, the Pan-
African movement has always been poorly coordinated, with no umbrella
organization having ever been created to consolidate it transnationally. This
partly explains why so many Pan-African organizations have been created, only
soon to be disbanded after a few years of existence. Thus, while the motive for
Pan-African resistance seems strong and consistent, especially with the added
impetus from the reparations movement that has been consistently gaining
ground, there still exists no institutionalized mechanism within the African
World to ensure its continued growth and development.
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1. Discuss the meaning of Pan-Africanism.
2. What were some of the characteristics of the early emigration efforts of Pan-
Africanists prior to the twentieth century?
3. Who were some of the major figures in the Pan-African movement, and what
were some of the contributions they made?
4. In what way has the Pan-African movement been influenced by major world
events?
5. Discuss some of the more recent developments in the Pan-African
movement that have occurred since the beginning of the twenty-first
century.
359
References
Hakim Adi and Marka Sherwood (eds.). Pan-African History: Political
Figures from Africa and the Diaspora Since 1787. New York& UK:
Routledge, 2003.
Vincent Bakpetu Thompson. Africa and Unity: The Evolution of Pan-
Africanism. London: Longmans, 1969.
Yassin El-Ayouty (ed.). The Organization of African Unity after Thirty
Years. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994.
Olisanwuche Esedebe. Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776–
1963. Washington: Howard University Press, 1982.
Marcus Garvey. Editorial in Blackman, Dec. 30, 1939.
Imanuel Geiss. The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in
America, Europe and Africa. New York, NY: Africana, 1972.
C. L. R. James and Robin D. G. Kelley. A History of Pan-African Revolt.
Oakland, CA: PM Independent Publishers Group, 2012.
Tony Martin. The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and
Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1982.
John Mukum Mbaku and Suresh Chandra Saxena (eds.). Africa at the
Crossroads: Between Regionalism and Globalization. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2004.
Timothy Murithi. The African Union: Pan-Africanism, Peacebuilding and
Development. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.
Kwame Nkrumah. Africa Must Unite. New York: International, 1963.
W. Ofuatey-Kodjoe (ed.). Pan-Africanism: New Directions in Strategy. New
York: University Press, 1987.
George Padmore. Pan-Africanism or Communism. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1971.
D. Zizwe Poe. Kwame Nkrumah's Contribution to Pan-Africanism: An
Afrocentric Analysis. University of Sankore Press, 2010.
Wole Soynka and Samir Amin. Reimagining Pan-Africanism: Distinguished
Mulimu Nyerere Lecture Series, 2019–2013.
Christel N. Temple. Literary Pan-Africanism: History, Contexts, and
Criticism. Carolina Academic Press: Durham, NC, 2005.
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Robert G. Weisbord. Ebony Kinship: Africa, Africans, and the Afro-
American. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973.
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Part III
The Present and the Future of the

Black World
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11
The Contemporary African World

Luis B. Serapiao
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Introduction
Chapter 9 outlined Africa's struggle towards political independence. As a
logical follow-up, this chapter focuses on the major problems of post-colonial
Africa and identifies some of the solutions proposed by government officials as
well as scholars. It is obvious that some of Africa's problems have their origins
in the natural process of colonies becoming nations. Scholars have identified
them as problems of nation-building. Similarly, Africa has had to establish and
maintain relationships with the outside world, which most scholars have
characterized as relationships of dependency. Thus, the assessment of the
performance of African governments in the post-colonial era has produced two
major types of theoretical framework. One is based on general theories of
nation-building or what some call theories on development. The second type,
which attempts to explain the nature of Africa's relationship with the outside
world, includes the entire approach to the understanding of dependency. It is
not the object of this chapter to discuss the theories in detail, but only to such
an extent as to provide to students simple tools of analysis of the achievements
and failures of post-colonial Africa.
Major terms and concepts: National integration, new economic order,
revolution of rising expectations, hegemony, apartheid, dependency, non-
alignment, homeland, ethnicity, irredentism, secession, colonialism, macro-
nation, micro-nation, per capita GNP, Group of 77, UNCTAD, trade deficit,
ANC, neo-colonialism, LDC's, Cold War, ECOWAS, SADCC (now SADC),
International Monetary Fund, World Bank, marginalization, structural
adjustment program, African Union, NEPAD.
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Africa's decolonization process has been marked by three main periods or
waves of independence: the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s. Prior to 1950,
only Liberia, which became independent in 1847, Egypt in 1922, and Ethiopia,
for centuries an independent state (except for the brief interlude between 1935
and 1941 under Italy), were independent states. During the 1950s, three
colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa, Sudan (1956), Guinea (1958), and Ghana
(1957), achieved independence, joining the already independent states of Libya
(1951), Morocco (1956), and Tunisia (1956). The majority of the African
colonies (some 31 of them) joined the rank of independent nations during the
1960s. During the 1970s, the five Lusophone former colonies, Mozambique,
Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome e Principe, achieved their
independence in 1974–1975, followed by Comoros (1975), Seychelles (1975),
and Djibouti (1977). Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Eritrea became the last to join
the community of independent African states in 1980, 1990, and 1993,
respectively.
The achievement of independence in Africa elicited many hopes within the
leadership and among the African masses. For some leaders, such as Kwame
Nkrumah, first president of Ghana, political independence became a key for the
solution of all problems related to socio-economic development. “Seek ye first
the political kingdom,” said Nkrumah, and all Africa's problems will be
resolved. Many other political leaders at the time of independence shared the
same philosophy. For the common people, political independence meant the
opening of doors to those opportunities which were closed to them during the
colonial era. In summary, the euphoria of independence created what
Africanists have called a “revolution of rising expectations.” Strategies to
achieve these expectations became part of the main process of nation-building.
Forging national unity has been the major political problem of every
independent African state. The process of achieving this objective falls under
the strategy commonly known by scholars as national integration. Colonial
boundaries and ethnicity (identification with one's ethnic origin) have been
singled out as two major sources of the problem. Most ethnic groups in Africa
form what may be considered mini-nations or groups of people with a common
culture and language and shared historical experience, usually living in or
originating from a specific geographical area. As a result, they exhibit close
affinity and bond, and find it difficult to transfer allegiance to a state or the
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“macro-nation,” which was artificially created by outsiders with no regard for
cultural boundaries. Scholars and politicians alike in Africa have argued that
the success of national integration depends on the subordination of these ethnic
micro-nations to the macro-nation. The resistance of the micro-nations has
created two main problems, commonly known as irredentism and secession.
Irredentism usually emerges out of a situation where one ethnic group was
split by colonial boundaries, resulting in two or three sometimes antagonistic
countries sharing parts of that group, as it happened with the Makonde in
Tanzania and Mozambique, the Dan in Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire, and the
Somali in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. It has happened, at times, that an
ethnic group, enjoying the support of one of the macro-nations, has sought the
unification of its members. When the process of seeking this unity is violent, it
is often called irredentism, and can cause border conflicts and even wars. A
typical example of this kind of conflict occurred between Somalia and its
neighbors, Ethiopia and Kenya. During the 1970s and 1980s, the government of
Somalia, in pursuit of the unification of the Somali, demanded the political and
territorial unification of its people. Obviously, its neighbors would not go along
with the demand. This led to a war between Somalia and Ethiopia during 1977–
1978 and violent clashes in 1986 (Somalia having lost that contest), while
Kenya and Somalia maintained extremely tense relations throughout that period
(Somalia and Ethiopia signed a treaty ending hostilities in April 1988; Kenya
and Somalia had signed one in November 1984). At times, ethnic allegiance has
resulted in internal political turmoil and even civil war, as has been the case, at
least in part, in Liberia, Sudan, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Burundi.
Another aspect of micro-national or ethnic loyalty over nationwide or macro-
national loyalty has taken the form of secessionist movements. Some ethnic
groups have attempted to form their own government and become independent
from the present macro-nation, as defined by the colonial boundaries. Typical
examples of these attempts are the cases of Katanga (the present Shaba
Province) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the former Belgian
Congo, Congo-Leopoldville, or Zaire, in 1968, and of the Ibo of Biafra, (1967–
1970). In DRC, a civil war broke out in 1960, partly as a result of secessionist
tendencies, which ended temporarily with the assumption of power by Joseph
Mobutu in 1965. (Political rivalries and foreign interests, particularly Belgian
mineral companies, heightened and compounded the national problem.) During
1977 and 1978, the late Mobutu had to request the assistance of Belgian,
French, and Moroccan troops to quell the resurgence of the rebellion, while the
Ibo of Eastern Nigeria fought unsuccessfully against the federal government of
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General Iakubu Gowan from 1967 to 1970. None of these ethnic groups,
however, ever succeeded in breaking away from the nation-states. In 1991, the
Eritrean ethnic group declared independence from the rest of Ethiopia. This
event became historic, not only because it violated the principle of the
Organization of African Unity (OAU) on national integration, but also because
it challenged the whole notion that the principle of self-determination was not
applicable to post-colonial Africa.
It was mentioned earlier that independence was perceived by many as a
panacea to all problems, as an “engine” which would totally eradicate poverty
on the continent. Unfortunately, the expectations did not materialize. In fact,
according to Roel Van der Veen, Africa failed to break free of poverty after
gaining independence. Today, over 60 percent of Africans are poor. The
concept of poverty, here, includes three main approaches. The first, which is
influenced mainly by economists, analyzes Africa from a financial perspective.
It emphasizes two dollars per person a day as a criterion for the definition of
poverty. Anyone living below two dollars a day will fall in the category of a
poor person. In 2004, when former US President Jimmy Carter was observer of
the presidential election campaign in Mozambique, he considered Mozambique
one of the poorest countries on earth because most people were living below
one dollar a day.
There are other scholars who argue that the dollar yardstick cannot be used in
all social environments. For example, what one can buy with one dollar in a
country could differ in another. Thus, this writer suggests the inclusion of other
factors in the definition of poverty, namely, social, economic, political, and
psychological considerations. The argument is that we must pay attention to
inadequate control over productive facilities, lack of political influence, and
poor access to such services as health care, education, water, and sanitation.
Additionally, the concept ought to include the lack of information and
awareness of the public services that are available to individuals. These two last
criteria are necessary to prevent the marginalization or exclusion that has been
linked to poverty. The model emphasizes the human poverty approach which is
much closer to reality than the two-dollars-a-day approach. Amartya Sen, the
Indian Nobel Laureate, advocates the choice theory. For him, poverty is a lack
of opportunity, a lack of choice. Indeed, he equates poverty with a lack of
choice. In the case of Africa, the logic will dictate that the entire continent is
not free. It has no choice.
How many people, then, have been losing their freedom, or how many
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people in Africa are living without a choice? The World Bank, in the late
1990s, provided statistics which showed that the population of Africa would
rise by over 300 million in 2000 and by 345 million by 2015 (in 2018, the
population actually reached 1.3 billion). Obviously, the preceding statistics
cause concern to many responsible African leaders. The problem demands a
solution. Scholars on poverty in Africa agree that there is no single cause that
can explain these grim statistics. Also, there are those who insist that the
shortage of skilled people contributes greatly to the impoverishment of the
continent. The painful situation, however, is that Africa, rather than maintaining
its own skilled people, is losing them to the Western world, to the USA, in
particular. For example, according to UN statistics, from 1985 to 1990, Africa
lost 60,000 professionals, among them doctors, lecturers, and engineers. Since,
then, Africa has been losing 20,000 professionals annually. For every 1,000
professionals sent abroad for training, 35 do not return home. As mentioned
earlier, most of them go to the USA. The International Organization for
Migration statistics show that there are more African scientists and engineers
working in the USA than in all of Africa. A few years ago, Zambia had 1,600
doctors; now only 400 work there. More than 21,000 Nigerians are working in
the USA. In Zimbabwe, two-thirds of the professionals have left the country
during the past five years. Unfortunately, the exodus of this skilled workforce is
causing a heavy financial burden on the African governments. The continent
spends an estimated $4 billion annually for the recruitment of some 100,000
expatriates.
The international economic system has also had a negative impact on African
development. Mention must be made of Africa's staggering foreign debt, the
terms of which have almost bankrupted some African states. The acquisition of
capital for the colonies and, later, for independent Africa, depended partly on
the exportation of Africa's minerals, oil, and cash crops to the Western
industrialized world. Yet, not the African governments but European and North
American governments and multinational corporations have continued to
determine and control the prices of these commodities on the one hand—prices
which, in most cases, have not been favorable to the Africans. On the other
hand, both during and after the colonial period, Africans have been compelled
to pay for finished manufactured goods from overseas and finance their
economic development using so-called hard currencies (the dollar, the franc,
the British pound, the Deutsche Mark, and the Euro). This economic
relationship with the industrialized world, particularly in the trading sector, has
been and continues to be detrimental to Africa and underscores its state of
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dependency. It is an unfair and exploitative relationship. Unfortunately, in a
true sense, the colonial legacy, adverse natural geo-physical factors, and the
international economic system can be seen as problems that are beyond the
immediate control of the African governments.
The root of Africa's socio-economic stagnation, however, is the direct
consequence of policy formulation by the African leaders, who must
themselves bear the responsibility for much of what is going wrong in Africa
today. In most cases, the wrong policies have been the outcome of well-
intentioned development strategies, which can be characterized as poor
planning. Yet, in the case of some African leaders, policies or ideologies of
personal aggrandizement, misguided ambitions, and corruption have ruined any
chances of development which might make a difference in the lives of the
people. Following independence, Africans adopted different ideologies as
guiding principles to deal with their problems and sometimes spelled out their
priorities. Instead of food sufficiency, for example, their most common priority
was law and order as a prerequisite of any development. In other words,
political order took precedence over economic policies, instead of having both
as partners of concomitant approaches.
In the name of political order and unity, for example, many African leaders
advocated a single-party state or military rule. Paul E. Sigmund, in The
Ideologies of Developing Nations (1963), noted that the late Julius Nyerere of
Tanzania, one of the most respected leaders on the continent, used to say that
foreign nations would take advantage of a country with an opposition and a
multi-party system, confuse people, and create chaos. “Who does not know,” he
asked, “any stooge who will dance to their political tune?” For Nyerere and
other leaders at the time (such as Joseph Mobutu), opposition political parties
were not concerned with the welfare of the nation. African leaders have also
argued that political maturity did not exist yet in Africa. In fact, Nyerere once
said that “mature opposition is rare in a newly independent state. Usually, the
irresponsible individuals I have mentioned have neither sincerity, conviction,
nor any policy, at all, save that of self-aggrandizement.” For many leaders in
Africa, therefore, a one-party state was the only viable strategy for
development, because, they claimed, countries, with the exception of Senegal,
The Gambia, and Botswana, adopted a one-party system immediately after
independence. Unfortunately, the system did not result in socio-economic
improvement in the lives of the people. Instead, it gave rise to a new wave of
opportunism in African politics: the military, which, during the mid-sixties and
seventies, toppled civilian governments left and right. In 1966, for example, six
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army coups took place in Africa and, by April 1985, 24 countries were under
military regimes, while only 21 still maintained civilian rule. Interestingly
enough, the main arguments of law and order and nation-building advocated by
the military were not different from those put forth by civilian single-party
advocates. In order to maintain themselves in power, both military and civilian
leaders have often squandered the resources of the nation by apportioning a
greater part of the national budget to procure arms and satisfy the military who
are a threat that can topple most governments as they please.
Most recent analysts, particularly Samuel Decalo, insist that personal power
and self-aggrandizement are the major reasons for the intervention of the
military in African politics. Indeed, reality has shown that coups d'état have not
been aimed at radically changing Africa's basic socio-economic and political
structures. Most leaders of both regimes have continued to support a capitalist
path toward development, even though a few have advocated, as early as the
sixties, socialism as an alternative to capitalism. The promoters of this new
approach included the late Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, the late Sékou Touré of
Guinea, the late Modibo Keita of Mali, the late Gama Abdel Nasser of Egypt,
the late Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, and the late Julius Nyerere of Tanzania,
as mentioned earlier. In general, their brand of socialism was still influenced by
the ideology of anti-colonialism; it was nationalist socialism. In 1975,
particularly with the independence of the five Lusophone former colonies, a
new type of socialism, namely, Afro-Marxism, emerged, with Mozambique,
Angola, and Ethiopia becoming its leading practitioners. As an ideology, Afro-
Marxism represented a radical departure from a pure one-party state system,
such as the one adopted in Côte d'Ivoire several years ago, and from a military
regime, such as the one prevalent in the DRC (formerly Zaire), because these
countries still pursued a capitalist model of development. At the same time,
however, Afro-Marxists distanced themselves from any type of nationalist
socialism, as they insisted that the other brands of socialism in Africa lacked
the ingredient of “scientific socialism.”
Afro-Marxism upholds the classic theory of class struggle, emphasizing that
African governments are ruled by a bourgeoisie elite class which maintains
strong ties with the bourgeois classes in Western capitalist states. Domestically,
while it calls for the elimination of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of private
ownership of the means of production, it advocates democratic centralism and
the establishment of state-directed economic institutions. As for relations with
the capitalist world, Afro-Marxism favors restricting linkages (trade
relationships), avoids active participation in world economic organizations
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(such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund), and it used to
call for strong ties with the Soviet Union and its ideological allies, such as
China and Cuba. Unfortunately, none of these ideologies succeeded in solving
the socio-economic malaise in Africa. In effect, wherever these ideologies
existed, they shared a common “value” of an authoritarian system. They
emphasized government control and monopoly over the socio-political and
economic activities of the country and remained anti-democratic by nature.
Violations of human rights, including the suppression of dissenting opinion,
incarceration and death sentences without trial, and restriction of freedom of
movement within and outside the country, became part of the dominant style in
African politics. Yet, even though the dreams of those who fought for the true
independence of Africa remained illusory at times, they are still alive today, as
the latest changes on the continent have demonstrated.
This section would be incomplete without taking note of the phenomenon of
political change which began in the 1980s and 1990s, which is now sweeping
through the African continent. The Afro-Marxist states of Mozambique,
Angola, and Ethiopia, for example, have caved in to domestic and international
pressure. They have renounced their “Afro-Marxism-Leninism” (Ethiopia,
having been the most radical of the states, in this camp) in exchange for a
multi-party system and privatization. Military dictatorships (such as the one in
former Zaire), as well as civilian dictatorships of one-party rule (as evidenced
some time ago in Côte d'Ivoire, Zambia, Cape Verde, Sao Tome e Principe,
Kenya, Cameroon, and Gabon) are either being dismantled or have already
been dismantled, as is the case in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Togo. Yet, not
all African countries were victims of authoritarian rule. Those that enjoyed a
modicum of democracy, such as Botswana and The Gambia, are the leading
examples in Africa, while, more recently, Namibia and Mauritius have been
hailed as a model other countries on the continent should emulate. One should
likewise point out that independence brought some social gains to the continent.
The most frequently cited example falls in the areas of education, health, water,
feeder roads, and energy. However, an assessment of the balance sheet on the
development of post-colonial Africa indicates that the losses have long
outweighed the gains, as the following statistics show.
In education, African leaders today have been eager to promote a peace-
building education. The obvious reason for the new emphasis is that, during the
last past three decades, almost half of Africa has been devastated by armed
conflict. The wars affected universal access to primary education, whose
enrolment fell by 30 to 40 percent. African governments reacted by calling a
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conference on conflict and education in Africa, which took place in Mombasa,
Kenya, on June 2–4, 2004. The conference paid most of its attention to three
main points: prevention of conflict, education in emergency situations, and
post-conflict reconstruction of the educational system. The main argument here
is that, in this era of so many conflicts, the scope of education should include
not only cognitive issues but also ought to capitalize on policies and models
that promote values, attitudes, and socially appropriate behavior. Accordingly,
in their classrooms, teachers should introduce syllabi whose content reflects the
values noted above. Thus, they urge, one of the strongest components of the
syllabi should emphasize inter-group skills, since conflict analysis identifies
inter-group confrontation as the main characteristic of Africa's contemporary
unrest.
In addition to conflicts, another “curse” plaguing the continent is the
HIV/AIDS crisis. In some countries, education, especially health education, has
been contributing greatly to limiting an escalation of the crisis. For instance,
South Africa, in conjunction with the Southern African Development
Community (SADC), launched The Higher Education HIV\AIDS Programme,
in November 2001. The program involves the partnership of three educational
organizations: The South African Vice-Chancellors Association (SAUVCA),
the Committee of Technikon Principals (CTP), and the National Department of
Education (DoE). It is designed to provide support to all public universities,
technikons, and SADC partners. One should note that, on February 21, 2005,
the university vice-chancellors from SADC launched the Southern African
Regional University Association (SARUA). SARUA members coordinate
efforts to combat HIV/AIDS in the Southern African region, where the
population has quintupled since the 1960s, while the population of African
capital cities has increased 20 times. During the 1960s, most African capitals
had approximately 50,000 inhabitants. But, by year 2000, virtually half of those
capitals reached a population of over half a million. Three major factors
contributed to the mass migration to the urban centers, particularly the capital
cities. Natural disasters, such as drought, the first factor, pushed the population
to the cities where food was still available. The second factor has been internal
conflict, civil wars, and all kinds of armed violence, which has forced people to
seek security in the urban areas. Capitals that experienced heavy population
growth due to civil war include Maputo (Mozambique), Luanda (Angola),
Khartoum (Sudan), and Freetown (Sierra Leone). Job opportunities and
freedom attracted in particular young people. Johannesburg (South Africa),
Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Lagos (Nigeria), and Kinshasa (DRC) fall in this
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category.
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It was noted earlier that the international environment has played a relevant
role in the performance of independent Africa. When Africa became
independent, it entered a world divided politically and militarily into two
camps: the Eastern bloc, led by the Soviet Union, and the Western bloc, led by
the United States. Economically, however, the world was dominated and
controlled by the Western industrialized countries, with the United States as the
leading giant. Thus, Africa had to find political and economic strategies which
would enable her to survive in this “alien” and ever-competing international
environment. While in the field of politics the major obstacle was the Cold
War, trade became the stumbling block in the economic arena. At this juncture,
two aspects of Africa's international relations are worth exploring briefly.
Politically, the two antagonistic blocs of East and West were competing for
politico-military hegemony in world affairs. Both were eager to secure spheres
of influence, establish military bases in allied countries, and control votes in
international organizations. Toward this end, they were prepared to deliver
political and economic favors to the newly independent African states:
economic aid, educational assistance, and support for the total decolonization of
Africa, the Portuguese colonies and Namibia included. Because it had no
colonies in Africa and no colonialist allies, the Soviet Union championed
decolonization openly. Accordingly, at the United Nations, it supported every
resolution against colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism. In fact, it went so far
as to provide military assistance to anti-colonial movements in the Portuguese
colonies, Namibia, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe. Although, on one hand, Africans
welcomed this special military assistance from the Soviet Union and its allies,
on the other hand, they refused to allow foreign military bases on their soil. The
United States and other Western countries, aware of the financial difficulties
the newly independent African states were facing, pledged to provide economic
and technical aid. Africans, of course, welcomed this help, but their policy on
foreign military bases on their soils adopted vis-à-vis the Soviet Union did not
change in their relations with the West.
The policy of refusal to establish a military alliance with either bloc became
known as non-alignment. Although non-alignment turned out to be the guiding
principle of African states in world affairs, it did not exclude special
relationships. For example, the former French colonies maintained a tight
relationship, which included military pacts, with France after they achieved
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their independence. Also, as Africa became deeply divided ideologically during
the 1970s, the socialist-oriented countries, with Afro-Marxists at the center,
developed stronger socio-economic and even military ties with the Soviet bloc,
while the pro-Western states cultivated similar relations with the United States
and its allies, making non-alignment an empty word. From a guiding principle,
non-alignment became a movement (a movement may shift emphasis and goal
in midstream), capitalizing instead on the solidarity of Afro-Asian countries
with the objective of extracting concessions from the West in some specific
socio-economic and political areas. Starting with the Banding Conference in
1955, by mid-1960 the non-aligned bandwagon was joined by the Latin
American countries and referred to as the “Group of 77.” During the first phase
of the new movement (1950–1970), which covers the period leading to the
Lusaka Conference, most of the demands from non-aligned countries were
political, particularly in regard to the decolonization process, which it hastened
through its bloc voting in the United Nations.
During its second phase, the non-alignment movement shifted its emphasis
from political to economic matters. During the 1970s, African leaders and
experts realized clearly that the continent's colonial role of providing raw
materials to the West had not changed drastically. As was the case during the
colonial period, Angola, Congo, Nigeria, and Gabon, for example, continued to
export oil to the West; Liberia, Mauritania, Niger, Sierra Leone, Togo, Zaire,
and Zambia still shipped minerals, such as copper and iron (at a loss), to the
West; Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Malawi exported such agricultural
products as cocoa, coffee, tea, and tobacco, while Mozambique, Lesotho,
Swaziland, and Botswana continued to provide their human resources
(manpower) to the mining industry in South Africa. Yet, Africans neither
dictated nor controlled the prices of the resources provided to the world market.
The prices of their commodities often fluctuated according to the perceived
needs and demands of the West. A typical example of this fluctuation was that
of Ghana's cocoa in the 1980s and Zambia's copper in the 1970s. This situation
has not been altered today.
Another problematic aspect of Africa's persistent colonial (or neo-colonial)
position in the world economy is the need to import manufactured goods.
Colonial powers were not interested in building manufacturing industries in the
colonies or improving the local African economy in order to benefit the
Africans—indeed, one of the major objectives of imperialism was the
accelerated exploitation of raw materials to feed European industries. Since
African industrial development lagged behind, the continent had little choice
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after independence but to export its raw materials to the West and buy back the
processed materials in the form of tractors, clothing, cars, tires, coffee,
cigarettes, etc. The price Africans pay for these finished goods includes the
wages of the Western industrial workers who process the raw materials and the
profits of manufacturing companies. If African countries had their own
manufacturing industries, the resources spent on imported manufactured goods
would be made available to African workers and nourishing African
economies, rather than draining them for the benefit of the former colonial
powers and the industrialized world.
In an effort to solve the dilemma of Africa's powerlessness, leaders and
scholars have advocated three major approaches. The first, which is prevalent
among “core conservative” leaders and scholars, advocates keeping the status
quo in trade relationships, with minor changes. Countries perceived to lean
toward such an approach included Malawi, Kenya, Côte d'Ivoire, Lesotho, and
perhaps Cameroon. The second approach has been articulated by “radical”
leaders and scholars such as Samir Amin and A. R. M. Babu, and it emphasizes
what has come to be called “de-linkage.” According to the proponents of this
theory, Africans and no one else ought to determine the nature of their trading
relationships, which should result in either Africa not having any relationships
at all or in reducing them to a minimum. Countries advocating this approach
included the Afro-Marxist states of Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. This
explains why, for example, for approximately 10 years, Mozambique did not
open its doors to international cooperation and refused to join the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The third theoretical approach has been advanced by the majority of the
African states and scholars, and it calls for the reevaluation of this historically
distorted trade system. It seeks dialogue between Africa (and all developing
countries, including those in Latin America) and the Western industrialized
nations. The dialogue has essentially taken place within the United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). African demands have
been articulated by the Solidarity Group or the Group of 77, comprising every
developing country, sometimes called the less developed countries (LDCs). The
argument of the developing countries is that the terms of trade between them,
particularly Africa and the industrialized countries, have been one-sided, to the
detriment of those who provide the raw materials.
Three major factors contributed to the unfavorable trade balance between
Africa and the Western world. The first was the result of the Israeli-Palestinian
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war in which Arabs have so far lost miserably. The OPEC, which was
dominated by Arab nations, decided to use oil as a weapon against the West
because of the help it provided to Israel. It raised the oil prices, and African
countries were the most affected by it. They now had to pay not only for the
high price of oil, but for other needed products as well. Thus, the terms of
difference in the trade of primary commodities, namely, agricultural products
and minerals, shifted in favor of the Western world. For instance, in mid-1980s,
Zambia's copper price fell by almost half from the price it used to sell for in the
world market. Also, Western countries began to reduce their imports, including
those from Africa. As a result, African exports began to decline, while the
import level continued to be relatively high. The second major factor that
affected unfavorably the balance between Africa and the West was the collapse
of the Eastern Bloc. The Western world was now eager to invest and to trade
with the former communist countries. As a result, such primary products as
uranium from Niger and manganese from South Africa lost their former
communist buyers. Consequently, the price of Niger's uranium and South
Africa's manganese dropped. These incidents prove the loss of strategic
importance of Africa to the West.
Finally, the appearance of the former communist countries in the
international market at the end of the Cold War reinforced globalization, which
became linked with the economic marginalization of Africa. Currently, the
open market in the former communist bloc attracts multinational corporations,
which are quick to invest and initiate trade wherever favorable economic
opportunities present themselves. Unfortunately, Africa will not compete
successfully with these newcomers. As for the debt, fortunately, Africa will
have some degree of relief. Following the creation of the African Union (July
2002) and the Agreement on the New Economic Partnership for African
Development (NEPAD), NEPAD member states—Nigeria, South Africa,
Senegal, and Algeria—met leaders of the G-8 nations to seek support for
NEPAD. Obviously, the meeting had positive results. In 2004, the then British
Prime Minister Tony Blair brought together 17 experts and concerned citizens
to form a Commission for Africa. The objective of the commission was to
define the challenges facing Africa and to provide clear recommendations on
how to support the changes needed to reduce poverty. Tony Blair lobbied the
G-8 members to gain support for this program aimed at the eradication of
poverty in Africa. Surprisingly, on June 11, 2005, finance ministers of the G-8
announced a 100 percent debt cancellation of 18 developing countries, of which
twelve are African.
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The most recent economic conditions have reflected these disparities and
problems for Africa, but forecasts are that things seem to be improving on the
continent, despite the ups and downs due to the whims of the international
market. The global fall of oil prices since 2010 has certainly hurt all oil-
exporting countries in Africa, which number about 20 so far, retarding the GDP
and shrinking economic Sub-Saharan growth from 7.1 percent to 4 percent
annually, while, in the Arab North, the rate has fallen from 1.7 percent to 0.6,
partly because of the adverse impact of the Arab Spring revolution. Overall,
during the same period, Africa's exports fell from 2.6 percent to 0.4 percent,
according to the World Economic Forum (Leke and Barton, 2016). Between
2000 and 2010, overall annual GDP growth in Africa was 5.4 percent,
representing $78 billion; subsequently, growth fell to 3.3 percent, about $69
billion, between 2010 and 2015. The service sector, however, generated 48
percent of Africa's GDP growth, representing an increase of 44 percent over the
“preceding decade” (see Leke, 2016), while manufacturing grew by 4.3 percent,
even though tapped resources contributed a negative 4 percent between 2010
and 2014, compared to a positive 112 percent during the 10-year period prior to
2010. Overall, industry represented 23 percent of the continent's growth, which
rose by 17 percent during the 10 years prior to 2010.
Another good sign was apparent in the sector of direct investment, which
reached $73 billion in 2014, up from $14 billion in 2004. During the last 10
years, the 700 largest African companies have earned more than $500 million
altogether, contributing $1.4 trillion in revenues for the continent. As the World
Economic Forum stresses, these large companies, along with the transportation
and health care sectors, achieved “double-digit revenue growth in local
currency terms between 2008 and 2014.” In contrast, however, the average
budget deficit for the continent was as high as 6.9 percent of the GDP in 2015
from its low deficit of only of 3.3 percent five years earlier. In addition, the
surplus account, which registered only 4.7 percent of the GDP, tumbled down
to 6.7 percent in 2015. This was certainly a downturn from the booming
economy Africa experienced during the pre-2010 period, which had resulted in
25 countries being among the top 30 economies whose growth had accelerated
relatively fast (Leke & Barton, 2016).
Of course, oil prices had a great upward impact while its price remained
high, but diversification was another factor that accounted for the positive
outcome prior to and after 2010. Africa's economic future seems promising so
far, but this will depend, says the World Economic Forum, on the right
management of many factors, such as continued diversification in commodities
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and industrial output, better urban planning, establishment of robust pensions,
expansion of access to banking and financial services, improvement of
educational and health systems, integration of the local and regional
manufacturing and trade sectors, accelerated improvement of the infrastructure,
the “deepening” of capital markets, and ending, once and for all, the rampant
corruption and graft practiced by African governments and its employees.
The urban situation, however, might be difficult to handle in the years to
come when the population in the urban areas is expected to rise exponentially,
reaching the 187 million mark, which will be three times as high as that in the
rural areas. This problem will be compounded by the fact that, by 2034, the
labor force will grow to 1.1 billion young people ready for the job market,
given that Africa is the continent with the largest and fastest growing and
youngest population globally. Indeed, says the World Economic Forum,
between 2000 and 2015, the job market had stabilized at a rate of 3.8 percent a
year, that is, 1 percent faster than the growth of the labor force, even though
this was still just a portion of Africa's labor needs. The brightest side for the
future of Africa is the incredible growth of the use of technology, even though
the base line for the continent remains very low compared to that of the other
continents. Technology has, in fact, been an important relief to the limited,
poor, and crumbling communication system and the financial and transportation
infrastructure. The growing change in financial transaction technology, for
example, has made East Africa, especially Kenya, “the global leader in mobile
payments” (Dahir, 2017). Experts predict that the smart phone, in particular,
will reach the 5 percent mark in 2020, compared to the 2 percent fraction of
2010, which contributed only 3.5 percent to GDP.
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In 1963, African nations banded together and formed the Organization of
African Unity. Developed to assure Africans a voice in both political and
economic matters on the continent, the OAU struggled for decades to establish
its position of authority on the continent. While in theory it was supposed to
function much like an African version of the United Nations, assisting to
stabilize and develop the continent, the OAU often faltered in its scope, and
failed to provide any lasting impact. Recognizing, therefore, the ineffectiveness
of the OAU, and desiring to see an African body which would serve the
continent's varied needs and goals, African leaders opted to disband the
Organization of African Union and replace it with the African Union (AU). In
July 2002, the successor African Union was established as a new incarnation of
the OAU. Like the OAU, the African Union is a unifying body of African
nations dedicated to the advancement of African nations and peoples and
seeking new alternatives to combat Africa's many social, economic, and
political problems. Unlike the OAU, however, the AU has an expanded role
and a more detailed focus, one that is being put forth by its various operating
organs and legislative bodies. Currently, the African Union is comprised of 53
member states. Each member plays a valuable role in representing its country's
interests to the entire body while also helping to formulate policy and plans for
a united Africa.
The structure of the African Union is similar in many ways to other
multinational organizations, including the United Nations and the European
Union. The assembly is the chief organ of the AU, comprised of heads of state
and government from member nations. The Executive Council is made up of
the ministers of foreign affairs from member states, while the Permanent
Representative Committee is made up of various representative and
ambassadorial positions. There is a variety of specialized technical committees
charged with addressing various aspects of Africa's development—political,
social, environmental, and economic. The Pan-African Parliament, a new body
of the African Union, but one that has not yet been completely organized, seeks
to bring unity to the continent through the fostering of Pan-African ideals and
encouraging member states to act together to tap into Africa's potential. Other
bodies within the AU include the Economic Social and Cultural Council
(ECOSOCC), the Court of Justice, and African financial institutions including
the African Bank, the African Monetary Bank, and the African Investment
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Bank.
The goals of the African Union are multi-faceted and varied, but encompass
broad efforts at development, and ambitious plans for monitoring civil and
regional unrest, social and cultural marginalization, education, protection of the
environment, and a host of other issues. More specifically, the AU has
endeavored to work towards a peaceful, unified Africa through the enforcement
of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, encouraging all African
peoples to respect the rights and self-determination of others, fostering
economic growth and building Africa's capacity to engage in the global
marketplace, and promoting better health and education initiatives throughout
the continent. A Peace and Security Council of the AU is garnering
considerable attention as of late, largely due to the ever-present conflicts on the
continent and the need for a Pan-African consensus on how to handle the
conflicts as a continent, as was recently underscored by the events in Central
African Republic (CAR), Zimbabwe, South Africa, and South Sudan. At a
meeting in Maputo, Mozambique, bolstered by support from the United Nations
Development Program (UNDP), the AU established the Peace and Security
Council, which functions somewhat like the UN Security Council. The Peace
and Security Council is made up of 15 member states, but, unlike the Security
Council of the UN, none has veto power. The council is supported by a
“Council of the Wise,” made up of five respected African dignitaries appointed
for three-year terms. In an attempt to dissuade countries from conflict and
encourage a stabilizing presence on the continent, the Peace and Security
Council will have the power to dispatch troops from stand-by African armies
and assist in peace-building efforts. In addition to the UN, certain Scandinavian
organizations have been involved in capacity training and funding of the
Council.
Additionally, a recent outgrowth of the African Union is working to develop
the economic interests of Africans and ensure the continent a successful future
outside the Western sphere of influence. This new approach to de-marginalize
the continent and work towards a better future for Africa has been substantiated
by the New Economic Partnership for African Development. The partnership is
a recent agreement of the African Union aimed at addressing the problems
plaguing the African continent with regard to deficits in economic development
and integration into the world economy. Beginning with the broad concept of
economic development, the initiative seeks to raise awareness of how the lack
of development (and by extension bad development practices) affects a myriad
of issues, including the position of women and children on the continent,
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political progress, health, and technology and environmental concerns.
The New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) is a
program of the African Union, in essence a vehicle for development with the
full support of the AU. Thabo Mbeki, once president of South Africa, was
widely considered to be the driving force behind the NEPAD program and
worked to empower NEPAD to replace former initiatives for development such
as the failed Lagos Plan of Action of 1980. The major impetus for NEPAD is
an understanding by African leaders that, in order to develop, African nations
must be able to take care of themselves, to develop outside of Western
involvement, and to begin to provide goods and services by Africans for
Africans. Recognizing that financial assistance provided by the West often
carries controlling stipulations, African leaders are concerned that Africans
extricate themselves from the Western political and economic “trap,” through
working to develop their own resources and dedicating themselves to building
capacity for development. However, while NEPAD seeks to free African
nations from the control of the developed nations, it recognizes that, currently,
theirs do not possess the financial resources necessary to accomplish their
goals. NEPAD, therefore, seeks to procure Western financial contribution to
Africa's development through the encouragement of equitable industry
investments, partnerships, and ventures that will contribute to the advancement
of the African economy.
NEPAD's program attempts to set up a formula, as well, for African
development. Its core documents analyze the many development roadblocks
that African countries face, most notably, lack of technological know-how due
to widespread education and training deficiencies, political instability and
governmental corruption, the marginalization of women and certain ethnic
groups, and environmental problems that threaten the eco-stability of Africa's
future. It appears that the major problem with NEPAD is similar to the major
problem of the African Union. It has not been around long enough to determine
whether or not it is actually a viable mechanism for development. The NEPAD
structure is organized, coherent, competent, and widely supported, but it is not
necessarily implementable if African nations do not seriously approach it in
terms of its practical applicability. Concerns as to the future of NEPAD seem to
be that it will fall by the wayside much as other development programs have, as
currently African nations lack the united front necessary to make the initiative
effective. Still, the African Union hopes that African nations and leaders will be
drawn to NEPAD's goals and possibilities and, in the hopes of bettering their
own countries, they will be willing to band together with others to make it
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work.
In short, while there are, as one writer put it, “laudable goals” associated with
NEPAD, it remains to be seen if NEPAD will, in fact, be effective in its
approach. However, the documents produced by the NEPAD commission
describing its goals and intents include very perceptive and seemingly accurate
assessments of Africa's current development dilemmas, from social and
political, to economic and environmental. If it receives the necessary support
from the international community and is given concerted attention from African
nations, it might have the potential for successful and sustainable
developmental growth on the continent.
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Southern Africa
The independence of Africa, which was technically completed with the
successful decolonization of Namibia in 1990 and the recognition of Eritrea's
independence in 1993, left behind some 34 million blacks under the apartheid
system in the Republic of South Africa. The Nationalist Party seized power in
1948 and had since then controlled the lives of its non-white population. Those
known as Afrikaners, (from Afrikaans, the language they speak) or as Boers
(descendants of Dutch farmers and sailors who arrived in the Cape beginning in
1652), compose 60 percent of the white population; the white minority (which
includes another minority of British descendants, about 40 percent of the white
population) constitutes a tiny proportion of the 54,841,552 (Central Intelligence
Agency, 2018) people living in the country, as the following percentages show:
80 percent black; 8.4 percent white; 8.8 percent colored (of mixed white and
other ancestry); and 2.5 percent Indian/Asian. In their effort to secure political
and economic power as well as “cultural identity,” the Boers had adopted a
policy of racial separation, euphemistically known as “separate development,”
targeting four areas: legal classification of the population according to race;
designation of specific areas for a determined race; interdiction on interracial
marriages; and prohibition of sexual relations between whites and the other
races. The laws governing these aspects of civic life were enshrined,
respectively, in the so-called Population Registration Act, the Group Areas Act,
the Prohibition of Marriages Act, and the Immorality Act.
Given that the laws were inhumane, their implementation made South Africa
a police state. Individuals 16 years of age or older had to carry a pass card
featuring a photo, race, residence, and employment of the carrier. The cards
likewise controlled the movement of blacks as “domestic visas” required for
them to enter and exit the white man's towns. In the past, signs separating the
people according to race were displayed on mobile and immobile facilities.
This was also an attempt to enforce the Immorality Act. Understandably,
African resistance to apartheid was inevitable, and resulted in the creation, over
many decades, of several resistance groups: the African National Congress
(ANC), the Pan-African Congress (PAC), the Black Consciousness Movement,
the Azania People's Organization (AZAPO), the United Democratic Front
(UDF), and the predominately Zulu Inkhata Movement. At present, the ANC is
the most active political organization whose leader, the late Nelson Mandela,
South Africa's first black president, released in 1990 from state prison where he
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was detained since 1964, was internationally known. Other major figures have
included the late Steve Biko, leader of the Student Consciousness Movement of
the mid-1970s, who was murdered in jail by the police in 1977; the Anglican
Archbishop Desmond Tutu; and Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, for a long time the
leader of the separatist Inkhata Movement.
During the early stages of the struggle, most of the organizations listed
above, including the ANC, limited their strategies for majority rule to non-
violent action. This changed, however, following the 1960 Sharpville Massacre,
when 69 peaceful apartheid demonstrators were shot and killed by the police.
Since then, internal as well as external pressure on the apartheid system
increased, with the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations
playing a major role in isolating and punishing South Africa. The United
Nations General Assembly, for example, adopted several resolutions over the
years, some of which included the following provisions to be enforced by the
member states: The breaking off of diplomatic relations with the apartheid
regime; prohibition of ships from entering South African ports; a boycott of all
South African goods and refrain from exporting goods, including arms and
ammunition to South Africa; and refusal of landing and passage facilities to all
aircraft belonging to that regime and all companies registered under its laws.
As a counter-offensive, South Africa adopted several strategies, some of
which are discussed here. One was an attempt to win the sympathy of the West
by capitalizing on its anti-communist stand as the bastion of Western
civilization in Africa and its strategic position. This approach had some
success, as South Africa is an important source of several strategic minerals
such as chromium, manganese, cobalt, and platinum. The strategic minerals are,
of course, not limited to South Africa, as the following figures demonstrate, but
the apartheid regime controlled the important quantities of them, as Buts and
Thomas remind us. Until a few years ago, South Africa still had 91 percent of
world chromium reserves (7 percent owned by Zimbabwe and 2 percent by
others); 41 percent of the manganese (37 percent owned by the former USSR,
11 percent by Gabon, and 11 percent by others); and 79 percent of the platinum
(19 percent owned by the former USSR, 1 percent by Canada, and 1 percent by
others). Cobalt reserves are more widespread, with 40 percent being owned by
DRC, 15 percent by Zambia, 8 percent by Caledonia, 7 percent by Cuba, and 32
percent by others, including South Africa. The country is, indeed, strategically
located, with the Cape of Good Hope serving as a conduit of oil imports to
Europe and as a trade link between the Middle East (and the Far East) and
Western Europe.
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South Africa's second approach to maintaining its racist policy internally was
structured within its regional foreign policy. Militarily, South Africa remains
the regional superpower, while economically it is the region's giant, two assets
the government has used successfully in the past. Thus, economically, most
Southern African countries, most of which are landlocked, depend greatly on
South Africa's good will for access to the sea. Furthermore, mining industries in
South Africa still employ thousands of workers from the neighboring states,
particularly Lesotho, Mozambique, Malawi, and Swaziland. Mozambique, for
example, as a result of colonial agreements, used to export to South Africa at
least 150,000 workers a year prior to 1975. (The official number was reduced to
fewer than 45,000 a year during the past decade.)
In the past, many of the neighboring states have been humiliated by South
Africa through military strikes undertaken to prevent them from harboring
nationalists, such as guerrillas from the ANC, especially during the 1970s and
1980s (at one point, three strikes against Mozambique; three against
Zimbabwe; two against Zambia; several against Angola, with an actual battle at
Cuito Cuanavale, and three against Botswana). In some instances,
destabilization of the regimes took place in the form of military and financial
assistance to resistance movements, as was the case with the Mozambique
Resistance Movement (RENAMO) in Mozambique and the Uniao Nacional
para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA) in Angola.
In order to counteract South Africa's economic and military stranglehold, the
Southern African states (Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland,
Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe), formed the Southern African
Development Coordinating Conference in 1979 (SADCC), now called the
Southern African Development Community (SADC), which attempts to
coordinate regional projects (roads, harbors, railways), agricultural activities,
technical training, and energy. However, because the Community has depended
heavily on Western donors such as the United States, Britain, and France,
SADC has met with mixed results. Of course, the effort was greeted with scorn
and anger by the South African government, which retaliated, whenever
possible, against the member states, as it did against Mozambique, by reducing
the amount of cargo allowed to pass through Maputo harbor and the number of
workers recruited for the South African mines.
Internally, South Africa propped up its strategy with the establishment of the
Bantustans, or separate homelands, for each of the nine major ethnic groups in
the country, promising them independence. Bophuthatswana, Transkei, Ciskei,
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and Venda were supposed to be independent states. However, the world
community refused to recognize these homelands as such. In addition to the
homelands, the regime introduced a plan of cosmetic constitutional changes
providing seats for coloreds and Indians within the white parliament. The main
objective of the “liberalization” policy was, of course, to gain international
credibility, while at the same time keeping intact the system of apartheid.
Ultimately, however, South Africa's strategies failed to stop the tide of internal
and international opposition to its regime, particularly during the late 1980s,
when the Western powers finally decided to impose trade and financial
sanctions, the impact of which seems to have extracted the hoped-for
concessions from the government: The repeal of all apartheid laws and
negotiations toward majority rule, both initiated after Nelson Mandela's release
from prison in 1990.
On May 10, 1994, South Africa adopted a new constitution that has granted
majority rule to blacks. Since then, one may say that South Africa has become
the most powerful black state on earth. It inherited the best economic
infrastructure and the strongest military of any post-colonial country in Africa.
Nelson Mandela, the first president of post-Apartheid South Africa (1994–
1999), succeeded by Thebo Mbeki (1999–2008)—a less charismatic although
articulate leader—became the most powerful black leader in the world. Indeed,
South Africa was then in a position of selling military armament outside the
continent. In early 1997, a reporter insinuated that the government of the United
States of America was unhappy because South Africa was now selling
armament to Israel's nemesis, Syria. The current economic and military strength
of South Africa does not necessarily guarantee future socio-political stability.
Like all African states, South Africa still faces the problem of nation-building,
transparency in governance, and equitable redistribution of mineral and
agricultural resources, such as land.
Unfortunately, governance in Africa, including in Southern Africa, continues
to be a thorny problem, even though the popular clamor for democracy and the
repulsion for the defense of autocrats have skyrocketed over the years. In fact,
according to the accepted Democracy Index of December 3, 2015, of the 44
African countries classified as “fairly” democratic in the period 2006–2014,
only 8 meet the criteria, while 22 were still considered autocratic or
authoritarian. Yet, since then, little progress has occurred in Sub-Saharan
Africa. Even with the demise of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Jacob Zuma
in South Africa in November 2017 and February 2018, respectively, the future
of the two countries may not mean substantive and meaningful political
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changes. In addition, the carnage and political turmoil that have prevailed over
the past decades in the resource-rich Democratic Republic of Congo, Central
African Republic, Burundi, Mozambique, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, have
not subsided.
More disheartening is the fact that the hard-fought independence of South
Sudan, which achieved its independence from Sudan on July 9, 2011, has
resulted only in chaos: A continuing civil war that broke out immediately
thereafter, which gave no signs of abating in early 2018. The deadly terrorist
incursions carried out by Boko Haram in Central Africa, including Nigeria,
Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, al-Shabab in Somalia and Kenya, and the
followers of ISIS and the Ansa al Dine in Mali and Mauritania, have begun to
re-strengthen the hands of the autocrats in the region, who, with the support of
the United States and France, have used the crisis to clamp down people's
demand for democratic reforms and transparent governance. Toward this
purpose, in cooperation with the regional central African states, the US
established the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2008, which carries out
consistent military operations and strikes in the region, as many as 674 in 2014
alone.
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The Chinese Puzzle: Neo-Colonialism or Assistance to
“Comrades in Arms”?
Since the 1990s, China has become a buzzword in Africa as well as among
the superpowers that suspect that its intention is to be the undeniable third
superpower given the large size of its population, its technological advances, its
hegemonic economic expansion, and its ever-growing aggressiveness and
military power. The chapter could not end without addressing, even if just
briefly, the debate that is raging in Africa today as to the impact of China's
presence in Africa. With the end of the Cold War during the early 1990s and
the US almost complete neglect of Africa except in the health sector, China has
become the greatest player on the continent, with the most-felt impact in the
economic sphere of infrastructure building, particularly transportation in the
form of roads and railroads. Indeed, China's involvement goes beyond
infrastructure building and provision of technology, both of which have made it
the most important outside player in the economic growth of the continent
during the last 15 years, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2000, China
has, in fact, been the most relevant economic partner for Africa, contributing 20
percent to the continent's trade, and continuing to directly involve itself in
Africa's trade, investment stock, investment growth, infrastructure financing,
and aid. As a result, in exports and imports, China has surpassed the activities
of all other countries involved in Africa, including Africa's former colonial
masters. In trade, China's current involvement represents $188 billion a year for
Africa, compared to $59 billion with India, $57 billion with France, $53 billion
with the US, and $46 billion with Germany. In Africa's infrastructure, China
contributes $21 billion a year, France $3 billion, Japan $2 billion, Germany $1
billion, and India $1 billion.
Furthermore, a recent study has shown that there are at least 10,000 Chinese
firms in Africa, though most privately owned and, therefore, not sponsored by
the Chinese government. One-third of these 10,000 firms are in involved in
manufacturing, one-fourth in services, and one-fifth in trade and construction
real estate. To show the extent of its financial muscle, China's activities in
Africa account for 12 percent of the industrial production, which currently
amounts to some $500 billion a year, and holds 50 percent of Africa's
international contracted construction market, generating altogether some
300,000 jobs a year. Economists predict that, by 2025, Chinese firms' revenue
389
in Africa will reach $250 billion, up from $180 billion in 2017. In terms of how
solid the partnership with China is on the continent, particularly in Sub-Saharan
Africa, the World Economic Forum considers its partnership as strongest
(“robust”) with Ethiopia and South Africa, followed by a “solid partnership”
with Kenya (where the much-touted rail line linking Nairobi and Mombasa was
inaugurated in late 2017), Nigeria, and Tanzania, then by an “unbalanced
partnership” with Angola and Zambia, and a “nascent partnership” with Côte
d'Ivoire. Coincidentally, China has been one of the few countries in the world
that have sustained the economy of Zimbabwe, despite the boycott of the rogue
country by the international community on account of the brutal actions of its
leader Robert Mugabe, who was finally forced out of office by the army in
November 2017.
Thoughtful Africans and nationalists, mindful of the enduring impact of
slavery and colonialism, which were introduced by slick but violent Europeans
holding a gun in one hand and the cross in the other, intuitively wonder why
China seems to be so interested in assisting Africans in coming out of their
economic misery by forging strong relations particularly with oil-producing
countries. Apparently, most African leaders are eager to embrace the Chinese
as non-aligned economic partners, who are said to better understand the
conditions of Africa, as they too suffered some time under Western greed, and
see Africans as “comrades in arms” against Western imperialism, capitalism,
and the exploitation of man by man. No matter what the answers to the question
might be, it is clear that altruism is not China's reason: pure national interest is
the driving force of the Chinese aggressive involvement in Africa, a natural
instinct of every nation. However, if, indeed, the partnership ends up in a neo-
colonial state for Africa, no one must bear the blame but our own African
leaders, who have shown but little appetite and courage to stand their ground in
matters that involve money and wealth.
It is also clear that the Chinese are repeating what the West has been doing
for the last 50 years in Africa: Assist Africa using only their resources, their
own workforce, and their own technology, while hardly creating new and
durable manufacturing units related to the future needs of Africa. Virtually 97
percent of the locals the Chinese companies and state projects employ perform
only menial tasks. Given these conditions, one would be right to say that the
Chinese came to Africa with the Chinese yuan or kuai in one hand and the
Smartphone with the picture of the devil in the other. Unless transfer of
technology and know-how are a part of the equation, the Chinese would not
have helped Africa in its search for economic and scientific sustainability. The
390
racist and derogatory attitude some Chinese have shown towards Africans both
at work and in the media recently should be a clear warning to African leaders
that to survive, one must learn the lessons of the past and be willing to abandon
any partnership that ultimately benefits only one side. What good would it do,
if after a couple of years only, the infrastructure built by a partner begins to
crumble?
391
Summary
The independence of Africa gave rise to high expectations among the
African masses. Indeed, to most, independence meant the end of taxation (with
or without representation) and the elimination of poverty and illiteracy. The
task of nation-building, however, was formidable, and African leaders struggled
to adopt the appropriate strategies. Unfortunately, the policies they adopted
most often reminded Africans of the colonial oppression from which they had
just freed themselves. The one-party state became the symbol of the new
authoritarian rule and a reminder of the past as well. Leaders also saw ethnic
loyalties as the major obstacle to nationhood and development. Because
members of ethnic groups shared common historical experiences and values
and perceived themselves to be “nations,” the efforts of the leaders were
directed, above all, toward thwarting ethnic loyalty or what was then called
“tribalism.” In part, the leaders were right, as some countries' ethnic loyalties
have led to irredentism at times and at others to secession and civil war.
However, African leaders often abused their powers by justifying every action
in the name of law and unity or national integration.
As elsewhere on the globe, Africa has had to overcome economic woes such
as food production shortages and the international debt. For example, almost
one-third of the African states were not able to feed their own populations in
1995, and today the foreign public debt has continued to rise above the 1991
figure of $272 billion to $518,064,583,529.78 in 2017, according to the African
Development Bank. Africa's problems are, of course, compounded by the fact
that they stem from several factors, including colonial legacy, adverse
geographical factors, and the international economic system (all outside the
control of African leaders), and from bad policies and poor planning. The
international economic system, or the external economic environment, affected
Africans adversely immediately following independence. At the root of the
problem lies, of course, the lack of capital on the continent and Africa's
inability to improve its capital formation. Thus, one of the strategies adopted by
African leaders has centered on generating capital through export. The setback,
however, comes from the fact that Africa does not control the prices of the raw
materials she sells in the world market, nor does she control the prices of the
manufactured goods which she buys from the Western world. As a result,
Africans have been demanding, through the “new international economic
order,” a change in these one-sided practices that perpetuate established unfair
392
patterns of trade.
In the political arena, on the other hand, Africans have adopted the now
almost-defunct principle of non-alignment, and, for the most part, stayed away
from the Cold War between East and West, as dramatized, for example, by their
refusal to provide military bases on their soil to either of the superpowers. In
the post-Cold War era, Africans have adopted the strategy of de-
marginalization in the hope that, by meeting the crippling structural adjustment
programs imposed on them by the West—especially those of the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank—they will secure economic development
on the continent. While the rest of the continent was achieving independence,
however, the South African government was intent on perpetuating the system
of apartheid by capitalizing on its strategic international importance to the
West, and by adopting economic and military strategies designed to destabilize
the southern part of the continent and thus maintain its hegemony. Fortunately,
apartheid is history now but South Africa, like many other African countries, is
facing similar problems, especially in health and an equitable distribution of
resources, including land and business opportunities for all.
Unfortunately, after freeing itself from apartheid, South Africa's economic
and political situation began to deteriorate after Nelson Mandela's death,
particularly after Jacob Zuma's ascent to power. Zuma, a former Zulu militant
leader who shared an undetermined prison term with Nelson Mandela at
Robben Island, assumed the presidency on May 9, 2008, a position from which
he was almost abruptly forced to resign on February 14, 2018, in the midst of
several charges of corruption, racketeering, and rape, all of which threatened to
dislodge the ANC from the leadership of the country during the upcoming 2019
presidential elections. The resignation of Zuma came as a shock, but the
peaceful ouster of Robert Mugabe by his own army from the presidency in
neighboring Zimbabwe in November 2017, replaced until the 2018 presidential
elections by Emmerson Mnangagwa, of the ZANU-PAF party, his first vice
president since 2014, sent shock waves to all remaining autocrats in Africa.
Mugabe had ousted Mnangagwa from the first vice presidency on November 6,
2017, due to his clashes with Mugabe's wife, Grace, who supposedly was slated
to succeed the ailing man.
African leaders are now acutely aware of the magnitude of the task ahead
and most have vowed to take the necessary steps to stimulate development. At
the 1991 OAU summit at Abuja, Nigeria, the 34 attending heads of state and
government signed a treaty to establish, by the year 2025, an African Economic
393
Community, which, by 2018, had not shown any signs of life. They pledged to
work immediately towards a “phased removal of barriers to intra-African trade,
the strengthening of the existing regional economic groupings,” and the
enhancement of “economic cooperation and integration” as a response to their
own 1980 Lagos Plan of Action, which was adopted but not seriously
implemented. Whether their actions are a result of a new resoluteness on their
part to tackle Africa's difficult situation is something Africans and the world are
waiting to see. Politically, the forced resignations of Robert Mugabe and Jacob
Zuma should a clear warning to the remaining autocrats in Africa that their
days may be numbered, and that the same police and army that kept them in
power for so long to the detriment of the people might turn against them any
time. This is, for example, a source of fear that has forced the president of
Mozambique, Filipe Nyusi, to attempt to meet Afonso Dhlakama in Gorongoza
in February 2018, and try to diffuse the threat of another civil war.
Beyond economic and political problems and apart from potential crises in
education, health, and urbanization, stands a milliard other concerns, such as
the known but perennial women's rights issue, who are often treated as second-
class citizens. Also pressing is the state of the environment. The U.N. reports
that Africa loses some 23 million hectares of “open woodland yearly, compared
to 3.8 million hectares worldwide.” The HIV/AIDS epidemic is still a major
threat, worsened by a re-emergence of the tuberculosis comorbidity, both of
which infect tens of millions of Africans. It is clear, therefore that the
continent's problems, issues, and concerns require well thought out policies and
programs, and demand bold action from those at the helm as well as sacrifice,
at least in the short-run, from the African masses. The issues of
democratization, transparency, and trade have been bolstered by the creation of
the African Union replacing the ineffective OAU, as well as by the objectives
and goals set in NEPAD.
394
1. When did independence occur in Africa and what did it mean to the majority
of the African people?
2. Identify and analyze four major roots of Africa's economic problems. What
are some of the major solutions proposed by African leaders and scholars to
resolve such problems?
3. Identify the major ideological approaches adopted by African leaders to
solve Africa's social and political problems.
4. Discuss the origin and the focus of the “new international economic order.”
5. Discuss the impact of South Africa's policies and strategies in Southern
Africa and how the new changes have affected the region.
395
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12
The Contemporary African Diaspora

Msia Kibona Clark
398
Introduction
This chapter will focus on the African Diaspora in the US. The chapter
examines the migration of populations from other parts of the African Diaspora,
as well as the African continent, to the US in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. This growing segment of the African Diaspora joins an established
African Diaspora that has been in the US since the sixteenth century. The
chapter will discuss the numerous social, economic, and legal push and pull
factors that have led to increased migration into the US from other African
Diasporas and from Africa. The important phases of migration from the
Caribbean (1900s to 2010s) and Africa (1960s to 2010s) to the US will be
examined by the author. These phases have led to the establishment of
Caribbean and African communities and cultures in America, adding to the
diversity of the African Diaspora living in the US. Also included in the chapter
will be a thorough examination of the presence and representations of
Caribbean and African peoples in popular culture and media in the US. Lastly,
the chapter will briefly take a comparative look at African Diasporas in various
parts of the world.
Major terms and concepts: Diaspora, neo-liberalism, refugee, Immigration
and Nationality Act of 1965, Immigration Act of 1924, Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1952, Diversity Visa Lottery, Afropolitan, Siddi.
399
The Diaspora refers to the scattering or removal of a population from their
homeland. It is in the Diaspora where migrants form permanent communities
away from their homeland. There are many Diasporas, including the Asian
Diaspora, the Jewish Diaspora, and the African Diaspora. African Diasporas
can be found all over the world, with the largest African Diaspora communities
established in North and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe. There are
also other sizable African Diaspora communities in the Middle East and Asia.
In this context, African Diasporas exist wherever there are large communities
of people of African descent, and includes Americans, Jamaicans, Afro-
Brazilians, Guyanese, Black British, and Siddis, who span the globe.
The relationship between Africa and its Diaspora is a long and complicated
one. There has always been an acknowledgement of the large numbers of
Africans dispersed (voluntarily or involuntarily) from the continent. There is
also a strong history of engagement among the Diasporas, and between the
Diasporas and Africa. For example, African Americans objected vocally to the
Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, African Americans supported the struggles
of the Kikuyu in the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s, and African
Americans mobilized in opposition to apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s
and 1980s. Likewise, African governments spoke out against the killing of four
African-American girls in the bombing of a church in Alabama in 1963; several
African states welcomed African-American and Caribbean expatriates in their
newly independent nations in the 1960s and 1970s; and the African Union
recognized the African Diaspora as the sixth region of Africa in 2001.
Additionally, Jamaican Rastafarian culture has been heavily influenced by both
Ethiopia and the Mau Mau rebellion, in which the rebels locked their hair. In
Nigeria and Brazil, practitioners of the Yoruba religion have frequently traveled
between the two countries. Musically, in addition, the social and political
content in Jamaican roots reggae and American hip hop have influenced the
development of roots reggae and hip hop culture in Africa.
The meeting of Africa and the Diasporas in the US has been shaped by a
history of engagement, and has involved the voluntary and involuntary
migration of African peoples. The African Diaspora in the US was established
when large numbers of Africans were enslaved and forcibly taken to America
between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The population of African
Americans that grew out of that time period would form a significant African
400
Diaspora community in America. Enslaved Africans also created African
Diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean (sixteenth–nineteenth centuries),
Europe (fifteenth–nineteenth centuries), and the Middle East and Asia
(seventh–twentieth centuries). This does not include the Africans who have
voluntarily migrated in smaller numbers to America, Europe, the Middle East,
and Asia since the first century. The size and scope of the African Diaspora is
so large that prominent Kenyan scholar Dr. Ali Mazrui once said:
Long before slave-days we lived in one huge village called Africa. And
then strangers came and took some of us away.... Today we are
scattered so widely that the sun never sets on the descendants of Africa.
The world is our village; and we plan to make it more human between
now and the day after tomorrow.
Once the importation of enslaved Africans ended in the US during the
nineteenth century, enslaved individuals were still forcibly brought in to the
country from the Caribbean islands. When slavery ended in the US in 1865,
voluntary migration from Africa or other parts of the Diaspora was minimal.
Voluntary migration from the Caribbean would not increase significantly until
the 1900s, while African migration would not begin in earnest until the 1960s,
and significantly increase during the 1980s.
Table I: The Composition of Black America
The African Diaspora in the US has grown and diversified almost beyond
recognition since 1985. As a result of successive waves of Black migrants from
the Caribbean and Africa, the African Diaspora in the US today speaks
Amharic, Yoruba, Swahili, Twi, Wolof, Xhosa, Creole, Patois, Pidgin English,
French, Portuguese, Arabic, and almost a thousand other languages, while
practicing diverse religions, eating a wide array of foods, and living in every
state in America. The growing African Diaspora in America has been impacted
by international economic trends, conflict, economic interests, and familial
401
migrations. The Black migrant presence in the US is increasingly reflected in
American media, schools, pop culture, and politics.
The number of migrants to the US from Africa and the Caribbean has
increased so much since 1985 that foreign-born Black populations in some
American cities can sometimes rival that of the American-born Black
populations. The rise in the total number of Black immigrants to the US has
jumped from 125,000 in 1960 to almost 3 million in 2000. In 2016, several
estimates put the number of first- and second-generation Black immigrants in
America at well over 5 million. Foreign-born Blacks make up between 10 to 15
percent of the Black population in America. In several major cities, like Miami,
Minneapolis, New York, and the Washington, DC, area, the foreign-born Black
population has grown to between 15 to 20 percent of the total Black population.
In an effort to examine the role Black migrants play in the changing
configuration of Black America, it is helpful to take a look at their growth
(Table I).
First- and second-generation migrants from the Caribbean and Africa have
been involved in shaping what it means to be Black in America and have
contributed to Black culture and politics in America in meaningful ways. In
many Black communities in major US cities, it is not uncommon to find a soul
food, Caribbean, and African restaurant within blocks of each other. African
hair braiding salons are frequent in Black communities, where Black
barbershops and Caribbean grocery stores can also be found. On college
campuses, African and Caribbean students' associations can be found alongside
Black student associations, with some students belonging to two or three of
them. African-American fraternities and sororities also frequently welcome
members who are first- or second-generation Caribbean or African immigrants.
The growth of the Caribbean and African immigrant communities is due to
several factors. Economic or educational opportunities often motivate people to
migrate from their homes. Migrants also may leave because of a conflict or a
natural disaster. Migrants tend to choose countries based a number of reasons,
including perceived opportunities available, ease of migration, and cultural
connections in the proposed host country. We will next examine some of the
push factors that have influenced the decision for Caribbean and African
migrants to leave home as well as some of the pull factors that influenced those
migrants' decisions to migrate to the US.
402
The economic crisis that many African and Caribbean nations found
themselves in during the 1980s occurred around the same time African and
Caribbean migration to the US increased dramatically. International migration
patterns can be linked to global economic systems. During the 1980s, many
African and Caribbean countries were facing economic difficulties and found
that they needed to borrow money from international financial institutions,
including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As
conditions for the loans, governments were required to adopt Structural
Adjustment Programs (SAPs). SAPs were based on neo-liberal economic
policies. Neo-liberalism is an economic structure that strongly favors the
private sector and reduces government involvement in the economy. The
recommended economic and social restructuring involves the privatization of
the economy, or opening up the economy to private enterprises, and increase in
exports. This has also involved opening up economies to foreign corporations,
who in competition with local businesses, often weaken local industries. In neo-
liberal economies, labor laws are weakened, labor unions are restrained, and
there are massive cuts in government spending on public and social services.
Regrettably, the results of the neo-liberal economic reforms that were
conditions of the badly needed loans were a decrease in the quality of living
due to unemployment, underemployment, and underfunded hospitals and
school systems. This also led to increased urbanization, the emergence of more
slums and informal dwellings in cities unprepared for the influxes, and
declining access to schools and healthcare, particularly for the rural areas. The
subsequent failure of SAPs (now called Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers or
PRSPs) in many countries was felt by the masses that failed to reap financial
benefits from SAPS. The economic conditions in the Caribbean and Africa (and
other developing regions) have translated into greater numbers of migrants
from the developing world moving to economically developed countries in
search of economic and educational opportunities, which have become scarce
in their home countries.
Several countries have also had to deal with instability. Conflict and
instability have directly affected citizens in countries such as Eritrea, Ethiopia,
Haiti, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.
Each of these countries has seen increases in immigration to the US as a result
of insecurity. The numbers of Rwandan refugees arriving in the US increased in
403
the years after the 1994 genocide, which saw up to 1 million ethnic Tutsi killed
in 100 days. Many Rwandans fled to neighboring countries such as Tanzania
and Burundi, some fled to Europe, while many of the lucky ones sought and
were granted asylum in the US. The number of Rwandans seeking asylum in
the US was 31 in 1994, 88 in 1995, and 118 in 1996. This was up from zero in
1990. A similar trend is found among Somalis with refugee arrivals in the US
going from 25 in 1990 to 6,436 in 1995, after the collapse of the state in that
country, which led to several years of instability and lawlessness. Africans now
make up the majority of refugees arriving in the US.
Most asylum seekers coming to the Unites States from the Caribbean have
been from Cuba or Haiti. Cuban refugees generally fall into two categories.
First, those that left after Fidel Castro came to power in 1961. These were
political refugees who fled the country in the 1960s and 1970s. The second
category are economic refugees who fled in the 1980s as US economic
sanctions were increasingly impacting Cuba's declining economy. Due to
America's strained, and often adversarial, relationship with Cuba, the US
government enacted a policy that granted all Cuban migrants legal status if they
successfully arrived on US soil. Cubans are the only migrants that this policy
has applied to, and it has been responsible for the comparatively large number
of Cuban refugees who have settled in the US, especially in southern Florida.
Haitian refugees have fled that country for reasons related to a poor
economy, corrupt and unstable government, and natural disasters. Haitians
coming to the US increased in the 1980s due to a poor economy and political
uprisings in this small island of the Caribbean. In the aftermath of the topping
of the government in the late 1980s, the numbers of Haitians leaving the
country jumped. Many went to other Caribbean countries, including the
Dominican Republic and the Bahamas, while several migrated to the US. The
flows of Haitian migrants coming to the US crowded on boats in the 1990s
became a major media story, as the Haitian population in America more than
tripled. With the return to political stability in Haiti, the US had begun
deportations of Haitian refugees living in the US. After the 2010 earthquake
those deportations stopped, and some Haitians were allowed to enter the US on
humanitarian grounds. As Haiti's economy continued to decline, and with the
2016 hurricane coming on the heels of the 2010 earthquake, Haitians continue
to make the journey to the US, many now coming by land through South and
Central America.
It has thus been a combination of economic and political factors that have
404
pushed migrants out of Africa and the Caribbean. While Europe was once the
main region from which refugees in the US came, today the majority of refugee
arrivals come from Africa. Economically, the economic shocks in the 1970s
and 1980s pushed many migrants out of Africa and the Caribbean, with many
lucky ones eventually settling in the US.
Table II: Number of Refugee Arrivals into the US
405
Pull Factors
The main pull factors that influenced migration to the US have to do with the
changes in immigration laws, both in Europe and the US, as well as the spread
of globalization and all of the advances that have been made in the availability
of information and communication. In the post-colonial era, migrants often
traveled to the country of their former colonial master. In most cases this was
England, France, or Portugal. Not only did migrants not have significant
language barriers to overcome, but Europe had labor shortages, and a
comparatively relaxed immigration policy. While immigration was especially
encouraged from other European countries, migrants from Africa and the
Caribbean were also able to take advantage of Western Europe's need for labor
and many immigrated there to study and find employment. The change in this
migration trend and Europe's attitudes towards migrants occurred with the oil
price shocks of the early 1970s, which led to an almost immediate curtailment
of the previous lenient immigration policies in Europe. During this time period,
oil prices more than tripled globally, having a major impact on the global
economy. As a result, European countries enacted laws that curbed the number
of immigrants who could legally enter their countries. France, for example,
began refusing the renewal of residency permits, deporting illegal immigrants,
and denying automatic citizenship to the children of immigrants who were born
in the country. Many of Europe's immigration laws have yet to undergo the
transformation that immigration laws went through in the US. Even these,
however, such the so-called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
in the US, need to be resolved through new laws.
Around the same time that immigration laws were being tightened in Europe,
they were being loosened in America. The US began to liberalize their
immigration policies, beginning with the Immigration and Nationality Act of
1965. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 should be seen as part of
the sweeping Civil Rights legislation that was passed in the 1960s, legislation
that was meant to get rid of racial discrimination. The act included five
important provisions: (1) the abolishment of the national-origins quota, which
got rid of national origin and race as basis for immigration; (2) the creation of a
seven-category preference system, which gave priority to relatives of US
citizens and legal permanent residents who were applying for residency; (3)
immediate relatives were not subject to numerical restrictions, in terms of how
many could gain their residency; (4) immigration from the Western Hemisphere
406
was limited; and (5) refugees were given preference. Of these five provisions,
two were critical to immigration from Africa and the Caribbean. First, the act
eliminated national origin, race, or ancestry as a basis for immigration to the
US. In doing so, the act abolished the national origins quota system that was
initiated by the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Immigration and Nationality
Act of 1952. Second, the seven-category preference system for relatives of US
citizens and permanent residents allowed for family reunification. The second
part of the act has meant that immigrants in America have been able to sponsor
the immigration of their relatives.
Another pull factor was the rise of the US as a global superpower. During the
Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union were the two main superpowers. Both
countries fought for power internationally and sought alliances with smaller
nations. At the end of the Cold War during the late 1980s, the Soviet Union
collapsed, and the US remained as the only superpower. This led to the export
and dominance of American economics, American-style education, American
culture, and American food. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, people in cities
around the world consumed American culture in all its manifestations. The
export of American culture served as an effective public relations tool, and
promoted America as a place where success was possible. This consumption of
all things American has had a significant impact on the large numbers of
Caribbean, and especially African, migrants who decided to migrate to the US.
Many migrants come as legal immigrants. Many also come as students and
find permanent employment after graduation. Others have come to the US as
refuges, or by other means, and claimed asylum in order to stay in the US. In
addition to coming to the US using legal channels, a minority of the migrants
arrive undocumented or have statuses that have expired. A good number of
migrants come as students but are unable to remain in status, which requires
remaining a full-time student. Some are also unable to find a job to sponsor
them after graduation, and are forced to work without papers if finding
employment at home is not an option. During the 2000s, an increasingly
popular method of entering the US from both the Caribbean and Africa was
through South and Central America. Many migrants fly into South America and
come into America by land, following similar routes as migrants from Central
America. Yet, only a small number of migrants from the Caribbean and Africa
enter the US this way. However, those that do often face language barriers,
criminal gangs, and stricter immigration enforcement.
Changes in immigration laws, namely the passing of the 1965 Immigration
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and Nationality Act in America, in conjunction with tighter immigration laws in
Europe during the 1970s, can be credited with the shift in focus for migrants
from Europe to America. When these factors are combined with the economic
crisis that hit Africa and the Caribbean in the 1980s, a vivid picture of the
factors influencing Caribbean and African immigration to the US becomes
apparent. A look at both Caribbean and African migration shows the distinct
migration experiences of the two communities, as well as some of the migrants
who had an influential impact in American culture and politics.
Table III: History of Caribbean Immigration to the US
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Caribbean Migration
While enslaved Blacks from the Caribbean were brought to the US during
slavery, voluntary Caribbean migration to the US began regularly occurring
after emancipation in the early twentieth century. As noted, their migration has
been driven by changes in immigration laws, economic and educational
opportunities, family reunification, and other factors. Caribbean immigrants
make up the largest foreign-born Black population in the US, far outnumbering
Africans in almost every city, except the Washington, DC, area. The Caribbean
migrants who initially settled in the US mostly settled in Florida. It would not
be until the early part of the twentieth century that New York would also
become a primary destination for Caribbean migrants. Today, both states are
home to the largest populations of Caribbean migrants in America. The
majority of these Caribbean migrants come from Cuba, the Dominican
Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, and Trinidad and Tobago.
America had a long history of Caribbean immigration, and their close
geographical proximity to the islands made the US a preferred destination for
Caribbean migrants. The trends in Caribbean immigration to the US are
reflected in Table III. Caribbean migrants began to increase their numbers in
the early twentieth century. Those numbers slowed down during the 1930s, as
America entered the Depression, and sharply increased in the 1960s after the
passing of the Immigration Act of 1965.
Caribbean scholar Winston James chronicles four phases in Caribbean
immigration to this country, beginning with the migration that occurred
between the colonial period and 1900. This immigration was primarily
involuntary and was a consequence of slavery and the movement of enslaved
peoples between the Caribbean and the US. The history of voluntary migration
from the Caribbean to the US is divided into three phases: 1900 to 1930, 1940
to 1960, and post-1965. The Caribbean migration has had important impacts in
the areas of politics, activism, economics, and culture in America. These
migrants have also been involved in major milestones in race relations and civil
rights in America.
The First Phase

The first phase occurred between 1900 and 1932, peaking in the 1920s and
waning during the Great Depression. During this time, Florida was the primary
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destination for Caribbean immigrants arriving in the US, until the early
twentieth century when New York became the number one US destination for
Caribbean immigrants. This era in Caribbean immigration and the shift from
Florida to New York intersected with the Great Migration, which saw millions
of African Americans migrating out of the South and establishing Black urban
metropolitans like Harlem. The convergence of African-American and
Caribbean migrants in New York saw the emergence of the Harlem
Renaissance. The cultural movement that was the Harlem Renaissance lasted
from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s and included important contributions by
such Caribbean migrants as Marcus Garvey (Jamaica), founder of the United
Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); poet and writer Claude McKay
(Jamaica); and intellectual and historian Arturo Schomburg (Puerto Rico).
During this time, the composition of the Caribbean community was different
from what it is today. The community of the 1930s was highly educated, and
these Caribbean migrants made up a significant percentage of New York's
Black professional community. Politician Shirley Chisholm (Guyana and
Barbados), General Colin Powel (Jamaica), and leader of the Nation of Islam
Louis Farrakhan (Saint Kitts and Nevis and Jamaica) were born into this
community to parents who were migrants from the Caribbean. This wave of
Caribbean migration, however, was slowed by two factors. During the first
phase of their immigration, America's economic troubles during the depression
of the 1930s slowed their immigration to the country. This was not helped by
the Immigration Act of 1924. The Immigration Act of 1924 established a
quota system that limited the number of migrants who could immigrate into the
US to 2 percent of the number of people from that country who were already
residents of the US in 1890.
The Second Phase

The second wave of Caribbean migration would occur in the 1940s. It was
largely spurred by World War II and the post-war economic boom, which
provided many employment opportunities. Several Caribbean immigrants
during this period would play roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Some of
them include actor and activist Sidney Poitier (Bahamas) and Kwame Ture
(a.k.a. Stokely Carmichael, Trinidad and Tobago). Kwame Ture held leadership
positions in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the
Black Panther Party (BPP), and the All-African People's Revolutionary Party
(A-APRP). A product of this second wave of Caribbean immigrants consisted
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of several US-born Caribbean Americans, including former US Attorney
General Eric Holder (Barbados).
This wave of Caribbean immigrants was slowed down by the implementation
of stricter immigration laws after the passing of the Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1952. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 was a
product of the Cold War and changed the qualifications for immigration,
linking immigration to political orientation. Many Caribbean migrants from the
English-speaking Caribbean turned to England and began increasing their
migration to that country. These migrants to England would establish large
Caribbean communities in neighborhoods such as Brixton in London. Even
though Europe was geographically further away, conditions in America meant
that Caribbean immigrants had to turn to their former colonial masters for
economic opportunities. By the time Africans began arriving in Europe in large
numbers, Caribbean immigrants had already arrived and formed the first post-
colonial Black immigrant communities in the region.
The Third Phase

After the Immigration Act of 1965, we see the third wave of Caribbean
migration to the US. The passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of
1965, in conjunction with tighter immigration laws in Europe, is credited with
the shift during this third wave. This new wave would bring such migrants as
hip hop pioneers DJ Kool Herc (Jamaica) and Grandmaster Flash (Barbados).
The post-1965 migrants also included author Edwidge Danticat (Haiti), artist
and activist Wycleaf Jean (Haiti), NBA player Patrick Ewing (Jamaica), actress
C. C. H. Pounder (Guyana), journalist Kojo Nnamdi (Guyana), and president of
Howard University Dr. Wayne A. Frederick (Trinidad and Tobago). The
children of these immigrants have had definite impacts in the fields of
education, entertainment, sports, and politics. Products of this third migration
wave include US-born Caribbean Americans such as actress and activist
Rosario Dawson (Cuba/Puerto Rico) and US Representative Misa Love (Haiti).
The relationship between Caribbean immigrants and African-American
communities has, obviously, evolved over time. Since the early years of
Caribbean immigration to the US, there have been tensions between Caribbean
and African-American communities. Those tensions have significantly
improved. The few tensions that do exist sometimes result in some Caribbean
immigrants separating themselves from African Americans and emphasizing
their ethnic heritage when they feel it is to their advantage. First generation
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Caribbean immigrants who have been in the US for shorter periods are less
inclined to recognize solidarity with African Americans, while Caribbean
immigrants who have been in this country longer, or were born here, are more
likely to identify with African Americans. Less wealthy Caribbean immigrants,
however, tend to identify more with African Americans. In contrast, those of
privileged backgrounds are more likely to distance themselves from their
Diaspora brothers and sisters.
Caribbean migrants settled in the US and created their own communities, or
ethnic enclaves. In various New York boroughs, as well as Little Haiti and
Little Havana in Miami, for example, there are communities where large
numbers of Caribbean migrants settled. The entire eastern seaboard, in fact, is
where a significant number of Caribbean immigrants have successfully sought
asylum. While Florida is an important destination for Cubans and Haitians,
many Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans have headed to
New York.
In these communities, immigrants have often settled into African-American
communities, bringing their music and food with them. Thus, many Americans
have become familiar with Caribbean music and foods, which are found in
many major American cities. Foods like jerk chicken, curry goat, beef patties,
and coco bread have become familiar staples in cities along the eastern
seaboard. In many large cities, Caribbean immigrants put on large parades, such
as the Puerto Rican Day Parade and Dominican Day Parade in New York, or
the carnivals held in cities like New York and Washington, DC.
Many communities have also endured discrimination and stereotypes,
especially surrounding Jamaican and Haitian migrants. The stereotypes about
Haitians seemed to have emerged from the HIV/AIDS outbreak in the Haitian
community, the reputation of Haitian laborers in such countries as the
Dominican Republic and the Bahamas, the role of some Haitian immigrants in
the international drug trade, and Haitian refugees seeking asylum in America.
While these stereotypes still abound, many credit the popularity of artists
including Wyclef Jean for dispelling some of those that are held among youth
about Haitians in America.
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African Migration
Very few Africans voluntary migrated to the US prior to the 1950s, notably
Kwame Nkrumah (the first president of Ghana) and Nnamdi Azikiwe (the first
president of Nigeria), who studied in this country during the 1930s before
returning to West Africa. Africans did not begin any significant voluntary
migration to America until during and after independence movements in Africa
of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Several students from the colonies or the
apartheid regimes, numbering perhaps 300 hundred, where the liberation
movements were in action, such as South Africa, Mozambique, Angola,
Guinea-Bissau, Zimbabwe (former Southern Rhodesia), South-West Africa,
now Namibia, received graduate education scholarships to study in the US in
the hopes that they would turn out to be friendly to America following
independence. Most of them, however, never returned home, which became
hostile to those who had spent time abroad, calling them “reactionaries,”
because they had not joined, instead, the war of independence. Today, African
immigrant communities exist in most major US cities. These African migrant
populations are especially concentrated in the east and northeastern US, with
Washington, DC, and New York being home to the largest communities of
African immigrants. The two countries that are heavily represented in the
African immigrant population are Nigeria and Ethiopia. Other African countries
represented in large numbers include Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, and
Sierra Leone.
Table IV: Number of Africans Coming to the US on Immigrant

Visas
While the third wave of Caribbean immigration to the US began in 1965, the
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start of significantly greater rates of African immigration to America began in
1965, rising dramatically in the 1980s. In fact, more than two-thirds of the
African immigrants currently in the US arrived after 1980. The three phases of
African immigration to the US include the post-independence arrivals in the
1960s and 1970s, the migrants who came in the wake of the economic crisis
that impacted the continent during the 1980s and 1990s, and those that came
after 2000 in a post-9/11 immigration environment that was also characterized
by revolutionary changes in communication.
Table IV shows the dramatic increase in the number of Africans who have
immigrated to the US since it began tracking immigration by region. These are
official numbers, but estimates have put the unofficial numbers, which include
undocumented immigrants and out-of-status migrants, at almost double the
official counting. The table below shows that, between 1980 and 2000, African
immigration to this country roughly doubled each decade.
Several African countries stand out in looking at trends on the continent
(Table V). There are several countries that had significant increases in the
numbers of their citizens who immigrated to the US between 1986 and 2004.
Somalia's 28 percent increase is likely directly related to the events that led up
to the 1992 US military operation in the country and the subsequent collapse of
the Somali state. Other countries include Sudan, with a 14-fold increase, Togo
with a 93-fold increase, and Cameroon with a 10-fold increase.
Table V: Immigration Trends in Select African Countries
The First Phase

The African migrants that came to the US in the 1960s and 1970s were
largely arriving from newly independent nations and came to acquire skills and
education. Many African migrants from this first wave eventually returned to
Africa. This includes Barack Obama Sr. (Kenya), historian Ali Mazrui (Kenya),
414
academic and activist Mahmood Mamdani (Uganda), philosopher Wamba dia
Wamba (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and filmmaker Haile Gerima
(Ethiopia). Many of these early migrants came to America to study and
returned to the African continent after finishing their studies. The children of
this first phase include actress Danai Gurira (Zimbabwe), hip hop artist Jean
Grae (South Africa), sports personality Sal Masekela (South Africa), and
President Barack Obama (Kenya).
Many of these early migrants returned home to help fight in anti-colonial
struggles and to use their acquired knowledge and expertise to help build their
newly independent countries. After Africa's independence, countries were in
desperate need of expertise. There were needs for people trained in all fields:
government, civil service, education, medicine, engineering, and law. This
meant that many Africans who returned home trained in these fields found,
except in the former Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-
Bissau, jobs awaiting them. However, some later returned to America as
economic or political situations at home forced them to leave. The migrants in
the first phase were among the scholars who helped carve out the African
perspective in the study of Africa. They were also influential in the Civil Rights
and Black Nationalist movements, some choosing to participate by joining and
working with such Civil Rights groups as the NAACP and SNCC.
The numbers of Africans migrating to the US was always much smaller than
the numbers of Africans migrating to Europe, as most Africans first turned to
the countries of their former colonizer. Thus, there was not so much as a slump
and resurgence of African migration to the US, but a surge of African migration
to America caused by Europe enacting stricter immigration laws, which forced
them to look elsewhere. The changes in immigration laws coincided with
political conflicts in the countries of Ghana, Nigeria, and Uganda, to name a
few, and led to the second phase of African migration to the US.
The Second Phase

The second phase of African migration to the US began after 1980 and was
largely impacted by shifts in Europe's immigration laws, as well as economic
and security concerns in Africa. Many African countries were contending with
political repressions, conflict, or military coups. This caused many to leave the
African continent in search of opportunities abroad. Coming to the US became
a realistic alternative for many Africans who were also able to take advantage
of the liberalization of the immigration laws with the Immigration and
415
Nationality Act of 1965. In 1990, African immigration got another boost with
the introduction of the Diversity Visa Lottery program, which was attached to
the Immigration Act of 1990. The Diversity Visa Lottery is run through the
US Department of State and was set up to give immigration opportunities to
citizens of countries that were underrepresented. The government allots 50,000
visas per year through the Diversity Visa Lottery. In 2015, the Diversity Visa
Lottery program received nine million qualified applications during the 30-day
application period. Of the 50,000 available slots, almost half went to applicants
from Africa.
Africans immigrating during this phase began to settle in many cities along
the east coast, such as the Washington, DC, area, New York City, and Boston.
Many of them settled and formed communities like Little Senegal in Harlem
and Little Ethiopia in Los Angeles. They created Ghanaian communities in the
Bronx, NY, and in the Boston, MA, area, and Somali communities in
Minneapolis, MN, and Columbus, OH. Unlike the previous generation, these
migrants did not return to Africa in large numbers. Instead, many post-1980
migrants established networks between home and host communities in America
and created communities with their own community organizations, churches,
mosques, grocery stores, and recreational groups. These groups brought their
religious and cultural traditions with them and created homes away from home.
Among this phase of African migration are writer Ngugi wa'Thiongo (Kenya),
poet Abena Busia (Ghana), scientist Bennet Omalu (Nigeria), actor Djimon
Hounsou (Benin), US District Judge Abdul Kallon (Sierra Leone), NASA
scientist Ave Kludze (Ghana), hip hop artist K'naan (Somalia), and
Representative Ilhan Omar, who was the first US lawmaker from Somalia. The
children of these migrants would contribute to the worlds of politics, activism,
sports, and entertainment, including co-founder of Black Lives Matter Opal
Tometi (Nigeria), actress Uzo Aduba (Nigeria), and hip hop artist Wale
(Nigeria).
The Third Phase

The third phase of African immigration to the US began after 2000. The
immigrants of this phase have benefitted from the foundations laid by earlier
migrations from Africa, as well as from the Caribbean. They arrived here in an
environment where they also benefitted from improvements in technology and
communication, allowing them to maintain connections with home. Among this
group are some of the most mobile African migrants of any time prior to 2000.
416
Like many who came in the 1980s and 1990s, several of the post-2000 African
migrants may not have been born in the country of their parents' birth. Some
may have migrated to America from Europe, where their parents migrated to
after leaving Africa. Due to improvements in communication and social media,
post-2000 African migrants often have maintained connections with classmates
and family members that may live in Africa, Europe, or Asia.
Three factors have influenced the mobility and characteristics of the post-
2000 migration out of Africa and into America. First, these migrants arrived in
a post-9/11 era that saw stronger enforcement of immigration laws. Second,
they arrived during a time when improvements in technology, communication,
and social media allowed them to maintain a relationship between host and
home that differs from previous generations of African migrants. Third, many
of these post-2000 migrants are also more transnational than previous migrants.
It is not unusual for post-2000 migrants to have lived experiences in two or
more countries, experiences that include socialization into multi-national and
multi-generational African immigrant communities.
The transnationality of the aforementioned post-2000 migrants has led to the
popularity of the term Afropolitan. Afropolitan is used to describe Africans
that are highly transnational and cosmopolitan, with experiences in two or more
countries. Afropolitans are seen as Africans who are (1) multicultural in
expression; (2) comfortable in a variety of international settings; (3) a product
of the migrants that left Africa from the 1960s to the 1980s or middle to upper
income Africans at home; and (4) frequently travelers between the West and
Africa. The term Afropolitan was coined by cultural scholar Achille Mbembe in
2001, but made popular by author Taiye Selasi in 2005. Since the popularity of
the term, Afropolitan has become a label applied to many young Africans in the
Diaspora. In addition to The Afropolitan magazine out of South Africa, and the
Afropolitan Vibes concert series in Nigeria, Afropolitan parties, fashion shows,
exhibits, and music performances occur throughout the Diaspora, notably in
England, France, Canada, and the US. The Afropolitan label has been criticized
for being too consumer driven, and elitist, but it has captured a segment of the
African migrant community that is more transnational and mobile than earlier
generations of African migrants. Many of these post-2000 migrants include
comedian Trevor Noah (South Africa), journalist Femi Oke (Nigeria), journalist
Isha Sesay (Sierra Leone), actress Lupita Nyong'o (Kenya), and hip hop artist
Blitz the Ambassador (Ghana).
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African Communities
While the percentage of African immigrants is low compared to other
immigrant communities, their arrival as immigrants is impacting America's
cultural landscape. African migrant communities have established large cultural
and economic networks. In most major and several smaller cities, they have
established community associations, churches, mosques, restaurants, food
stores, hair salons, and community soccer teams. Community associations are
often for members from the same country, though larger immigrant groups, like
Nigerians, Ethiopians, and Ghanaians, also have associations based on ethnic
group memberships. African restaurants and food stores allow migrants to eat
familiar foods and provide economic support for their countrymen. An industry
that African women have especially found employment is the hair braiding
industry. Many hair braiding salons in major cities are owned and operated by
African women. Just as the Caribbean communities, African communities in
America are beginning to hold festivals in major cities. In the Washington, DC,
area, numerous African festivals, such as PanaFest, FestAfrica, and the DC
Africa Festival, are held. In Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside of
Washington, DC, September has been declared African Heritage Month.
The Washington, DC, metropolitan area, with over 100,000 African-born
residents, currently has the highest concentration of African immigrants in
America. Washington, DC, is the only US metropolitan area where the number
of African immigrants outnumbers that of Caribbean immigrants. While the
number of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in Washington, DC, rose from around
32,000 to almost 49,000 between 1990 and 2000, the African population rose
from around 32,000 to just over 80,000 in that same period. This brings
Africans closer to Washington, DC's shrinking African-American population,
which was 400,000 in 1990 and 343,000 in 2000. Due to the large number of
African migrants in the region, the Washington, DC, Mayor's Office established
the Mayor's Office on African Affairs in 2006. It was the first of its kind, and
has played a large role in providing support to African communities in
Washington, DC. A survey conducted by the DC Mayor's Office on African
Affairs found that Washington, DC's African population is 40 percent
Ethiopian, which has resulted in the publishing of multi-language DC
government news and decrees in Amharic.
The African immigrant population tends to be highly educated. Almost 35
percent over the age of 25 have at least a bachelor's degree. This compares to
other groups, including American-born residents, which range from 10 percent
418
to 30 percent. This has not translated into higher incomes, however, as many
African immigrants in this country are underemployed. There are several
reasons for this. Lack of proper immigration status, non-transferability of
degrees, lack of employment authorization, and stigma of being foreign all
impact their ability to get high-paying jobs, which has resulted in Ethiopian cab
drivers with a MAs from Ethiopian universities not being able to find an
employer to sponsor their work visa; or Ghanaian security guards with MDs
from a Ghanaian medical schools who cannot find a job because their medical
degree is not recognized in America.
419
Popular Culture Representations of African and
Caribbean People
Representations of different racial and ethnic groups impact the way the
general public sees those groups. The reinforcement of stereotypes of any one
group, affects the way others interact with and perceive members of that group.
Much of the information we get about others comes from common
representations. It has therefore always been important to critically examine
representations that appear in popular culture. Additionally, many in the
African Diaspora have turned to new and social media, as well as traditional
media, to tell their own stories and present their own representations.
In literature, authors such as Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
(Americanah), Ghanaian author Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go), Zimbabwean
author NoViolet Bulawayo (We Need New Names), Jamaican author Marlon
James (A Brief History of Seven Killings), and Haitian author Edwidge Danticat
(Breath, Eyes, Memory) tell stories that center on African and Caribbean
migrant experiences. Many of these authors are Caribbean and African
transplants who moved to the US and wrote about the experiences they
witnessed. In television and film, Caribbean and African actors, writers, and
directors are using the medium to share their views of African Diaspora
experiences in America. Several projects have been launched on YouTube and
other online sites to promote the visibility of African immigrant communities in
the US. In music, Caribbean and African artists are influencing the sounds and
culture being produced in the African Diaspora. Black music has operated as a
cycle of influence, with African rhythms impacting salsa, reggae influencing
hip hop, and funk influencing Afrobeat. Caribbean and African migrants have
added their flavor to Black music scenes in America.
Television and Film

The representation of Caribbean and African people in the media has evolved
over the years. Social media spaces, news media, entertainment, and politics
have several prominent Caribbean and African immigrant faces. Several
representations of Caribbean and African people retain popular stereotypes, but
over the years we have seen greater diversity. The presence of Caribbean and
African content creators creating programming for platforms like YouTube has
helped. For example, Ghanaian producer Nicole Amarteifio created the
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YouTube series An African City. The series centers on the lives of five African
women who lived in the US and Europe but decide to return to Africa. The
series challenges stereotypes of African women as dependent or docile, and
diverges from the familiar tropes of African women as poor and in need of
intervention. In the mainstream media, African Americans have long had to
struggle with their representations, or erasure, from television programming.
Caribbean and African communities have had to grapple with similar issues, as
they were often cast as stereotypes. For example, in the 1980s the popular TV
series Miami Vice often featured the Caribbean gangster, pot-smoking Jamaican
Rastafarians, or sensationalized depictions of African religious practices in the
Caribbean.
The stereotypes of Caribbean and African immigrants were seen throughout
various Hollywood productions. Images of the Jamaican or Haitian drug dealer
are found alongside images of the African-American drug dealer. Hollywood
films like The Deep (1977), Black Samurai (1976), Marked for Death (1990),
Predator 2 (1990), New Jack City (1991), Belly (1998), Shottas (2002), and
Bad Boys 2 (2003), all featured either Haitian or Jamaican drug dealers and
gang members. Africans in Hollywood are often portrayed as the Nigerian drug
lord (Sugar Hill, 1994), the African rebel fighter (Black Hawk Down, 2001,
Tears of the Sun, 2003, and Lord of War, 2005), the witchdoctor or wise sage
(Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, 2001), or the non-English speaking immigrant
(Phone Booth, 2002, and Barbershop, 2002 and 2004).
The 2000s did bring more diverse portrayals of Caribbean and African
characters, in large part because Caribbean and African filmmakers were
creating much of their own content. While the problematic stereotypes persist,
actors get cast in diverse roles, portraying diverse ethnicities. Actors like
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Nigeria), Garcelle Beauvais (Haiti), Idris Elba
(Ghana/Sierra Leone), Akosua Busia (Ghana), Edi Gathegi (Kenya), Danai
Gurira (Zimbabwe), Jimmy Jean-Louis (Haiti), Lupita Nyong'o (Kenya), David
Oyelowo (Nigeria), and Lorraine Toussaint (Trinidad) have played characters
that were African American, or either African or Caribbean. Ghanaian actress
Akosua Busia has primarily played African-American characters, including her
roles in The Color Purple (1985), Native Son (1986), New Jack City (1991),
and Rosewood (1997). Actress Naomie Harris is British and of Jamaican and
Trinidadian descent. In addition to portraying British characters, she played
Winnie Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013) and a West Indian
in Pirates of the Caribbean (2006 and 2007). Carmen Ejogo, who is Nigerian
and Scottish, has also played mostly African-American roles, including playing
421
Coretta Scott King in the films Boycott (2001) and Selma (2014).
Likewise, African Americans have been cast in roles as African characters,
including Don Cheadle playing a Rwandan in Hotel Rwanda; Omar Epps
playing a Ghanaian in Deadly Voyage; Forest Whitaker and Keri Washington
playing Ugandans in The Last King of Scotland, Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose
playing Botswanan in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, and Whoopie
Goldberg (Sarafina), Alfre Woodard (Bopha!, Mandela), Angela Bassett
(Boesman and Lena), Denzel Washington (Cry Freedom), Danny Glover
(Boesman and Lena, Bopha!, Mandela), and Ice Cube (Dangerous Ground), all
playing Black South Africans in Hollywood films.
The representations of Blacks in TV and film are more diverse, though
representations of characters from Africa and the Caribbean are still
problematic. While Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje's portrayal of a Nigerian
survivor in the TV show Lost was multidimensional, and sitcoms like Where I
Live portrayed the lives of a Caribbean immigrant family in New York, such
shows as Heroes, Law & Order SVU, Miami Vice, and Modern Family have all
pushed the familiar stereotypes of African and Caribbean immigrants. While
African and Caribbean actors often portray African-American characters, the
increased visibility of Caribbean and African actors provides a space for their
voices in African Diaspora stories.
Music
We taking it back to the real, '01 till infinity/Original immigrant, never
facsimile/From Flatbush to Marcy, Bushwick, Canarsie//My Africans
are running things, catch us on/Canal Street, Selling fake Gucci, fake
Prada/Fake Louis V, Some of us got bachelor degrees/Between you and
me, We still push the dollar cab/Where ever the dollars at, We wire
that, Western/Union, Money Gram without a doubt, Speaking with/Our
native tongues and I ain't talking Tribe and them,/I'm talking Twi,
Swahili, Wolof, you not understanding/Them. Dance Africa, where we
parading at BAM/The flyest African women be looking like,
Damn/Some are Eritrean, and some are from Sudan, Some/Came here
to model, And some came here to dance/Whatever the hustle baby, keep
that dream alive/New York city Africans we hustle to survive
“African in New York,” Blitz the Ambassador
There has long been a musical back and forth between Africa and the various
422
Diasporas. In the US, enslaved Africans brought with them the musical
influences that went into the blues, jazz, R&B, and hip hop. In Latin America
and the Caribbean, those musical influences went into reggae, salsa, and
calypso. The African Diaspora has always contained music that was a fusion of
African and local cultures. The African presence in Diaspora music is a
fundamental element in most music genres in the African Diaspora. Later, as
migrants from both the Caribbean and Africa came to America, they would
further add to the sounds of the African Diaspora. Early Caribbean migrants
from Jamaica, Cuba, and Puerto Rico were involved in the sounds and culture
of the Harlem Renaissance, and so were many Puerto Rican and Cuban
musicians in the development of the jazz scene during the Harlem Renaissance.
Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, both Caribbean and African migrants would
contribute to the flavor of African Diaspora music in the US. African migrants
from Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal would participate in the music scene in
America, and some, including Fela Kuti, would have a lasting impact on Black
music in America. During the 1960s and 1970s, many young African migrants
visited America for training, moving into established Black communities and
socialized with African Americans and Caribbean migrants. While in the US,
some of these migrants became active in the music and political scenes on the
local and national level.
When Caribbean migrants come to the US in the 1960s and 1970s, they
brought their musical fusions and styles with them. Roots reggae and dancehall
reggae became prominent music genres in the US, and Caribbean immigrants
would greatly influence hip hop culture. As hip hop emerged in the 1970s,
Caribbean migrants were among the architects of the new culture, blending
Jamaican sound system culture into the growing hip hop scene. Such Caribbean
immigrants as Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) and Barbadian-
born Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Saddler) were among the pioneers who helped
develop hip hop culture. The Caribbean influence on hip hop could be clearly
heard with the use of two Caribbean music trends: The introduction of dub
music, which consisted of remixing and manipulating sound recordings, often
removing the vocals to work with the drum beats and the second, was the
Jamaican style of toasting, or talking over beats.
First- and second-generation African and Caribbean immigrants Wale
(Nigeria), for example, Akon (Senegal), and Rihanna (Barbados) continue to
contribute to music in the African Diaspora. While African and Caribbean
music and dance have become common parts of the music scene in the African
Diaspora in America, reggae music and dance styles have been incorporated
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into the mainstream by African-American and Caribbean artists. African dance,
drumming, and fashion have also become a part of the mainstream through the
work of African-American artists, influenced by the growing African presence
in the US. African-American music icon Beyoncé performs and includes
Caribbean and African styles in her music and videos. Nigerian music icon Fela
Kuti is one of the most sampled musicians in American hip hop. Fela was
sampled in the following songs: Mos Def's “Fear Not of Man” (1999), Missy
Elliott's “Watcha Gon' Do” (2001), Nas' “Warrior Song” (2002), The Roots' “I
Will Not Apologize” (2008), and J. Cole's “Let Nas Down” 2013. In sum, the
African Diaspora in America has a vibrant and diverse music scene that has
incorporated many styles and experiences. African and Caribbean migrants
arriving in the African Diaspora in this country are a part of that music scene;
adding to it, influencing it, and borrowing from it.
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Identity
Traditionally, African Americans were seen as a group whose ancestors
arrived in the US involuntarily via the transatlantic slave trade and whose
history is rooted in the American South and the Civil Rights Movement. Their
identity has gone through as many transformations as the terms used to describe
them: Negroes, Coloreds, Afro-Americans, and African Americans.
Historically, African-American communities have had to adjust to waves of
African and Caribbean immigrants. That adjustment has included navigating
the complex stereotypes each group has of one another and the distancing from
other groups that sometimes happens. For those African Americans who have
bought into the image of the uncivilized African savage, it may be difficult to
break with it. Likewise, there are African Americans who believe all peoples of
African descent should self-identify as being African, or, in the case of African
Americans, as Africans born in America.
By the same token, many African and Caribbean immigrants have distanced
themselves from an African-American identity, some believing the image of the
criminalized African American. Some immigrants claim their national
identities, or multiple identities: Nigerian, African, and African American. In
other instances, many Caribbean or African immigrants who are US citizens
feel they have earned the right to call themselves African Americans or
Americans. While they embrace their Caribbean or African culture, they also
celebrate their experiences in America and how their host country has shaped
who they are. Many second-generation immigrants may hyphenate their
identity, for example, as “Nigerian-American” or “Jamaican-American,” or
may identify as African American. Many scholars argue that, in the second
generation, migrants become American. If, therefore, second-generation
Caribbean and African immigrants claim Caribbean or African identities,
alongside African-American identities, will room be made on soul food menus
for curry goat or fufu? What about Caribbean Patois or West African Pidgin
English as part of the African-American vernacular?
There is pressure from first-generation immigrants for the second generation
to retain their African or Caribbean identities. With the numbers of African and
Caribbean immigrants now in the US, it is possible for a second-generation
Ethiopian, for example, to find an entire social network of Ethiopians in their
own city. One of the fears for immigrant parents is that their children will
become Americanized to the detriment of their traditional culture. On one hand,
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there is much pressure exerted in these immigrant communities for one to retain
one's immigrant identity. On the other hand, second-generation African and
Caribbean immigrants feel social pressure to become “African Americanized.”
In some of these cases, second-generation Caribbean or African immigrants
who lack a Caribbean or African accent and have adopted African-American
culture, often assimilate into the African-American community.
A critical piece of the identity debate is the importance of one's accent. An
accent signals one's origin. With Caribbean and African immigrants in the US,
this has played a significant role in how they identified themselves and how
other people identify them. Any Black person in America who has shed their
foreign accent and acquired an American accent has, in the process,
simultaneously acquired multiple identities. Regardless of how that person self-
identifies, he or she will have several imposed identities. For example, a
Nigerian who has lost his/her Nigerian accent and acquired an American accent
may still be seen as a Nigerian. However, the communities around that person
will listen to their accent and assign them an identity, probably an African-
American identity.
Most African immigrants self-identify first as being African, most Caribbean
immigrants self-identify as being either Caribbean or West Indian, and most
African Americans self-identify as being African American. In a survey of the
three groups, however, some African Americans and Caribbean immigrants
also adopted African identities. These African identities are based less on
citizenship, and more on racial identity. The importance of race, racial identity,
and racial politics is important in America, more so than almost anywhere else.
Even when one examines the different ideas of race found in such countries as
South Africa or Brazil, the strict definitions which surround the two major races
in America are unique to this country. Indeed, the binary system of race
relations has made the American example unique.
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Other Diasporas
The US Diaspora is not the only Diaspora with a significant population of
descendants from Africa. The country with the second largest Black population
in the world is Brazil, with over 75 million people of African descent. This
compares to the US, where the Black population is almost 40 million. The
country with the largest Black population in the world is Nigeria, with more
than 170 million people. It is important to briefly examine three other regions
which have large African Diaspora communities. Most of these communities
were established because of the involuntary migration of enslaved Africans.
While Africans were traveling to the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and
Asia prior to the institutionalization of slavery, the size and scope of those
Diaspora communities is directly tied to slavery, in the case of the Americas,
the Middle East, and Asia. In Europe, large African Diaspora communities can
be directly related to the colonial endeavors of imperialist Europe. In the last
sections, we will briefly look at the origins of African Diaspora populations in
the Americas, the Middle East and Asia, and in Europe. We will also see how
Africans established or recreated home in their new environments, consciously
and subconsciously retaining African cultural and traditional customs.
The Americas
Brazil and other countries in South America and the Caribbean were
recipients of populations of enslaved Africans. Like the US enslaved Africans,
they were taken throughout Latin America and the Caribbean and subjected to
forced labor. Of the 10 to 15 million enslaved Africans who survived to arrive
in the Americas, Brazil received the largest number. About 30 percent (3 to 5
million) of the enslaved Africans brought to the Americas went to Brazil. Most
of the others went to the various islands of the Caribbean, with 600,000 to
900,000 going to the US. In Latin America and the Caribbean, unlike in the US,
enslaved Africans were able to retain aspects of their culture, namely religion,
by keeping them hidden from Europeans. The Yoruba religion, for example, is
still practiced widely in countries like Brazil (where it is called Candomblé) and
Cuba (where it is called Santeria). West African religious traditions can also be
found in Haiti (Voudoun), Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago (Obeah), and
Venezuela (Palo). While African religious traditions have survived in African-
American communities (Voodoo and Hoodoo), they are not as widespread and
427
mainstream in their practice as they are in the Caribbean and Latin America.
The African Diaspora in the Americas incorporated other aspects of African
culture. The cuisines, music, and language structures of Blacks in the Americas
have borrowed heavily from Africa. Merengue, salsa, reggae, calypso, R&B,
and hip hop are all examples of music styles that have roots in West African
rhythms and dance styles. Additionally, Caribbean Creole, West Indian Patois,
and African American Vernacular English (AAVE), all have structures similar
to languages found in West Africa. The African Diaspora in the Americas is
diverse and changing, as people migrate within the region, as well as to and
from Africa. In addition to the US and the Caribbean, large populations of
African-descended people live in Brazil, Belize, Guyana, Suriname, Panama,
Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Columbia. Other but smaller African-
descended populations can be found in Mexico, Argentina, and Bolivia.

There has always been travel between Africa and the Middle East. Much of
that travel was voluntary. During the East African slave trade, enslaved
Africans were also taken to the Middle East and Asia. These enslaved Africans
were taken from East Africa all the way to the Far East, to such places as
China. While the enslaved Africans destined to the Americas were taken
between the 1500s and 1800s, those destined to the East were taken between
700 and the 1900s. The majority of the enslaved Africans from East Africa
went to the Middle East. Thus, Basra, Iraq, was the site of one of the largest
slave rebellions in the Middle East in the 800s. While enslaved Africans were
brought to the Americas to work on farms, those who went east were mostly
women and often were seen as a status symbol. In the Middle East, enslaved
Africans eventually blended into local populations, though communities of
African descendants can be found in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and
Yemen. With a long history of contact between East Africa and the Middle
East, communities that are both Middle Eastern and African have emerged in
both regions. The Swahili language, spoken in East Africa, is indeed a blend of
African Bantu languages and Arabic.
However, fewer enslaved Africans were taken to Far East Asia (China,
Japan), while many Africans went (voluntarily and involuntarily) to India and
Pakistan. There is a community of African decedents in those countries called
the Siddi. While their numbers are small, presumably no more than 60,000,
their presence as a distinct group is significant. There are also communities of
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Siddis living in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. The Siddi culture is a hybrid of
Asian and East African culture. In fact, Siddi communities have dance and
music styles that are similar to those found in East Africa. Many of their
cultural and traditional celebrations commemorate their identities as Siddis. As
a small community, their presence has only recently become widely known
outside of Asia and East Africa. They have since established a presence online,
as part of the larger African Diaspora.
Europe
Africans have also had a long history of travel to Europe. As early as the first
century AD, Africans, mostly North Africans, migrated into Europe. Many
North Africans were living in southern Europe and were a part of European
societies at that time. Between the 1500s and 1800s, enslaved Africans were
brought into Europe in small numbers, and it was not until the 1900s that
Africans began migrating to Europe in large numbers. During colonialism and
immediately thereafter, many Africans went to that continent in search of an
education and economic opportunities. After World War II, there was a demand
for labor in Europe, and many African and Caribbean migrants moved to their
former colonial empires in search of work. During the mid-1900s,
neighborhoods like Brixton in London, Goutte D'Or in Paris, and Celas and
Cova da Mourain in Lisbon became populated by Caribbean and African
migrants moving into these cities. These neighborhoods are today still
dominated by poor and working-class migrants from the Caribbean and Africa,
and have created community centers, grocery and retail stores, and restaurants
that cater to these immigrant populations. Much like the Black immigrant
groups in the US, in Europe, the Black immigrants have established large
Diaspora communities within which they find support and a sense of
community.
Once Europe tightened its immigration laws in the 1970s, migrants from
Africa (along with migrants from the Middle East and Asia) began to look for
alternative ways of getting there. Once economic and political conditions in
some African countries deteriorated during the 1990s, Europe saw an increase
in Africans migrating north, either across the Sahara or by boat through the
Mediterranean route, an extremely dangerous journey. As a result, between
1997 and 2001, an estimated 3,285 dead bodies were found in the waters
between North Africa and southern Europe. In 2015, that number increased to
over 2,000 in a single year. With a trip from Senegal to Spain costing an
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estimated $500–$1,000, many migrants risk their lives when taking the journey.
Those choosing to cross the Sahara Desert also find the route rife with dangers,
compelling observers and experts to refer to it as “the most dangerous
migration route in the world.” Like migrants coming into the US from Central
America, many migrants crossing the Sahara Desert have died trying to cross it
due to inadequate supplies or as the victims of crime from thieves.
Today, most European countries have African Diaspora communities made
up of Caribbean and/or African immigrant populations. This includes countries
such as Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, that had no colonies abroad. The
flow of migration into Europe continues, especially from North Africa, which is
geographically closest to Europe. The tensions between these migrant
communities have led to backlash from host populations and politicians. One of
the more serious rebellions against the treatment of migrants occurred in France
in 2005. In that year, two African youth were electrocuted and killed while
running from the police. Uprisings broke out in the ghettos or banlieues outside
Paris over the treatment of African and Arab immigrants. In 2011, news
channel Al Jazeera produced the program “Surprising Europe,” which
highlighted the lives of African immigrant communities throughout Europe. It
underscored some of the challenges those immigrants face, as well as the
cultural and political impact their presence is having in Europe. Across Europe,
African and Caribbean migrants have won political seats and gained political
appointments. England, France, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and
The Netherlands have all elected or appointed Black immigrants from Africa or
the Caribbean to political office.
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Summary
The African Diaspora is large and spans the whole world. The scattering of
enslaved Africans created African Diasporas in the Americas, the Caribbean,
Asia, and the Middle East. Colonialism created African Diasporas across
Europe. The voluntary migration of Black people globally is tied to numerous
factors that have influenced the push from home and the pull into various host
countries around the globe. Those push and pull factors center on economic and
safety considerations, immigration laws, family reunification, and access to
education resources. Additionally, US immigration laws have greatly impacted
the numbers of migrants coming to this country from the Caribbean and Africa.
In the US, large-scale immigration from the Caribbean and Africa came in
different phases, each influenced by changes in the US economy and
immigration laws in both the US and Europe.
Migrants from both the Caribbean and Africa have come over in different
immigration waves, often influenced by both US immigration policy and events
at home. Each migration wave has been shaped by domestic and international
events, and each has impacted the US in different ways. The presence of
African Diasporas impacts and influences host cultures, politics, and
economies. African Diasporas around the world have established community
businesses and economic and education associations. Many Black immigrant
communities abroad also perform a vital role back home through remittances
that boost local economies.
Likewise, members of the African Diaspora around the world have entered
into politics. The US has several years of African-American elected officials in
its history, dating back to the late 1800s. When the US elected its first Black
president in 2008, it was a Black president who was also a second-generation
African immigrant. Other Black immigrants have held various federal, state,
and municipal government positions in America. Across Latin America, Black
lawmakers and politicians have held various positions. These lawmakers and
politicians in turn have influenced laws on discrimination, as well as
affirmative action policies. In Europe, there have also been several first- and
second-generation African and Caribbean immigrants who have earned political
posts. Members of African Diaspora communities are increasingly visible in the
media and in popular culture as well. They head projects, work as journalists
(professionally and independently), and star in various big budget and
independent projects. African Diaspora communities in the US include an
431
African Diaspora that is more than 400 years old, as well as one that is less than
a century old. Through festivals, films, music, and cultural representations,
Black immigrants are diversifying Black identities and representations in this
country and throughout the world.
Finally, the presence of African Diasporas globally shows the size and scope
of African dispersals. African descendants speak every major world language,
live on every continent, and have settled in almost every country in the world.
In fact, Black people are migrating at ever larger rates. Caribbean migrants are
now also migrating back to Africa. African migrants have begun to increasingly
migrate to new parts of Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and to other parts of
Africa. African Americans are also on a global move. Many have migrated into
Europe or Asia, but there are many others migrating to the Caribbean and Latin
America, as well as to Africa, where the two largest African-American
communities are in Ghana and South Africa. The African Diaspora is,
therefore, as diverse as it is large. In 1986, Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui said that
“the sun never sets on the descendants of Africa.” This is truer in the twenty-
first century than it ever was.
432
1. Discuss the verse from Blitz the Ambassador's song “African in New York.”
How does his depiction of New York show the African influence in the city?
How does it differ from other media images of New York City?
2. What are the similarities in push and pull factors that influenced both
Caribbean and African migration to the US?
3. Discuss the role played by immigrant Caribbean and African associations in
the US. Discuss the ways in which immigrants use their associations to both
navigate the US and to relate to home.
4. What is the relationship between the increased Caribbean and African
populations in the US and the representations of those communities in
Hollywood?
5. “Being African must mean something.... Few of us escaped those nasty
‘booty-scratcher’ epithets, and fewer still that sense of shame when visiting
paternal villages. Whether we were ashamed of ourselves for not knowing
more about our parents' culture, or ashamed of that culture for not being
more ‘advanced’ can be unclear.”—Taiye Selasi.
a. How is Afropolitanism a response to the depictions of Africa in popular

culture?
b. Why do you think so many African (and Caribbean) migrants have adopted
Afropolitan identities?
6. If you had to leave the country in which you currently live: a. what factors
would influence your choice of host country? b. what sort of community
associations would you seek out to both help you adjust, and maintain links
to home?
433
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John A. Arthur. The African Diaspora in the US and Europe: The Ghanaian
Experience. New York, NY: Routledge and Taylor and Francis, 2016.
John A. Arthur, Joseph Takougang, and Thomas Owusu (eds.). Africans in
Global Migration: Searching for Promised Lands. Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2012.
Randy Capps, Kristen McCabe, and Michael Fix. “Diverse Streams: African
Migration to the US.” Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2012.
Manoucheka Celeste. Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the African
Diaspora: Travelling Blackness. New York, NY: Routledge and Taylor &
Francis, 2016.
M. K. Clark. (2008). “Identity among First and Second Generation African
Immigrants in the US.” African Identities, Vol. 6(2): 169–181.
Jacqueline Copeland-Carson. Creating Africa in America: Translocal
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Jorge Duany. Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the
Hispanic Caribbean and the US. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2011.
Shelly Habecker. “Becoming African Americans: African Immigrant Youth
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Marilyn Halter, and Violet Showers Johnson. African & American: West
Africans in Post-Civil Rights America. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2014.
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(http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm), 2007.
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Isidore Okpewho and Nkiru Nzegwu (eds.). The New African Diaspora.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.
Jean Muteba Rahier and Percy Hintzen. Problematizing Blackness: Self
Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the US. Lanham, MD: Routledge,
2014.
Yoku Shaw-Taylor and Steven A. Tuch (eds.). The Other African
Americans: Contemporary African and Caribbean Immigrants in the US.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom (eds.). Frenchness
and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France.
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Boston, MA: EP Dutton, 1999.
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13
Continental Africans and Africans in

America: The Progression of a
Relationship
F. Ugboaja Ohaegbulam
436
Introduction
Prominent leaders of peoples of African descent have at one time or another
asserted that the experience and interests of the people have been persistently
similar and require them to cooperate in order to achieve maximum mutual
benefits. For example, W. E. B. Du Bois, the United States-born father of pan-
Africanism, expressed his belief that no man or woman of African descent will
be free anywhere in the world until and unless the ancestral homeland, Africa,
is politically and economically free. Hence, he stressed, it was imperative that
the people should cooperate. Similarly, the Ghanaian apostle of pan-
Africanism, Kwame Nkrumah, who received his post-secondary education in
the United States of America, insisted that the close links between continental
Africans and African peoples in diaspora, fostered by years of common
oppression, should inspire them to fight collectively against exploitation,
oppression, racism, and neocolonialism. The American prelate and civil rights
leader, Martin Luther King, echoed the sentiment when he proclaimed that
peoples of African descent were all tied together in a common garment of
mutuality. Therefore, he believed, they should never seek to break ties in their
struggle for collective freedom. His compatriot and founder of the Organization
of African and Afro-American Unity, Malcom X, reiterated these beliefs in his
address to the Organization of African Unity Summit in Cairo, Egypt, in 1964.
Before the summit Malcolm X said “African problems are our [black
American] problems and our problems are African problems. Your problems
will never be fully solved until and unless our problems are solved. You will
never be fully respected until and unless we are also respected. You will never
be recognized as free human beings until and unless we are also recognized and
treated as human beings.”
Despite these views expressed during the 1900s and up to the first decade of
the present twenty-first century, the relationship between continental Africans
and Africans in the American diaspora has been a complex and multifaceted
one. At the same time, there exists between the two kin groups a close
relationship with deep historical and cultural roots; a relationship of relative
mutual prejudice and mistrust; a not-so-easily bridgeable gulf; and, yet, a
common worldview and a shared experience of oppression, degradation, and a
coalescing of interests that points to a common destiny. It is a relationship that,
on the one hand, has been cultivated by the kin groups and fostered by external
forces and, on the other hand, has been neglected over the years. Yet, it has
437
weathered internal and external storms that attempted to break it apart. Thus,
there abound ups and downs, paradoxes, and inconsistencies in the history of
the relationship.
Until recently, masses of continental Africans were largely ignorant of their
kin in America while, on the other hand, because of stereotypes of incredible
longevity, masses of Africans in America historically developed negative
feelings about Africa and frequently refused to identify with the continent.
Even the small number of the elites of both groups that were aware of each
other, had their mutual misperceptions and a definite need to understand each
other better, one that that was part of the driving force of racial pan-Africanism.
Now that there is a greater awareness of each other (a consequence of the
post-World War II revolution in mass communications, which brought
members of both groups into closer proximity and of political changes that
occurred in both Africa and America), the relationship is one of cooperation on
a relatively small scale. But still, the relationship is complicated by tensions,
imagined or perceived superiority complexes, mutual jealousies, and lingering
stereotypes about each group. These complications are, among others, a
function of the depth of experience, for example, with racism, changes over
centuries of separation, and of living in different psychological, economic, and
ideological environments. They also reflect the influence of white supremacist
values, which frequently shaped the behavior of the elites of both groups. The
continental African's understanding of the African American's experience and
the realities of his existence in America is frequently superficial. Hence,
continental Africans do not seem to fully appreciate the dilemmas of African
Americans and their feelings of paranoia, hatred, and hostility toward white
Americans. For their part, African Americans do not realize the scope of the
limitations of their continental African kin group. Externally invented myths
and stereotypes about both groups, just as external control by forces of
colonialism, have historically tended to limit their mutual understanding and
prohibited effective cooperation between them.
In this chapter, we have limited ourselves to a survey of the progression of
the more positive aspects of the relationship as it has existed especially between
continental Africans and African Americans, the largest and, certainly, the most
powerful group of Africans in the diaspora in North America. We have
excluded the story of how Africans came to the Americas, since that story is a
well-known one. We have concentrated on the relationship from the beginning
of the African presence in what became the United States of America to the
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present, as the following concepts in the survey indicate.
Major terms and concepts: diaspora, overseas Africans, pan-Africanism,
double-consciousness, race conservation, “the talented tenth” of the race, “the
advance guard” of the race, Ethiopianism, Eurocentric perspective, Afrocentric
or African-centered perspective, collective security, globalization,
neocolonialism, nomenclature.
439
Throughout the centuries that they have been domiciled in America, black
people have referred to themselves, at one time or another, as Africans, Afro-
Americans, black, colored, and negroes. Their earliest known designation of
themselves is the name African. Earliest extant documents about them,
including letters, poems, pamphlets, and autobiographies bear such designation.
Similarly, practically all their earliest schools, churches, and social
organizations were also christened African or, at times, Ethiopian, a generic
synonym for African. Having been stripped of their national and ethnic group
identities and renamed by their enslavers, they found it natural and necessary
for themselves and their descendants to designate themselves and their
organizations as African. The nomenclature served them as a communal and
unifying symbol of shared suffering, a rallying point for developing pride, and
an indication of their separate identity and vital ancestral roots. Thus, there is
no period of black peoples' presence in America when there was not clear and
definite evidence of their sentimental attachment to and nostalgia for Africa.
As a result of widespread stereotypes and myths about Africa during the
nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, some black people in the United
States began to stress their birth in America and to criticize and reject the
designation “African” as well as its derivatives “Afro-American” and “black.”
W. E. B. Du Bois, and Henry Highland Garnet before him, wrote that, because
of the constant campaigns in American churches and society to discredit Africa,
its culture, and its history, black people in America “shrunk from any ties with
Africa and accepted the color line.” The terms “colored” and “negro,” by which
Europeans and their descendants in America referred to black people, also
began to be used by black people in referring to themselves. Some insisted that
they were bona fide citizens of the United States and espoused the notion of a
complete cultural break with Africa because they surely did not care to be
known as resembling in any way those “terrible” Africans. Dissociation from
Africa and its fabricated negative and primitive images, which had become an
argument for the alleged inferiority of black people and a justification for their
enforced lower social status in America, appeared to be the acceptable antidote
to the black American's low status and poor self-esteem. However, both
appellations—“colored” and “negro,” although widely used—were criticized by
elements of the black population as being vague, because they had neither geo-
political locus nor significance. They were simply a device by the enemies of
440
black people designed to make them contemptible in the eyes of the world and
to deny them the “true, vital, and honorable connection” with their ancestral or
present land, history, and culture. The dissociation from Africa which they
sought to convey was impossible. The pervasive fact of the physical
characteristics of Africa stamped on black people in America remained
indelible. And so, their rejection of Africa was, at bottom, a rejection of
themselves.
Therefore, the designations “colored” and “negro” did not enhance the
dignity of black people in America or ameliorate their sense of alienation and
rejection. On the contrary, the terms may have accentuated that double-
consciousness of being “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
non-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged
strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” which, W. E. B. Du Bois
wrote, was felt generally by black people in America. “The history of the
American Negro,” Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk,
is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious
manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this
merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not
Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and
Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white
Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the
world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a
Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his
fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his
face.
The double-consciousness notwithstanding, the nomenclatures “African” and
“black” survived the other names by which black people in America were
referred to. They symbolized a psychological return to and a continuing
connection between the descendants of Africa in America and their ancestral
homeland. They helped to maintain the peoples' continued cultural and spiritual
identity with their ancestors. For Du Bois, who articulated the feeling of two-
ness, they meant not just psychological but also physical return to his land of
ancestry where, in Ghana, he now rests eternally with his ancestors.
The independence revolution in Africa elevated the continent and black skin
pigmentation to new heights of appreciation and respectability. It certainly
changed, in varying degrees, not only the self-image of increasing numbers of
black people in America, but also their vision of their place in America and the
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world generally. After that independence revolution, black was seen as
beautiful and black people in the diaspora in America began to see Africa in a
new light and to take pride in being black and Afro-American, in taking African
names for themselves and their children, in wearing “Afro” and “natural”
hairstyles and African clothing styles, and in learning to speak an African
language. Thus, as they began once again to identify with their African roots,
“black” and “Afro-American” became the most popular appellations of black
people in America after the emergence of sovereign nation-states in Sub-
Saharan Africa. In December 1988, the Reverend Jesse Jackson and other black
leaders espoused the belief that people of African descent in America should be
designated as African Americans. This, they held, would embellish their
cultural anchor such as other ethnic Americans enjoy, as well as reflect their
double heritage. Following their advocacy of the nomenclature, they and
several other black Americans began to identify and regard themselves as such.
Consequently, the U.S. government officially also began to designate its black
citizens as African Americans. Today, the overwhelming majority of them refer
to themselves as African Americans and demonstrate their nascent identity with
renewed interest in Africa and African cultures. That identity with the continent
and its cultures is shown in a variety of ways, including personal names,
sojourns, extended academic study programs, and group and individual
contributions to the economic, social, and political development of the
continent.
Despite this trend that accompanied the adoption of the new nomenclature by
many black Americans and, officially, the U.S. government, some black
Americans, including Motown Records singing star, Smokey Robinson, and
Herman Cain, a former Republican Party candidate for the U.S. presidency,
rejected the new appellation. A hero of the rejectionists, one Gibre George of
Miami, Florida, insists that he is not “African American.” He set up a Facebook
page he named “Don't Call Me African American.” George and his co-
rejectionists want nothing to do with Africa. They still perceive the continent as
“benighted” and filled with dark memories of their past.
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The interest of African Americans in Africa is not new. It began from the
inception of black peoples' enforced domicile in America. Their songs,
especially the spirituals, expressed their longing for their people and fatherland.
As already noted, they gave the name “African” to their churches and social
organizations: The African Union Society of Newport, Rhode Island (1780),
The Free African Society of Philadelphia (1787), New York African Free
Society (1787), The Free African Society of Newport (1789), The African
Benevolent Society of Newport (1827), The Anglo-African Magazine (1859),
and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (1794).
Between 1773 and 1790, groups of black and Free African societies in New
England, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts especially, expressed their desire to
emigrate to Africa in petitions to New England legislatures. Prince Hall, a
Methodist preacher, and 74 other blacks sought assistance from the
Massachusetts legislature in 1787 to return to Africa. They referred to Africa as
their native “country” where they would live among equals and be more
comfortable than they were at the time in the United States. Interest in
emigration to Africa, collectively or individually, continued in varying degrees
from the eighteenth century to the last years of the twentieth century and, to
some degree, to the early years of the current millennium.
Emigration schemes that developed during the entire period had three related
motives. The major driving force of all the early emigration or back-to-Africa
schemes was the belief by leaders and participants alike that only by leaving
America, a nation they believed to be dedicated to their suppression and
degradation, and returning to their peoples in Africa could they ever free
themselves and their brethren still under the bondage of slavery in America
from further oppression and achieve happiness and prosperity. The realities of
the black condition in the United States had taught them that they as blacks,
even as legal free individuals, could never achieve real freedom, equality, and
dignity in the land. Had Africans in the diaspora in America enjoyed the
freedom, the dignity, the civil and political rights, and the economic
opportunities enjoyed and shared by other ethnic Americans from Europe, for
instance, there probably would have been no organized back-to-Africa
movements. On the contrary, like other ethnic Americans, they would have
employed their liberties and opportunities to do good and advance their
ancestral homeland.
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A related motive of the back-to-Africa movements was that of service to
their brethren in Africa by the participants. By returning to Africa, the
emigrants hoped to carry the Christian Gospel and the fruits of Western
civilization to the continent, which was generally believed to be primitive and
heathen. Christian education would eradicate, as repeated by many African
Americans, “heathenism, ignorance, and barbarism,” by which Africa had been
stigmatized by 19th century missionaries and European colonialists to justify
the conquest and evangelization of the continent (Davis, 1958). Profitable
commerce would develop between enlightened Africa and the Western world
and, in turn, undermine slavery in the American South.
A third motive for back-to-Africa movements was nationalism. A newly
established black nation outside the United States could aggressively strive to
improve the well-being of black people in America. A black nation outside the
U.S. could become closely allied with other black people in Africa and
throughout its diaspora and incorporate their resources. Early nationalist
emigrationism champions hoped that the political and commercial strength of
such a black nation would speedily lead to the destruction of American slavery
as well as European and American notions of black inferiority. Similar hopes
were entertained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for a black
nationality in Africa which would attack and destroy European imperial
occupation and economic exploitation of Africa. It was believed that the elite of
the Africans in the diaspora in the Americas were destined to lead the black
nation and their “backward” African kin groups along the path of political,
economic, and spiritual emancipation.
To the motives discussed above must be added the fact that the persistence of
the interest and sentimental attachment of black people in America to Africa
cannot be dismissed as merely a corollary or consequence of the ebbs in black
fortunes in America. The cultural pull of Africa must be factored into the
equation and recognized as central to the struggle for freedom by overseas
Africans. Finally, emigrationism was also a reflection of confidence in the
capacity of black people to create and control their own reality without the
fetters and corrupting influences of the white man's culture.
In 1789, a contingent of Newport free blacks conducted preliminary inquiries
about resettlement in West Africa. In 1808, Paul Cuffee, a wealthy New
England shipbuilder and owner, called for the establishment of a colony in
West Africa and received the support of other New England blacks. After an
exploratory trip to Sierra Leone in 1811 and a petition for assistance to the U.S.
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Congress in January 1814, Cuffe took, at his own expense, 38 blacks to the
West African country in 1815. He planned to send missionaries to Africa and to
establish a single organization to represent the “African Nation” in America.
His death in 1817 ended his evangelical, mercantile, and other plans for both
West Africa and his “African Nation” in America. His activities may have
inspired the formation of a racist organization called the American Colonization
Society by Henry Clay and other white Americans. Created in 1816, the society
sought to serve as a vehicle for deporting free blacks to Africa, thereby
removing the problem they represented for slavery. In 1822, the society
founded Liberia and dispatched ninety initial repatriates.
In 1820, Daniel Coker, an ordained minister from Baltimore, traveled with a
group of ninety blacks to Sierra Leone with the support of the American
Colonization Society. Coker, like Paul Cuffe, sought to evangelize Africa and
to promote the freedom of his black brethren in the United States. Another early
black colonizing missionary to go to Africa was Lott Cary of Virginia. Cary
went to West Africa in 1821 to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to Africans, to
escape from racism in America, and to live within a country where he would be
judged by the merits of his character and ability and not by his complexion. The
Reverend Edward Jones, educated at Amherst College, Boston, migrated to
Sierra Leone, where he served as the principal of Fourah Bay College in the
1850s. From there, he led an expedition to Igboland in what is now Nigeria in
1853.
John B. Russwurm, a graduate of Bowdoin College and one of the first black
people to earn a degree from an American college, initially opposed the idea of
a return to Africa. But, by 1824, he became the first of such opponents to
change his mind and migrated to Liberia. There, he served as the
Superintendent of Schools and as editor and owner of the Liberia Herald. He
was convinced, he wrote, that there was “no other home for the man of color, of
republican principles, than Africa.”
Frederick Douglass, a leading black abolitionist, was perhaps the preeminent
opponent of emigration to Africa. Henry Highland Garnet was another
prominent opponent of emigration. These two and other opponents of the idea
believed that blacks were in America to stay; that their destiny was tied for
better or for worse with that of white Americans; and that to withdraw to Africa
after their sweat and blood had built up America would signify complicity with
the racist American Colonization Society and surrender to bigotry.
In the meantime, the condition of black people in America worsened,
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especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred
Scott decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857. By the former, whose
enforcement procedure was biased against free blacks, persons accused of
being fugitive were denied trial by jury and were readily re-enslaved. The latter,
the Dred Scott decision, excluded blacks from protection under the U.S.
Constitution and asserted that blacks had “no rights which the white man was
bound to respect.”
As a consequence of these, a number of opponents of emigration to Africa
began to re-evaluate their position on the issue. One such individual was the
Rev. Henry Highland Garnet. A preacher and militant abolitionist, Garnet
abandoned his earlier stand and began to advocate emigration as a path to
economic and political advancement. Another opponent of emigration, who
reversed his position on the issue, was Martin R. Delany, a Harvard trained
physician. Again, the reversal of his position on the emigration question was
brought about by the worsening condition of blacks in America. Delany was
one of those small but vocal number of black people in America who, after the
increasing voice of the slave interest in U.S. national affairs, the passage of the
Fugitive Slave Act, and the consequent deterioration of the civil position of the
free blacks in the northern United States, believed that there was no future for
Africans in the United States.
In 1852, Delany wrote The Condition, Elevation, and Destiny of the Colored
People of the United States (published in book form by Arno Press and The
New York Times in 1969). Delany examined the true position of black people in
the United States and articulated the causes and cure of that position. His
objective was to induce black people to act upon the remedy. Delany's major
argument was that color prejudice had become so deeply imbedded in the
American society that the black man was not and could never be politically
included in the American body politic. The only way to remove the color
prejudice, he said, was the complete destruction of the identity of the black
man. Since this was not desirable, for the black man to remain in America, he
said, was to consign himself to perpetual vassalage. The only remedy to the
black condition in America, as he saw it, therefore, was emigration to or
resettlement in a country where there was no color prejudice and where black
people could, as worthy citizens, elevate themselves above the status and
condition of a race of servants. He considered Central and South America as
possible sites, then, East Africa, and, eventually, West Africa, excluding
Liberia, which he regarded as a tool of slavery created by the racist American
Colonization Society.
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In August 1854, Delany helped to organize a National Emigration
Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1859, he led the Niger Valley Exploration
Party as a commissioner of the National Emigration Convention. Besides its
scientific objective, the mission was to promote the cultivation of sugar and
cotton in the West African region by black emigrants as a means of
undermining slavery in Southern United States, to evangelize and “civilize”
Africans, and to establish a homeland where black people could fully develop
their abilities and function as a nation. He believed that blacks in America
already comprised “a nation within a nation.”
Delany remained in Yorubaland in what is now Western Nigeria for one
year, negotiating treaties for land for the settlement of blacks in keeping with
the goals of his mission. In his Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploration
Party, Delany asserted that “Africa is our fatherland” and that “our policy must
be Africa for the African race, and black men to rule it.” Black men he defined
as “men of African descent who claim an identity with the race.” The Civil
War, which began upon his return, and the hope that the war would bring
complete liberation and equality for black folks in America, prevented the
implementation of Delany's plans to establish a black nationality in West
Africa. Delany himself served in the Union army and, after the war,
participated in politics in South Carolina during Radical Reconstruction.
The Civil War brought about emancipation and constitutional rights but not
equality and, certainly, not economic advancement for black people. The
Compromise of 1877 and the collapse of Radical Reconstruction had the effect
of consolidating white supremacy and vitiating whatever civil and political
rights and economic opportunities black people had shared after the end of the
Civil War. Black hopes were dashed. New interest developed in emigration to
Africa.
This new interest received the endorsement and encouragement of Edward
Wilmot Blyden. Born of Igbo parents in the Virgin Islands, Blyden voluntarily
emigrated to Liberia in 1850 after his encounters with racism in America.
Blyden consistently maintained that “outside Africa, the fatherland, dignity and
respectability were beyond the reach of blacks”; that Africa required its
children in diaspora in the Americas for its redemption and regeneration as
much as those children “needed the land of their ancestors for their spiritual
salvation” and the full development of their manhood. He reiterated in his
speeches before black audiences in the United States that, collectively, black
people would never be respected by other groups of human beings until they
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established a powerful nationality. He appealed to those he described as “pure
blacks” to emigrate to Liberia, which, he said, needed the skills and wisdom of
overseas Africans in its strivings to build a powerful black nation.
Despite the black condition in the United States and these appeals and
schemes for emigration to Africa, it is estimated that the number of African
Americans who actually emigrated permanently to Africa between the end of
the Reconstruction in 1877 and 1910 was about two thousand, a far cry from
the number of those who migrated from the Southern United States to the urban
centers of the north. The explanation is not far to seek. The vast majority of the
Africans in the United States were too poverty-stricken to emigrate to Africa.
Collectively, blacks could not afford the capital to operate a steamship line to
transport willing and mobile blacks to Africa during the period when few
merchant vessels plied between the United States and West Africa. Very few of
the blacks who had the means to emigrate to Africa were willing to do so.
Powerful capitalist forces and state, local, and national forces in America put
road blocks to emigration schemes to conserve black labor essential for profit
and to avoid the embarrassment and humiliation a mass departure of African
Americans would cause America. Also, fearful that contact between African
Americans and their colonial wards could exacerbate colonial revolts, European
powers in Africa discouraged immigration into their colonial territories.
Imperial policy was to prevent the involvement of Black Nationalist visitors
and expatriates who were viewed as potential subversives.
Interest in emigration to Africa was revived after World War I by Marcus
Garvey, who, encouraged by Booker T. Washington, had traveled from his
native Jamaica to America in the hope of gathering support for a proposed
school in Jamaica patterned after Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute.
Arriving after Washington's death, Garvey settled in Harlem, New York, where
he established an unprecedented mass nationalist emigration scheme, the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) that had more than two
million members. The black condition after World War I—the climate of
disillusionment and hopelessness amidst unprecedented interracial strife—
provided Garvey the opportune moment to launch his back-to-Africa
movement. Garvey fully exploited the prevailing climate. He effectively
preached race pride, the glorification of black skin, the glories of the African
past, and the possibilities of a great nation in Africa that black people could call
their own, and one which could speak and act for them and at the same time
redeem Africa for Africans at home and abroad. From these and other activities,
Garvey developed into one of the foremost advocates of a reclamation of Africa
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as a way of enhancing the tarnished image of black people and their
opportunity for advancement.
In 1921, Garvey formally proclaimed the existence of a black empire in
Africa with himself as the provisional president. He planned to use Liberia as
the base of his African empire, but the plan fell through and the land for which
he had negotiated was leased instead to Firestone, an American rubber
company. Garvey's scheme included elaborate plans for black psychological,
religious, and political independence, economic self-determination by blacks, a
national liberation army, and a propaganda organ, the Negro World. Also
included in his plan was a return, albeit not a wholesale exodus from America,
to Africa. He boldly articulated his vision of a united Africa under the rule and
control of black people.
While Garvey's back-to-Africa scheme was never implemented in the form
of a physical return of Africans in America to the African continent, his
speeches and activities had profound political and psychological impact on the
black world. They inspired nationalists in Western, Eastern and Southern
Africa, including those who thought that his schemes were grandiose and such
continental Africans as Kwame Nkrumah, of Ghana, and Nnamdi Azikiwe, of
Nigeria, both of whom studied in the United States. The colonial powers in
Africa were so frightened by Garvey's activities that they monitored the
movements of those among their colonial wards who dared to communicate
with him, and either banned or strictly regulated the circulation of his Negro
World in their colonial domains. Representatives of the British government in
the United States went further to assist in financing a new magazine—The
British West Indian Review—to offset the impact of UNIA's Negro World. In
America, Garvey increased black people's consciousness of their African roots
and identity and at the same time struck at the heart of the race problem in
America by instilling pride and a spirit of militancy in black people.
Garvey was not without his American and continental African critics who
saw him as a pretentious and impractical upstart. Du Bois was his severest
American critic. Blaise Diagne of Senegal, West Africa, who served as a
deputy in the French National Assembly, believed that Garvey had unilaterally
arrogated too much power to himself when he proclaimed himself the
provisional president of Africa, and that he and his fellow citizens and subjects
of France were satisfied with the work the French were doing in Africa and
wished to remain under French sovereignty. Other African critics, like Prince
Madarikan Deniyi of Nigeria and Mokete Manoedi of Lesotho (then
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Basutoland), mounted vigorous campaigns to discredit Garvey in the United
States.
Garvey's nationalist emigration scheme collapsed for reasons similar to those
that caused the failure of the earlier ones. It attracted masses of poor blacks
who were caricatured as “monkey chasers” and “race fanatics” by more affluent
blacks who, in the first place, disliked Garvey because he was a foreigner. The
latter had accepted and internalized the widely disseminated stereotypes about
Africa and Africans as primitive and jungle-dwelling brutes and savages.
Having grown up learning that Africa was black and that black was bad and
dirty, they cringed upon hearing the word Africa or African. Therefore, they
would have nothing to do with the source of their hated physical characteristics
and lowered social status in America. Furthermore, the movement had no solid
political support in America or base of operations in Africa, since it was
occupied by European imperial powers that saw it as a threat to their imperial
interests. The glue that held it together was lost when its leader was deported to
his native Jamaica by the U.S. government in 1927, after a brief imprisonment
on the conviction of using the U.S. post office to defraud shareholders in his
failed Black Star Steamship Line.
Following the eclipse of UNIA, after the deportation of Garvey in December
1927, no other emigration scheme of comparable size developed. Because of
factionalism within the UNIA after Garvey's deportation and the ravages of the
Great Depression of 1929 to 1932, and the continuing impact of overt and
institutional racism on black people in America, the former Garveyites could
not promote or implement a scheme of mass exodus to Africa. However, the
idea of back-to-Africa did not die. On the contrary, the hopes and aspirations of
a few were directed towards Africa. Hence, since that time, individuals or small
groups, without much publicity, have physically returned to or sought refuge in
Africa.
The Nationalist-Negro Movement was one group that directed its efforts
towards resettlement in Africa. It petitioned the League of Nations for land for
settlement in the Cameroons, lost by Germany during World War I and
controlled by Britain and France under the League's mandate. Nothing came of
the petition to the League. Another group, known as the Pacific Movement,
based in Chicago, appealed directly to the King of England for assistance for
repatriation from the United States back to their home and native land, Africa.
The appeal was treated with silence. A third group, the Peace Movement of
Ethiopia, based also in Chicago, petitioned President Franklin D. Roosevelt to
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use relief monies earmarked for blacks during the Depression to subsidize
repatriation of African Americans to West Africa. The petition was rejected as
impractical. The group's persistent desire for resettlement in West Africa was
supported by a leading racist senator from Mississippi, Theodore G. Bilbo, who
introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to that effect. But the U.S. Congress flatly
refused to enact such legislation.
Additional efforts to emigrate to Africa were sparked by the emergence of
independent nations in Sub-Saharan Africa after 1956. The best known is the
emigration of about 175 black Jews in 1967 to Liberia. Some of the emigres left
Liberia for Israel after two years. Again, since the emergence of sovereign
nations in Africa, a number of individuals have emigrated physically to the
continent and others, spiritually. In a conference in 1970, at Howard University
in Washington, DC, PASO (Pan African Students Organization) and the
Student Organization for Black Unity called for a treaty between the United
States and African states to guarantee human rights to Africans born in the
United States and to grant automatic citizenship in African states to all diaspora
Africans. Similarly, the Rev. Jesse Jackson proposed the granting of dual
citizenship to Liberia and U.S. blacks. None of these propositions has thus far
been implemented. However, in the 1990s, the Nigerian government provided
that citizens of Nigeria domiciled in the United States could become naturalized
U.S. citizens and still retain their Nigerian citizenship, while Jerry Rawlings of
Ghana invited African Americans to become naturalized citizens of Ghana.
Although he did not repudiate the idea of resettlement in Africa as a long-
term solution to black people's problem in America, Malcolm X stressed the
restoration of cultural and spiritual bonds between African Americans and
continental Africans. He saw such restoration as the immediate priority. He
shared the belief that black people had a duty to stay in the land of their birth
and citizenship to wage their struggle for freedom and justice by any means
necessary. They could not, in his view, abandon the nation they had built and
for which they were still making sacrifices. Malcolm also urged black people in
America to recognize that they are essentially Africans in America. He traveled
extensively in Africa, mingling with the masses, university students, and
political leaders, and urging his hosts to recognize that Africans in America are
their children. In Ghana, where he had been provided the opportunity to address
the Parliament, Malcolm pleaded with the members of that body to show their
support for “our black people in America who are being bitten by dogs and
beaten with clubs.” At the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Summit held
in Cairo, in July 1964, Malcolm entreated the OAU states to assist their long-
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lost brothers and sisters in placing their problems and the U.S. government
before the United Nations. His travels and reception in Africa convinced him
that there was, undoubtedly, a reservoir of sympathy and concern in Africa for
the dilemmas and tribulations of black people in America. Thenceforth,
Malcolm became an articulate exponent of “establishing direct brotherhood
lines of communication between the independent nations of Africa” and
Africans in America. To that end, he established the Organization of Afro-
American Unity (OAAU) by which he planned to unite Africans in the diaspora
in the Americas and then these overseas Africans with continental Africans. His
assassination in February 1965 prevented full implementation of the program.
Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael, a pan-Africanist and black
power advocate, resettled in Guinea, West Africa, where he eventually died. He
believed that continental Africans and Africans in the diaspora comprise a
single African nation. Regardless of their particular domicile in the world,
African peoples, Ture asserted, share a common oppressor and common
problems—racism and imperialism—and a common destiny. The final solution
to the oppression and exploitation is the complete liberation of Africa, which
then becomes a land base from which black people, he held, would work out
their destiny.
For their part, leaders of independent African states generally have been
receptive to the idea of immigration of Africans in the diaspora to Africa,
although an October 1968 motion to bestow automatic Kenyan citizenship upon
all African Americans was rejected after debate in the Kenya legislature. Given
the economic and social realities of their embryonic states—their citizens' needs
for employment, education, and housing, for example—and the potential
problems and difficulties wholesale immigration would pose, African leaders
have a particular preference for the immigration of skilled and highly educated
African Americans into their countries. Historically, this has been the group
most reluctant to and unwilling to emigrate. However, some leaders saw no
harm in mass immigration into their territories provided the immigrants would
work hard, adapt to local conditions and not serve as subversives. Other
leaders, best represented by the late Tom Mboya of Kenya, believed that the
African American's battle for justice, equality, and human dignity had to be
fought in America and could not be won by emigration. This stance is part of
the general belief that Africans—all black people—cannot be fully free if there
remains any part of the globe where a black person is denied his or her rights,
and that Africans in the diaspora in America should look for opportunities in
Africa to give and to receive guidance for the collective good of the African
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world.
The above positions notwithstanding, the economic and political condition of
Africa since the 1980s, especially, has not been conducive to immigration into
the continent. Economic and political difficulties and acts of nature have
marginalized the continent, causing a brain drain from the ancestral homeland
to America, Europe, and Asia. This continental African situation is completely
different from the cause of the African American interest in emigration. It is
economic, not racial. The African American emigrationism is a reflection of the
black American's utter despair over racism and ever achieving first-class
citizenship, justice, and full humanity in the United States.
Historically, any aggravation of this despair and black condition in America
heightens black people's consciousness of Africa and a longing for emigration
to the continent. The greatest obstacle to that emigrationism is, perhaps, not the
series of measures and roadblocks imposed by external forces to impede it, nor
merely the poverty-stricken condition of black people in America, but the fact
that the vast majority of African Americans, naturally, seem to love the United
States, their native land, more than their ancestral homeland. Those, for
example, who resettled in Liberia never stopped being Americans. They totally
refused to turn their backs to America and their faces to Africa. Their ideal was
to transplant the United States to Africa, where they could live as a white man
rather than integrating themselves into African society. Thus, their flag and
constitution were patterned after those of the United States, and they referred to
themselves as Americo-Liberians, while those in Sierra Leone called
themselves Creoles.
What we have witnessed, especially since the 1980s, is a reverse migration of
continental Africans into the United States. This recent development is not just
a function of globalization feeding global migration. Rather, it is more the
result of individuals seeking greener pastures and better opportunities for self-
improvement, and refuge from internal wars and political repression. The
reverse migration is transferring most highly skilled and educated continental
Africans to America. Undoubtedly, the African immigrants and their off-spring
are leaving an indelible mark on America's social, political, religious, and
economic development. One very conspicuous example is Barack Obama
(whose Kenyan father had been such a pre-globalization immigrant) who was
elected in November 2004 by the state of Illinois to serve as Democratic
senator in the U.S. Congress. Earlier, Obama had contributed to his state and
nation in a variety of ways. He had also taught constitutional law at the
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University of Chicago Law School, worked as a community activist, pushing
for voter registration and better public housing, and had served as a senator in
the Illinois State Senate. Barak Obama triumphed further to serve for two
terms, 2009–2017, as the chief executive of the United States. His election as
the first African American president was enthusiastically welcomed and
joyously celebrated in Africa, the ancestral homeland.
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The interests of African Americans in Africa were not confined to a physical
and spiritual return to the continent. They were manifested in various other
ways. Black colleges and universities—Xavier, Tuskegee, Hampton, Lincoln,
Livingston, Wilberforce, Bethune-Cookman, Fisk—opened their doors to
African students and provided them the material, spiritual, and intellectual
support and nourishment that prepared them for their future missions in Africa.
John Chilembwe and Hastings Banda of Malawi (formerly Nyasaland), Nnamdi
Azikiwe of Nigeria, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Eduardo Mondlane of
Mozambique became nationalist leaders either after their studies in black
colleges in America or following extensive contacts with black people in
America. Mondlane, who attended Oberlin College and Northwestern
University and later taught at Syracuse University, led a determined
Mozambique liberation struggle against imperial Portugal, which arranged his
death by a letter bomb in his office in Tanzania in 1969.
Black churches, for their part, supported Christian evangelism, missionary
activities, and education in various parts of Africa. The Rev. Alexander
Crummell, one of the earliest black missionaries to West Africa, served as the
principal of an Episcopal school at Cape Palmas. Crummell strongly believed
that New World blacks had a duty to assist the Christian and commercial
elevation of Liberia, which he regarded as the center of an emerging black
nationality in West Africa. In his view, the Great Ruler of all things assured the
regeneration of Africa by working through black missionaries. The Rev.
Edward Jones, as we have already noted, served as the principal of Fourah Bay
College, Sierra Leone, in the 1850s. Bishop Henry M. Turner, of the African
Methodist Episcopal Church, and the leading emigrationist of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, toured Africa in the 1890s. He
consciously sought to promote the emigration of poor black sharecroppers and
itinerant laborers in Africa. Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Methodist
Episcopal Zion Church participated actively in the first racial Pan-African
Conference held in London in 1900 to promote black solidarity and the
elevation of the race.
Earlier, in 1895, black religious leaders had met in Atlanta, Georgia, to
discuss contemporary developments in Africa and produced a report—Africa
and the American Negro—that included the largest body of accurate
information on Africa then available anywhere. African American missionaries
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serving in various parts of Africa flatly refused to maintain silence about civil
and political injustices meted out to Africans by European imperial
administrators. The missionary William Sheppard helped to expose to the
outside world the atrocities of Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo during the
1890s and early 1900s. The resulting opprobrium forced the Belgian monarch
to surrender the territory to the Belgian government in 1908. Collaboration
between the black missionaries and continental African Christian churches
encouraged the formation of separatist African Christian churches under
African leadership. Such churches frequently served as centers of opposition to
both European colonial rule and the ecclesiastical paternalism of the white
clergy in Africa. Consequently, African American missionaries in Africa were
suspected by the colonial powers and white missionaries as subversive to the
colonial order and the ecclesiastical status quo.
The Italian invasion of Ethiopia, in October 1935, roused pan-Africanist
passions in the African community in America. To members of that
community, Ethiopia was a symbol of African independence and evidence of
African civilization. Frequently, Ethiopia was used as a synonym for the entire
African continent, and Ethiopianism as a manifestation of African religious,
cultural, and political nationalism. Hence, the Italian invasion and consequent
conquest and occupation of Ethiopia constituted a dastardly attack upon Africa
and peoples of African descent and their heritage. The invasion sparked off
anti-Italian sentiments and support rallies for Ethiopia in several black
communities in America. Concerted efforts were made to raise funds, to
purchase medical supplies for Ethiopia, and to boycott Italian products. Black
newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, Amsterdam
News, the Afro-American, and The Crisis magazine provided extensive and
passionate coverage of the conflict. They implored the League of Nations to
support Ethiopia on the basis of justice and the international organization's
basic principle of collective security—that an attack on one member constituted
an attack on all. J. A. Rogers, who had been dispatched to the war zone by the
Pittsburgh Courier, wrote several pieces on both the war and on Ethiopian
history, while Du Bois wrote a series of articles in Foreign Affairs on the
conflict, including one on its interracial implications. Prayers were offered
across the United States in support of Ethiopia in its hour of need. Volunteers
offered their services but were discouraged by the U.S. Department of State.
Clearly, the whole unfortunate episode, which really marked the beginning of
World War II, demonstrated the oneness and racial solidarity of Africans in the
diaspora in America with the land and people of their ancestry.
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A venerable number of African American scholars and writers took pride in
their African roots and demonstrated their concern for and appreciation of the
continent's past and the possibilities of its future. J. A. Rogers, in his numerous
writings, including The World's Great Men of Color, in two volumes,
documented the contributions Africans at home and overseas made to world
civilization. Arthur Schomburg, a Harlem Renaissance essayist, accumulated an
extraordinary collection of books, periodicals, and newspapers by and about
black people worldwide. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,
of the New York Public Library, stands as a monument to his efforts.
Chancellor Williams produced The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great
Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. in which he provides a
comprehensive analysis of the African past and a perceptive illumination of the
present condition of black people. William Leo Hansberry wrote and taught
African history and civilization from 1922 to 1959 at Howard University.
Pillars in Ethiopian History and Africans as Seen by Classical Writers, both
edited by Professor Joseph Harris and published posthumously, are collections
from Hansberry's African History Notes, which he prepared and used as lecture
notes at Howard University. It is no wonder that one of his students and
founder of the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, Nnamdi Azikiwe, honored him
by naming that university's library after him.
The most prolific writer of his time on the world of black people was W. E.
B. Du Bois. Du Bois provides us a rich and insightful historical narrative of the
black race in his published works, which include The Negro, The Gift of Black
Folk, Black Folk Then and Now, Africa: Its Place in Modern History, Color
and Democracy: Colonies and Peace, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into
the Part Africa Has Played in World History. In The World and Africa, for
example, Du Bois attempted to reconstruct the mutilated story of the African
past, emphasized the historic presence, achievements, and artistic and social
history of Africa, and refuted with a masterful marshaling of facts the
misinformation of Eurocentric scholarship that Africa had no history prior to its
imperial occupation by European nations. Du Bois also is regarded as the
intellectual “father of Pan-Africanism” (a topic discussed in an earlier chapter),
the belief by certain individuals of African descent that the continent of Africa
is a national homeland for Africans at home and abroad which should be
independent and free under African leadership and that African peoples should
unite in a collective effort for mutual understanding, liberation, and
advancement.
The reality of race and race prejudice in the black experience in America and
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the world, generally, persuaded Du Bois to believe that the conservation of the
black race was a critical part of the only way out for black people and for
making their full, complete contribution to the world. Years of experience
taught him, he wrote, in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay towards an Autobiography of
a Race Concept, “that the whole set of the white world in America, in Europe,
and in the world was too determinedly against racial equality to give power and
persuasiveness” to the agitation of black people. Therefore, he believed that
only black people, “bound and welded together” as a race and “inspired by one
great ideal” can develop the black genius and “work out in its fullness the great
message they have for humanity.” Du Bois believed that African Americans
could never solve their problem by focusing entirely on the American context.
The source of their difficulties, in his view, lay in the weakness of Africa and
could not be solved apart from the liberation of the continent.
Du Bois, at first, regarded the “Talented Tenth” of black people in America
as “the advance guard” of the black race who should provide the leadership for
the conservation, solidarity, and regeneration of the race. By the 1950s,
however, he conceded that role to continental Africans. He was then appalled
by what he had perceived was the apparent apathy and aloofness of African
Americans from their ancestral homeland, while their continental African
brothers had intensified their struggle against European colonial rule.
All was not the apathy that Du Bois lamented. Individual African Americans
in the U.S. diplomatic service sought to negate the pervasive impact of the
European Desk in the Department of State on U.S. support of European
colonial policy in Africa. They attempted to minimize that impact in order to
enhance the African struggle for colonial freedom as well as the security and
stability of independent and emerging African states.
The esteemed late professor and diplomat, Ralph Bunche, was among
African American scholars who appreciated the significance of the link
between the United States and Africa represented by African Americans. In his
role as a member of the U.S. delegation to the conference that produced the UN
Charter in San Francisco, California, Bunche ensured that provisions for
decolonization were included in the charter. Similarly, in the 1960s, Roy
Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples
(NAACP) and other African American civil rights leaders lobbied the U.S.
government to support the ongoing struggle for national self-determination in
Africa.
Along with diplomats, historians, and sociologists, several African American
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creative writers manifested deep interest in and warm sentiment for Africa.
Their works explored the meaning and significance of Africa and African
heritage to their art and for black people in America. In “The Negro Speaks of
Rivers,” Langston Hughes illustrates the African American's search for his
African roots and identity in the 1920s. Similar sentiments were expressed in
“Georgia Dusk” by Jean Toomer, “Heritage” by Countee Cullen, and “Stars of
Ethiopia” by Lucian Watkins. Also, writing in the New York Age, (12 May
1923), James Weldon Johnson articulated the feeling and the wish that “it may
be that the day is not far off when the new Negroes of Africa will be demanding
that their brothers in the United States [should] be treated with absolute fairness
and justice.” The entire tradition and sentiment were continued by African
American writers and intellectuals who, in 1956, organized an American branch
of the Society for African Culture—AMSAC—to assess their African roots and
to educate other Americans about Africa.
In 1977, the late Alex Haley sparked off a great interest in the African roots
of African Americans when he traced his own to West Africa and condensed
the saga of that effort into a book, Roots, and a television miniseries that caught
and occupied the attention of the entire nation over a period of time.
Collectively, African American writers, whose sampling we have provided
above, fostered the interest of their readers in Africa as well as continuing ties
between African communities in America and those in Africa.
In addition to black colleges, religious bodies, missionaries, and writers,
several other African American organizations have demonstrated in various
ways their solidarity with African countries. Examples include:
1. The Council on African Affairs. The council was founded in New York in
January 1937 by Paul Robeson who, at that time was, perhaps, the most
famous and controversial individual of African descent in the world. Inter-
racial but under black leadership, the council had other prominent
members, including Ralph Bunche, who later became Under Secretary-
General of the United Nations and who had ensured in Francisco in 1945
that provisions for decolonization were included in the Charter of the UN;
Mordecai W. Johnson, president of Howard University; Raymond Leslie
Buell, a Harvard University political science professor specializing in
African affairs; and the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem's
Abyssinia Baptist Church. The council sought and promoted four specific
objectives: provision of concrete assistance to African nationalist struggles;
dissemination of accurate information on Africa and peoples of African
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descent; exertion of pressure on the U.S. government to adopt policies
favorable to the independence of African descendants; and mobilization of
public opinion to foster the above goals. The council ran into trouble with
the Harry Truman administration when it denounced the Marshall Plan, the
North Atlantic treaty, and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO). It saw these as mechanisms that would guarantee
that colonial peoples under Western European imperial domination would
not regain their freedom and independence. It became defunct in 1955
partly because of internal leadership rifts but mainly due to the communist
witch hunting of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
2. Operation Crossroads Africa, created in 1957 to aid African development.
The organization was founded by the Rev. James H. Robinson. It is
interracial, volunteer, and youth-oriented. It sends young American
volunteers to different parts of Africa every summer to work in various
aspects of rural development. It became the model on which the U.S. Peace
Corps was established in 1961 by the John F. Kennedy Administration.
3. The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA), formed
in 1962 to promote civil rights in the United States and independence and
development in Africa. Its membership included such prominent African
Americans as Roy Wilkins, President of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored Peoples; the Reverend Martin Luther King,
Junior; and Whitney Young, leader of the National Urban League. During
the first of its series of biennial meetings, the ANLCA expressed delight
over the success of African peoples who had recently regained their
political freedom. It urged African Americans to pressure the U.S.
government to formulate African policy designed to promote the
independence of the remaining colonial and white-dominated territories. It
urged for greater participation by African Americans in American public
and private programs in Africa. In its second biennial meeting, ANLCA
urged America's historically black colleges and universities to institute
African Studies courses and to initiate exchange programs for faculties of
African universities and their African American counterparts. In 1964 its
leaders appealed to the Lyndon B. Johnson administration to prohibit
future American investment in South Africa and to support UN-endorsed
embargo against the republic as part of the pressures on its government to
abandon its policy of apartheid. In 1967 its executive director, Theodore E.
Brown, visited Africa twice in a futile attempt to mediate the Nigerian civil
war. The conference became defunct in 1968 when it was learned that its
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leadership had received funds from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA).
4. Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The CBC was established in 1972 to
improve the effectiveness of black members of the U.S. Congress as a
group in the performance of their duties to their domestic constituencies. It
was active in seeking relief and solutions to various problems, such as
drought and famine, civil war in Angola, the struggle for independence in
Namibia, the end of apartheid in the Republic of South Africa, which
afflicted Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. A late member from Texas,
George “Mickey” Leland, had been instrumental in the passage of an
African Famine Relief bill in the U.S. Congress. He died in a tragic air
crash with his team in 1989 in Ethiopia in the course of providing
assistance to victims of war, drought, and famine in the Horn of Africa. In
1998, members of CBC exerted pressure on the Clinton administration and
the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to increase the number of
African refugees granted asylum in the United States. It was also very
effective in congressional passage of the Africa Growth and Opportunity
Act (AGOA) in 2000. AGOA institutionalized a process for strengthening
U.S. relations with Sub-Saharan African states and provides incentives for
the countries to achieve political and economic reform and growth. It
established a U.S.-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation
Forum to facilitate, among other priorities, regular trade and investment
policy discussions between the countries and the United States.
5. TransAfrica, Inc., established by the Congressional Black Caucus in 1977
to lobby the U.S. Congress and government in the interest of African and
Caribbean nations. TransAfrica was very active on the problems of
Southern Africa, especially the total elimination of apartheid. It organized
a Free South Africa Movement in the 1980s and worked closely with the
Congressional Black Caucus and other cooperating members of Congress
to foster the passage of the U.S. Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Sanctions
Act of 1986 over President Reagan's veto. The act contributed to the
process of dismantling apartheid and to the negotiations that culminated in
a non-racial democratic Republic of South Africa. (TransAfrica publishes
TransAfrica Forum, a quarterly journal focusing on various aspects of the
problems of African national communities.) It holds an annual colloquium
to examine U.S. relations with African and Caribbean nations and the role
of African Americans in determining and influencing the relations.
6. ASA Restoration Project. This is an ongoing African American activity in
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Africa that contributes immensely to document the black presence in world
civilization. The project was established in 2008 by Anthony Browder with
the generous support of the Hilliard family. It honors the work of Dr. Asa
Hilliard III, an internationally recognized African American teacher,
author, and historian who died in Egypt in 2007 while he was on a research
mission. The project was dedicated to the restoration of Kushite presence
in ancient Egypt. For this purpose the project funds the archaeological
restorations by Dr. Elena Pischikova and her South Asasif Project in Egypt.
So far, this survey has focused largely on the activities of African Americans.
Part of the explanation is that we have more available documentary evidence of
the activities of the Africans in the diaspora than we have of those of the
communities in Africa itself. People plucked from the roots from which they
require nourishment and obtain ministration in order to fulfill themselves
completely have a fundamental need to re-establish connection with their roots.
Africans in the diaspora, unlike the economic and religious refugees from
Europe and Asia who emigrated to America, started to do this from the moment
they were forcibly uprooted from Africa. The degraded condition of their
existence in America reinforced this activity perennially.
The fundamental explanation for more focus on the activities of African
Americans, however, lies beyond the availability of evidence of those activities.
It may be found in the circumstances which permitted and fostered the dispersal
of Africans to the Americas. The circumstances include the organization of
Africa as a mosaic of small states and communities which frequently, as in
other human societies, fought each other and enslaved the victims of those
wars. Since those enslavements occurred within the African geographical
context, the plight of the enslaved, even though he was an outsider, a stranger,
was relatively benign. He could be fully absorbed into his new domicile as a
full-fledged member with equal rights, privileges, and obligations as other
members; or he could be freed or ransomed to return to his original community.
Because of this and other practices in Africa's domestic servility, a bonded
individual slave could succeed in life, even to the extent of becoming a king,
depending on his ability, regardless of his prior condition of servitude.
The transatlantic slave trade, which brought about the dispersal of Africans
to the Americas, was an entirely different phenomenon. It enlarged the scope
and frequency of the wars and transformed them from wars of self-protection to
slaving wars among African communities that were already smaller than the
contemporary European states and so unable to protect their members or to
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ensure that victims dispersed overseas received humane treatment.
Furthermore, throughout the years of the transatlantic slave trade, the African
communities were too preoccupied with the task of ensuring their own survival
and preventing their enslavement to engage in any concrete plans to re-establish
connections with their uprooted and dispersed children in the Americas.
Although we are not aware of any written records of any plans or activities, it
does not mean that there was no desire on their part for the return of the exiles
or that the exiles were entirely forgotten. There was always deep sorrow for
their loss and hope that they might return.
The powerlessness inherent in Africa's misfortune of comprising a mosaic of
small states and communities was a factor in the continent's conquest and
occupation by larger and better armed European nations as soon as the
transatlantic slave trade was abolished. The powerlessness was perpetuated by
the European imperial occupation and control of Africa for about one hundred
years, a control which was certainly another form of slavery. During those
years, continental Africans could organize no activities either to re-establish
meaningful relations with Africa's overseas communities or to advance the
well-being of those communities. Instead, the communities in the diaspora were
the ones which continued to seek to re-establish links and to attempt to liberate
their ancestral homeland.
As expected, the European imperial powers frowned upon contacts between
the two groups and were suspicious of subversive African American influences
on their imperial wards. The British, in particular, discouraged Africans in their
colonies from studying in America. The alleged reason was that American
education was inferior. Contact, however, was never completely severed, and,
in collaboration with other forces, bore fruit in the fullness of time.
The political independence of African states in the 1950s and 1960s marked
the beginning of the fullness of time. Its timing during the era of the Cold War
and a bi-polar world, was, racially speaking, propitious for black people's drive
for full political equality with their former oppressors. It provided continental
Africans leverage and forums they had lacked which now, as sovereign states,
they began to utilize to promote the interest, well-being, and dignity of all
peoples of African descent. African leaders began to demand justice and fairer
treatment for all peoples of African descent by their national governments.
Independent Nigeria's first foreign minister, Jaja Wachuku, whose government
had already declared that it could not be neutral on any issue affecting the
destiny of peoples of African descent, reiterated that declaration before the UN
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General Assembly on December 13, 1960, when he said: “anybody who is not
prepared to eradicate that humiliation that had been meted out to people of
African descent or people of our racial stock cannot claim to love us.”
Individually and collectively, African leaders registered loud and clear
protests to U.S. officials during the 1960s against the degrading Hollywood
images of black people. Milton Obote of Uganda sent President John F.
Kennedy a letter in 1963 protesting the racial oppression and police brutality
meted out to black people in Alabama. The OAU cabled Kennedy in the same
year its resolution expressing concern over racial discrimination and brutalities
committed against African Americans in Alabama and other parts of the
Southern United States. The organization's resolution in its Cairo Summit
Conference in 1964 expressed the disturbance of African states over continuing
manifestations of racial bigotry and oppression against black people in
America. In 1968, African diplomats at the UN, in New York, offered Julian
Bond their vocal support and a luncheon when the Georgia legislature denied
him his elected seat because of his criticism of American policy in Vietnam. In
the era of the ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet
Union for world hegemony, these protests had salutary effects on the official
position on the race problem in America.
As Du Bois and other pan-Africanists had foresightedly stated that an
improvement in the future status of black people in America would result from
a victory against colonialism in Africa, the political victory in Africa now
began indeed to contribute to the improvement of the black condition in
America. The respected late African American professor and historian, John
Hope Franklin, has suggested in From Slavery to Freedom (1988) that it was
critical international factors, among them the political evolution of Africa, and
not merely either the U.S. presidential advocacy or the mounting pressure of
Civil Rights movement, that induced the U.S. Congress to enact the Civil and
Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Franklin affirms:
The emergence into independence of the sub-Saharan nations
enormously changed the world-wide significance of the American race
problem and provided a considerable stimulus to the movement for
racial equality in the United States. As Congress began to debate the
proposed civil rights bill in the summer of 1957, the diplomatic
representatives from Ghana had taken up residence at the United
Nations and in Washington. This important fact could not be ignored by
responsible members of Congress. It seemed that black men from the
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Old World had arrived just in time to help redress the racial balance in
the New.
The Civil and Voting Rights Acts, to which Franklin referred, empowered
African Americans to elect representatives to the U.S. Congress. Two products
of that empowerment to which we have already referred include the
Congressional Black Caucus and TransAfrica. The same empowerment that
produced these results contributed to the election of African Americans in
several high offices in the land, for example, as governor of Virginia, as mayors
of such major American cities as New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago at
one time, Detroit, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, and as members of
practically every state legislature and judiciary, the U.S. Supreme Court and in
the constabulary of American cities.
While racism, overt and institutional, remains alive and well in the United
States, there is no doubt that the independence of African states helped to
minimize its scope and effect on African Americans. The influx of African
students, diplomats, and businessmen into America contributed to sending the
walls of segregation tumbling down in American restaurants, hotels, and other
places of public accommodation.
The ethnicity of African Americans came into vogue after the emergence of
sovereign nation-states in Africa. The phenomenon of independence helped
blacks in America to redefine themselves in relationship to Africa, to question
and, eventually, to reject the assimilationist assumptions and goals of the Civil
Rights movement of the 1950s. It inspired an African American African
renaissance, an unprecedented interest in African culture, in blackness, and in
African names and history. The Black Studies revolution and the demand for a
multicultural curriculum and holistic approach to education not just from the
traditional Eurocentric perspective but from the African or Afrocentric
perspective also are all aspects of the African American's new interest in
Africa.
As evidence of the continuing interest in Africa, the African American
National Black Arts Festival was inaugurated in 1988 as a national showcase
for black artists. The biennial festival reaches far and wide to draw talents from
Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States in its efforts to
disseminate knowledge about the influence that people of African descent have
had on major cultures throughout the world. An observer, Don Winbush, writes
(in Upscale: The Successful Black Magazine, August/September 1992) that
“few events can match the festival's ability to teach broad and powerful lessons
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about the heritage and culture of people of African descent and how the world
is influenced by them.”
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The new image of Africa in a politically changing world and the consequent
African American African renaissance have not prevented tensions between the
new generation of both kin groups, especially since the 1960s, when increasing
numbers of continental Africans came to the United States. The tensions could
be traced to a variety of sources. Elliott P. Skinner, late Franz Boas Professor of
Anthropology at Columbia University, attributes part of the source to white
Americans who sought “to frustrate any solidarity between Africans in the
diaspora and those in the continent for a radical improvement of [the] status of
Afro-Americans.” He notes how frequently continental Africans were accorded
treatment, rights, and privileges denied their African American cousins, and
how both groups were often manipulated into believing that they were different
and had nothing in common. Other members of the black community believe
also that both groups have often manifested superiority complexes towards each
other because of stereotypical images created by white people to hinder black
solidarity. Decades after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, the belief is
still strong among some members of the black community in America that the
black nationalist leader was killed because of his efforts to forge links with the
leaders of African states to indict the United States before the United Nations
for the violation of the human rights of Africans in America.
Mutual resentment is another source of tension. This, often, is a function of a
sense of frustration that each group, consciously or unconsciously, takes out on
the other as the real or imagined source of its discomforts or because of relative
powerlessness to effect real changes in the local or global dilemmas that
confront black people. Despite the passage of time, many African Americans
still feel that historically they have been victimized because of Africa's alleged
inglorious past and the role of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade. They
feel the injustice and bitterness of their condition at the fond attention given
continental Africans in their midst. Often, similarly, continental Africans
domiciled in the United States feel a sense of rejection by their African
American kin. Such rejection was manifested by statements made by three
prominent African Americans in 2004. First, in January of that year, two senior
African American professors at Harvard University made a divisive statement
about the makeup of black students enrolled at that university. They claimed,
critically, that the majority of black students enrolled at the university “were
not true African Americans but West Indian and African immigrants or their
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children.” The second statement was made later by Alan Keyes, a former
Republican presidential candidate recruited by Republicans in the state of
Illinois to oppose the popular Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, in the
2004 election for the U.S. Senate. Keyes claimed that Obama was not “a true
enough African American.” He went on:
Barack Obama claims an African-American heritage. [He] and I have
the same race—that is, physical characteristics. We are not from the
same heritage. My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country. My
consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggles,
deeply emotional and painful, with the reality of that heritage.
Keyes' attempt to disown Obama is not typical of prominent African
American leaders. Nor is the attempt by the two senior African American
professors at Harvard University to create a wedge between African students
and their diaspora cousins.
Due to cultural and historical differences, both continental and overseas
Africans tend to define their common problems in terms of their distinctive
histories. Continental Africans tend to stress the system of exploitation, while
African Americans tend to define the enemy in terms of skin pigmentation.
This tendency of both poses a problem for developing a strategy towards the
attainment of a common goal.
Many African Americans accepted and internalized the false images of
Africa and Africans as barbarous and primitive and so tend to feel superior to
continental Africans. This is not new. Many of the African American emigres
to Africa felt the same way. They were frequently paternalistic and
condescending to and exploitative of Africans when they proposed or
implemented their remedies for the economic and spiritual ills of Africa. The
notion of a mission to Africa impelled them to believe that Africa was there for
them to civilize and save with little or no reference at all to the local people and
their culture. Garvey's vision of Africa typifies the situation. It was patronizing
and deficient of continental African involvement. The image of Africa as a
primitive land inhibits the desire of some African Americans to visit Africa or
resettle there. Some would rather visit Europe. The loss of their ethnic or
nationality group identity compounds the problem of resettling or adjustment in
African societies, where ethnicity remains a major force in political, economic,
and social life.
Finally, the unscrupulous behavior of the great powers, including the United
States, creates an atmosphere that causes African states great concern that
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African Americans might take advantage of their African links to subvert
African states and their leaders as agents of neo-colonialism. Therefore,
whether as a Peace Corps volunteer or as a diplomat or a visitor, the African
American is frequently suspect as a possible agent of the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) who might work to promote the interest of America
as a superpower to the detriment of Africa.
The situation delineated above is not entirely unique to African peoples. It
has neither created a wedge between Africans and their overseas cousins, nor
has it impeded their solidarity. The need today is to expand cooperation
between the two. FESTAC, the Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture,
held in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1977, is an example of a past measure in that
direction. FESTAC provided a magnificent opportunity for cooperation,
solidarity, and display of the connections between continental Africans and
Africans in the Americas. On a personal level, the fair employment guidelines
introduced in 1977 by the Rev. Leon Sullivan, the African American board
member of General Motors Corporation, a definite step towards ethical and
morally responsible policies for U.S. companies operating in South Africa, is
another example. Known as the Sullivan Principles, the guidelines comprised
part of the general offensive by black people against apartheid or legalized
racism in the Republic of South Africa. The ongoing series of performances by
African artists in various American cities and the Africana Studies revolution
are additional measures. We have already mentioned the activities of the
Congressional Black Caucus and TransAfrica.
Increasing numbers of African Americans are tracing their roots back to
continental African nationality groups through DNA testing and other means.
Those that have the means are carrying out philanthropic projects in various
parts of Africa. For example, since 1992, Julius Wayne Dudley, a native of
Atlanta, Georgia, formerly history professor at Salem State College,
Massachusetts, and subsequently vice president of the Phelps-Stokes Fund,
New York, has made several trips to Angola, the Republic of South Africa, and
Ethiopia to help build a culture of reading in rural schools. He has donated over
3.1 million books and other educational materials to disadvantaged schools in
the region through a nonprofit enterprise—Collaborative Education with
Africans (CEWA). In the process, he has spent more than $33,000 of his own
personal income in a spirit of practical “pan-Africanism.” Similarly, Oprah
Winfrey, the very successful African American talk show host, undertook a
philanthropic mission to South Africa, where she distributed toys, clothes, and
soccer balls to orphans of AIDS victims. In 2005, she and her foundation built a
469
$10 million leadership academy in the republic.
Finally, there is increasing communication between African American
leaders and leaders of African states for the mobilization of the energies and
talents necessary to deal with the problems of African peoples and the
development of Africa. The First African and African-African Summit was
organized and co-chaired by Rev. Sullivan and President Felix Houphouet-
Boigny and was attended by 1,500 delegates from Africa and the diaspora and
by five African presidents. Held April 16–19, 1991, in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire,
the conference was an outward manifestation of the efforts toward that end.
Subsequent Leon Sullivan Summits have been held in Libreville, Gabon;
Accra, Ghana; Harare, Zimbabwe; Dakar, Senegal; Abuja, Nigeria; Arusha,
Tanzania; and Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. The eighth summit held in Arusha,
Tanzania (2–6 June 2008) focused on topics that ranged from climate change
and energy needs to jobs for young people, improved health care, and coping
with rising food prices.
The African Society of the National Summit on Africa organizes forums on
U.S. policy towards Africa. Collaborative efforts spearheaded by the kin groups
have produced actions, first on the part of the United Nations, to build a
memorial at Goree, Senegal, West Africa, to honor all the sons and daughters of
Africa who had fallen victim to the Atlantic slave trade and who never returned
to the continent. Secondly, the kin groups in Africa and the Americas in general
are demanding for themselves worldwide reparations, including
acknowledgment of past abuses, as part of the remedy for years of subjection of
their ancestors to servitude, racist oppression, and colonial exploitation. These
demands were part of the issues discussed and debated at the 31 August to 7
September UN World Conference Against Racism held at Durban, South
Africa. Before and since then, the issue has received increased attention
although it remains doubtful whether the goal will be accomplished.
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Summary
In a survey of this type it is impossible to exhaust the many issues involved
in the relations between Africans at home and those in the diaspora in America.
Thus, the survey has touched upon various aspects of the relationship which
may lead to in-depth research on those aspects or to the investigation of other
related aspects not directly touched upon by it. The problems of powerlessness
and stereotypical images created by outside forces which, for example, have
adversely affected the relationship, are still with us and deserve urgent
attention. For some black people in America the issue of name designation of
Africans in the diaspora has not been completely resolved. In their view, they
are not Africans. Yet, after globalization, worldwide political and mass
communication changes helped to foster greater mutual awareness and
appreciation among peoples of African descent, the bonds between continental
Africans and Africans in America are stronger than ever and continue to grow.
The reverse migration of sizeable numbers of continental Africans to the
United States of America since the 1960s, especially, has contributed
significantly to the growth. Surely, it redounds beneficially, in several respects,
both to America and to the ancestral homeland of African Americans.
The tumultuous and heartwarming reception accorded to Nelson Mandela by
Americans, especially by African Americans, during his tour of the United
States in 1990 following his release from jail, and Reverend Sullivan's
delegates' triumphant landing in Abidjan in 1992, amidst dances and a great
outpouring of emotions by their African brothers and sisters, are positive
evidence of growing mutual admiration. So was the grandiose welcome
President Obama received during his first official welcome to Africa. There is
now greater awareness by the elite of African peoples of the pan-Africanist
concept that African peoples are much stronger together than separate. All of
these are elements of the progression of the relationship between continental
Africans and African Americans. There is now obviously a sure political base
in Africa which all African people, in the words of Du Bois, “bound and
welded together” as a race and “inspired by one great ideal,” can use to develop
the black genius, to promote the well-being and dignity of all Africans and “the
great message [they] still have for humanity.”
471
1. Why do you think that the African exiles in America sang to the Lord
melodies known as “spirituals” in their land of exile?
2. “Not Yet Uhuru” means “freedom has yet to be achieved.” In your opinion,
do you think this phrase uttered by Jomo Kenyatta might be used to
characterize the present condition of Africans on the continent and blacks in
America? From your readings, what are the similarities and the
dissimilarities between the two?
3. Do you agree that W. E. B. Du Bois was essentially correct when he said
that improvement in the future condition of Afro-Americans would be
conditioned by developments in Africa?
4. What do you consider to be the major sources of tension between African
Americans and continental Africans? How, beneficially, may these sources
be eliminated or reduced?
5. Did Barack Hussein Obama help improve the relationship between Africans
in the U.S. and African Americans?
472
References
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MI: University of Michigan Press, 1969.
J. W. E. Bowen (ed.). Africa and the American Negro. Atlanta, GA: Atlanta
University, 1896.
James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism. Berkeley, CA:
University of California, 1958.
David Cronon. Black Moses: Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro
Improvement Association. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press,
1955.
John P. Davis (ed.). Africa as Seen by American Negroes. Paris: Presence
Africaine, 1958.
__________ (ed.). The American Negro Reference Book. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966.
Martin R. Delany. The Condition, Elevation, and Destiny of the Colored
People of the United States. New York, NY: Arno Press and The New
York Times, 1969.
__________. “Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploration Party,” in
Howard Brotz (ed.). Negro Social and Political Thought: 1850–1920.
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W. E. B. Du Bois. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Towards an Autobiography of a
Race Concept. New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1960.
__________. “The Inter-Racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis.”
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__________. The Souls of Black Folk. New York, NY: Penguin Books,
1989.
__________. The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Africa Has
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John Hope Franklin. From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Knopf
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Joseph E. Harris (ed.). Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora.
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__________ (ed.). Pillars in Ethiopian History: The William Hansberry
African History Notebook, Vol. 1. Washington, DC: Howard University
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Press, 1987.
Adelaide C. Hill and Martin Kilson (eds.). Apropos of Africa: Afro-American
Leaders and the Romance of Africa. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1971.
Robert A. Hill and Barbara Bair (eds.). Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987.
Henry F. Jackson, From the Congo to Soweto: U.S. Foreign Policy toward
Africa Since 1960. New York, NY: William Morrow and Company, Inc.,
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Martin Kilson and Daniel Fox (eds.). Key Issues in Afro-American
Experience, 2 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971.
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Colonization 1787–1863. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1975.
Jake Miller. The Black Presence in American Foreign Policy. Washington,
DC: University Press of America, 1978.
Godfrey Mwakikagile. Relations between Africans and African Americans:
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Press, 2007.
F. Ugboaja Ohaegbulam. Progression: United States' Policy towards Africa
Since 1789. Princeton, NJ: Sungai Books, 2013.
John N. Paden and Edward W. Soja (eds.). The African Experience, Vol. 1:
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Charles Quist-Adade. “Africa and the Diaspora,” In Africa News, (4 April
2004).
Edwin Redkey. Black Exodus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969.
J. A. Rogers. The World's Great Men of Color. New York, NY: Macmillan,
1972.
Elliot P. Skinner. African Americans and US Policy towards Africa, 1850–
1924. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992.
Elliot Skinner (ed.). Peoples and Cultures of Africa. Stanford, CA: Stanford
Okon Uya. Black Brotherhood: Afro-Americans & Africa. Boston, MA: D.
C. Heath & Co., 1971.
Robert G. Weisbord. Ebony Kinship: Africa, Africans, and the Afro-
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American. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973.
Chancellor Williams. The Destruction of Black Civilization. Chicago, IL:
Third World Press, 1974.
Carter G. Woodson. The African Background Outlined. Washington, DC:
Negro Universities Press, 1968.
__________. The Miseducation of the Negro. Washington, DC: The
Associated Press, 1933.
Donald Yakonone and Henry L. Gates, Jr. The African Americans: Many
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and Noble), 2013.
475
Part IV
Contributions of the Black World
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14
Music in Africa and the Caribbean

Roderic Knight &
Kenneth Bilby
477
Introduction
Bring up a map of the world on your computer. Cut and paste the United
States over the continent of Africa. It will take three such moves to cover the
continent. From the Mediterranean to the tip of South Africa, the land stretches
from one temperate zone to the other, encompassing the Sahara Desert, lush
tropical forests, and towering peaks in between. Nearly one thousand languages
are spoken there. How can the music of this vast place be characterized in a few
pages? Fortunately, despite the diversity of cultures and terrain, there are
common features that link the continent, especially when focusing, as this book
does, on Black Africa—Africa south of the Sahara. Certain types of instruments
are distributed widely in this large area; playing styles, singing styles and song
content, and the roles of musicians in their respective societies can all be
broadly stated and illustrated with some relatively familiar examples.
Today anyone listening to popular music with the least bit of international
content has heard at least one African musician. A generation ago, it was
Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, or Olatunji. Today Angelique Kidjo, Habib
Koité, Thomas Mapfumo, and Joseph Shabalala are familiar and beloved by
many. Several books have been written on African popular music. Although
popular music blends features from Africa and the West, the African traditions
have come to dominate more and more as the styles have developed. In this
chapter, the focus will be on African traditional music rather than the popular
styles. Of interest are the cultural contexts for music, the instruments and vocal
styles that typify Africa, and some of the stylistic features of performance.
Major terms and concepts: personal music, griot, group music, listener's
music, polyphony, balafon, mbira, kora, goge, donso koni, mvet, toke, djembe,
inanga, towa, hemiola, offset alignment, call-and-response, antiphony,
polyrhythm, reggae, calypso, salsa, soka, meringue, merengue, inter-African
syncretism, creolization, highlife, maroon, metronome sense, polymusicality,
stylistic continuum, “nation,” collective participation, improvisation.
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Music in Africa

Hundreds of commercial recordings of traditional music have been issued,
beginning with 78 rpm records early in the twentieth century, spanning the era
of the LP, and continuing today with CDs. These recordings represent well the
diversity of settings in which music is performed in Africa. Writings on
traditional music from any part of the world are plagued with problems in
assigning names to types of music. The long-used terms classical or art music,
popular, folk, and tribal music, have all come under fire recently, and with good
reason, because each has been applied to too many dissimilar styles. For Africa,
I propose three terms that have meaning both musically and socially to
encompass all the traditional styles. With more emphasis on the social than the
musical, these terms identify the recipient of the music: personal music, group
music, and listener's music.
Briefly, personal music is performed for one's personal enjoyment. It is
performed by a single individual, singing, playing an instrument, or doing both
at once. There is a large and varied body of such music in Africa: a woman
sings a lullaby, accompanying herself with a rattle made of a large empty land
snail shell which she also slaps against her palm for a deep resonance; a boy
sitting on a platform in a rice field to scare birds from the ripening crop plays a
small ocarina-type flute of unfired clay; a man walking from one village to the
next plays his mbira, plucking the metal tongues for a soft melody; a girl twirls
two dried fruit pods on a string—they rattle and click together in a catchy
rhythm.
Group music is music performed by a group, and for that group. More often
than not, dancing is an essential component. The performance may comprise a
wide range of participation, from virtuoso drumming or singing to simply
repeating a vocal refrain or hand-clapping, but the overriding feature is that
everyone present takes part in some way. Group music events span a wide
range: children playing a singing game, women dancing for recreation to the
music of a traveling drum troupe; men or women singing as they work a field;
family members dancing and singing at a wedding or child-naming; entire
communities taking part in a ritual observance, a funeral, or a festival
celebrating a successful hunt or harvest.
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Listener's music is music performed by professionals, in some societies
defined as distinct from the rest of society because they are musicians. In other
societies no such distinction is made. Rather than stumbling over definitions of
professional, semi-professional, or any other terms that might be used to
describe the status of the musicians, I prefer to simply define listener's music as
music that is performed for a clearly discernible audience that is listening to the
music. For example, an East African player of the inanga trough zither
whisper-sings an epic tale; a troupe of young Chopi men dance a tightly
choreographed virile dance to the accompaniment of a huge timbila xylophone
orchestra in Mozambique; a West African xalam plucked lute player and his
wife entertain a patron family in their home; or newly initiated girls perform
songs and dances unique to their coming-out festival.
Clearly, much crossing over between these categories is possible: a personal
song with a chorus added becomes a group song (the concept of personal
ownership of a song, familiar in some American Indian cultures, is not common
in Africa); group music may become listener's music when a village flute
ensemble plays at the king's court (this was common in the former kingdom of
Buganda). Even though the choice of a label rests primarily on the social use,
and even though the musical variety within each type is potentially large, there
are certain predictabilities: a single performer playing personal music is limited
in what he or she can do; the numerous performers in group music (in Africa, at
least) invariably define a multipart or polyphonic style; listener's music,
springing ultimately from either personal or group music, usually displays an
added degree of polish or professionalism, or perhaps only an added social
importance.
It appears that group music predominates in Africa, for observers and
researchers frequently note the absence of a clearly defined audience. Instead,
everyone is taking part. In certain contexts, however, most notably in the many
West African cultures where a hereditary professional (often known by the
generic term griot) provides much of the music, listener's music is more the
rule, and monetary gain is an important factor. Of the three categories, personal
music is the sort that suffers most under urbanization and the electronic
invasion of radio, television, and cassette industries, but historically personal
music has been a vital part of most African cultures. All traditional music in
Africa is transmitted aurally, with neither words nor music being written down.
Dance has been mentioned in several instances above. Focusing on music in
this chapter will put dance in the background, but it must be noted that if people
480
are dancing, the event is by definition a dance, not just a musical event. Most
African cultures have some dances that are gender-specific, and others that can
involve both men and women, though usually not as couples. Some events call
for group dancing with predetermined and synchronized steps as noted above,
but in many cultures the more common style is one that emphasizes
spontaneous interaction between individual dancers and the instrumentalists:
drummers play invitational signals, dancers enter and dance to the beat or
initiate another by their steps, and the instrumentalists follow. Dance postures
range from erect to deeply bent, with strong foot stamping and angular arm
motions more common than side-stepping, graceful arcs, or turns. The familiar
wooden masks in African art collections are part of the elaborate costume for
some dances.

Musical instruments provide a handle for comprehending the enormous
variety of African music. Often visually striking as well as appealing in sound,
instruments catch our attention first. The instrument that everyone seems to
have noticed first in Africa is the drum, often leading to the unfortunate
impression that this is Africa's only instrument. Drum ensembles and solo
drumming are indisputably important in many African cultures, but in some
they play no part. Among other types of instruments played widely on the
continent, two deserve special note: the xylophone and the mbira (the latter is
known technically as a lamellophone, an instrument with springy tongues
plucked with the thumbs or fingers; the word mbira, from Zimbabwe, has
become a generic term). The xylophone in Mali, known as the bala or balafon,
with gourd resonators under the keys, was described as early as the fourteenth
century by the Arab geographer Ibn Battuta. Similarly, the mbira drew the
attention of the earliest European visitors to East Africa. Flutes, in all the
varieties known in the West—transverse, vertical, oblique, and the raft flute
(“panpipe”)—are also played widely, as are stringed instruments, in variety of
shape and type equaling any other place in the world.
Some stringed instruments, known well from twentieth century recordings,
are nearly extinct today (the many varieties of musical bow in South Africa, for
example) but others flourish, such as the goge monochord fiddle, played across
the savanna belt of West Africa. Still others, such as the kora, 21-string double-
row bridge harp of the Mandinka of West Africa, have become internationally
familiar. Reed instruments (oboe or clarinet types) are rare, as are trumpets,
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except for ensembles of single-note trumpets of antelope horn, elephant tusk, or
wood that are unique to Africa and the Caribbean diaspora. Instruments of the
“rhythm section”—rattles, clapperless bells, claves, scrapers—instruments that
in their African form have in large part defined the rhythm section in Western
popular music, are widespread, both geographically and across genres.

There are very few purely instrumental genres in Africa. Singing is a part of
every music tradition, even if people are not singing. Beneath the surface of an
instrumental piece one typically finds a song; the musician might be humming
it, or at the very least, it will be revealed as essential to learning how to play the
piece. Complicated multi-part pieces involving many players, such as the horn
ensembles noted above, or the same idea applied to single-note flutes, where
each player has only one note to play and must do so in a precise rhythm, are
held together by a song in the players' heads. Verbal expression, if not singing,
applies to drum playing as well. Drummers talk with their drums, not only the
well-known “talking drums,” whose hour glass shape allows squeezing the
cords between the heads for infinite pitch variation, but any drums. Drummers
play greetings to the town square before a dance begins, greetings to the host of
the dance, praise and thanks to prominent members of the community, praise
for good dancing. These are not just signals, but replications of the rhythm and
tonal pattern of spoken phrases. Proverbs or praise names are often spoken in
this way on other types of instruments as well.
Thus, it is not quite accurate to describe vocal music as distinct from
instrumental music, but rather to talk about the vocal parts. A feature known to
many, and indeed widespread, is the African responsorial style of singing,
known popularly as “call and response,” in which a soloist sings a line,
answered by a chorus. Variations are manifold: the soloist may utter a word or
two followed by a long choral response, or the solo part may be long and
elaborate with a short response; both parts may be equal in length and identical
in melody or vastly different; sometimes the parts overlap, with one coming in
before the other is finished.
Singing in Africa tends to be extrovert and forceful; it is rarely timid or
plaintive. Soloists achieve their leadership role not necessarily because they are
endowed with a beautiful voice (a concept that is valid in many African
cultures), but because they are unashamed to sing and adept at extemporization.
Even though African women rarely play melodic instruments or drums, their
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roles as singers, dancers, and handclappers or players of various rhythm
instruments mark them as absolutely vital to the music. On the subject of
handclapping, it is worthy of note that multipart handclapping is typical in
many African genres. We tend to take handclapping for granted, because it is a
component of Western folk and popular music as well, but the question is:
Where did it come from? Hand-clapping is not a cultural universal, and perhaps
the West learned it from Africa.
Choral singing, with two, three, or four different parts spanning the bass to
soprano range, is not common in Africa as a whole, even though it is a
mainstay of the mbube style of groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo in South
Africa. Rather, African women tend to sing in the alto range and men in the
tenor, in what might be called a unisex voice range. In some cultures, especially
where listener's music predominates and vocal soloists are specialists (such as
the famous soloists Baaba Maal and Youssou N'Dour from Mali and Senegal),
voice quality tends to be stylized, much in the way Western operatic or bel
canto singing is stylized. Western-trained singers, hearing this African-trained
voice quality, identify it immediately as the sound of a high larynx. But in a
large majority of African cultures, singers sing with what we call the “natural”
or open-throated voice. The familiarity of this sound contributes to the affinity
Westerners feel for African music.
The content of songs in Africa is noticeably different from the West. Love
songs as we know them, expressing desire, lament, pleasure, or tragedy, are
virtually non-existent. Protest songs and ballads, arguing a point or telling a
story verse by verse, are also rare, although several cultures have an epic
narrative tradition: Fang players of the mvet harp-zither in Gabon narrate battles
from mythic times, and Mande players of the donso koni hunter's harp in West
Africa tell of animals cleverly eluding experienced hunters. In both, rapid
declamatory singing is punctuated by short choral songs at appropriate points.
By far the most common song type continent-wide is the praise song. In East
Africa, cattle nomads praise their cows; where kings ruled in earlier days,
descendants of court musicians praise today's government leaders; soloists in
group singing all over Africa extemporize greetings and praise for anyone who
should appear at an event, to be echoed immediately by the chorus. The genre
can be turned around as well: if someone is more deserving of scorn or
criticism than praise, an oblique statement, often in the form of a proverb, can
be incorporated into a song. Praise takes on a lighter air in topical songs,
commonly sung at recreational dances in many cultures: song leaders “praise”
their friends with extemporized lines such as “Her groundnut stew is the best in
483
town!” or poke fun in jocular ways.
Work songs are also an important genre, usually of the work-synchronizing
variety. This genre is not unique to Africa—other well-known examples are
European sea shanties and many Japanese folk songs—but the African
expression is most familiar. In America work songs were still being sung in
Southern black prisons in the late 1960s before integration. Still today, Jola
farmers in Senegal line up across a field in two groups with long-handled
shovels to turn over the earth, trading verses back and forth as they work.
Mandinka women in Gambia sing as they hoe a field. Gabra men drawing water
from cavernous wells in Kenya keep the rhythm of passing buckets from hand
to hand by singing as they work.
Naturally there are many celebratory songs linked to events or festivals, such
as weddings, child-namings, harvest time and other calendrical events, and
initiation into age-grades, secret societies, or adulthood. A special celebration
in many African cultures is the funeral, which, in addition to providing
formalized mourning, is an occasion for upbeat music, often on the xylophone,
with the purpose of celebrating the greatness of the deceased and giving the
soul a rousing send-off to the realm of the ancestors.

Singers call and respond, dancers move to a drumbeat. Without delving too
deeply into musical terminology, it is possible to note some general features of
multipart performance in Africa. The most pervasive feature is polyrhythm, in
which individual parts (instrumental or vocal) are intertwined to form a
composite whole. Drum ensembles of the Ewe of Ghana are typical: four barrel
drums of different sizes, two types of iron bells (one looking like a taco held in
the open palm and called toke, the other, paired cowbells on a single handle),
and one or two gourd rattles in a net of beads, each play a short, assigned
rhythm, establishing a steady composite rhythm, or “groove.” Variation is
minimal, and the tempo is rigid. Each part has an identity of its own—a
succession of tones and tone colors in a particular rhythm. The composite
sound, a variegated mix of simultaneous strokes by several instruments,
individual strokes on single instruments, and momentary silences, identifies the
rhythm as belonging to a particular dance. Over this a lead drummer controls
the group with a more sporadic and constantly changing part, signaling changes
for the ensemble and dancers alike. A smaller ensemble is the djembe ensemble
of the Malinke of Guinea. Minimally, only two drums are needed: the
484
cylindrical sangba for the basic rhythm, and the goblet-shaped djembe in the
solo role. More typically, two other cylindrical drums, kenkeni and dundun,
complete the ensemble, with two of these players also playing an iron bell
mounted on their drum.
Western percussionists, masters of counting, are always amazed to learn that
African musicians do not count. Instead, they keep their complicated
polyrhythms in tight synchrony by the mere physicality of playing and by
knowing how their part fits with another part playing simultaneously. Despite
the musicians' disdain for counting, we may apply the Western concept of pulse
to quantify what they are doing. With very few exceptions across the continent,
rhythms may be perceived as strings of six or eight pulses (or their multiples,
12, 16, or 24). Rhythms in 6, 12, and 24 are especially suited to juxtapositions
of duple and triple patterns (“two against three”), known as hemiola in the
West, and familiar to most people in the song “America” from West Side Story.
African musicians, listening to the resultant sound of their rhythm and another
player's rhythm and watching dancers' footsteps, know perfectly well where
they are in the music. But Westerners can become confused, hearing “multiple
downbeats” or strong accents coming at the “wrong” place. These perceptions
only serve to emphasize a crucial feature of African polyrhythm: the parts are
offset in their alignment with each other, whether applied to the starting points,
accents, or entire rhythmic patterns.
Polyrhythm does not require an ensemble, nor is it restricted to drums and
bells. Melodic instruments played by a single player, such as the kora, various
arched harps of Central Africa, most xylophones, the mbira, and other two-
handed instruments are typically played in a polyrhythmic manner. Even a solo
song is likely to be sung to an independent rhythm played on a resonant object,
such as the shantu: Hausa women in Nigeria play this tubular gourd as they
sing, tapping the surface and striking the open end for an almost drum-like
sound.
Melodically and harmonically, African music has much in common with the
West. The earliest European visitors noted that singers in many parts of Africa
sang in parallel thirds (a sound familiar to most Westerners from singing the
round Frère Jacques). This coincidental similarity to Western music made the
early introduction of church-style hymn singing comparatively easy. Today
numerous hybrid styles can be traced to this blending of traditions; an early
success was the Missa Luba, a Mass in Luba style from Zaire, released in the
1950s. Instruments are typically tuned to pentatonic (five-tone) or heptatonic
485
(seven-tone) scales. Western versions of these scales may be played on the
piano keyboard (black keys/white keys respectively), illustrating a close
similarity, but subtle differences in intonation define the African versions.
Although Western instruments and their tuning (keyboards, for example) are
taking over the popular music today, the African scales that sound Western
were not borrowed from the West but coexisted all along, as evidenced by early
travelers' reports of familiar sounds, such as singing in thirds, even on first
contact.
Vocal polyphony (i.e., multipart singing) reaches a height of complexity and
appeal in the music of the hunter-gatherers of Central Africa. The best known
are the Babenzele and the Bambuti or Aka. Singing as they gather honey or
edible plants, or as they dance in celebration of a successful hunt, a group may
have as many parts as there are performers. Each man, woman, or child sings a
partially improvised melody, usually wordless, and all conforming to the same
scale. Some may sing one or two tones; others may sing the full range of five or
six. The resultant sound is a sustained tone-cluster; such as the notes B-D-F-G-
A, static in harmony but varying in texture (thickening/thinning) as singers
begin and end their parts at different points and as one melody or another
comes to the fore. This style of performance, built on a few fixed melodies with
leeway granted to each performer in how to sing them, plus the possibility of
participation by all present, typifies in many ways the African approach to
music.
Today, the lure of urban life draws many people away from traditional
music. Coinciding with the emergence of the recording industry in the twentieth
century, the guitar gained a permanent foothold in Africa. Today it attracts
young players away from the instruments of their ancestors, such as the towa, a
soft-toned V-shaped zither once played by Kissi men in Sierra Leone and
Liberia. Famed virtuosos such as Sekou Diabaté of Guinea's Bembeya Jazz, or
the Congolese masters of soukous Franco and Rochereau, are the idols of many
young players today.
On the other hand, some traditional music thrives in the urban or
international setting: upon independence in the 1960s many countries formed
national ensembles, establishing a “trademark sound” based on existing music.
Among the best known are the Ensemble Instrumental du Mali, incorporating
instruments of many ethnic groups with the Mande dominating, and the Royal
Drummers of Burundi—a massed drum ensemble whose powerful non-
polyrhythmic unison sound attracts a wide audience today. Whether creating an
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international-style spectacle, as in the Royal Drummers, or adding dignity and
musical depth to state affairs, as in the Mali Ensemble, these new directions
represent the trends that will endure and form the future of traditional African
music.
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For centuries the Caribbean region has provided Europe and other parts of
the world with much-desired commodities, such as sugar, coffee, and rum. The
wealth of more than one European empire was built in considerable part on a
system of exploitation consecrated to the production of such goods. The
Caribbean, more than most areas of the world, bore the brunt of this enterprise
and was shaped by its demands.
The millions of human beings who were pressed into the service of this
system were drawn from nearly every continent. Whether indentured
Europeans, enslaved Native Americans or Africans, or post-emancipation
African and Asian contract laborers, their primary reason for being there was—
like that of the Europeans in control—to contribute to the machinery of
production. Indeed, the plantation-based Caribbean societies of the slavery era
have been characterized by some authors as little more than artificially created
industrial complexes, held together only by the threat or use of force. Given
such a history, dominated so singularly by bare economic considerations and
populated by such a diversity of individuals thrown so suddenly together, one
might be led to assume that little in the way of a cultural life could have
developed in the Caribbean. In fact, such a view has been common in the past,
and many people continue today to see the Caribbean as a “cultureless” region,
or a region where the only culture that exists consists of fragmentary or corrupt
versions of transplanted European traditions. Even in the Caribbean itself,
Eurocentric ideologies have penetrated at every level, and in spite of growing
nationalism, this attitude is still held by many.
The great irony is that, during this century, even as this ideology has
continued to hold sway, the Caribbean region has become a major exporter of
culture. The material products exported in previous centuries have more
recently been joined by a succession of musical forms, born and bred in the
Caribbean. Not only Europe, but much of the rest of the world as well, has
developed a steadily growing appetite for the indigenous musical creations of
Caribbean peoples. This process has unfolded gradually, one wave of musical
exportation following on another, and practically every major linguistic sub-
region of the Caribbean (hispanophone, francophone, and anglophone) has been
represented. Afro-Cuban and Dominican music, Haitian meringue, and
Trinidadian calypso have all had international success. More recently, Jamaican
reggae has had the widest, and perhaps the most significant, impact of any
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Caribbean form to date.
The remainder of this chapter is intended as a synthesis of much of what has
already been published on Caribbean music, which will provide the reader with
some idea of the variety of musical forms to be found in the region, their
essential characteristics, their social significance, and the wider impact that
some of them have achieved.
Most Caribbean musical forms, like Caribbean language forms and other
aspects of culture, are characterized by a simultaneous newness and oldness,
the heritage of a historical process that has come to be known as creolization.
That is, most Caribbean musical forms are the relatively recent products of a
meeting and blending of two or more older traditions on new soil, and a
subsequent elaboration of form. This creative process appears to have been set
in motion during the earliest years of the European settlement of the area.
Although the contributing peoples and their traditions varied from one part of
the Caribbean to the next, the results were similar in many ways. One reason
for this is that almost everywhere in the region the creolization process brought
a variety of European and African musical traditions into contact.
There were, of course, exceptions to this rule. In places where large-scale
plantation systems did not take root, and where the population included few
persons of African descent, the process of creolization took a rather different
shape. In the rural interior of Puerto Rico, for example, where small farms
predominated and settlement was more limited to Europeans and their
descendants (the native population having been decimated and/or assimilated
early on), musical forms tend to be almost exclusively Hispanic-derived. In
addition, there remain a few Caribbean areas (such as the coastal strip of South
America that includes Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana) where
Amerindian populations have until recently remained relatively isolated and
have maintained purely native musical traditions.
The process of blending began very early on. There exist numerous reports
of slaves dancing, sometimes encouraged or forced by Europeans, on board
ship while en route to the Caribbean. These impromptu musical events were
sometimes backed by European instruments, such as concertina or fiddle,
sometimes by African percussion, and sometimes by a combination of the two.
On the plantations, the initial process of creolization took several directions.
Blending occurred not only between European and African traditions, but also
between the varied traditions of the multitude of African ethnic groups, whose
cultures and languages often differed from each other at least as much as did
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those of the various European colonizers. This blending of distinct African
traditions, which occurred throughout the Caribbean, has sometimes been
referred to as “inter-African syncretism.” The new musical creations that
resulted sometimes owed a particularly heavy debt to one or more specific
African ethnic groups; but even when this was not the case, they often remained
predominantly African, in that they displayed very little European musical
influence.
At the same time, there existed everywhere in the Caribbean purely European
musical forms, stemming from both folk and art traditions, performed at first by
Europeans on European musical instruments. As slave musicians were exposed
to these forms and were increasingly integrated into the social contexts in
which they occurred, a host of new and strikingly different musical forms
began to emerge. In many cases these new creations were neither
predominantly European nor predominantly African in form and style but rather
represented a thorough fusion of the two.
In most parts of the Caribbean, then, there developed out of this creolization
process a broad spectrum of musical forms, ranging from purely European-
derived examples at one extreme to what have sometimes been called neo-
African styles at the other. Each colony evolved its own version of such a
spectrum, a fact that now makes it possible, in spite of tremendous local
variation, to treat the Caribbean as a single region.
Music constituted only one aspect of the creole slave cultures that flourished
throughout the Caribbean region, but it was an important one. The historical
literature leaves no doubt that music loomed very large in the lives of the
slaves. Nearly everywhere in the Caribbean, for instance, slaves regularly held
their own dances—both on the plantations and in towns—accompanied by
drumming and singing. These dramatic musical events (referred to as “fetes,”
“plays,” and so on) often took place on holidays or “off days” when slaves were
not required to work, and they sometimes continued without interruption for
several days and nights. It is clear from the existing descriptions of these
ceremonies that they sometimes had religious significance; they were
commonly tied to slave funerals, and they often involved spirit possession.
(There is also evidence that they were sometimes tied to well-organized cults.)
The slave owners felt obliged to allow these periodic “entertainments,” even
though they feared that they provided opportunities for the planning of revolts,
for they viewed them as “pressure” valves that helped to discharge the pent-up
resentment of the slaves before it could reach the point of explosion.
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The daily work regimen also had an important musical component. Field
gangs often carried out their tasks to the accompaniment of work songs,
performed in call-and-response style by a leader and chorus. These songs, most
of them sung in the local creole language, often served—as did many songs at
slave dances—as satirical vehicles, commenting on, and often ridiculing, the
behavior of local personages. No one was immune to this form of social
criticism, including Europeans, who frequently found themselves the butts of
slave humor.
In most parts of the Caribbean, a grand theater of cultural and musical
blending was to be found in local carnival traditions. These island-wide
celebrations often began as traditional observances of European religious
holidays but over time became increasingly dominated by slaves and free
blacks, who incorporated many of their own innovations. A typical Caribbean
carnival during the slavery period included participation by both blacks and
whites and involved colorful troops of costumed and masked dancers
(sometimes organized in competing “teams” or “sets”) who paraded through the
streets and lanes to the accompaniment of singing and music, which was played
on a variety of African and European instruments. In many cases, such
festivities coincided with brief periods of general license, during which slaves
were temporarily allowed to violate certain rules of plantation regime with
impunity.

It is difficult to find a major island or other territory in the Caribbean where
African-derived traditions showing only very slight European musical influence
do not continue to exist. Whether religious or secular, these traditions are
distinguished by their fundamentally African instrumentation, consisting of a
variety of drums (usually of African design, and most often played in
ensembles of two or more) and other percussion instruments, such as rattles,
scrapers, sticks, and bells (or bell-like metallic objects). Almost always,
drumming is based on a principle of interlocking leading and supporting parts.
In most cases, these traditions, in their general outlines, harken back clearly to
the “plays,” or slave dances, held so often on the plantations in previous
centuries.
Not only the centrality of drumming and percussion, but also a number of
stylistic features—such as the close interaction and communications between
musicians and dancers, as well as the presence of a “metronomic sense,”
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overlapping call-and-response singing, off-beat phrasing of melodic accents,
and occasionally polymeter—reveal the African origins of these traditions, it is
usually limited to the language and melodic shape of songs. One of the most
interesting things about these neo-African traditions is that, although they
remain essentially African in every respect, most of them must be seen as
syncretic (blended) New World creations, for with few exceptions they are not
traceable in their entirety to any specific region or ethnic group in Africa. And
this is the case even with traditions that bear the names of specific African
places or peoples. That such syncretic styles flowered so consistently
throughout the Caribbean, gives eminent testimony to the fundamental affinity
—and easy compatibility—of African musical traditions south of the Sahara.
Beginning with the anglophone Caribbean, we note the presence of an African-
based drumming tradition in the Bahamas, where two- or three-drum
ensembles, accompanied by a saw scraped with a knife, are used to provide
music for a variety of dances such as the “jumping dance” and “jook dance.”
Farther south, Jamaica displays a rich variety of musical traditions clustering
around the African end of the stylistic continuum. The various communities of
Jamaican Maroons (descendants of slaves who fled the plantations in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to form their own societies in the forest)
possess a religious tradition known as “Kromanti dance” or “Kromanti play,” in
which ceremonies revolve around the possession of participants by ancestral
spirits who use their powers to help the living solve various problems. The
Maroons also have a large repertoire of complex drumming traditions (most
often played on an ensemble of two drums) used to invoke and entertain the
ancestors. Among the several musical categories employed in Kromanti
ceremonies—each of which is associated with a particular dance, and songs,
sung both in Jamaican Creole and a number of African-derived languages—are
prapa, mandinga, ibo, dokose (said to be the names of “nations”), and saleone,
tambu, and jawbone (recreational styles).
In the western part of the island, there is a religious tradition known as
gumbe. Similar in many ways to Maroon ceremonies, gumbe dances include
musically induced spirit possession, ritual healing, and complex drumming.
Also in the western area are the nago and etu traditions, said to be practiced by
the descendants of post-emancipation indentured African immigrants, many of
whom were Yoruba. The ceremonies of both groups make use of songs in
Yoruba and Jamaican Creole, accompanied by distinctive styles of drumming
that are found nowhere else on the island. Tambo (or tambu), found primarily in
the parish of Trelawny, is a Kongo-related drumming tradition, used mainly for
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entertainment, that may also have been introduced by post-emancipation
immigrants; here, a single drummer produces subtle and complex rhythmic
variations by applying the heel of his foot to the head of the drum to change
pitch. (He is often accompanied by another musician, who beats the back of the
drum with two sticks.)
In the central part of Jamaica, there is a tradition known as buru (a word used
elsewhere on the island to refer to any African-derived dancing or drumming);
buru, played on an ensemble of three drums, along with scrapers, rattles, and
other percussion instruments, is associated in some areas with secular
masquerade dances and is said to derive from work songs stemming from the
slavery period. When this music was carried by rural migrants to the ghettos of
West Kingston several decades ago, it played an important role in the
development of a new kind of drum ensemble music, called nyabingi, created
by adherents of the Rastafari religion.
Still in Jamaica, but farther to the east, we find the kumina cults, whose
members possess a vital dance-drumming tradition that is largely Kongo-
derived. Specific drum rhythms (usually played on a battery of two drums,
though sometimes three or more are used) and “African county” songs are used
to summon the spirits of deceased cult members so that they may possess
devotees and maintain contact with the living. Kumina, like a number of other
African-based traditions, is thought to have evolved shortly after emancipation,
primarily among recently arrived indentured African immigrants. The Afro-
Christian religious tradition known as convince or bongo, limited to the eastern
part of the island, also makes use of a clearly African-derived style of music.
Although drums are generally not used in convince ceremonies, songs are
backed by polyrhythmic clapping (sometimes reinforced by percussive sticks)
and are performed in typically African call-and-response style. Ceremonies
almost always involve possession by ancestral spirits.
The Virgin Islands, which have been under the control of various colonial
powers in the past, possess an interesting dance-drumming tradition called
bamboula, which is thought to go back at least to the eighteenth century. The
bamboula is danced during wakes, in carnival celebrations, and on other
socially important occasions. Usually played on a single drum known as the ka
(found historically in many parts of the Caribbean), the music may incorporate
a second player who beats the back of the drum with percussive sticks. The
drummer, as in Jamaican tambo and kumina, and a large number of other
Caribbean traditions, skillfully uses the heel of the foot in order to vary the
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pitch of the drum.
In the chain of islands that make up the Lesser Antilles, most of the English-
speaking islands have at one time or another either been French possessions or
received substantial numbers of French immigrants; the populations of some of
these remain largely bilingual (in English- and French-based creoles), and their
musical traditions—even those closer to the African end of the continuum—
continue to show varying degrees of French influence. But in some of these
traditions this is seen only in the existence of songs sung in French Creole and,
as in other areas of the Caribbean, there are some musical styles that display
almost no French influence. This is true, for instance, of the kutuma and kele
ceremonies of St. Lucia (the former associated primarily with wakes and the
latter with memorial rites for the ancestors). These two traditions are practiced
by people who claim descent from a number of African “nations,” and the
songs, dances, and drumming that form an essential part of all their ceremonies
are, for the most part, unmistakably African-based.
African influence is also central in the “big drum dance” of Carriacou, a tiny
island off the cost of Grenada, whose neo-African musical traditions are some
of the best documented in the Caribbean. Big drum ceremonies are held for a
wide variety of purposes, ranging from weddings to ancestral memorials, and
although they do not involve spirit possession, the dead are nonetheless invoked
and given offerings. Like the Kromanti play of the Jamaican Maroons, and a
number of other African-based traditions in Cuba, Haiti, and other parts of the
Caribbean, the big drum tradition encompasses a large repertoire of distinctive
singing, drumming, and dance styles, all of which belong to the African end of
the island's musical spectrum. Some of these are associated with particular
African “nations” and carry religious significance; others are primarily
recreational.
Trinidad is particularly rich in African-based traditions. One of the more
notorious, because of its connections with social unrest and riots at several
points in the island's history, is known as kalinda. (The dance carrying the same
name in Carriacou is said to have been brought there from Trinidad.) Dances
called kalina or calenda have been noted as well in several other parts of the
Caribbean in the past. The Trinidad tradition centers on intricately
choreographed stick-fighting, accompanied by music played on two or three
drums, and sometimes also by tamboo bamboo, a type of stamping tube that is
beaten rhythmical against the ground. Kalinda bands and stick-fighters once
competed for regional championships but, after being banned by the authorities,
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were forced to go underground.
The bongo is a dance found in several parts of the island, traditionally
performed at wakes for the purpose of placating ancestral spirits. The bongo
dance is backed by drumming, and sometimes the tamboo bamboo as well.
Sung in call-and-response styles, bongo songs often include humorous social
commentary.
Trinidad also boasts a number of musical traditions that seem to have been
introduced by post-emancipation African immigrants. The congo (or kongo)
dance, held by people who claim Kongo descent, occurs in conjunction with
weddings and christening ceremonies. Songs sung by a leader and chorus are
backed by a three-drum ensemble. The rada tradition (whose name is derived
from Allada, a major port on the coast of what was once Dahomey)
incorporates music played by a three-drum ensemble, to which are added a
rattle and a piece of iron used as a percussion instrument. The drumming, as
well as call-and-response singing, is used to bring on spirit possession. The
shango or arisha religion (also known as yarraba), largely of Yoruba origin,
makes use of three or four drums, along with rattles, and a wide repertoire of
songs, to invoke a number of deities (known as “powers”) to come and take
possession of dancers. Minor ceremonies are held throughout the year for a
variety of purposes, and once a year a major four-day ceremony takes place.
Yet farther to the south and east, Guyana is the home of several predominant
African-derived traditions. Cumfa and kwe-kwe (or queh-queh) are two of the
better-known ones; sometimes the two are combined in a single ceremony.
These furnish us with yet another example of the sort of syncretic tradition that
has over time integrated a varied selection of “nation dances” into a single
complex. Cumfa and kwe-kwe, both of which center on ancestor veneration,
include typically neo-African call-and-response singing, dancing, and
drumming (played on two or more drums).
The Spanish-speaking Caribbean is no less rich in fundamentally African-
derived musical traditions. Cuba, in particular, possesses some of the most
purely African music in the entire Caribbean. Perhaps the best known of these
traditions is that tied to the lucumi religion, which is derived primarily from
religious traditions of the Yoruba people of West Africa, but which also
contains influences from Catholicism. Lucumi worship centers on the
invocation of a large number of deities (known as orisha) and a complicated
system of divination known as ifa. There is a large repertoire of different songs
and drumming styles associated with specific deities, such as Ogun (god of war
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and iron), Ochun (goddess of the rivers), and Chango (god of thunder). The
hourglass-shaped drums used in lucumi, called bata, are essentially the same as
those used in certain types of Yoruba music in Nigeria today. Also represented
at the African end of Cuba's musical continuum is the music of several congo
cults, such as mayombe, kinfuite, and palo-monte. All of these cults or sects are
concerned with the tapping of nganga, a sort of magical or spiritual force that
pervades the universe; but each has its own dances and songs, accompanied by
several different kinds of drum ensembles.
Another Caribbean tradition, the abakua, must not go without mention. The
abakua, a secret society with an all-male membership, is derived largely from
the traditions of the Efik people of the Calabar region of Nigeria. The society is
said to have emerged during the slavery period among the free blacks, who
organized themselves and pooled resources in order to help buy the freedom of
slaves, who were then admitted to the society. Abakua music is based on a
percussion ensemble, at the center of which are two or three drums, and it is
distinguished by its association with a unique masked dance, performed by a
character known as ireme or diablito (Spanish, “little devil”).
The Dominican Republic also possesses a number of African-derived
musical forms, most notably those belonging to the congo ensembles. Although
songs are in Spanish, the drums used to back them (known as congos or palos),
the call-and-response form, and the wide variety of complex drumming styles,
produce a music whose resemblance to African forms is as strong as any in the
Caribbean. The groups that play this sort of music are found primarily in the
southern part of the island, where much of the black population is concentrated.
Puerto Rico, which has a predominantly Spanish-derived population, also has
a neo-African tradition, known as the bomba. A recreational dance dating back
to the period of slavery and documented in the historical literature, the dance is
a sort of contest between the leading drummer and a particular dancer. The
dancer challenges the drummer by improvising steps that the latter must try to
match on his instrument. If the drummer is unable to follow the steps, he loses;
if the dancer runs out of improvisations, he or she loses. The traditional form of
the bomba is confined primarily, if not exclusively, to the former plantation
region of the island.
In the francophone Caribbean, the most famous African-derived musical
traditions are associated with the Haitian religion known to outsiders as voodoo,
vodun, or vaudou. (Although these names have been used by outside observers
to refer to the entire ceremonial complex, the rural Haitian equivalent denotes
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only a kind of dance that may or may not be performed in religious contexts.)
This religious system is present both in the capital of Port-au-Prince and
throughout the countryside, and there is marked regional variation from one
area to the next. Although the theological system of Haitian voodoo represents
a syncretic blend, combining beliefs derived from a number of West and
Central African religions with influences from Catholicism, the bulk of Haitian
ritual music and dance styles are overwhelmingly African-derived. Throughout
the country, particular categories of music are connected with different
“nations” and/or lwa (or loa-possessing deities); in some areas these deities are
divided into two major pantheons, known as rada and petro, each with its own
type of drum and percussion ensemble and its own cycle of dance-drumming
styles. Among the more widespread styles of Haitian ritual music and dance are
banda, nago, congo, yanvalou, and ibo.
Farther to the east, in Guadeloupe, we find a tradition called gwoka (or
groska—ka being the name of the type of drum on which the music is played).
Essentially a recreational music, gwoka is associated with celebrations of
several sorts, sporting events, weekend parties, and other social events. Three
or four drums, as well as rattles, percussive sticks, and sometimes tambourines,
are used to back topical songs performed in call-and-response style.
French Guiana, located on the northeastern coast of South America, also has
its neo-African tradition, known as casse-co (said to be derived from French
casser-corps, “to break the body”). This is the traditional dance music of the
African-descended creole population, which lives primarily in the coastal
region. Played on two or three drums, along with a bench-like instrument
beaten with two sticks, French Guianese neo-African music includes several
distinct sub-styles, such as grage, le role, belia, and camougue, each of which
has its own dance movements.
Finally, we come to the Dutch Caribbean. The islands of Curaçao, Aruba,
and Bonaire (part of the Netherlands Antilles) possess in common a musical
tradition known as tambu, usually making use of a single drum accompanied by
a piece of iron struck with a stick or another piece of metal. The call-and-
response songs, most often topical, are usually sung in the local creole
language, Papiamentu, and show a certain degree of European melodic
influence; but the drumming itself, often involving virtuoso displays and
complex cross-rhythmic play against the patterns of the percussive iron, is quite
clearly African-derived.
Suriname, the South American republic that gained its independence from
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the Dutch in 1975, is so well represented by musical traditions belonging to the
African end of the spectrum that only the most summary mention can be made
of them. The African-descended segment of the population divides roughly
between the Creoles (living in the coastal region) and the Maroons (descended
from slaves who escaped from the coastal plantations during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries and, at least until recently, living primarily in the
interior (forest)). Because many of their original ancestors were slaves on the
same plantations, the present-day Creoles and Maroons are culturally related in
many ways.
The Suriname Creole religion known as winti incorporates a music and dance
tradition much like many of the others already mentioned. Centering on the
invocation of a large number of deities belonging to different categories, each
with its own domain of concerns (and some connected with specific “nations”),
winti ceremonies contain a corresponding diversity of styles.
The Maroons, on the other hand, can be divided into six different ethnic
groups (Kwinti, Saramaka, Matawai, Ndjuka, Paramaka, and Aluku, the last
being the only Maroon group located primarily across the border in French
Guiana), which are separated by both linguistic and cultural differences. But all
of the Maroon groups are historically and culturally closely related, and they
share a number of ritual music and dance traditions that, in their general
outlines, resemble those of the Creoles. Thus, each Maroon group has its own
version of a kumanit/komanti, ampuku/apuku, papa, and so on, all of them
involving a variety of broadly similar styles of drumming, dance, and song,
ministering to similar gods, and occurring in similar social contexts (funerals,
rites honoring deities, and so forth). But there are important regional variations
as well, fostered by continual stylistic innovation, and a number of music and
dance forms are associated with specific groups. The dances susa and agankoi,
for instance, are considered to be specifically Ndjuka, while tjeke and
bandammba belong to the Saramaka.
Before moving on to a discussion of Caribbean music forms located toward
the middle of the African-European spectrum, I wish to mention one unique
tradition found in the coastal Central American county of Belize. This is the
ritual music of the Black Carib (also known as Garifuna). (The Black Carib are
descended from African slaves who were shipwrecked off the coast of St.
Vincent in the seventeenth century and merged with the Amerindians of that
island to form a new society, which was later transported by the British to
British Honduras—now called Belize.) What makes the ritual music of the
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Black Carib particularly interesting is that it has clearly blended African and
Amerindian features and at the same time displays virtually no European
influence.
Just as each part of the Caribbean has its neo-African music, each also has its
European-African hybrids. These are forms that have their feet planted, as it
were, in both musical worlds and yet belong to neither; and they occur
throughout the Caribbean. The various European traditions involved in their
formation were more homogeneous than the varied African traditions that
contributed to Caribbean music. For this reason, pan-Caribbean comparisons
and generalizations are easier to make for these hybrid forms than they are for
neo-African ones.
Perhaps the most ubiquitous musical traditions of this kind are those that
grew out of the European social dance music of an earlier era. This music was
pan-European, in the sense that it was shared—with local variations, of course
—by all of the European countries involved in the colonization of the
Caribbean. Not only did this sort of music everywhere make use of the same
kinds of instrumental ensembles (including, for instance, violins, guitars, flutes,
and concertinas), but it was also based on the same repertoire of pan-European
popular ballroom dances.
Today, the direct descendants of these ballroom dance styles are still found
in every part of the Caribbean, with names that differ slightly according to area,
as part of the repertoires of local village bands. Whether in Haiti or Puerto
Rico, Jamaica or Curaçao, Martinique or the Virgin Islands, one can find rural
bands that continue to play their own versions of dances such as the quadrille,
the contredanse, the lancer's dance, the polka, and the mazurka.
Some Caribbean village bands continue to be capable of producing less
creolized renditions of these dance tunes, versions that sound very European
and remain quite close to the originals. But what one hears much more often is
a thoroughly Caribbean adaptation that could never be mistaken for European
dance music. Many bands make use of non-European instruments, such as the
banjo (an Afro-American instrument found in many parts of the New World),
the “rhumba box” or marimbula (a large, bass version of the African instrument
known as sanza, mbira, or thumb piano), and various kinds of drums, rattles,
and other percussion. But it is the modification of style and form, even more
than the instrumentation that sets these Caribbean creations off from their
European precursors.
The Caribbean village bands that play this sort of music—a music of
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irrepressible vitality, combining the best of both worlds—tend to be associated
with purely secular recreational dances. However, there exist a few intriguing
examples of musical traditions stemming from these same ballroom dances that
have been wedded to ritual contexts. In Trinidad and Tobago, for instance, as
well as some of the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles, one finds versions of
the reel and the jig performed in the context of “jumbie dances”—rites
involving the invocation of the spirits of celebrated obeah-men (ritual
specialists) of the past, who come to take possession of the dancers. The music
of these dances fuses clearly British-based violin playing with African-
influenced rhythmic accompaniment played on an ensemble of tambourines or
drums, along with a triangle.
In most parts of the Caribbean, the repertoires of village bands are not
limited to European-derived ballroom dances. After all, it was rural ensembles
much like the contemporary village bands—with their predominantly European
instrumentation and their fundamentally European harmonic underpinnings—
that played an important part in the development and proliferation throughout
the Caribbean of other, completely original song and dance styles (ones that
have no direct European antecedents). Virtually every country or island in the
Caribbean has its own version of such indigenous style, displaying its unique
blend of African-derived and European-derived features, culled from the local
corpus of folk traditions. In spite of the many ways in which they differ from
one another, such “national” styles as the Dominican merengue, the Jamaican
mento, the Puerto Rican plena, the Cuban son and danzon, and the Martiniquan
biguine, all owe a great deal to the syncretic music first played by rural
ensembles of the village band sort; all of them are rooted, ultimately, in creole
forms developed during the slavery era. And all of them continue to grace the
repertoire of present-day village bands.
Another widespread Caribbean genre deserving mention is that of the work
song. In many places, cooperative labor gangs continue to coordinate their
work to the rhythm of special songs, often performed in call-and-response
styles by a leader and chorus. Most commonly these work songs are associated
with agricultural tasks (such as the clearing and preparation of fields for
planting), but their applications range from house building to rowing, and from
food pounding to the cutting and hauling of lumber. A clear precedent for such
musical forms is to be found in the historical descriptions of the work songs
once employed by slaves on the plantations. It should come as no surprise, then,
that many of the work songs heard in the Caribbean are closer to the African
end of the African-European stylistic continuum (for example, in their melodic
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shape and in their short, repeating responsorial phrases).
Throughout the Caribbean, another important context for music making is
the wake. Wake traditions such as the Puerto Rican baquine, the Haitian gage,
or the Jamaican “nine-night” (or dinky-minny) display similarities. Among
other things, they share an association with a number of similar musical genres.
A typical Caribbean wake might include, at different points through the night,
the music of a village band, the performance of game songs, and the singing of
European hymns or other religious choral music. The game songs—which have
a special association with wakes but often occur independently—are of
particular interest. Performed usually in call-and-response style (the form often
being dictated by the structure of the particular game), these songs also vary in
style along an African-European continuum; examples range from those clearly
related to specific songs of European origin to others that can only be
considered indigenous and that show all of the more common African-derived
stylistic features found in other kinds of Caribbean music.
The influence of European religious music has been felt in nearly all parts of
the Caribbean. In the hispanophone areas, one still finds religious
“brotherhoods,” or cofradias, whose members perform ancient Spanish-derived
religious chants. In Haiti, Catholic cantiques (hymns) have been integrated into
voodoo ceremonies. In the anglophone Caribbean, where large-scale
missionization among slaves tended to take place somewhat later than in other
areas, a number of independent Afro-Protestant cults or sects sprang up during
the nineteenth century. Their present-day descendants, including groups such as
the Spiritual Baptists (Shouters) of Trinidad, and the Revival Zionists and
pocomania (pukkumina) practitioners of Jamaica, possess particularly
interesting musical traditions. Blending Protestant devotional songs (many
taken from nineteenth-century British and American hymnals) with
polyrhythmic clapping and, in the case of the Revival Zionists, forceful
drumming, these groups have invented an entirely new musical form—once
again, neither European nor African—which displays a certain kinship with
North American gospel music.
Finally, we come to the great street celebrations or carnivals of the Caribbean
where animated music and dance have always been central elements. Today, as
in the past, virtually every island or territory observes its own annual calendar
of outdoor festivities. During designated periods—usually coinciding with
major holidays such as Christmas, the New Year, Mardi Gras, Easter, and a
number of Saints' days—celebrants don festive apparel and take to the streets,
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adding their voices and movements to a folk drama in which performers and
audience are one and the same. These communal manifestations have long
served as meeting grounds where different musical forms normally occurring in
other settings mingle and give birth to new styles.
Just a few examples from different parts of the Caribbean will suffice to
show the variety and richness of these carnival traditions. The Cuban
comparsas, or street processions, tied to the celebration of traditional religious
holidays, have been a point of convergence for some of the most vital Afro-
Cuban musical forms. Among the musical traditions having a special
relationship with these festivities is the rumba. The traditional carnival music
known by this name (to be distinguished from the popular styles known as
rumba in North America, which was actually based on another Cuban form, the
son), in fact, encompasses a variety of different dance-drumming styles, such as
the guaguanco, yambu, and columbia. All of these must be placed close to the
African end of Cuba's musical continuum.
In Haiti, the beginning of carnival (shortly before Easter) signals the arrival
of the rara bands. Winding through the roads and lanes from village to village,
the musicians pick up crowds of dancers, singers, and spectators as they go.
The rara bands produce some of Haiti's most compelling music. Rara bands
use a wide variety of instruments. Particularly noteworthy are the vaccines
(long, hollow trumpet-like tubes that are blown to produce single pitches).
When played in ensembles of two or more, the vaccines produce complex
interlocking melodic patterns, each instrument interjecting its own note at
specific time intervals. This technique, known as “hocketing,” is shared by
traditional horn ensembles throughout West and Central Africa. Various kinds
of drums are also employed, as well as rattles and other percussion.
The most famous of Caribbean carnivals is that of Trinidad, which draws
thousands of tourists every year. The close relationship between calypso music
and the Trinidad carnival—with its calypso “tents” (makeshift theaters where
contenders compete for the calypso crown), steel bands, and annual “road
march” (procession)—is generally well known. But most of the smaller islands
in the Lesser Antilles also have vigorous (if less famous) carnival traditions that
have borrowed elements from Trinidad, such as the steel band, while retaining
their own distinctive features. Almost all of the islands have mumming
traditions, derived in part from European folk plays that have been integrated
into the festivities. Masked dancers parade through the streets, pausing
occasionally to recite passages from Shakespeare or medieval mumming plays
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or, in the French-influenced islands, to sing carnival songs in French patois.
A similar carnival tradition is found, in somewhat attenuated form, in the
“John Canoe,” or jonkonnu, in St. Kitts and Nevis. (A transplanted version of
the latter is also found in San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic,
brought there by immigrants from St. Kitts and Nevis.) These last examples
deserve special mention because of the unique form of music they use: a type of
fife and drum music that was born out of a blending of European military
drumming traditions with the music of West African flute and drum ensembles.
This exciting music is paralleled by similar traditions in Haiti and other parts of
the Caribbean, as well as by Afro-American fife and drum traditions found in
certain parts of the Southern United States, and it is thought to bear a close
relationship to the sort of drumming that was used in the very earliest forms of
jazz.
Traveling along the Caribbean musical continuum yet farther, we arrive at
the European extreme—musical forms showing little or no African influence.
As should be evident by now, many of the African-European hybrid traditions
already discussed contain occasional examples of specific songs or instrumental
pieces that are primarily of European derivation. Some Caribbean village bands
play versions of ballroom dances that sound purely European; and it is not
difficult to find particular work songs or ring play tunes whose melodies can be
traced to specific European folk songs.
Having finished our journey from the African end of Caribbean music to the
European, it is necessary to mention that there are certain parts of the Caribbean
where a strong Asian presence has also left its mark on local musical life. In
countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Suriname—where people
of Indian descent are either in the majority or constitute a very substantial
minority—there exist thriving musical subcultures based on both Hindu and
Muslim traditions. Indian traditions such as the hosse (hosein) festival of
Trinidad—with its tassa (kettle-drum) ensembles—are attended by people of
all ethnic backgrounds, and drummers of African descent are not uncommon.
So it seems more than likely that these Asian-derived musical forms, in spite of
having arrived later than most others and remained more or less separate, will
contribute more and more to the development of Caribbean music as time goes
by.
Most writers on Caribbean music have noticed the extent to which musical
traditions are closely integrated with social and religious activities. Music as an
autonomous art form, pursued for its own sake, and divorced from every day
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social life—as in the Western classical tradition (or at least a large part of it)—
is a concept foreign to all but the Eurocentric elite sectors of Caribbean
societies. As should be evident from the preceding description of specific
musical traditions, Caribbean folk music is almost always embedded in some
larger social context, whether this be a religious ceremony, an afternoon of
communal labor, or a weekend dance where young men and women seek out
prospective lovers. Music is more than mere accompaniment to such activities;
in many cases, it is central to them, and their successful completion depends
upon it.
The use of song for social commentary has been so widely reported in the
Caribbean that one must consider this a pan-Caribbean phenomenon. The
topical song, relying for its effect on such devices as double entendre, irony,
and veiled allusions, is a Caribbean specialty that cuts across many musical
genres. Virtually anyone or anything can be made a target of such songs, and
thus several writers have surmised that this sort of sung criticism functions as a
means of social control. Attempts have been made, as well, to link these songs
to the widespread West African tradition of “songs of derision.” But not all
Caribbean topical songs fit this mold; while some are used to ridicule human
foibles, others are more neutral and serve simply to channel information on
local current events through the community.
One of the most salient features of Caribbean musical life is the collective
nature of most music and dance performances. In most traditional settings,
there is no division of participants into passive audience and active performers.
To be sure, there are specialized roles; specifically gifted instrumentalists,
singers, or dancers are given recognition for their abilities. And individual
performances, or segments of performances, may be dominated temporarily by
one or more central performers. But all participants have the opportunity to
contribute in some capacity. Indeed, a performance that does not inspire
enthusiastic collective participation—and thus does not became “hot”—is a
failed performance. What determines the success of a musical performance,
then, is not only the technical skill with which it is executed, but also the degree
to which it engages others in active participation; the process is circular, for the
higher the level of participation, the more the leading players and dancers will
be spurred on. The quality of communication and interaction generated—
interaction between the listeners and watchers clapping and offering
encouragements and the players and dancers receiving them—is what makes or
breaks a musical performance. This general criterion of collective participation
is something that Caribbean musical traditions share with African and Afro-
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American music in general, and it constitutes one of the most powerful
reminders of the depth of the African contribution to Caribbean musical life. It
is an aesthetic canon, a sensibility that permeates nearly all Caribbean music.
At the same time, within this collective framework, there is a strong
emphasis on individuality. Performers who wish to occupy the limelight must
cultivate a personalized touch—an individual “flash” or elan—that
distinguishes their performances from those of others. Originality and
flamboyant individualism are encouraged. In all but the most conservative
traditions (most of which are tied to religious contexts), improvisation—within
limits, of course—is a normal and expected part of performance behavior.
Variation and novelty are consciously sought, rather than standardization and
accurate reduplication, as is generally the case in the Western classical
performance tradition. This stress on individualized expression applies not only
to musical performances, but also to much of the social interaction
characterizing daily life in the Caribbean. It can perhaps be said that this is part
of what lends Caribbean social life in general its particularly “dramatic”
quality. But it must be emphasized once again that, in musical spheres, an
individual's flare for performance cannot stand on its own, for the power of any
individual performance flows in very large part from the context within which
it unfolds.
Finally, it is necessary to assess the significance of the tremendous diversity
marking most Caribbean societies for the musicality of the individual. The
sheer diversity of the Caribbean individual's musical world is paralleled in few
other parts of the globe. A tiny island such as Carriacou (seven and a half miles
long by three and a half miles wide, with a population of roughly six thousand)
can lay claim to as many as ten or fifteen distinct “types” of folk music, ranging
from predominantly African-derived traditions such as the big drum dance, on
the one hand, to British balladry, on the other. On many of the larger islands,
internal regional variation creates an even more complex situation. So the
individual Caribbean musician is confronted with an unusually wide variety of
musical choices.
This has led to the development in many areas of a phenomenon that may be
referred to as polymusicality. In a musical environment in which it's possible
for one to encounter virtually back to back the buoyant strains of string bands
and the complex drumming of possession cults, the call-and-response of field
gangs and the layered harmony of a Bach chorale, it is not surprising that many
individuals acquire competence in more than one tradition. In the Caribbean,
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the individual musician who specializes in a single form or style to the
exclusion of all others is a rarity; just as the instrumentalist who limits himself
to a single instrument is an exception. This polymusicality of the individual
Caribbean musician can be illustrated with an example drawn from my own
field experience in Jamaica. One Jamaican musician whom I once trailed for a
period of several days moved through the following succession of very
different kinds of musical performances, never showing the least difficulty in
switching from one style to another. Starting one morning by playing guitar in a
coastal mento band for tourists, he returned later that day to his rural village to
join in a fife and drum performance, playing the leading drum, and then, in the
evening, added his voice to a Revival church chorus. The next day he treated a
group of friends to an impromptu performance of British ballads,
accompanying himself on guitar, and late that night, played guitar and led a
number of religious songs at a “nine night” (wake). On the afternoon of the
third day, I found him jamming on electric bass with a local reggae band, and
by the early evening, he was contributing some excellent banjo playing to a
village quadrille dance. The next morning found him on the coast entertaining
the tourists again, this time on harmonica, and, when I left him that evening, he
was on his way to a Kumina ceremony, where he intended to sit in on the
supporting drum. While his musical schedule during these few days may have
been more fully packed than usual, the easy movement between styles was not
unusual for this man; nor was the wide scope of his musicianship extraordinary
for a rural Jamaican musician.
There is a temptation to see Caribbean musical life, because of its great
diversity, as being made up of a rich but incoherent patchwork of different
traditions. However, Caribbean musical cultures—like Caribbean languages
and Caribbean cultures more generally—are perhaps better represented as
integrated wholes than as jumbled assortments of separate and competing
cultural traditions. The African-European musical spectrum displayed by each
Caribbean country of the islands belongs to its entire population, with the
exception perhaps of small European-oriented elites. The polymusical
individual—and almost all individuals are polymusical to at least some degree
—moves across the stylistic continuum with no sense of discomfort or
disjointedness.
The polymusicality of individual Caribbean folk musicians, who sample
freely from the musical spectrum without regard for the historical provenance
of specific styles, provides the strongest evidence of the integration of
Caribbean musical cultures. I offer another example from my own experience.
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When making a study of music of the Jamaican Maroons, who have a
reputation for being the most culturally African of all Jamaicans, I discovered
that one of the most knowledgeable and respected Kromanti drummers was also
the best harmonica player in the area. His lively performances of jigs, reels, and
the various figures of the quadrille were without equal and would have stood
up to the best that the British Isles themselves have to offer. To suggest to this
man that this music, in which he took such pleasure, was any less “his” than
were the Kromanti drumming styles that he had also mastered would have been
a patent absurdity. There was nothing in the least “schizoid” or incongruous
about the way this individual had lent his talents to the whole range of Jamaican
music. The two traditions, though tied to very different social contexts,
belonged in equal measure to the integrated creole culture that had been handed
down to him. Although he might divide his musical world into parts, he would
have no doubt that his musicianship was equal to the demands of all of them.
With its wealth of coexisting musical styles, its history of blending and
adaptation, and its polymusical citizenry, the Caribbean region has produced a
series of particularly “open” musical cultures. Polymusical individuals in the
Caribbean most often have no scruples about using what they have learned
from one musical tradition to add something new to another. Moreover, the
“typical” Caribbean citizen—regardless of class or level of formal education—
shows a degree of musical sophistication and an appreciation for musical
variety and innovation that are rare among North American and European
audiences. Caribbean musical cultures, with their emphases on individual
expressiveness, collective interaction, improvisation, and experimentation, are
distinguished by their receptivity to new combinations of ideas and influences.
Borrowing and blending between traditions, after all, has been occurring for
several centuries; it is a part of the Caribbean heritage. Whatever else may be
said about Caribbean music, it remains always ripe for change.

When speaking of Caribbean popular music, one thinks of contemporary,
“modern” styles such as Jamaican reggae, Trinidadian soca (or soka), or the
modern konpa of Haiti and the cadence (or kadans) of the French Creole-
speaking islands of the Lesser Antilles. These are the sounds of the “new
Caribbean,” the Caribbean of oversized urban sprawls and rampant migration,
of transistor radios and electrified sound systems. They are the sounds of music
businesses, with recording studios and professional musicians. But one must be
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careful not to make too sharp a distinction between popular and folk music. In
the Caribbean, the two have never really been severed. In spite of
commercialization, Caribbean popular music styles can be considered urban
folk traditions. Still largely orally transmitted, they continue to display many of
the essential features of the rural traditions that have long fed into them.
It was inevitable that such popular styles should have sprung up throughout
the Caribbean under the stimulus of urbanization, large-scale migration, and the
spread of new technologies. The Caribbean penchant for musical
experimentation and the receptivity to new ideas ensured that individual
musicians would take full advantage of the new musical opportunities and
influences to which these forces increasingly exposed them. The age-old
process of blending and adaptation continued to give birth to new forms, which
have since been further modified to create still other varieties. Yet, through all
these changes, popular styles have remained firmly rooted in folk traditions,
often passing through phases in which contributions from older, rural forms
have surfaced (or resurfaced) with particular vigor. The basic outlines of this
process can be traced for several of the better-known popular music forms,
although the evolutionary paths of most styles have yet to be documented in
detail.
Take, for instance, Trinidad. The island's first urban popular music form, the
famous calypso (or kaiso), grew up primarily in and around the capital of Port-
of-Spain, where the variegated folk traditions of the countryside had long been
converging. It is impossible to pinpoint exactly when the musical style today
recognized as calypso emerged. But one thing that is clear is that it went
through a steady succession of transformations before taking on its present-day
form. It appears that the origins of calypso are to be found in a number of folk
traditions, such as the bamboula and bealir (or bele), which go back to the
nineteenth century or before, making it one of the oldest Caribbean popular
music styles. Apparently, the earliest songs were primarily in French Creole,
but English was in use by the beginning of this century. Early on, a relationship
was forged with the annual carnival, and so calypso acquired an association
with the drum rhythms of the kalinda stick-fighting tradition. But it was not
long before stringed instruments (such as guitar and cuatro) were adopted, and
along with these, a number of stylistic influences from the dance music of
nearby Venezuela. By the 1920s and 1930s, when calypso began to be
commercialized and to achieve its first international exposure, the music of the
calypso tents (where calypsonians preformed and competed during carnival)
was being played on guitars, bass, trumpets, saxophones, clarinets, and a
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number of other instruments. At the same time, there was also the calypso
dancing of the streets, the parades or “road marches,” that was backed by the
rhythms of kalinda and tamboo-bamboo. When the tamboo-bamboo (stamping
tubes made of lengths of bamboo) were prohibited as dangerous weapons
during the 1930s, urban musicians responded by coming up with an entirely
new instrument to replace them: the tuned steel pan, fashioned from discarded
oil drums. This new instrument, in turn, sired a profusion of new techniques
and sub-styles, which continued to feed into the larger calypso tradition.
The innovations that have figured so greatly in the development of
Trinidadian popular music have not always been the result of new introductions
from outside. Trinidad's own folk musical continuum still furnishes studio
musicians—many of whom are conversant with the older musical forms—with
a well-stocked reservoir of local styles into which they continue to dip from
time to time. The currently reigning offshoot of the calypso tradition, a style
known as soca, provides a good example of this. According to several of the
musicians involved in its popularization, the soca “beat” was first developed
during the 1960s by studio musicians who, while experimenting, used the trap
drums to fuse a number of rhythmic patterns derived from the shango cults and
the hosse drumming tradition with the current kaiso/calypso style (by then
played on amplified instruments, such as electric piano, guitar, bass, organ, and
so forth). Elements of North American funk were added as well. The result was
at first called the “rotto beat” or “rooto beat,” and for some time it received
little attention. During the 1970s, however, it resurfaced as the “soca beat” and
contributed to the production of some of Trinidad's most vital music to date.
Today, it continues to flourish.
Jamaican popular music, though much younger, has an equally convoluted
history. As early as the 1940s and 1950s, a tiny recording industry had already
begun to operate in Kingston. Local mento compositions, often influenced by
the then popular Trinidadian calypso, were pressed and distributed on a small
scale. This urbanized form of the mento achieved some popularity for a number
of years, but it was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s that a completely
original new style known as ska burst upon the scene. Ska was born when urban
Jamaican musicians began to play North American rhythm and blues, a style
that had penetrated the island via imported records and radio broadcasts from
Miami and other parts of the Southern United States. Whether consciously or
not, these musicians began to graft certain rhythmic patterns derived from the
music of the Revival cults and other traditional forms onto the basic rhythm and
blues framework, and a completely new form of music gradually emerged.
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Within a few years, the ska had slowed down its tempo and absorbed a number
of further influences from North American “soul” music and other sources; in
its new incarnation, it was known as “rock-steady.” Shortly after this, yet
another new style known as reggae cropped up. Reggae retained the basic
rhythmic structure of the previous popular styles but showed the influence of
both mento and the Rastafarian drumming tradition known as nyabingi. (The
liaison between popular musicians and the Rastafarian movement had actually
begun back during the ska era.)
Since the late 1960s, reggae has remained the dominant popular style in
Jamaica, but it has passed through countless trends and absorbed numerous new
influences. Reggae covers of the latest North American popular hits coexist
alongside traditional Rastafarian religious chants set to a reggae beat. Romantic
ballads alternate with message songs, some earnest and some humorous,
dealing with the latest local and international political events. A profusion of
sub-styles—“rockers,” “lover's rock,” “militant,” “dancehall,” “ragga,” and so
forth—continue to pop up and to lead to further innovations. And the Caribbean
penchant for variation and experimentation has been canonized in the Jamaican
concept of “version”: the practice of including on the flip side of a record a
modified mix (often with vocal tracks removed) of the same song featured on
the A side. This practice developed during the 1960s, when local disk jockeys
began to “toast”—to improvise extended “raps”—over the sounds of the latest
hits (thus the need for “versions” of these tunes minus the vocal tracks). Many
North American and European record buyers interpreted this custom
negatively, assuming that it was motivated solely by a desire among producers
to take in as much money as possible by delivering a final product that cost less
to produce. However, this practice helped spawn not only vital and still thriving
deejaying tradition, but also a very important new sub-style known as “dub,” in
which local recording engineers and studio musicians used “version” sides to
experiment with new sound recording technologies.
Some of the most important Caribbean music has grown up outside of the
Caribbean, among immigrant communities in Europe and North America.
Large-scale emigration has long been a feature of Caribbean life. For several
centuries, movements of people from one part of the region to another have
been resulting in inter-island musical cross-fertilization. But the last few
decades have seen emigration—particularly to urban centers to the north—on
an unprecedented scale. Sizeable Caribbean minority populations now exist in
cities such as London, Paris, Amsterdam, Toronto, New York, and Miami, to
name just a few. Caribbean music remains as important as ever in the lives of
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these immigrant communities. And so the creolization process continues both at
home and abroad. In London, young Jamaicans, Guyanese, Trinidadians, and
Grenadians—as well as British-born children of immigrants from these and
other parts of the Caribbean—have joined forces to create a new, and still
evolving, style of “Brit reggae,” reflecting their experiences in the metropole.
In Paris, French Antilleans and their children have begun to cross reggae with
their own styles of dance music. In London, New York, Toronto, and other
cities, there are huge annual Caribbean carnivals rivaling those occurring in the
Caribbean itself. The constant flow of people back and forth between the
islands and the metropolitan immigrant communities ensures that the latest
musical developments on either side of the ocean are rapidly circulated to all
parts of the diaspora and added to the larger pool of musical resources.
New York's very large Latin community has made that city one of the great
world centers of Caribbean music. So-called salsa—the name began to be
applied to “hot” New York Afro-Latin dance music in the late 1960s/early
1970s—is but one of the more recent developments in a long line of musical
innovations stretching back several decades. Several volumes could be
dedicated to this branch of Caribbean popular music by itself. In typically
Caribbean fashion, New York Latin musicians have made use of the full range
of musical resources available to them. Although much of New York Latin
music is strongly based on Cuban folk and popular traditions (from all points
on the spectrum), influences from Puerto Rican, Dominican, Panamanian,
Colombian, and other varieties of music have surfaced time and again in the
many stylistic permutations that the New York scene has produced.
Thus, Caribbean music can no longer be defined by geographical boundaries.
Yet, wherever it is produced, it continues to be resolutely Caribbean, not only
in its approach to structuring sound but also in its social dimensions. Collective
participation remains a cornerstone of popular music performances. Although
the line between performers and audience has become much more sharply
drawn than in traditional contexts, a contemporary concert or dance is still not
considered really satisfying unless it manages to elicit lively interaction
between musicians, dancers, and listeners. Even Jamaican reggae—which until
recently has been primarily a studio music, with performances by live bands
being the exception rather than the rule—has always had its deejay tradition, in
which the recorded output of the studios is reclaimed by live performers and
made the basis of huge collective manifestations (“sound system” dances).
The genre of topical song—so important in Caribbean folk music—has never
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been healthier. The bustle and stepped-up pace of urban life and the experience
of emigration have added new grist to the songwriter's mill. The frustrations,
fears, hopes, and joys of life in the contemporary Caribbean—as well as in the
diaspora—are given voice more clearly than anywhere else in popular song.
Much of the recent popular music issuing from Haiti is dominated by images of
New York City, Miami, and laja (l'argent or money). Jamaican reggae songs
continue to protest as strongly as ever against injustice and to document the
grinding poverty, overcrowding, and political violence that plague the lives of
the urban ghetto dwellers. Trinidadian soca numbers persist in subjecting the
latest political and social developments to the incisive critiques and slave wit of
the “Kaisonians.” And the revolution in Grenada was chronicled by local
calypsos. Indeed, the contemporary topical song provides much of the
Caribbean with its most effective news medium. (This takes on special
significance when it is recalled that levels of literacy vary a great deal from one
part of the Caribbean to the next.) Few of those current events that matter most
to the man in the street escape the scrutiny of popular songwriters. In many
Caribbean societies, then, the pulse of contemporary life can best be captured in
local popular music. No one understands this better than Caribbean politicians,
who have often felt compelled to monitor closely the latest sounds, and who
have not always been above dabbling in the local genre and attempting to
manipulate it for their own ends.
Caribbean popular musicians continue to be distinguished by their
polymusicality. Many of the top salsa musicians are devotees of santeria and
double as drummers, percussionists, and singers in religious ceremonies. The
names of top Jamaican reggae musicians can often be found in small print on
the jackets of local Revivalist-tinged gospel recordings (this in spite of the fact
that many of them are Rastafarians and are vocal in their rejection of
Christianity). Some of the leading Trinidadian soca musicians are familiar with
the drumming styles of the shango and rada cults. And many French Antillean
popular musicians are regular participants in gwoka drumming performances.
One does not have to search very hard to find examples of the resurfacing of
traditional influences in popular music. New York Latin music, for example,
has gone through several periods dominated by new introductions from
traditional sources. The mambo, which grew up in the 1940s and became a fad
in the 1950s, stemmed in part from Afro-Cuban religious traditions. Around the
same time, traditional charanga music—an older, less African-sounding form
of Cuban music played by ensembles characteristically consisting of flute,
fiddles, bass, and piano—experienced renewed popularity, with the
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introduction of the cha-cha-cha. The pachanga rage the followed a few years
later came about as the result of the fusing of rhythmic elements taken from an
Afro-Cuban dance celebration known as the bembe with current popular dance
styles. More recently, a number of salsa musicians have begun to introduce the
sacred bata drums of the Afro-Cuban lucumi religion, along with their
distinctive rhythms, into popular music recordings. And in Haiti, popular
musicians have drawn on the neo-African music of voodoo and rara, creating a
new genre known as mizik rasin (meaning “roots music”).
Borrowing from traditional sources, however, is not limited to such
spectacular examples as these; it occurs continually, on a more modest scale, as
a result of the input of polymusical popular artists who, whether intentionally or
not, bring their familiarity with folk traditions to bear in the recording studio.
And so subtle references to traditional music forms—stylistic quotations—are a
regular feature of contemporary popular forms. In the latest Jamaican reggae,
dancehall, and “dub” pieces, the attuned ear can occasionally separate out
mento-style guitar strumming, “John Canoe”-influenced drum rolls, and
Revival-like voicings.
Then there is the other side of Caribbean popular music, which is outward-
looking, which thrives on novelty, experimentation, freshness, and innovation,
the side that remains always open to new influences from outside. One might
even go so far as to say that many popular musicians subscribe to a “mingling
ethic”—a conviction that to absorb new, external influences and create new
blends is in itself normal and good, part of a natural process of musical growth.
The record abounds with examples of new musical forms that have come into
being when this attitude has been put into action. North American readers may
recall, for instance, the “Latin bugalu,” a blend of the New York Cuban mambo
with black rhythm and blues, which managed to find a place on the AM radio
play lists during a brief period in the 1960s. Or there is the spouge of Barbados,
a new style that arose during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when local
musicians began to remake Jamaican ska by merging it with their own
traditions, Jamaican reggae is itself a product of such fusion, resulting from the
blending of North American rhythm and blues with indigenous influences. The
process continues in all parts of the Caribbean. Musicians in Martinique and
Guadeloupe continue to build upon the new Antillean fusing called zouk, which
achieved great popularity in the Caribbean and beyond during the 1980s. And
at this moment, Trinidad “kaisonians” and popular musicians in the Lesser
Antilles are in the process of breathing life into new musical varieties blending
soca, zouk, and reggae. Some French Antillean musicians have been heavily
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influenced by salsa; one can sometimes detect Afro-Cuban-style guajeos
(repeating melodic riffs providing a base for instrumental soloing) in popular
cadence and zouk recordings. These few examples represent only the tip of an
enormous iceberg. In fact, all of the older popular styles that are still in use—
such as the Trinidadian calypso, the Cuban son, the Suriname kaseko, the
Haitian meringue, and the Dominican merengue—are in their modern
incarnations very different from what they used to be only a few decades ago,
largely because they have been open to outside influences (changes in
instrumentation, amplification, new stylistic introductions, and so forth).
Musical blending and cross-fertilization are of course not unique to the
Caribbean. But there are few other regions where such a multiplicity of diverse
musical currents have been packed into such close quarters; few other areas
have been swept by such a whirlwind of musical interaction or have given rise
to so many fresh and original local musical expressions. Long before “fusion”
became a self-conscious jazz fad in the 1970s, all that this term implies had
already been successfully achieved a thousand times over in the Caribbean.
And yet, in spite of its openness to currents originating elsewhere, Caribbean
popular music remains anchored to local life; it continues to express the
essential concerns of those by whom and for whom it is made. No matter how
often they are temporarily co-opted by commercial or other interests, the
various branches of the Caribbean musical family always manage, in the end, to
stay in close touch with their constituencies. This is one of the great strengths
of Caribbean popular music and part of what ensures its continuing vitality: it
remains everywhere, in the truest sense, a people's music.

As much as Caribbean popular musical forms remain tied to the societies that
gave birth to them, many of them have nevertheless proven—thanks to the
spread of modern communications media—capable of transcending local
context and of winning over foreign audiences solely on the basis of their
musical appeal. Numerous Caribbean styles have managed to break through
ethnic and geographical barriers. Some have succeeded in attracting substantial
international followings indeed and have inspired important new musical
developments by non-Caribbean musicians. In the history of Caribbean popular
music, the phenomenon that has come to be called “crossover” (in the jargon of
the popular music industry) goes back farther than one might think.
As early as the 1920s, there already existed a market for Trinidadian calypso
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in the United States. (It was during this period that North American record
companies first began to release calypso recordings.) Not long after this,
calypsonians were making appearances in New York nightclubs. But it was not
until several years later that calypso reached its peak of international popularity,
during the “calypso craze” of 1956–1957 (at which time calypsos or calypso-
influenced recordings represented a reported one-fourth of United States record
sales).
Then there was the Cuban rumba, which swept North America and Europe
during the 1920s and 1930s; or the Cuban-derived dance known as the conga,
which followed upon its heels. The 1940s saw a great deal of interaction
between Latin and black American musicians in New York, culminating in the
emergence and flowering of the “Cubop” movement—which was responsible
for some of the earliest successful fusions between Afro-Cuban music and
North American jazz. Shortly after this, North American rhythm and blues,
from New Orleans to New York, began to show subtle but important Latin
influences, and by the mid-1950s, Latin dance styles such as the bugalu were
being played by both Latin and North American musicians. In their heyday,
during the 1940s and 1950s, Latin dance styles such as the meringue, the
mambo, and the cha-cha-cha, and the pachanga spread beyond the borders of
the United States, conquering audiences in Japan, Europe, and several parts of
South America. In the 1970s, a new fusion, “Latin rock,” had an international
impact, and by the end of the decade, a substantial market for salsa had grown
up in Europe, Japan, and several other parts of the world.
The most recent success story is of course that of Jamaican reggae. As early
as the 1960s, reggae began to make major inroads in Great Britain, thanks to
the presence there of a large West Indian community; in the United States, the
impact was much less marked, but significant nonetheless. By the mid-1970s, it
was becoming a truly international music. Through a combination of
economics, politics, favorable promotion and distribution, and sheer musical
attraction, reggae music has, as of this moment, succeeded in penetrating
virtually every part of the planet. The ongoing association between the
Rastafarian movement and reggae—which led to its being thrust in the
spotlight as a major vehicle of Third World protest—has been partly
responsible for the music's dispersion. Active Rastafarian reggae bands can
now be found in almost all parts of the Caribbean—as well as among Caribbean
immigrant communities in Canada, the United States, Britain, the Netherlands,
and France—and in South Africa and many West African and Central African
countries. But the internationalization of reggae has not been totally dependent
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on this sort of cultural and political base. Today, reggae is being produced by
local musicians in such unlikely places as Sweden, Germany, Japan, and Java.
There is even an Austrian Aboriginal reggae band. In England, moreover,
reggae strongly influenced a good deal of the punk rock and new wave music
of the late 1970s, and a short-lived but influential craze in British popular music
at the end of the decade—the so-called Two Tone movement—was based
almost entirely on a blend of rock-and-roll and Jamaican popular music styles.
Since the late 1980s, the new style of dancehall reggae has had a major impact
on urban African American styles such as hip-hop. And the last few years have
seen the emergence of a new generation of ska bands in the United States,
whose music fuses Jamaican styles with punk and other varieties of hard-core
rock. Through channels such as these, reggae influences have finally entered
the European mainstream in a big way. The point has been reached where
reggae-tinged hits are now sold in massive quantities to European and
American record buyers who—in many cases—have no idea of their debt to
Jamaican popular music.
The place where Caribbean popular music has had its most significant
international impact is Africa. In anglophone West Africa, the West Indian
calypso contributed to the development of the hardy local style known as
“highlife,” which—after several decades of growth and change—is still going
strong, from Nigeria to Sierra Leone. Beginning in the 1930s, popular Cuban
recordings began to make their way into several parts of Central Africa, and
ever since, Afro-Cuban music has remained tremendously popular in this part
of the continent. More recently, salsa has experienced a growing wave of
popularity in West Africa. And, since the late 1970s, reggae has enjoyed
increasing popularity in almost every African country south of the Sahara (once
again, thanks to the wide distribution of Jamaican recordings). Finally, during
the 1980s, the new French Antillean style called zouk took much of the African
continent by storm.
These new introductions, whose African-derived components are
immediately grasped by an African ear, have often played a central role in the
development of major new musical fusions. African popular music, like that of
the Caribbean, has been marked by an openness to new ideas from the outside,
a positive stress on innovation, an attitude supporting blending between
different traditions, and a continual fluctuation between new introductions and
traditional influences. The Afro-Cuban music that was so popular in Central
Africa during the 1930s and 1940s paved the way for one of the greatest bursts
of creative activity in African popular music to date. African musicians began
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experimenting with Cuban musical forms almost as soon as these reached their
shores. By the late 1950s, popular musicians—particularly Congolese artists—
had begun to develop a new style in which musical phrasings inspired by
Cuban-style horn arrangements were being played on guitar. Before long, the
new guitar style picked up other influences from traditional sources and was
being adapted to local techniques used in playing traditional stringed
instruments. Over time, the Cuban-based music of the Congolese guitar bands
was radically transformed—one stylistic innovation following on another—and
by the 1970s, there existed a vital new Congolese musical genre. It was wholly
original musical form, with its lovely, fluid guitar work (three or four guitars
being played simultaneously to create a rhythmically complex interlocking
weave), and, although Cuban influences continued to be incorporated, there
was no way of confusing this new style with its Afro-Cuban ancestors.
The “Congolese sound” (nowadays known as soukous) is but one, albeit the
most famous, of an untold number of Caribbean-inspired musical fusions in
Africa. The biguine, meringue, calypso, and other older Caribbean popular
styles have also attracted the attention of popular musicians in several parts of
the continent. More recently, soca and salsa have been finding increasing
numbers of admirers in Africa, and local salsa recordings from countries such
as the Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire) and Guinea are beginning to show more and
more indigenous influences. The explosion of interest in reggae has also led to
a good deal of experimentation in the academy. Indigenized reggae recordings,
sung in local languages—and sometimes transformed so thoroughly that they
are hardly recognizable any longer as reggae—have been produced in such
countries as Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Zaire, and South Africa. The themes
of black consciousness and pan-Africanism, that continue to dominate so many
Jamaican reggae songs, ring with a special resonance in modern Africa, and so
it seems likely that the popularity of reggae will do nothing but grow in this
part of the world during the coming years. It would not be surprising, then, if
experiments in blending reggae with indigenous influences were to lead in the
future to a durable new fusion that, like the “Congolese sound,” could take the
entire continent by storm. For reggae, like much of Afro-Cuban music, rests on
a generalized African musical base that appeals to listeners in virtually all parts
of Sub-Saharan Africa.
The preceding comprehensive coverage of the music of Africa was designed
to introduce students to this form of performing arts on the continent, focusing
mainly on the general similarities, without dealing with the issues that loom
high in the minds of seasoned Western-educated musicians, musicologists, and
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music students, one of the major reasons North Africa was not covered here.
Indeed, North Africa, comprising the countries of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria,
Libya, Egypt, and even Sudan and Djibouti, is often classified as a region
affiliated more closely with the Middle East—Arab and Islamic—rather than
with Africa below the Sahara Desert or Sub-Saharan Africa. We might only add
this point here: That the student needs to be aware that debates over the
intricacies of music in Sub-Sahara Africa, as a part of this specific chapter,
were purposely not discussed in length. A group of revisionist musicologists
tend to highlight the differences that others may not have seen, while not
negating the similarities, forcing such scholars as Victor Kofi Agawu, a
prominent Ghanaian ethnomusicologist professor in the Department of Music at
Princeton University, to question whether we should be writing about “African
musics” rather than “African music” or, for that matter, Caribbean music. The
arguments among the scholars have ranged from the normally accepted musical
instrument classifications in Africa and elsewhere as idiophones,
membranophones, chordophones, and aerophones to the role of language in
music composition (see Stephen Blum 2017), from the impact of crossovers in
Caribbean, African, and Western music to which many educated continental
and diaspora Africans have been exposed to the role of “intentionality” in
African music's enactment or the priority of its performance and the central
place of the original composer or the inventor, so to speak, including due
acknowledgement of authorship, and those pieces of music that have become
essential as a part of the community repertoire that may span centuries, just as
is the case with African art. In summary, the debate that raged about the music
of Africa and outside the continent during the 1950s and 1960s is still with us
in 2018. Similar remarks might be made of the music of the Caribbean, which
is overwhelmingly made up of peoples of African descent, also known as the
black diaspora.
Meanwhile, back in the Caribbean, local musicians, largely oblivious to
recent musical developments in Africa, continue to push forward with new
innovations of their own. Caribbean popular musical remains in as close touch
as ever with its local audiences. There has been some initial contact and
cooperation between farsighted Caribbean and African popular musicians, and
the growing musical dialogue between continents promises to lead to some of
the most exciting music of the future. Whatever may happen to Caribbean
music in the coming years, two things seem certain: it will remain a people's
music, and it will not stay still for long.
The story of Caribbean music is a remarkable one. For this relatively small
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geographical region, ravaged by centuries of European colonial domination and
long looked upon as a region of “colonial backwaters,” “deracinated” peoples,
and societies that had supposedly produced nothing indigenous of any value,
has over and over brought forth unique and vibrant musical creations to which
the entire world can dance. That the story is far from finished means that the
lives of music lovers in both the Caribbean and other parts of the world will be
that much richer in the years ahead.
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Summary
Traditional music in Africa fills many roles, which may be generalized into
three broad types: personal music, performed by individuals for their own
enjoyment; group music, performed by and for groups, rather than for an
audience as such; and listener's music, performed by professionals for the
enjoyment of an audience and for monetary gain. All music is transmitted
aurally. Within each of these types, music may be only vocal or only
instrumental, but more commonly the two are mixed, songs being accompanied
by instruments, instrumental pieces having a song at their root.
In Africa, instruments include virtually every sound-producing mechanism
devised by humankind: drums, xylophones, flutes, and the mbira are spread
widely, as are lutes (both plucked and bowed), harps, and zithers. The musical
bow in many varieties was formerly common. Ensembles of single-note horns
or flutes are an African specialty. Rattles, iron bells, and wooden instruments
both struck and scraped are widespread. Vocality (singing or speaking)
permeates the instrumental realm: drums and other instruments can “talk” by
imitating the rhythm and tones of speech, while multipart instrumental pieces
are modeled after a song in the players' heads.
The call and response form is most common for vocal music, with a soloist
leading, a chorus answering. Women's roles focus on singing and dancing,
while drums and melodic instruments are typically played by men. Love songs
and ballads are uncommon, but epic narratives and praise songs are widespread.
Song leaders excel at extemporizing topical words to fit individual occasions,
while at the same time, celebratory and ritual songs for important life events are
retained unchanged. Polyrhythm, based on offset alignment of the parts and
often incorporating hemiola, is a pervasive but not universal feature of the
music. Melodies are pentatonic or heptatonic, and thirds-harmony is common.
Today the guitar and popular music displace some traditions, while other
traditions are bolstered by their use in national ensembles.
520
1. In what ways might a participant in a performance of group music take part?
When might such a performance be considered listener's music instead?
2. What connections can be seen between the various environments in which
Africans live and the types of instruments they play?
3. Comment on the interaction of speech and music, and the interaction
between vocal and instrumental music in Africa.
4. Focusing on song content, what types or styles of American music might be
traceable to African antecedents? In what ways do the songs of the two
continents differ widely?
5. Identify the characteristic features of multi-part performance in Africa:
How is group singing typically organized? What are the essential
components of polyrhythmic ensembles?
6. How do urbanization and other modern developments affect traditional
musical styles? What might be the factors that cause one to languish, another
to flourish?
7. Compare and contrast what you learned about African music and Caribbean
music in terms style, instrumentation, and community participation.
8. By examining the various musical manifestations in the Caribbean, which
ones can you trace to Africa, and which ones can you not? Does the diaspora
in the United States of America have more or less influence on the islands'
music?
521
References
V. Kofi Agawu. The African Imagination in Music. New York: Oxford
__________. Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music.
Oxford: Oxford University Press in Music Theory, 2014.
__________. “Structural Analysis or Cultural Analysis? Competing
Perspectives on the ‘Standard Pattern’ of West African Rhythm.” Journal
of the American Musicology Society, Vol. 59 (2006): 1–46.
Sean Barlow and Banning Eyre. Afropop: An Illustrated Guide to
Contemporary African Music. Edison, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1995 (with
Jack Vartoogina photographs).
Paul F. Berliner. The Soul of Mbira. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1978. Recordings with notes by the same author: The Soul of Mbira,
Nonesuch CD 79704-2; Africa: The Shona Mbira, Nonesuch CD 79710-2.
Kenneth Bilby. Words of Our Mouth, Mediations of Our Heart: Pioneering
Musicians of Ska, Rocksteady, Reggae, and Dancehall. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2016.
Stephen Blum. “Review of Kofi Agawu, The African Imagination in Music.”
Journal of the Society for Music Theory, Vol. 23, 1(March 2017): 1–6.
Mark Brill. Music of Latin America and the Caribbean. New York, NY:
W.W. Norton, 2010.
Ronnie Graham. The Da Capo Guide to Contemporary African Music. New
York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1988.
Michelle Kisliuk. Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography
of Performance. Oxford, 1998 (includes two CDs).
Roderic C. Knight. “Music in Africa: The Manding Contexts,” in G.
Behague (ed.), Performance Practice: Ethnomusicological Perspectives.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984, 53–90. Compact disc with notes
by the same author: Gambie: L'art de la kora—Jali Nyama Suso.” Ocora
Radio France, C-580027.
Gerhard Kubik. Theory of African Music, Vol. 2. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology, 2010.
David Locke with Godwin Agbeli. Kpegisu—A War Drum of the Ewe (pron.
“Peggy Sue”). Crown Point, IN: White Cliffs Media, 1992. Book with
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instructional and documentary videotapes.
Peter Manuel, Kenneth Bilby, Michael Largey. Caribbean Currents:
Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae. New Yok, NY: Barnes and
Noble, 2014.
Alan P. Merriam. African Music in Perspective. New York: Garland, 1982.
A collection of nineteen articles by this pioneering writer.
Cesar Miguel Rondon. The Book of Salsa. Wingate, NC: Southeastern
Council on Latin American Studies, John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
Dave Thompson. Reggae and Caribbean Music: The Essential Listening
Companion. New York, NY: Thriftbooks distributed by Barnes and Noble,
2002.
Colin Turnbull. The Forest People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961
(latest edition 1988). Recording with notes by the same author: Mbuti
Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways
SF CD 40401.
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15
African American Music: An

Introduction
Eddie S. Meadows
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Introduction
It is widely acknowledged that music is the most significant contribution of
African Americans to world culture. Within this context, several musical
genres, sacred and secular, have evolved from African American experiences in
North America, including jazz, blues, hip hop/rap, soul, spirituals, and gospel,
and are characterized by diversity within unity, creativity, rather than
stagnation, and continuity, spiced with change. They reflect the attitudes and
concerns of both the performer(s) and their culture at a specific time and place
in history. In the following chapter, ethnomusicological, rather than historical
musicological, principles and concepts are used to discuss selected African
American musical genres.
Major terms and concepts: jazz, avant garde, contrafacts, fusion, gospel,
blues, spirituals, polyphony, African retentions, Gnawa, ethnomusicology, call
and response, Euro-American classical music, improvisation, genre, hip hop,
tempo, bebop, rap, soul, neo soul, funk, swing, hard bop, “jungle style,” funky
style, pentatonic, instrumentation, and scat singer.
Ethnomusicologists espouse the view that music is more fully explained and
understood relative to the culture of which it is an outgrowth—that, without
understanding the cultural significance of the event in which music is
performed, one cannot expect to understand the meaning of the performance by
analyzing the music alone. In a paper that deals with the crucial immediacy that
the concept of musical culture has for ethnomusicological analysis, Kwabena
Nketia1 described musical culture as:
The aggregate of cultural traditions associated with music, which
become evident at the juncture of the social and the musical traditions
that are learned in the social process or in special learning situations.
Traditions that are cultivated, practiced, and recreated by members of a
society in the different roles they assume as music makers, instrument
makers, and audiences in different contexts of the situation.
(Nketia1980: 3)
Nketia adds that a musical culture maintains distinct identity not only through
the musical but also the social sphere of culture, for the socio-musical juncture
admits only forms of behavior, status and structural relationships, expressions,
and roles that are idiomatic to it.
Another tenet of ethnomusicology is that music varies drastically as culture
525
varies. Moreover, the variation of musical styles between cultures and culture
areas is clearly greater than between the styles of the individual or groups that
compose cultures. If, as some scholars advocate, music is a communication
system that lives in and varies by culture, it must be, somehow, a
communication about culture rather than about other things, and its variation
must symbolize specific differences between cultures. In this essay, I provide a
concise introduction to jazz, blues, spirituals, gospel, Euro-American classical
music, ragtime and boogie woogie, and popular styles like R&B, soul, neo soul,
and hip hop/rap as cultural expressions of the African American community.
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Cultural Spheres
Because of immense interest among African Americans, and others, for
many years, a series of scholars representing diverse disciplines have
researched issues like cultural focus, African retentions, revival, Survivals,
transformation, and reinterpretation. A summary list of “Africanisms” retained
in the musical traditions of the African diaspora, as itemized by a selected
group of music scholars, is as follows:
Richard Waterman
A. Call-and-response instrumental and vocal patterns, including overlapping
call and response.
B. The dominance of a percussion approach in music.
C. Offbeat phrasing of melodic accents.
D. “Metronome Sense,” a cultural psych-physical reaction to music. An innate
ability to actualize and perceive music.
E. Polymeter or multi-meter occurring simultaneously.
Olly Wilson
A. Bending notes, sliding into and off notes, improvisation and changing lines.
B. The stratification of musical lines by emphasizing the independence of
timbre for each instrument and voice.
C. High density of musical events within a relatively short musical space.
D. Inclusion of environmental factors as integral parts of the musical events.
E. Adoption of “functional harmony” in jazz is not an indication of equal
African and European influence. According to Wilson, the Africaness of jazz
is represented by:
1. Meterical organization with cross rhythms.

2. Percussive technique of playing any instrument with an abundance of
accents and sounds.
3. Use of environmental sounds like “buzzing” to create and depict musical
timbres.
527
Eddie S. Meadows
A. The ability to create and diversify music spontaneously and without
notation.
B. The subjugation of complexity, form, and sound to feeling and message.
C. The role and function of instrumentalists within a group, soloists to group,
and group to soloists.
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Old-Time Music
Before discussing the previously mentioned musical genres, it is first
important to introduce a little-known tradition of African American music that
dates to the slave era, and one that has been adapted, appropriated, and
forgotten. Banjo, fiddling, and guitar ensembles proliferated during and after
the slave era in the United States. Beginning in the colonial era, Simeon “Sy”
Gilliat, a violinist, performed in the Richmond, Virginia, area in the late
seventeenth century, and was accompanied by London Briggs on clarinet and
flute. Around 1680, in Virginia, George Walker, also a violinist, became the
heir apparent to Gilliat. The musical expertise and exploits of Gilliat and
Walker were the norm because plantations owners and slaveholders often hired-
out slaves and master slave musicians for economic gain (Southern 1997: 41–
58). To this end, we hear of jug, banjo, and fiddler performers in both slavery
and post-slavery Memphis, in Mississippi, North Carolina, and in other parts of
Tennessee. One of the best-known groups to keep the tradition alive into the
twentieth century was the Mississippi Sheiks, a guitar and fiddle group that
consisted primarily of the Chatmon Family.
The Chatmon family's legacy is deeply embedded in Mississippi, where they
were enslaved, and the musical legacy evolved from their father, Henderson
Chatmon, a slave fiddler, who was known for his technical proficiency and
improvisational skills during the slave era. The family's roots were planted in
Bolton, Mississippi, and that became their homestead for carrying their father's
tradition forward. In the 1930s, the band consisted of Armenter Chatmon, who
was the best known of the group, and who became a country blues icon under
the name, Bo Carter. In addition, the group consisted of Lonnie Chatmon, Sam
Chatmon, and Walter Vinson; later Charlie McCoy was added to the group.
Their best-known recording was “Sitting on Top of the World,” which was
covered by diverse artists, including Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, John Lee
Hooker, Frank Sinatra, Howling' Wolf, and several others. Other important
twentieth century exponents of the banjo, fiddle, and guitar tradition are
Howard Armstrong (1909–2003) of Tennessee, Joe Thompson (1918–2012) of
North Carolina, and The Carolina Chocolate Drops, a group that took its name
from the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, a group led by Howard Armstrong.
Armstrong was a string band and country blues performer, and an expert on
the fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, and as a vocalist. He was born in Dayton,
Tennessee, and died in Detroit, Michigan. With his brother, Roland, and Carl
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Martin, he formed the Tennessee Chocolate Drops. Later, the group added Ted
Bogan, a guitarist. His musical repertoire included country blues, rags, and
some popular songs. He was fluent in Italian, Spanish, and Polish, was a
talented painter, and designed jewelry and album covers. Unlike Armstrong,
who moved to Detroit, Michigan, Joe Thompson spent his entire life in North
Carolina. With his brother, Odell, and cousin, he formed a group that
specialized in old-time music. Thompson, an expert fiddler, performed at
numerous folk festivals and at historic venues like Carnegie Hall and the
Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. He is credited with keeping the Piedmont
tradition of string band music alive, and his musical style has influenced both
blues and bluegrass.
Perhaps the most dynamic, efficient, and dedicated group of African
Americans performing old-time music today is the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a
group that was formed in 2005, named after Howard Armstrong's group, and
tutored by Joe Thompson. Originally named the Sankofa Strings, featuring
Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Sule Greg Wilson, all are expert
banjoists and percussionists. The original group occasionally added Justin
Robinson as a guest performer. During their performances, Giddens, Flemons,
and Robinson often trade instruments, including banjos, fiddles, guitar, jugs,
harmonics, bones, and several other melodic and percussion instruments.
Like their mentor, Joe Thompson, they are experts of the Piedmont old-time
musical tradition and also perform country blues, old-time fiddle music,
minstrels, and waltzes. In addition to their respective expertise on a myriad of
old-time musical instruments, they are known to be very creative during their
performances. To that end, in a 2012 performance at UCLA, they performed
“Read Em John,” a song from one of John Lomax's 1950s field recordings. In
the performance, they abandon their instruments, and instead used rhythmic
hand clapping, and call-and-response shouting to accentuate the performance.
Among their most recent achievements is the inclusion of their song,
“Daughter's Lament,” in the movie Hunger Games. Students should also
consult the performances of the Ebony Hillbillies, a New York-based African
American group of old-time music.
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Africa in Blues
Scholars interested in “Africanisms” retained in African American music,
especially blues and jazz, date to the nineteenth century. Since the publication
of Jeannette Murphy's “The Survival of African Music in America,” published
in 1899, and one of the first articles to address the issue, a plethora of
ethnomusicologists has published on the topic, including Ernest Brown, David
Evans, Portia Maultsby, Eddie S. Meadows, Alan Merriam, and John Storm
Roberts. African retentions in African American musical genres vary in breath
and depth, transformation, and reinterpretation, depending upon the traceable
contact between cultures.
In the published research of the aforementioned scholars, one can find
discussion detailing the difficulty of tracing and documenting African
retentions, as well as a list of specific African musical elements and practices
found in African American genres. In the Mississippi Delta blues of Robert
Johnson and Charley Patton, one can find descending melodic lines, shifting
rhythms, pentatonic, hexatonic, and heptatonic scales with altered tones,
polyrhythm, and call-and-response patterns. Among the transformed or
reinterpreted African retentions in jazz are call-and-response patterns, repetition
(especially riffs), polyrhythm, use of cowbells on early drum sets and the
melodic use of rhythm by drummers like Baby Dodds and Max Roach. In
addition, one can hear African influences (tonality, rhythms, instruments) in the
jazz of Herbie Hancock (the Foday Suso recordings), Yusuf Lateef, and Randy
Weston; in the classical works of minimalist composers Phillip Glass and Steve
Reich; and in the compositions of contemporary composers like the now
deceased Roy Travis and currently active scholar and composer, Olly Wilson.
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Like all African American musical genres, it is impossible to give a specific
date and place of origin for blues. Some scholars believe blues originated in the
post-Civil War period. This writer, however, after examining the relationship
between blues and spiritual texts, believes it existed in slavery, perhaps not by
name, and that the word “blues” emerged after slavery, as the following
illustrates.
Spiritual: I want to see my Lord one day
Blues: I want to see my Baby (Mother/Father) one day
By changing a word or symbol, one can change the meaning of a text: in this
case, from sacred to secular. It is assumed that African Americans sang some of
the aforementioned secular songs in the antebellum period because the context
for such songs existed. Since all antebellum African American music, including
work songs, field hollers and cries, and spirituals, evolved out of sociocultural
conditions, and, since the conditions for blues existed, there is a logical reason
to believe that blues were performed in antebellum America. In addition to text,
call-and-response patterns, bending tones, textual improvisation, and complex
rhythmic structures are common in blues and spirituals, as well as work songs.
Blues is a genre that is defined by its harmonic structure. A blues piece can
be performed fast or slow, and may be sad, melancholic, or euphoric. In its
rawest, non-substitute harmonic structure, blues can be outlined as follows:
Although multiple blues can be found, including 8, 12, or 16 bars, the most
common blues structure is 12 bars. The harmonic and bars can be combined as
follows:
The most common early blues form, especially country blues, is AAB; early
blues harmony, bars, and form can be combined as follows:
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An AAB form text is as follows:
A = when you see me comin' raise your window high
A = when you see me comin' raise your window high
B = when you see me goin' hang your head and cry
In AAB form, the first two lines were identical. However, early country
bluesmen such as Son House, Robert Johnson, and Willie McTell might add a
short introductory statement like “I said,” before singing the second “A” line.
The short introductory statement helped to increase the tension. Line “B”
provided the release for the tension created in line “A.” In addition, the last
word of line “A” often rhymed with the last word of line “B.” The blues
structure was common to all early country blues, regardless of geographical
location. Among the most discussed geographical country blues are the
Mississippi Delta and Texas, with the following selected characteristics:
Mississippi Delta. This blues is characterized by the use of a harmonica,
acoustical guitar, and, on some occasions, a piano; bottleneck or a ring to
actualize the slide guitar technique; use of pentatonic, hexatonic, and heptatonic
scales; use of melodic repetition moans and groans; use of harmonica tremolos;
shifting rhythms (linear) and polyrhythm (vertical); descending melodic lines;
borrowed material (melodies and text), musician to musician; and call-and-
response patterns (often between a vocalist and his guitar). Exponents of
Mississippi Delta country blues include Son House, Charley Patton, Robert
Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Howard McGhee and Sonny Terry, Willie McTell,
Sonny Boy Williamson, and others.
Texas. Blues musicians here used acoustical and steel guitar; emphasis on
single string melodies; used pentatonic, hexatonic, and heptatonic scales; some
descending melodies; high nasal voice quality (cowboy influenced); borrowed
material (melodies and text); and callandresponse (vocalist and his guitar). An
exponent of this style is Blind Lemon Jefferson.
The characteristics outlined above, combined with country blues structure,
harmony, bars, and form, were the sum total of the two geographical blues
styles. The musicians—guitarists, composers, and vocalists—were
predominantly African American males who were often transient, but excellent,
533
musicians. They performed at barbecues, picnics, and in very small clubs—for
little economic remuneration. The musicians played by ear and were basically
self-taught. Musicians who were products of rural cultures performed the
music, created primarily for rural audiences, in rural settings.
Before the 1920s, African Americans began to migrate to major metropolitan
areas like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Concurrent with this
migratory movement, major record companies began to notice the economic
potential offered by these new immigrants and “race labels” were created to
exploit the new market. The labels included Okeh, Paramount, Vocallion, and,
according to some scholars, Blue Note. These labels specialized solely in
African American musical genres, especially blues, gospel, jazz, and spirituals,
because the major record labels would not record African Americans. Within
this context, the first blues was recorded in 1921 by Mamie Smith, although
country blues had been around longer. Because the first blues was not recorded
until 1921 (and Mamie Smith recorded it), at least one question should be
posed: Why was the first blues recording made by Mamie Smith when male
country blues singers had been around since at least the turn of the century? In
this writer's opinion, African American females were recorded before males
because they were considered to be less of a sexual threat. Record executives
felt an African American male singing text permeated with double entendre
(double meanings), especially sexual metaphors, was a threat to the perceived
superior masculinity of Euro-American males. Concurrently, allowing females
to sing a text permeated with double entendres reinforced negative stereotypes
of African American women as loose, available, and promiscuous. Both were
antebellum racist attitudes.
As African Americans migrated from the South, especially the rural South,
one also witnesses a transfer of culture to many metropolitan areas throughout
the United States. The migrations transpired for many reasons, including the
opportunity to secure better jobs, educational opportunities, better living
conditions, and to escape racism. Soon, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and
Washington, D.C., became meccas of African American culture, hence the
reason why blues, jazz, and gospel became strong musical expressions in these
cities.
Classic Blues
Concurrent to the migrations of African Americans into major metropolitan
cities like Chicago, New York, Oakland, and Washington, D.C., a new style of
534
blues emerged. This music was called “classic blues,” for two reasons: it
contained all of the musical elements of the blues that had preceded it, and it
was the first blues (African American and Euro-American) to be accepted as
public entertainment. It was also the first blues to be recorded, and to reap
substantial economic benefits, and the first to benefit from marketing. Some of
its performers were marketed as stars, especially Ma Rainey, Mamie Smith, Ida
Cox, Alberta Hunter, and Bessie Smith. Arguably, Bessie Smith was both the
best and most recognized of these performers. She was known for her clear
diction, strong voice, good intonation, and ability to stage her performances
professionally. The characteristics of classic blues include a style dominated by
African American females; many lyrics containing sexual overtones; variations
on the AAB form; notated musical arrangements; instrumentation expansion to
include trumpets, saxophones, trombones, and rhythm section instruments
(piano, bass, drums, and guitar); and harmony both changing and becoming
stabilized because of notated arrangements and recording requirements.
Note the following progression:
In the 1920s and 1930s, Bessie Smith sold numerous records and became a
popular club/cabaret performer and the symbol of classic blues in both the
African American and Euro-American communities. She also made several
thousand dollars a week—a lot of money in the late twenties. However, not all
“classic blues” singers enjoyed the same economic success, and some,
including Mamie Smith, who made only three recordings, received few
recording opportunities. The success of a blues performer was directly related
to both recordings and marketing. Thus, while some became economically
successful, others faded into economic ruin.

Classic blues was not the only style to become popular in major metropolitan
areas. Simultaneous to the popularity of classic blues, a style of blues flourished
(especially in Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.) which this writer has
termed “Early Urban.” Because blues musicians were included in the
migrations, some continued to espouse new influences while retaining some of
the old. In particular, Mississippi Delta musicians, like Otis Spann, Muddy
Waters (McKinley Morganfield), James Cotton, and bluesman John Lee
535
Hooker, fit this classification. Early Urban is a style that contained selected
country and urban blues musical elements including the AAB form; singers
doubled as guitarists; call-and-response patterns; I-IV-I-V-I harmonic
progressions (although these characteristics could also vary); amplified guitars;
microphones; and text with country and urban metaphors. Audiences tended to
be recent immigrants with limited economic means who wished to maintain
contact with their indigenous culture. They, too, were caught halfway between
two cultures. Early urban blues was prominent in the 1940s and 1950s. As time
passed and urban culture became both internalized and actualized, a more
culturally bound urban bluesman began to emerge.
In urban blues, one can hear four-line verses, followed by two-line refrains;
the use of amplified guitars and microphones; and big bands and lyrics more
reflective of urban life and concerns, with both males and females represented.
The style is also reflective of a closer alliance between blues and jazz in
instrumentation, arrangements, sophisticated substitute harmonies, and
improvisations. Urban blues vocalists were not necessarily instrumentalists as
they were in country blues. Finally, in urban blues, one seldom hears the basic
harmonic structure, lyrics that focus on rural concerns, or head arrangements.
Instead, the urban blues is a polished, sophisticated genre, one that is reflective
of the totality of the African American experience. Although it is seldom
programmed on either radio or television, today blues enjoys a limited, but
dedicated, audience throughout the world.
In light of today's musical emphasis on profit over tradition, several of
today's blues artists are dedicated to keeping the urban blues tradition alive and
in the spotlight. Examples can be found in both the jazz and blues communities.
For example, a territorial band like Count Basie, a Kansas City icon, promoted
big band blues until his death as heard on compositions “One O'Clock Jump,”
“Jumpin' at the Woodside,” and “Everyday I Have the Blues.” His love of blues
was also an indelible part of his programming, as was his use of shouting blues
vocalists like Jimmy Rushing, Joe Williams, and the modernist vocals of Leon
Thomas.
The urban blues tradition has also been ingrained, retained, and promoted on
the West Coast, especially in California, past and present, by artists like Ernie
Andrews, Charles Brown, Margie Evans, Sugar Pie Disanto and, Bob Geddins,
until their respective deaths. And, on a national and international basis, artists
like Eric Clapton, John Lee Hooker, Albert King, and B.B. King have also been
dominate keepers of the tradition.
536
Boogie Woogie is based upon blues harmonies and melodies, and in its
1920s to 1950s heyday was heard in both rural and urban contexts. In the latter
case, it was heard in large metropolitan areas like Chicago, New York, and
Philadelphia, especially during the migrations of African Americans from the
South. Somewhat related to Boogie Woogie is Ragtime, a musical genre that is
closer to Euro-American Classical music than to blues. Ragtime became
internationally known when it was introduced to a wider public at the Chicago
World's Fair in the 1890s. It flourished from around 1897 to 1917, and was
popularized primarily by Scott Joplin. A summary of geographical Ragtime
styles and comparison of the two genres is as follows:
New Orleans Ragtime

A. Fast rhythms.
B. Complex, chromatic harmonies.
C. Includes improvisation.
D. Often featured a 2 and 4 emphasis within a four beat rhythm.

A. Slower rhythms, and flat four beats per measure.
B. Walking bass lines.
C. He was one of the first arrangers/composers to compose ragtime for
instruments other than the piano.
St. Louis Ragtime

A. Both Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton influenced the St. Louis School of
ragtime.
B. The emphasis on 2 and 4 within a four beat rhythmic pattern was
deemphasized in favor of a flat four beats per measure.
C. Moderate tempos were favored.
D. Improvisation was deemphasized because the compositions of Joplin and
others were notated and published.
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Eastern Ragtime
A. Strong bass lines.
B. Stride piano style.
C. Fast tempos were common.
D. Improvisation was a common feature, especially in the Rags of artists like
Eubie Blake.

A. Generally not notated. A. Beginning with Scott Joplin,
ragtime was composed and notated.
B. The genre is based upon 12 bar B. Because of the musical influence of
blues harmonies, and features Scott Joplin and others, there is more
repetitious bass lines. contrast in the form, melody, and
phrase structure. Joplin formalized
the AABBACC-DD Ragtime musical
form.
C. Improvisation is an essential C. Because of notated compositions,
element of Boogie Woogie. improvisation was deemphasized.
D. It was performed mostly by ear; D. It became necessary to read music
reading notated music was not a to perform the Rags of Joplin and
prerequisite to perform Boogie others.
Woogie.
E. Boogie Woogie was geared to E. From around 1902, Ragtime became
grassroots audiences, house rent a favorite musical genre of the White
parties, etc. middle and upper class (concerts and
social gatherings).
F. Boogie Woogie performers were F. Because of Joplin and other
primarily self-taught; most had composed and notated compositions,
little or no formal training. from 1900 onward most ragtime
pianist possessed formal musical
training.
Similarities
Both originated as piano styles, and were later arranged for other musical
538
instruments.
Performers
Albert Ammons, Pete Eubie Blake, Scott Joplin, Charles
Johnson, Johnson, John Lamb, Luckye Roberts,
Meade Lux Lewis, and and James Scott.
Jimmy Yancey.
539
Africa in Jazz
Throughout its evolution, jazz history has been chronicled through the
various deeds and accomplishments of star performers like Louis Armstrong,
John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis. However, this approach has
failed to acknowledge that jazz artists, especially contemporary ones, have been
and continue to be influenced by musical elements, ideas, and philosophies that
emanate from outside of North America. To this end, the impact of world
music, especially African, on the ideology and musicking of composers and
performers like Yusef Lateef, and Randy Weston, is immense. Although
contact between jazz composers, performers, and Africa has increased in recent
years, jazz scholars have failed to document both the breath and depth of the
contact, or the musical creativity that evolved from the contact. In my view,
contact between jazz composers, performers, and Africa can be divided
between, but not limited to, three categories. First, those like Dizzy Gillespie
and John Coltrane who “imagined Africa” by listening, reading, and associating
with musicians who possessed knowledge of African music and culture;
second, musicians like Art Blakey, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Max Roach
who either studied briefly (for less than a year), or made short exploratory trips
to selected African countries; and thirdly, artists like Yusef Lateef and Randy
Weston, who lived and studied in Africa for an extended period (more than a
year), accumulated knowledge, and continue to use the knowledge to enhance
their ongoing musical creativity. Before discussing the Pan African ideology
and musical creativity of Randy Weston, I will combine my research with that
of Norman Weinstein to briefly address specific ways and means that jazz
musicians have imagined and included Africa in the titles of selected
compositions (Weinstein: 1992: 16–17).
Within the imagination, one can find at least five classifications: place,
nature, portraits, history, and liberation. In the “place” category we find John
Coltrane's “Dahomey Dance,” “Liberia,” and “Gold Coast”; Miles Davis'
“Zimbabwe”; and Duke Ellington's “Liberian Suite,” “Togo Brava,” and
“Virgin Jungle”; and Randy Weston's “African Village/Bedford Stuyvesant,”
“Tangier Bay,” and “Sehel.” Compositions evoking “nature” include George
Benson's “Ode to Kudu,” Arthur Blythe's “Bush Baby,” Yusef Lateef's “Nile
Valley Blues,” and Randy Weston's “Purple Gazelle.” Portraits of people
include Miles Davis' “Tutu”; Bill Dixon's “For Nelson and Winnie”; Archie
Shepp's “Tuareg”; and Wayne Shorter's “Nefertiti.” Marion Brown's “Geechee
540
Recollections”; John Carter's “Castles of Ghana”; Anthony Davis's “Middle
Passage”; and Chico Freeman's “Kings of Mali” represent “history.” Among
the “liberation” themes are Gary Bartz's “Uhuru”; Jay Hoggard's “May Those
Who Love Apartheid Burn in Hell”; James Newton's “Diamonds Are for
Freedom”; and Max Roach's “South Africa Goddam.”
Images of Africa are also reflected in instrumentation and performance
concepts. The melo-rhythmic drumming of Art Blakey, Max Roach, and
Warren “Baby” Dodds (1898–1959) are directly related to either contact with,
study of, or travel in Africa, and in Dodd's case ancestral roots; Bill Summers'
use of the agogo and hindewhu on Herbie Hancock's second recording of
“Watermelon Man”; Hancock's recordings with Foday Suso (Jali Kora
performer from the Gambia); Gil Scott Heron's use of the shekere on several
recordings, and Yusef Lateef's use of the sarewa after his 1981 to 1985
appointment as a Senior Research Fellow, Center for Cultural Studies, Ahmadu
Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria.
References to Africa expanded during the civil rights movement, especially
the 1957–1961 period when Art Blakey's “Ritual” and “From Kenya”; Abbe
Lincoln's “African Lady”; Billy Mitchell's “Kwanza” and “African Violets”;
and Horace Silver's “African Waltz” were recorded. Within the context of this
discussion, it is also important to profile the African centered philosophy, and
musicking of a special artist who performs in this space. One such artist is
Randolph Edward Weston.
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Jazz Styles
Before discussing the evolution of jazz, one must realize that jazz is not a
single, monolithic genre, but one whose documented history dates as far back
as the late nineteenth century. Some scholars believe that jazz might have
existed in antebellum America because its essence, particularly improvisation,
was an important part of the music-making process. Jazz, which originated in
the African American community, can be defined as a musical genre that
incorporates improvisation, swing, phrasing, articulation, emotion, and meaning
into one individual performance. While improvisation is, arguably, the most
salient feature of jazz, improvisation alone does not make one a jazz musician.
In addition to improvisation, swing, phrasing, articulating, emotion, and
meaning, one must develop one's individual approach and sound into something
that distinguishes it from other performers' of the same genre. Without diversity
within unity, one is an imitator rather than an originator, because jazz expects
and encourages individual interpretation of specific musical compositions to a
much greater degree than Euro-American classical music.
Throughout its history, jazz has been dominated by African American
musicians. Whether big bands, small groups, or vocalists, the greatest
exponents of jazz, past and present, have been and continue to be African
Americans. Typically, pre-1950 jazz musicians learned to play by emulating the
masters that had preceded them, after which they developed their individual
approach to sound, technique, and style phrasing. The field was dominated by
males, with women relegated primarily to vocals. The few exceptions have
included, among others, Lil Hardin Armstrong (the second wife of Louis
Armstrong), piano; Dorothy Donegan, piano; Vi Redd, alto saxophone; Clora
Bryant, trumpet; and Mary Lou Williams, piano. Most pre-1950 jazz musicians
had excellent “ears”: they could hear harmonies and, as a result, could
improvise without knowing the technical term for a specific harmony. After
1950, some jazz musicians continued to espouse pre-1950 ways and means of
learning to play jazz. Others, however, began to emphasize academic training
as a vehicle to learning both the technical and subtle ways and means of playing
jazz.
While no credible evidence has been presented to prove that jazz originated
in New Orleans, there is little debate that New Orleans has always been a
mecca of jazz activity and innovation. Musicians who have performed or
continue to perform New Orleans jazz include: Louis Armstrong, Sidney
542
Bechet, Buddy Bolden, Joe “King” Oliver, Kid Ory, Baby and Johnny Dodds,
Jelly Roll Morton, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, and
Donald Harrison. New Orleans, before and around the turn of the century, was
an exciting city for both cultural and musical reasons. In the African American
community, brass bands were an important part of the culture; they played in
funeral parades and for business advertisements, especially in Storyville, a red
light district that opened in 1897 and closed in 1917. Brass bands consisted of
cornets, clarinets, trombones, a sousaphone (tuba), and, occasionally, tenor
saxophones. Brass bands also played for funerals; they played slow dirges on
the way to the funeral, such as “Didn't He Ramble: Till the Butcher Cut Him
Down,” and up-tempo, joyful compositions, such as “When the Saints Go
Marching In,” after the burial.
Brass bands were hired by secret societies and religious organizations, which
emerged in earnest after a series of Black Codes were passed (beginning in
1724) to outlaw all religious worship except Roman Catholicism. Brass bands
actualized, through music, an African American philosophy which espoused
that one should cry at birth and rejoice at death—a philosophy that dates to
slave times. This philosophy was central to African American culture and brass
bands, perhaps the primary reason why such thinking has survived from the
nineteenth century until today. Among the most famous brass bands stand The
Excelsior Brass Band (1880–1931), The Onward Brass Band (1885–1930), The
Reliance Brass Band (1892–1918), and The Tuxedo Brass Band (1917–1925).
These bands were important to the development of early New Orleans jazz
because many of the early jazz stars were also members of brass bands,
including Louis Armstrong, Buddy Bolden, Joe “King” Oliver, Bunk Johnson,
and Kid Ory. The turn-of-the-century New Orleans jazz bands featured cornets,
clarinets, trombones, drums, and a sousaphone. It was common to hear both
five- and seven-man groups.
5-Man Group
Cornet—played the melody, was allowed to decorate the melody but not to the
extent that one could not recognize the melody
Clarinet—had three roles: (1) played obbligato parts to complement the
melody, (2) played the harmony above the melody, and (3) doubled the melody
on occasion
Trombone—outlined the most important notes in a chord
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Sousaphone/tuba—played background, two tones, “um-pah” parts
Drums—kept the tempo
7-Man Group
The 7-man group added the following instruments:
2nd Cornet—played counter melodies (counterpoint) to the main melody;
would double melody on occasion
Banjo—strummed the harmony four beats per measure; could also vary the beat
Beginning around 1914, and especially after the closing of Storyville in 1917,
New Orleans musicians began to migrate to cities throughout the United States.
Swing
Not all big bands were swing bands. “Swing,” however, featured melodic
lines that were written to be played in unison by the whole band or by a section
of the band. Call-and-response patterns between the brass and reed instruments,
known as “riffs,” were also featured. To this, the band would add outstanding
soloists, with one or more sections playing a suitably arranged background.
Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman are credited with devising the “swing”
formula. Henderson became the chief arranger for Benny Goodman around
1932–1933, and by 1934 Goodman had 36 of Henderson's
arrangements/compositions in his repertoire. The first known recording of a
swing composition was “The Stampede” done by Fletcher Henderson, in 1926.
Although there were several “Kings of Swing,” such as Andy Kirk, Jimmy
Lunceford, Luis Russell, and Chick Webb, Count Basie and Duke Ellington
were the most celebrated. Basie became leader of the Benny Moten Band
following the death of Moten in 1935. Basie was known for a hard-driving,
swinging band that featured short thematic melodies, shout brass courses, tight
ensemble phrasing and articulation, and strong soloists. In addition, until his
death in 1984, he used a “shouting” blues vocalist. Basie's appeal can be traced
to his predictable style, rooted in communication rather than complexity, and a
style that featured the strong rhythm guitar playing of Freddie Green. Basie
realized that a swinging band that featured tight ensemble phrasing and strong
soloists was more important than one featuring complex compositions for the
sake of complexity, and his band attained and retained its popularity among
both jazz enthusiasts and musicians from the time he assumed the leadership in
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1935. Whereas Basie's approach was musically monolithic, Ellington was very
musically eclectic. Born in Washington, D.C., and exposed to both eastern and
southern jazz styles in his youth, Ellington moved to New York in 1922. Over
the next few years, he worked with Wilbur Sweatman, Elmer Snowden, and his
band, The Washingtonians. His first major break occurred when he accepted an
invitation to perform at the Cotton Club (1928–1931). Ellington's acceptance of
the Cotton Club engagement confronted him with a major obstacle: producing
music for different acts and actors (dancers, arrangements for vocalists, dance
music, and, of course, big band jazz) on short notice. With some help from
Bubber Miley, he met this challenge, which helped to refine his compositional
skills, and, eventually, catapulted him into jazz stardom. Miley co-wrote several
of Ellington's most popular early compositions, including “East St. Louis
Toodle-Oo” (his first theme song), “Black and Tan Fantasy,” and “Creole Love
Call.”
In addition, Bubber Miley and Joe Nanton gave Ellington's band the
grassroots and blues feeling needed to make his “jungle music” style sound
authentic; his “jungle style” featured flutter tonguing, growls, and bending-of-
notes. The music was used to accompany stereotypical scenes of jungle life,
including an African American woman lying in a hammock, while men and
other women were fanning her with palm leaves. Since the Cotton Club's
clientele consisted primarily of gangsters and affluent whites, “jungle style” fed
their negative and inaccurate perceptions of both Africans and African
Americans. Big bands, including swing bands, were popular at the time because
they played music to which people could dance. They performed at movie
theatres, and their music was easy to follow. They also promoted the star
system, and, due to the influence of radio, persons of all ages throughout the
United States knew their names and, as a result, often idolized stars like Basie,
Ellington, Goodman, Lunceford, Henderson, and Webb.
Musical Attributes of Swing

A. Swing bands, commonly called big bands, often contained more than 13
musicians.
B. The quality of the music was directly related to the musical ability of its
arrangers or composers, including Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, Sy
Oliver, and many others.
C. Swing was a notated style, which, in turn, required musicians to read scores
and to play in tune with each other.
545
D. Swing ushered in the need for specialist in jazz. Specifically, it provided a
role for non-improvisers who could serve as lead instrumentalists within the
overall ensemble.
E. The repertoire was geared to dancing, and often contained swing
arrangements of popular songs of the day. “Sweet Sue” is a classic example.
F. Rhythmically, a flat four beats per measure was the standard.
G. Because of wide exposure on radio, 1930s and 1940s swing bands were
very popular. Among the most popular were Count Basie, Duke Ellington,
Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, and Artie Shaw.
Duke Ellington
Although very prolific (it is estimated that he composed around two thousand
compositions), Ellington did not like the terms jazz and swing. In the first case,
he did not like the term because it was both a delimitation and stereotype of his
musical output. And, regarding swing, Ellington also felt it was a pigeonhole of
African American music, and he made a special effort to avoid making the
swing musical formula the genesis of his musical composing and philosophy.
His son, Mercer Ellington, underscored this point:
He objected to the word “jazz” because in the early days it was used by
the lowest elements of the society ... the people in brothels ... to identify
music linked with orgies. This was really a kind of defense mechanism
that was not concerned with his disapproval of this form of life but with
the broad use of the jargon in connection with the music (Meadows
2013:377).
Ellington described his musical philosophy as follows:
My contention about the music we play is that it is also folk music, the
result of our transplantation to American soil, and the expression of a
people's soul just as much as the wild skirling of bagpipes denotes a
heroic race that has never known the yoke of foreign dictatorship
(Meadows 2013:376).
In a series of 1939 interviews that were focused on swing, Ellington was
emphatic regarding the purpose of his music:
We are not concerned personally with these conditions (regarding
swing), because our aim has always been to develop an authentic Negro
music, of which swing is only one element. We are not interested
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primarily in the playing of jazz or swing music, but in producing
musically a genuine contribution from our race. Our music is always
intended to be definitely and purely racial. We try to complete a cycle
(Tucker 1993:135, Meadows 2013:379).
His musical philosophy and disdain for the words jazz and swing are, in my
opinion, why he composed a diverse repertoire of compositions (Gridley 2000:
129–130). The categories of Ellington's repertoire are as follows:
A. Impressionist Book: A series of compositions where more emphasis is
placed on orchestral colors and shadings than on swinging. Among the
compositions in this repertoire are “On a Turquoise Cloud,” “Transbluency,”
and “Paris Blues,” as well as portions of the movie theme “Anatomy of a
Murder.”
B. Romantic Ballads: A book of slow and creative melodies, including some
where text was later added to the original instrumental. This book includes
“Daydream,” “Sophistated Ladies,” “Prelude to a Kiss,” “Mood Indigo,” “In
a Sentimental Mood,” and several others.
C. Exotic or World Music Compositions: A series of compositions that were
influenced by his travels or imaginings of world cultures. Included are
“Togo Brava Suite,” “Latin American Suite,” “Caravan,” “Afro-Eurasian
Suite,” “Flaming Sword,” and several others.
D. Concert Book/Extended Compositions: These programmatic works were
longer than most of his compositions, and as a rule featured less
improvisation. Perhaps his most famous is “Black, Brown, and Beige,” an
extended composition that was dedicated to the evolution of African
Americans in North America. Others include “Such Sweet Thunder,” “A
Drum Is a Woman,” and “Sweet Thursday.”
E. Concerto: Compositions that were dedicated to and used as a vehicle to
feature the talents of individual band members. Examples are “Concerto for
Cootie” and “Echoes of Harlem,” composed for Cootie Williams, “Clarinet
Lament,” for Barney Bigard,” “Boy Meets Horn,” composed for Rex
Stewart, “Lonesome Lullaby,” composed for Ray Nance, and “Cop-Out,”
composed for Paul Gonsalves.
F. Sacred Compositions: A series of compositions that used sacred texts,
choirs, dancers, soloists, and jazz arrangements. The most recognizable
compositions can be heard on the albums Duke Ellington's Concert of
Sacred Music and Second Sacred Music.
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G. Swinging Instrumentals: The sole purpose of this book is to feature his
excellent soloists in compositions that contain hard-driving rhythms, catchy
phrases, and excellent ensemble work. This repertoire includes, “Rockin in
Rhythm,” “Cotton Tail,” “Launching Pad,” and “Diminuendo and Crescendo
in Blue,” to name a few.
Duke Ellington's Musical Attributes, Contributions, and

Innovations
A. Orchestrational Concepts: Specifically, he often used instruments in an
atypical way, including using the baritone saxophone to carry the lead
melody on compositions like “Mood Indigo,” and “Sophisticated Ladies” or
using the baritone saxophone on the upper notes of a harmony, such as the
ninth of a chord. He was also known to reverse the roles of instruments. An
example would be assigning lower notes and roles to the alto saxophonist,
and higher notes and melodic leads to the baritone saxophone.
B. Reharmonizing: One of his greatest musical attributes was the ability to
reharmonize the existing chords of a composition. For example, the opening
measure s of “Subtle Lament,” the second chorus of “Blue Light,” and the
alternating use of major and minor harmonies in compositions like “Mood
Indigo,” which was unusual for his time.
C. He experimented with small and large compositional forms, especially
traditional forms like a 12-bar blues, and 32-bar AABA compositions. His
experimentation with the 12-bar blues form can be seen in “Diminuendo and
Crescendo in Blue,” a 14-bar blues. Ellington's experimentation also extends
to large forms. For example, “Reminiscing in Tempo” is a 13-minute
composition with limited improvisation, and “Black, Brown, and Beige” is a
43-minute composition with limited emphasis on improvisation. Both are
programmatic and atypical for the 1930s and 1940s.
D. Because Ellington recruited his band personnel to imitate everyday sounds,
his band was permeated with musicians who possessed unique skill sets,
including Johnny Hodges's tone, Harry Carney's baritone sound, Bubber
Miley's flutter tonguing, Cootie Williams's ability to evoke human sounds by
muting his trumpet, and more. To accentuate their expertise, he would often
assign chord tones to the instrumentalist that sounded the best playing the
tone, rather than assigning chord tones to individual instruments within a
specific section. This technique became known as “voicing across sections,”
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and was first introduced by Fletcher Henderson, an African American
arranger and composer who became the primary arranger-composer for
Benny Goodman around 1935.
E. He arranged and composed music to fit the individual and collective
musicians in his band (see Musical Attributes of Swing, D).
F. Sacred Jazz: Ellington combined harmonies, melodies, rhythms and sacred
text to compose “Sacred Jazz Compositions.” Although Mary Lou Williams
might have been the first to experiment with sacred jazz, Ellington
popularized the concept. His composition featured choirs, dancers, costumes,
soloists/narrators, and a jazz band.
To recap, Ellington's most significant contributions to jazz included his
experimentation with musical forms: he wrote a fourteen-bar blues titled
“Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” and several extended compositions
(concertos and suites) like “Black, Brown, and Beige” and “Reminiscing in
Tempo.” He also featured Harry Carney, his baritone saxophonist as a soloist
on several compositions, unusual in jazz history. He wrote several instrumental
pieces to which a text was later added, such as “In A Sentimental Mood,”
“Mood Indigo,” and “Sophisticated Lady,” and he pioneered sacred jazz
concerts (setting biblical or religious text to jazz). Ellington was one of the
most significant jazz musicians of all time not only because he refused to be
stereotyped but also because he had an unyielding thirst for musical creativity.
In addition, his big band, which performed from the late 1920s to his death in
1974, was one of the most stable in pre-1950 jazz history
Overall, the musicality of Ellington was immensely respected by a myriad of
musicians. Proof of respect can be seen in the number of jazz artists and others
that have either recorded or used his music to accompany their creative
projects. Among the instrumentalists that have recorded his music are John
Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk. Vocalists that
have recorded his music include Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah
Vaughan, Cassandra Wilson, and many others. Alvin Ailey used Ellington's
music to chorography his world-renown dance, “Resurrection.”
Count Basie
William “Count” Basie was also hugely successful during the swing era.
Born in New Jersey, he spent his early musical career in Kansas City, Missouri,
and later made New York his home base. He was a pianist in Benny Moten's
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band, and, after Moten's death, Basie became the band's director. Unlike
Ellington's eclectic style, Basie's band followed a time-tested musical formula
that was rooted in the Southwest area of the country, especially, the blues-
flavored jazz styles that were associated with Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Count Basie's Musical Attributes, Contributions, and

Innovations
A. He used riffs as major structural devices in many of his blues-based
compositions. A swinging rhythm section that featured Freddie Green
strumming four beats per measure supported the riffs.
B. Tight ensemble, unison phrasing and articulations, excellent soloists, and
sensitivity to dynamics are also trademarks of Basie's band.
C. More often than not, Basie uses dynamics to build the tension and volume in
his compositions, which, in turn, are followed by unison “shout brass
choruses.”
D. Many of his melodies consist of short 2- and 4-bar phrases or riffs that are
strung together to make a complete melody. Repetition is also very common
in his melodies.
E. Basie deemphasized the use of the left hand in piano playing, thereby
leaving a space to be filled by either Freddie Green, rhythm guitar, or the
bassist. In turn, this concept pre-dated the “comping” concept that became a
hallmark of the bebop era.
When comparing Basie and Ellington, we find that Basie's repertoire and
compositions, although he wrote few, were more formulaic than Ellington.
Ellington wrote in many different styles, and, with the exception of Billy
Strayhorn, wrote most of the music for his band. In short, Ellington was more
experimental than Basie, although both were immensely successful using their
own approach to the music. At least one other approach separated the two;
Basie used a vocalist (such as Jimmy Rushing or Joe Williams) much more
than Ellington. To Basie, a blues-orientated vocalist was essential to a
successful performance. Ellington, however, used vocalists only on occasions
where he deemed they were needed. In “Black, Brown, and Beige,” for
example, he used Mahalia Jackson. And, in the 1970s, he used Freda Payne, a
vocalist known primarily as a popular music artist.
Although swing enjoyed immense popularity, a growing number of jazz
musicians grew tired of the cliché-filled compositions and improvisations and,
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consequently, began to advocate a return to small groups, with and emphasis on
improvisation.
Bebop
This new style was labeled “bebop,” and it was in full force by the early
1940s, championed by several musicians who conceived of themselves as being
creative artists rather than “moldy figs” (entertainers and musicians out-of-
touch with modern jazz). The new style emerged and flourished in the strong
Harlem nationalistic environment of the early forties, which dates back to the
UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) Movement of the 1910s
and early 1920s, headed by Marcus Garvey. UNIA was strong in Harlem and,
arguably, planted the revolutionary seeds of the ‘40s. Bebop was the antithesis
to existing jazz styles, and became the subject of controversy among both jazz
musicians and their fans. While some jazz musicians felt the music was
dissonant and, thus, too difficult to perform or to enjoy, some of their jazz fans
thought the music was dissonant yet enjoyable and that the musicians' reactions
were too strong. Some bebop musicians were either Muslims or sympathetic to
Islam and occasionally would stop a performance, spread their prayer rug,
kneel, and pray toward the east. In addition, beboppers did not cater to dancers
or to popular entertainment venues because they felt they were creative artists,
not entertainers.
What was bebop? Bebop was a jazz style that featured primarily quartets and
quintets (trumpet, alto or tenor saxophone, drums, bass, and piano),
championed by musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles
(Charlie) Parker, and Max Roach. The compositions featured disjunct melodies,
short introductions and endings, compositions based on the harmonies of other
songs (such as “I've Got Rhythm,” “What Is This Thing Called Love,” “How
High the Moon,” “Cherokee,” and several more), extended harmonies, comping
(short chord statements situated strategically between silences played by the
pianist), and the dropping of “bombs” (loud explosions by the drummer).
Monk, a pianist, was known primarily as a composer, and his most famous
compositions were “‘Round About Midnight,” “Straight No Chaser,” “Blue
Monk,” and “Mysterioso.” Gillespie (trumpet) and Parker (alto saxophone)
formed one of the greatest jazz quintets of all time in the early forties. Gillespie
is known for playing long, fluid improvisational lines, and for possessing a
great sense of both harmony and rhythm. He also composed several jazz
standards, including “Salt Peanuts” and “Night in Tunisia.” In his short life (he
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died at 34), Parker became the guru of the alto saxophone. His incredible
technique, sense of rhythm, and ability to improvise has influenced jazz
players, especially saxophonists, since his death in 1955. He also composed
numerous jazz standards such as “KoKo,” “Confirmation,” “Moose the
Mooch,” “Anthropology,” and “Warming Up a Riff.”
Hard Bop
Unlike Gillespie and Monk, who performed bebop until their respective
deaths in 1993 and 1992, a few artists that entered jazz in the bebop era after
Parker's death in 1955 eventually transitioned to hard bop (and then late hard
bop) before adapting the dogma and musical practices that were variously
labeled avant garde, free, or creative music.
Hard bop emerged in the 1950s after the death of Charlie Parker, and was
primarily centered on the East Coast and in the Midwest. In its earliest form,
the articulations, harmony, and phrasing were indebted to bebop. However, it
also differed from bebop in the following ways:
A. The style did not use contrafacts as much as bebop because artists like
Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, and Sonny Rollins composed lots of original
compositions.
B. The rhythm seems to swing more than bebop, and was also used in
repetition to set a groove or mood. There was less emphasis on breaking up
the rhythm, as was the case in bebop.
C. Strong use of motivic improvisational concepts, especially by artists like
Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins.
D. In addition to a continuing use of Bud Powell's voicing concepts, we hear
the use of dominant seventh chords and their inversions, and the use of
quartile harmonies by Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock in piano comping.
E. The use of quotes, a process known as interpolation, in improvisations is not
as common as it was in the music of Thelonious Monk (who usually quoted
himself) and Charlie Parker. An exception to this fact is Horace Silver, who
used lots of quotes in his improvisations.
As in the transition of one jazz style to another, some artists are anxious to
embrace change, whereas others choose to remain within the musical and
philosophical confines of whatever style or genre that they are currently
practicing.
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Since the death of Charles Parker in 1955, the evolution of jazz can be
broken down into two approaches. One approach was championed by Horace
Silver, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, and others who either followed their lead,
functioned as sidemen with them, or shared their eclectic approach of the fusion
of musical genres into a palpable jazz style. The second approach was fueled by
performers who both shared Parker's approach and worked to transcend his
excellence after his death. To this end, we hear of styles labeled hard bop, early
and late versions, and the advent of styles that were labeled “avant
garde,”“free,” or “creative music.” Among the individuals or groups that used
Parker as a beginning point and planted the musical and philosophical seeds for
the aforementioned styles were John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra,
Association of Creative Musicians, The Chicago Art Ensemble, and others. The
mapping of jazz's creativity and evolution since Parker's death can be
summarized as follows:
Funky style Bebop
Soul jazz Hard bop (early and late)
Fusion Avant garde, free, creative music

Concurrent to hard bop, a style that advocated a return to the blues and
gospel roots of jazz also evolved in the fifties. Funky style performers played
improvisations based on the harmonies of blues and gospel music. Blues and
gospel melodic inflections could also be heard, and the music was geared to
grassroots audiences. Performers did not attempt to impress either audiences or
other musicians with their technique. Instead, they chose to improvise within
the context of the tune. Horace Silver, Stanley Turrentine, and the Jazz
Crusaders are among the best performers of this style. Silver composed several
pieces that have become jazz standards, including “Song for My Father,”
“Doodlin',” “Señor Blues,” and “Sister Sadie.” Silver's funky style is permeated
with melodies played a fourth apart by the tenor and trumpet, occasional unison
lines between the bass and piano, atypical musical forms, and excellent soloists
that play close to the harmonic structure. It also includes repetitious melodic
phrases and rhythms, two-bar melodic and rhythmic patterns, improvisations
based primarily upon the scale, lots of flat or minor key signatures, and a
performance energy appropriate to the composition. Silver, most often, used a
quintet that consisted of himself on piano, and a trumpeter, tenor saxophonist,
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bass, and drums. Another attribute of Silver was his respect for diverse musical
cultures, including African, American Indian, Brazilian, Japanese, and Latin
American; he wrote compositions as a way of respecting these and other
musical cultures.
With a deliberate return to the roots of jazz, Silver helped to reverse a trend
that saw jazz becoming more esoteric and more removed from the average
listener. The return to the roots movement also influenced a separate track of
jazz development. Funky style ushered in the fusion styles (jazz rock and soul
jazz) and, to a lesser degree, what is called third stream. Since the 1970s, the
creative and economic potential of fusion jazz has created a space that, in turn,
has enabled several traditional jazz artists to record fusion albums, including
Cannonball Adderley, Donald Byrd, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Wayne
Shorter, and Horace Silver.
Soul Jazz
Soul jazz was an offshoot of fusion. Soul-jazz fusion is characterized by the
musical characteristics found in funky style, plus a penchant to record music
originally recorded by soul artists like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. In the
seventies, George Benson, The Crusaders, Stanley Turrentine, and Grover
Washington, Jr., were stalwarts of this style, that eschewed complex and
dissonant compositions and improvisations, choosing instead to espouse
conjunct musical compositions with improvisations closely related to the
harmonies.
Jazz Rock
In its earliest stages, jazz-rock was a style dominated by ex-Miles Davis
sidemen and others like Pat Metheny. To that end, some of its most prominent
innovators were Josef Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, co-leaders of Weather
Report; Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters, who also incorporated funk in this
group's repertoire; Chick Corea's Return to Forever; John McLaughlin's
Mahavishnu Orchestra; and Tony Williams's Lifetime. Stanley Clarke, also an
ex-Miles Davis sideman, has made significant contributions to this style. Since
the early 1970s, jazz-rock groups have proliferated and influenced groups like
Fattburger, Spyro Gyra, Tower of Power, and Radio Head. The style is
characterized by the use of electronic instruments and devices, multi-layered
ostinatos (percussion and keyboard), solo/group improvisations, and high
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volume levels with added musical abstraction. However, not all jazz-rock
soloists or groups espouse high volume; for example, Kenny G leans more
toward soft dynamics and soft volume. In a musical sense, the jazz styles of
Silver, Crawford, and The Crusaders can all be labeled fusion.
Third Stream
Another approach to fusion is a style labeled third stream, a term coined by
Gunther Schuller, and is defined as music which lies between jazz and classical
music and embodies musical elements of both. It is a style that advocates the
use of classical performance techniques (straight tone quality, phrase structures,
and dynamics) and forms (canons, fugues, theme, and variations) in jazz
performances. The Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ), organized in 1952 and semi-
disbanded since the early 1980s, is the foremost exponent of third stream. The
original group personnel consisted of Connie Kay (drums), Percy Heath (bass),
Milt Jackson (vibes), and John Lewis (piano and leader).

In addition to Coltrane, Coleman, and Taylor, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton,
Donald and Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and Archie Shepp have been some of
the prime exponents of “free” or “avant-garde” jazz ideas. While some of these
musicians continue to be active, free or avant-garde jazz does not presently
enjoy a large following, because media exposure of fusion has overshadowed it,
it is too difficult for some musicians and most jazz enthusiasts to follow, and it
does does not fit comfortably in either concert or entertainment venues. Free
jazz was jazz for its own sake and the logical extension for musicians who were
both tired of bebop and hard bop and wanted to continue to expand their own
creative endeavors. Since it is not a commercially viable genre, this type of jazz
is seldom heard on jazz radio stations, hence the culture shock and subsequent
rejection a person feels upon first hearing the music.
Concurrent with the development of fusion, the bebop-hard bop continuum
evolved into a style termed free or avant garde jazz because musicians felt they
had exhausted their creative potential within the confines of specific
predetermined harmonies, melodies, rhythms, and forms. The music was
spontaneous and difficult to follow; it was also permeated with grunts, screams,
moans, and groans, thereby creating a quantum leap from previous jazz styles
enjoyed and performed by jazz musicians and listeners. The champions of this
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movement, dating from the 1960s, were Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Ornette
Coleman, Pharaoh Sanders, Cecil Taylor, and their protégés.
Although exponents of free jazz concepts, Coltrane and Taylor often featured
tonal compositions spiced with atonal sections. In fact, some of Coltrane's
extended compositions, like “Out of This World,” would begin in a specific key
or mode, proceed to an atonal section, and end with the melody (stated in the
original key/mode), announced at the beginning. In turn, Coleman expanded
free jazz principles further to incorporate his theory of jazz performance,
“harmolodics,” which espouses the simultaneous sounding of a specific melody
or theme. Coleman believes Euro-American concepts like intonation and tonal
centers are irrelevant. His music also features phrase pick-ups and unresolved
melodic and improvisational ideas. Coleman's ideas and musical practices have
allowed jazz musicians to experiment freely with ideas that until then had been
considered to be outside of both jazz composition and performance.
The musical and ideological movement was also influenced by the
theoretical paradigms that championed diversity and difference as something to
be respected, not denigrated, and arguments that difference is not less than
individual or collective rights. In addition to the meshing of 1950s and 1960s
civil rights and musical dogma, the two camps also shared a common interest in
devising creative solutions to problems, accountability, and credibility. Generic
concepts of the style are as follows:
A. They rejected the notion that the “new” jazz must be wedded to the old jazz
(harmonic progressions, forms, key signatures).
B. The genre was dominated by “spontaneous composition,” was difficult to
notate, and was not to be performed the same twice.
C. The genre featured extended compositions and altered horn and vocal
techniques.
D. The improvisations were not measured in numbers or by choruses.
E. Often compositions have no pre-set form; instead the soloist sets the form
during their performance.
F. If harmony is composed as a component of the original composition, it
should function as a guide. In addition, the accompanist should be flexible in
its use and function. Therefore, the accompanist should not use it exactly as
written at all times throughout a performance to produce a successful
performance.
G. One of the most prominent old improvisational concepts retained and
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expanded by performers of the new jazz is the use of motifs or melodic
fragments from the melody to create an improvisation.
In addition to the aforementioned musicians, Sun Ra and the Art Ensemble
of Chicago were important contributors to the overall 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s
new jazz movement. Sun Ra, a musician who spent many years in Chicago,
New York, and finally in Philadelphia, is one of the earliest artists to explore
alternative ways and means to conceptualize, compose, and perform avant-
garde jazz. He was a bandleader, composer, pianist, and philosophical guru to
many musicians who either performed with him or admired his non-traditional
creative approaches to life and music. Another important contribution of Sun
Ra was the influence that he exerted on the Chicago creative music community,
including the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
(AACM), and the Chicago Art Ensemble.
The two latter groups contained some of the greatest artists to conceptualize
and create the new jazz during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Among the many
artists that are using the contributions of the previously mentioned artists as
points of creative departure are contemporary icons like Charles Gayle,
Matthew Shipp, William Parker, and William Ware, to name a few.
Issues, Trends, and Developments in Jazz, Past and

Present
The confluence of issues, trends, and developments that have impacted the
historical evolution of jazz, pre- and post-1968, can be divided into two broad,
but related, categories, musical and non-musical.
Musical
A. The use of repetition and ostinato as structural devices in both compositions
and improvisations. Examples include Horace Silver's “Song for My
Father,” Miles Davis's “All Blues” and “Miles Run The Voodoo Down,”
John Coltrane's “Acknowledgement,” and Wayne Shorter's “Footprints,” to
name a few.
B. The reemergence of the soprano saxophone as an important instrument in
fusion and other styles. After the death of Sidney Bechet, jazz artists rarely
used the instrument; however, it achieved a new life after Coltrane recorded
“My Favorite Things” in 1960.
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C. Extensive use of electronic instruments (bass, guitar, piano, and
synthesizers) and devices became the norm, led by giants like Miles Davis
and his sidemen, including Herbie Hancock, Josef Zawinul, Wayne Shorter,
John McLaughlin, and groups like The Crusaders.
D. The rise of jazz fusion, including:
1. Jazz and classical music, better know as third stream, the title it was given
by Gunther Schuller.
2. Jazz and world music. These include the fusions of Chano Pozo with Dizzy
Gillespie, Gillespie's recordings with African and Afro-Cuban musicians
like Mario Bauza, Stan Kenton's recording of “Peanut Vendor” (which
featured an Afro-Cuban rhythm section), and the Afro-Cuban jazz stylings
of Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, and Pacquito D'Riveria, to name a few.
3. Bossa nova, samba, and jazz. The recordings of Stan Getz, Astrud
Gilberto's “Girl from Impanema,” and the stylings of Milton Nassimento
are noteworthy in this fusion style.
E. Jazz and Africa. See the previous discussion of artists, titles, instruments,
etc.
F. Rhythm and blues, soul music, and jazz. The artists emphasize feel, rather
than technique, and are generally focused on producing music that is both
appealing and understandable to the masses. Examples include Cannonball
Adderley's “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” and “Country Preacher,” and the
previously mentioned recordings by The Crusaders and Hank Crawford, as
well as artists like Stanley Turrentine.
G. Other fusion-related jazz styles. Among these are New age (George
Winston), smooth jazz (George Benson, Earl Klugh, and Bob James), and
klezmer jazz (Dave Douglas and John Zorn).
H. The advent of extended musical compositions, forms, and recordings.
Although this phenomenon can be traced to select recordings by Duke
Ellington, such as “Black, Brown, and Beige,” many of the post-1960
recordings of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy,
and Pharaoh Sanders set the standard for extended jazz compositions.
I. Revisionist movement. A movement that is led by jazz purists like Wynton
Marsalis, whose purpose is to keep alive the legacy of pre-fusion jazz artists.
They are against modernity, specifically, the use of fusion elements to create
new musical styles, the use of electronic instruments, and the belief that the
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use of fusion musical elements and electronic instruments are prerequisites
to producing good jazz. In addition to Marsalis, Terrence Blanchard, Roy
Hargrove, and Marcus Roberts are also revisionista who share all or some of
the tenants of the previously mentioned philosophy.
Non-Musical
A. The development and expansion of jazz studies programs and degrees,
undergraduate and graduate in jazz composition, performance, and research.
Some programs also prepare their students in the business aspects and
technological issues affecting the composing and performing of jazz.
B. The use of technology to replace jazz performers and as session performers
for film, TV, and studio work. Also, lack of live venues to perform jazz, as
opposed to pre-1968.
C. The impact of media and technology in defining, marketing, and promoting
jazz. Closely related is the role artists must assume in marketing and
promoting their music via the Internet, etc.
D. In light of current creativity and innovation, and given the issues of
marketing and promotion, how will future jazz be identified and
distinguished? Indeed, will jazz cease to exist as a separate and distinct genre
in future discussions of African American music?
In conclusion, jazz has remained one of the most significant contributions to
world music. Born and nurtured in the African American experience, it is a
genre that continues to develop, to expand, and to welcome new ideas,
musically and technologically, from all sources.
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In an article (Meadows 1983: 172–177), rhythm and blues is defined as “The
secular Black American music recorded by single performers and groups during
the forties, fifties, and mid-sixties when the term Soul Music evolved.” In
addition, the generic musical characteristics of rhythm and blues are as follows:
A. The music consisted of soloists, quartets, and quintets, and limited
instrumentation.
B. Before the distribution of recordings on labels like Atlantic, Motown, Stax,
and Philadelphia International, most Black music, including R&B and doo-
wop recordings, were done on “Race Records.”
C. Because mainstream record labels would not allow African Americans to
record, labels like Okeh, Paramount, and Vocallion were created to record
and sell recordings to African Americans.
D. Some small independent labels could not afford to hire outstanding
arrangers and background musicians, therefore a piano, bass, guitar, drums,
and tenor saxophone became the common support instrumentation. R&B
producers crafted a role and function for the instruments that did not conflict
with or overshadow the role of the vocalists, solo or background.
E. Black male soloists dominated the style or groups; however, in the mid-
fifties there were several integrated groups, including the Crests, Del-
Vikings, and Marcels.
F. Female soloists include Faye Adams, Lavern Baker, and Ruth Brown;
females singing with male groups include Ann Nichols with the Bluebirds,
Savannah Churchill with the Four Tunes, and Lil Easter singing with the
Robins, who later changed their name to the Coasters, and the Dominoes.
G. Prominent female groups of the 1950s include the Enchanters and Queens,
followed by the Chantels, Marvelettes, Shirelles, and Vandellas.
H. Ballads dominated, and the text focused on love, man/woman issues, and
teenage concerns.
I. Group naming conventions:
A. Love metaphor: Dreamers, Heartaches, Lovers, Moonglows, and

Valentines.
B. Nobility: Barons, Counts, Crowns, Kings, and Five Royals.
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C. Birds: Cardinals, Crows, Five Blue Birds, Larks, Parrots, Penguins,
Pelicans, Ravens, and several others.
D. Animals: Bees, Crickets, Hornets, and Jaguars.
J. Three- and five-instrument groups dominated, specifically bass, drums,

guitar, piano, and tenor saxophone.
K. Rhythm. A straight four beats per measure, backbeats, and shuffle rhythms
were common. Up-tempo compositions often featured backbeat rhythmic
concepts, and a nervous triplet pattern can be heard in some recordings. For
example the Platters used the concept in “The Great Pretender,” the
Impressions use it in “For Your Precious Love,” and the Chantels used it in
“Maybe.” The shuffle rhythmic feel can be heard in Fats Domino's “I'm
Walkin,” Bill Doggett's “Honky Tonk,” and Wilson Pickett's “Midnight
Hour” and “6345789,” to name a few.
L. Vocal concepts include call and response, talking leads, and alternating
leads between a tenor, and baritone or bass lead.
Among the greatest exponents of cross-over African American music
were/are Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Lloyd Price, and groups like
the Chantels, Platters, and Shirrels. The crossover hits of Berry, Diddley, and
Richard served as the origin of rock and roll, including Berry's
“Maybellene”and “Roll over Beethoven,” Diddley's “Who Do You Love” and
“I'm a Man,” and Richard's “Long Tall Sally”and “Lucille.” The Shirrelles's
“Tonight You're Mine,” Lloyd Price's “Personality,” the Chantels's “Look in
My Eyes,” “I Love You So,” and “Maybe,” and the Platters's “Only
You,”“Harbor Lights,”“Magic Touch,”“Great Pretender,” and “Smoke Gets in
Your Eyes” are excellent examples of rhythm and blues related music that had
great appeal across racial lines.

Because the record industry before 1960 was segregated, and Black music
was popular among Blacks and others, a question of how to produce and market
Black music to White audiences, for economic purposes, became a big issue
with some major record companies. It was not a question of whether Black and
White artists differed stylistically; the issue was to continue the segregation of
the record market while simultaneously benefiting, economically, from having
Whites recording Black music. Therefore, record labels signed White artists to
cover Black music, and, as a result, the label and artist were rewarded for
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exposing their version of Black music to a White audience. The end-result was
that Blacks were eliminated from receiving fair economic profit from their
creative output.
Because of distribution and marketing, the aforementioned White covers of

Black recordings sold more than the original versions, a trend that also
extended to jazz; Benny Goodman's recording of “In a Sentimental Mood”
outsold the original by Duke Ellington because of marketing and exposure,
rather than the quality of the recording. However, Black performers, who did
not sound Black, also profited from covering the original recordings of Black
artists. This phenomenon occurred when Chubby Checker, an African
American, covered Hank Ballard and the Midnighters recording of the “Twist.”
Checker's version sold millions of copies because he was both marketed and
programmed on radio programs and TV shows, Ballard was not, and because
Checker looked and sounded less Black than did Hank Ballard.
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Soul Music
According to two distinguished scholars, soul music is “a form of urban
Black popular music derived from Rhythm and Blues of the 1950s that
crystallized in the 1960s and peaked in the 1970s” (Burnim and Maultsby
2006:71). They state that the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s
influenced the music, and that the music reflected individual and collective
identities, views, and visions (ibid: 271).
Because of its relationship to the Civil Rights movement, and the subsequent
effect that the quest for freedom and justice had on individuals and groups, the
text and dogma of soul music expanded beyond that of rhythm and blues. To
this end, we can identify at least four different categories of soul music, from
the 1950s to the 1970s:
A. Traditional. Included in this category are the blues-gospel based songs of
artists like Wilson Pickett's “I Found a Love,” Sam and Dave's “When
Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” Marvin Gaye's “Distant Lover,” and
the Manhattans' “Kiss and Say Goodbye,” to name a few.
B. Socio-Political. This category contains songs that deal with Black pride,
uplift, and the quest for freedom, justice, and civil rights. Curtis Mayfield
and The Impressions excelled in this space with songs like “Keep on
Pushing,” “We're A Winner,” “Choice of Colors,” “Freddie's Dead,” and
“Miss Black America.” James Brown's “Say It Loud, I'm Black and Proud”
and “I Don't Want Anyone to Give Me Anything” and Marvin Gaye's
“What's Going On” and “Save the Children” are other examples of songs in
this category.
C. Religion. This category contains songs that are more sacred than secular,
and the performers refer to God or Jesus in their text. Marvin Gaye's “Wholy
Holy” and “God Is Love” and Curtis Mayfield's “Amen” and “People Get
Ready” are examples.
D. Crossover. A series of artists and songs whose repertoire expanded the
meaning of soul music. In this category, we find groups and songs that
attained popularity in all segments of the popular music community, Black
and non-Black. Included are songs by artists/groups like the Drifters' “Up on
the Roof,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “This Magic Moment,” and “Save the
Last Dance for Me,” Ben E. King's “Stand By Me,” Lloyd Price's
“Personality,” The Chi-Lites' “Have You Seen Her,” and selected Motown
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recordings like the Temptations' “Just My Imagination.” In the 1970s and
thereafter, Earth, Wind, and Fire (EWF) were the epitome of crossover
groups. Their use of jazz-oriented arrangements, unison horn lines and
vocals, tight articulations and phrasing, and the soaring and majestic vocal
leads of Phillip Bailey are among their noteworthy attributes. They are also
adaptable, as heard in the rap-oriented “Saturday Night,” and the jazz-rock
versions of “Shining Star” and “Serpentine Fire.” In addition, they are
known for their creative and meaningful ballads, for example “Be Ever
Wonderful” and “After the Love Has Gone,” and overall innovation that can
be heard in songs like “Let's Groove Tonight.”
Whereas Drake, Usher, and R. Kelly are among the most innovative soul
artists today, the foundation and attributes of traditional soul music continue to
be heard in the music of Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. His genius is in the
originality of his compositions and his penchant to use others to accentuate the
feeling and meaning that he desires in his compositions. For example, in “Every
Time I Close My Eyes,” he features Kenny G on soprano saxophone, on “This
Is for the Lover in You,” LL Cool J is featured, and on “How Come, How
Long,” Stevie Wonder is featured.
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Funk
The term was borrowed from the hard bop jazz style of artists like Lee
Morgan, Less McCann, Horace Silver, and Jimmy Smith. According to Burnim
and Maultsby (2006:293), funk is “an urban form of dance music, party music
that merged in the late 1960s.” In a sense it is a natural offshoot of soul music
because it also emerged during the 1960s African American quest for freedom,
justice, and civil rights. Among the pioneers are:
A. James Brown. Strong rhythms, two-bar bass lines, and biting guitar,
keyboard, and horn riffs supported his message of Black and community
empowerment. Brown's rhythm was atypical of the triplet and shuffle
rhythms of some rhythm and blues artists. The musical elements supported
Brown's dynamic chorography and vocals in compositions like “Papa's Got a
New Bag,” “The Big Payback,” and “Black and Proud.”
B. Rick James. In addition to Brown, although not as prolific, Rick James
became a dominant exponent of strong bass lines, a funky groove, and biting
unison horn lines, as in “Super Freak,” that characterized funk in the 1980s.
C. The Ohio Players. They arrived on the scene in the 1970s and became a
dominant force in funk. Their approach to funk includes strong repetitious
bass lines, unison jazz related horn lines, and a gravelly, funky vocalist.
The Isley Brothers, Junior Walker, and rock-jazz-funk fusion groups like Sly
and the Family Stone and Kool and the Gang are later examples of this style.
The Isley Brothers are known for their melodic and rhythmic lines, and
blending of passion, politics, pride, and a smooth flow of lyrics in songs like
“For the Love of You,” “Fight the Power,” and “I Wanna Be with You.” In
addition, Herbie Hancock's Headhunters and The Crusaders are excellent jazz-
oriented funk groups.

A. The style is predicated by a driving, danceable rhythm and repetitious
melodies or vocals.
B. The bass often serves a prominent role in setting a groove or playing a
melody. In addition, the bassist often plucks, pulls, slaps, or thumps the
strings. The bassists of James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, and Rick
James used these techniques.
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C. Compared to most jazz, funk often features two or less chords because the
feel and groove are more important.
D. Solo singing is common with James Brown and Rick James; however,
group singing is also prominent in groups like Sly and the Family Stone,
Earth, Wind, and Fire, and Kool and the Gang.
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Recording Labels
Four major recording labels, Atlantic, Motown, Stax, and Philadelphia
International, were the major creators, distributors, and promoters of soul,
primarily, and, to a lesser extent, funk.
Motown
Established by Berry Gordy in Detroit, Michigan, in the late 1950s, Motown
songwriters and producers focused on telling stories that everyone could relate
to, understand, and appreciate. From its beginnings, Motown focused on the
crossover market, and to that end fused whatever musical genres were needed
to achieve their musical goals. Gordy's musical philosophy preached that songs
should tell a story that people could relate to, and that they must have a
beginning, middle, and end. He also believed that songs should be honest, be
based on a melody that was easy to remember, and that they should contain
“hooks.” In turn, his musical philosophy formed the basis of what made
Motown one of the greatest creative producers of Black music in history. The
evolution of Motown from its humble origins in Detroit, ascent to fame, and
move to Los Angeles has been discussed by Sykes (2006: 431–470) with
additional insights from the author.
Phase I, 1959–1963
A. From its beginnings, Motown featured a variety of songs, songwriters,
instrumentation, arrangers, composers, and the venerable group of session
musicians known as the Funk Brothers.
B. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Supremes, the Temptations, Four
Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, and Marvin Gaye began with Motown.
C. Their musical philosophy centered on achieving an identifiable sound that
was unique, distinct, and markable within the existing rhythm and blues and
soul music market.
D. Among the characteristics are stomp rhythms, multi-track mixing, echo
effects, overdubbing, and other electronic effects. The diversity of the early
repertoire can be seen in the following:
1. Marvin Gaye's gospel-influenced “Can I Get a Witness.”
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2. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “You Better Shop Around,” a moral,
rock crossover.
3. Barrett Strong's “Money,” influenced by blues and gospel.
4. Little Stevie Wonder's “Fingertips I and II,” a rock and gospel crossover.
The first period is also characterized by the emergence of strong songwriters,

including Smokey Robinson, Barrett Strong, and Eddie Holland-Lamont
Dozier-Brian Holland (H-D-H).
Phase II, 1964–1967

A. Holland, Dozier, and Holland became the gold standard with Motown, and
are credited with meshing the confluence of Motown's diverse musical
concepts and approaches into a “Motown Sound.”
B. During this period, H-D-H became the writers and producers of the
Supremes, featuring Diana Ross as the lead singer.
1. In their style, they used blues and gospel musical elements and sounds,
call-and-response vocalizing, and songs that moralized or gave advice,
such as “You Better Shop Around.”
2. The musical expertise of the Funk Brothers (which included the use of
stomp rhythms, tambourines, and repetitious rhythmic grooves and
occasional handclapping) is also a common thread. They were central to
the success of Motown because they created rhythmic tracks without
reference to a specific tune. In turn, Motown writers would use the tracks
to inspire or compose songs. In short, the Funk Brothers created a sense of
unity, ensemble, and creativity that others could build upon.
3. Overdubbing of horns, strings, and vocal tracks and multi-layering is also
heard on some of their recordings.
4. Among the many compositions that H-D-H composed and produced for a
variety of Motown artists were “I Can't Help Myself,” “Baby I Need Your
Loving,” and “Reach Out and I'll Be There,” for the Four Tops, “Nowhere
to Run,” for Martha Reeves, “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You,” for
Marvin Gaye, and “Shotgun” and “Roadrunner” for Junior Walker. Stevie
Wonder, Nick Ashford, and Valerie Simpson also became successful
writers and producers for Motown during this period.
Phase III, 1968–1972
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A. This phase is characterized by the broad social awakening that occurred
throughout America. In turn, Motown composers, songwriters, and
performers developed many thematic songs that addressed the myriad of
social issues that were confronting African Americans during this electric
period. Songs that were imbued with a social consciousness or theme
include:
1. “Love Child” by The Supremes

2. “What's Going On” by Marvin Gaye
3. “War” by Edwin Starr
4. “Balls of Confusion” by The Temptations
B. New sound concepts evolved simultaneously with the personnel changes

that occurred within groups. To this end, the Supremes became Diana Ross
and the Supremes, the Miracles became Smokey Robinson and the Miracles,
and the Vandellas became Martha and the Vandellas. The Temptations
resisted this trend, and when David Ruffin left to become a solo act, Dennis
Edwards replaced him as the lead singer.
C. Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, and Stevie Wonder became prominent
artists, writers, and producers during this phase. Gaye's What Going On
became Motown's largest selling album within the social and political unrest
that permeated the nation at that time. Also, during this phase, Barrett Strong
and Norman Whitfield became the co-writers and producers of the
Temptations.
D. During this phase, Motown signed the Jacksons, and launched the Rare
Earth label, a label named after the White psychedelic group. They also
signed the group in an attempt to expand their audience.
E. Diana Ross, the Temptations, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and other groups
and songwriters left Motown for other labels. However, after 1972, Motown
signed Lionel Richie and the Commodores and Rick James as a way of
maintaining their smooth crossover lyrical ballad style, and as an attempt to
expand their audience to include persons who loved funk.
F. Motown moved to Los Angeles in 1972 and expanded their record business
to include making movies. Their two most prominent movies starred Diana
Ross, and were entitled Lady Sings the Blues, a tribute to Billie Holiday, and
Mahogany.
Since its heyday, Motown's prestige has diminished because it was slow to
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adapt to hip hop. However, the Jackson Five (featuring Michael Jackson),
Lionel Richie, and the Commodores continued to produce crossover hits until
they left Motown. Because of changing musical tastes, slowness to sign hip hop
artists, and the rise of neo soul, both its musical output and significance as a
cutting-edge label has diminished since the 1990s.
Stax Records
Rob Bowman, a scholar who completed a dissertation and has written books
and articles on Stax Records, has chronicled the history, evolution, and
importance of the label (Bowman 2006: 452–470). Among his findings are the
following:
A. Stax Records can be divided into halves. First, from 1960 through 1968, its
recordings were distributed by Atlantic because of an agreement between the
two labels. The Stax sound was developed, and artists like Eddie Floyd, Sam
and Dave, Otis Redding, Booker T. and the M.G.'s, Carla and Rufus
Thomas, and Albert King were signed and recorded.
B. The second period of Stax's development ensued from 1968–1975. Stax was
sold to Gulf and Western in 1968, but remained an independent label until its
demise in 1975. By this time, the company was led by Al Bell, a Black
executive and visionary who expanded the company. In addition to
continuing with Rufus Thomas, Bell signed The Dramatics, Isaac Hayes,
The Staple Singers, and Johnny Taylor to recording contracts.
C. In 1975, we witnessed the demise of Stax records because of hostile
takeover efforts, economic issues, and an inability to repay Union Planters
Bank a loan that was borrowed to finance the label. Also, during this time
Stax loss control of numerous recordings of its artists to Atlantic Records
because of a deal made between them.
The Stax Sound

Bowman (2006: 452–469) delineated characteristics of the Stax sound as
follows:
A. Head arrangements, specifically prearranged horn ensemble sections, were
often used to replace either a bridge section or improvised guitar, keyboard,
or saxophone solo, a concept that was featured by Otis Redding.
B. They used sparse textures and fewer ride cymbals to support vocalists along
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with unison horn lines, and before 1968 seldom used background vocals or
strings on their recordings.
C. Promoted a blues and gospel feel through the use of plagal cadences, pitch
inflections, timbral variations, and syncopated horn and vocal parts. Major
chord harmonies were also common in their compositions.
D. A delayed backbeat on the snare drum and rhythm guitar, as performed by
Al Jackson and Steve Cropper, respectively, was generic to Stax recordings.
E. Unison horn parts were common, and horns were used to substitute for
background vocals before 1968.
F. Stax artists, from its beginnings to its demise, included Sam and Dave, Isaac
Hayes, the Staple Singers, the Dramatics, William Bell, Otis Redding, the
Bar Kays, Eddie Floyd, Carla and Rufus Thomas, and several others. In
addition to Motown and Stax Records, Atlantic and Philadelphia
International Records also contributed significant hits to soul music.
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Neo Soul
This style emerged from artists who grew up listening to funk, jazz, soul, and
rap music, and contains musical influences from all of them. The spoken word
of groups like the Black Poets of the 1960s also influenced neo soul.
A. Many exponents of African American popular styles wished for new
musical expressions, and by the 1990s neo soul became a rival of rhythm
and blues, soul, funk, and rap for market share.
B. Among the earliest exponents of the style were Erykah Badu, D'Angelo,
Lauren Hill, and Jill Scott.
C. Most of the artists are both performers and songwriters.
D. Unlike the love-dominated ballads of R&B and soul music, with the
exception of artists like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield, the lyrics of neo
soul are not dominated by a single issue or topic. To this end, the music of
D'Angelo, Badu, Hill, and Maxwell is known for experimentation.
Experimentation can be heard in Badu's Mama Gun and Baduzim,
D'Angelo's Brown Sugar, and Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite, to name a few.
E. Since the style was influenced by spoken word poetry, combined with
musical elements from diverse styles, including jazz and soul music, neo
soul can be described as a cross between speech and song.
F. Slow to moderate tempos, syllabic style textual patterns, and a pitch range
less than an octave are additional generic features of the style.
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Hip Hop
Hip Hop Culture

In the 1960s and thereafter, urban cities throughout the United States were
permeated with economic and social issues. Cities like the Bronx, New York,
and Compton, California, had experienced economic and social upheaval since
the 1960s, and as a result, every phase of existence, including attitudes
regarding freedom, justice, and civil rights, were affected. Within this cultural
context, a new cultural and musical form entitled hip hop/rap music evolved.
In turn, the phenomenon can be defined as a cultural form that negotiates the
experiences of marginality, police brutality, unequal opportunity, and
oppression within the communities and identity of both African Americans and
Caribbean Americans. Within this complex cultural formation, rap music
evolved as an anti-establishment musical genre during the 1970s. Rap was
different because it was not created by the music industry, producers, or
established artists; instead it evolved from the street culture of New York and
Los Angeles. Among the most prominent scholars to define the culture, genre,
core, and additional elements is Price (2006: 21–42), supplemented with
insights from the author. The early pioneers and their respective contributions
are as follows:
A. Afrika Bambaataa. He was the first to outline the four pillars of hip hop
culture: MCing, DJing, break dancing, and graffiti writing.
B. Kool Herc. He is credited with mixing the “break” of a few choice records
into a sequence without playing the beginning and ending of each song. The
break concept became known as “mixing” beats. In addition, Herc
influenced prominent New York DJs like Jazzy Jeff, Kurtis Blow,
Grandmaster Theodore, and Grandmaster DXT.
C. Grandmaster Flash. He took Herc's idea of “break beats” and perfected
mixing records by developing what he labeled a “quick mix” theory.
1. His system enabled him to mark records, and to use a headset to the second
recording before it was merged into the second recording.
2. Herc was concerned with making a smooth transition from one recording
to another, especially with making the basis pulse seamless and smooth
without losing the basic beat of the song.
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D. Doug E. Fresh. He is credited with developing “beat breathing,” the
development of beats, melodies, and rhythms by using the human voice.
This concept was very popular with the B-boying, and B-girling New York
groups of the late 1980s.
E. Grandmaster Theodore. He was mentored by Grandmaster Flash, and is
credited with creating the “scratch.” He achieved this concept by turning
down the volume, putting pressure on the recording to stop its rotation, and
gently rocking the record back and forth. Later, he used the device to create
different sounds and rhythms.
Elements of Hip Hop Culture

As has been chronicled by Price and others, Afrika Bambaataa outlined the
four pillars of hip hop culture as follows:
A. DJing: The purpose of the DJ was to present pre-recorded music or sound to
an audience. In addition, the DJ had to entertain, and to use language to keep
the audience engaged and interested, “rapping.”
B. MCing: He occupied a role and function that was similar to the DJs, except
he was not responsible for playing the music. He had to tell jokes, entertain,
elaborate on current events that were of interest to his audience, and use
language and metaphors that the audience would recognize and accept. Also,
this person would most often occupy the intermission space.
C. Break dancing (B-boying and B-girling): By the mid-to-late 1970s,
especially in New York, crews of dancers were formed and would follow
their favorite DJ and MC to different events. In turn, they would do their
performances on breaks and timeouts. The dancing was both popular and
important because it filled the space between the transitions from one record
to another. Originally the dancers were all male, as, for example, in Afrika
Bambaataa's Universal Zulu Nation; however, B-girling also became popular
as presented by Lady Doze, Daisy Castro (Baby Love), and Headspin Janet.
D. Graffiti: This phenomenon ensued out of a youth subculture that rebelled
against their parents, police, society, and all other forms of social control.
Social and political themes permeated their graffiti, and they use different
sized lettering, code names, and terms like “throw up,” a quick execution of
graffiti using more than one color.
E. In addition to the “core” elements of hip hop culture that Bambaataa coined,
one should add rap. Rap differs from other African American musical styles
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because (1) it is permeated with street metaphor, language, social issues, and
worldview; (2) the style is predicated on vocal improvisation over a repeated
background, horn lines, scratching turntable, etc., coupled with a rhythm
scheme; (3) the style accentuates a vocal-rhythm aesthetic, rather than horn
arrangements and it is also cheaper to produce than most of its R&B, soul,
and neo soul predecessors; (4) rap music and hip hop culture have
transcended racial, class, and cultural lines to become an international
phenomenon featuring artists throughout the world; and (5) the music has
created its own culture, including vocabulary, dress code, social behavior,
stance, and walk.
Additional Core Hip Hop Cultural Elements

Price (2006: 38–41) and other hip hop and rap scholars have added several
additional elements to Bambaata's core list of DJing, MCing, b-boying and b-
girling, and graffiti. They are as follows:
A. Fashion: The hip hop cultural phenomenon led to the development of
companies to meet the attitudes and needs of its practioneers. As a result,
companies like Fubu, Phat Farm, Adidas, and Reebok emerged to fill this
space. Fashion also included hairstyles, hooded coats, oversized shorts, and
sagging pants.
B. Language: In addition to its rich imagery and subject matter, rap language
uses terms like “yo,” “dis,” and “homie” often. It is also common to hear
source material from spirituals, slang, DJ language, and sampling from
blues, jazz, funk, and R&B recordings.
C. Street knowledge: As might be expected, street knowledge and the ability to
transform it into a logical presentation of an issue is essential to rap. It refers
to one's knowledge of events, people, and issues, and the ability to stay in
touch with the previously mentioned.
D. Entrepreneuship: The hip hop and rap phenomenon created business
opportunities for several giants, including some who doubled as performers
and businessmen. These include Ice Cube, P. Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, 50
Cent, Master P., Snoop Dogg, and Russell Simmons. The business ventures
included t-shirts, clothing lines, record labels and studios like Def Jam and
Death Row, concert promotion, and artist management. Also,
businessmen/performers like Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, and P. Diddy are
successful endorsers of mainstream products.
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E. Authenticity: This is one of the most serious issues in both hip hop culture
and rap music. At the core of whatever business or musical product that is
produced, is whether the businessperson or artist is a true representation of
both. To this end, and because of the involvement of big business, some in
hip hop and rap are worried that both are in danger of being assimilated.
They believe it is losing its edge because it has been watered down to
appease a wider market, specifically to sell more records to the White
community. Among the groups that are attempting to retain the original
focus and purpose of hip hop and rap are the Roots, Mos Def, Lupe Fiasco,
KRS-One, Dead Prez, Jurassic 5, and Immortal Technique. Overall, they
continue to emphasize verbal skill, internal and external issues of concern,
life lessons and unity, social and political messages, and activism. They tend
to reject messages of material wealth, violence, and misogyny.
Developments from the 1970s to today include (1) DJs becoming involved in
the marketing and producing of recordings; (2) rap becoming regulated because
of the number of recordings and the expanding market; and (3) synthesizers and
electronic instruments becoming more prominent in the performing and
production process, in addition to sampling, sequencing, and beatboxing; and
(4) the process of creating drum and percussion patterns, “beats,” and different
feels also became prominent, especially on recordings.
Regional Rap
Rap is not monolithic. To that end, an East and West Coast style has been
identified in early rap, with other regions also developing their own style.
A. East Coast: It is believed, especially in early rap, that the subject matter and
language differed between East and West Coast rappers. For example, Public
Enemy dealt with national and international social and political issues more
than their West Coast peers.
B. West Coast: Often viewed and described as “gangsta rap,” because many of
its earliest recordings focused on guns, killings, street culture, and violence.
Ice-T was the first West Coast rapper to record a gangsta rap song/album; it
was titled Rhyme Pays. However, this was not true of all West Coast rap; for
example, Eazy-E and N.W.A recorded “Dope Man,” a denigration of the
dealer figure. West Coast rap also became known for its rich storytelling
accompanied by driving funk sampling from artists like George Clinton, Sly
and the Family Stone, Rick James, the Ohio Players, Average White Band,
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and Cameo. Gangsta rap originated in Los Angeles. Some of the early
individuals, groups, and their generic musical philosophy are as follows:
1. Gangsta rappers include Above the Law, Hi-C, Compton's Most Wanted
(C.M.W.), The Rhyme $yndicate, Snoop Dogg, King T, DJ Quik, Poison
Clan, South Central Cartel, Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. (a Samoan group), and
Chicano rappers like Frost and Proper Dos.
2. Generally, Gangsta rappers do not celebrate gang violence, favor one gang
over another, or accentuate the importance of gangbanging in their lyrics.
Instead, their lyrics tend to focus on social realism, especially issues like
police brutality, racism, and man-woman relationships.
C. Southern and Midwestern gangsta rap: Fueled by the deaths of Tupac

Shakur and Biggie Smalls, several innovative rappers emerged in the South
and Midwest. Master P, based in New Orleans, established No Limit
Records, and received national recognition when he recorded The Ghettos
Tryin' to Kill Me, featuring Silkk the Shocker and C-Murder. Gangsta
rappers also emerged in Memphis, Tennessee; for example, Three 6 Mafia
and Project Pat led a Memphis collective called “Hypnotize Minds.” Their
music was characterized by a strong rhythmic beat and graphic street
language.
In the late 1980s, Houston produced a group that became known as the Geto
Boys, led by the lead vocalist, Scarface, whose popularity lasted into the
mid-1990s. In addition, Houston also produced rappers like Big Moe,
Lil'Flip, E.S.G., Lil' Keke, Spice, and South Park Mexican. In addition, a
genre that became known as “Chopped and Screwed” was first heard in
Houston in the early 1990s. It is an invention of DJ Screw, a Houston DJ
who mixed tapes of slowed-down music to create a variety of moods.
The Midwest has also produced noteworthy rappers. BoneThugs-N-
Harmony, a Cleveland, Ohio, group became known for their up-tempo
harmonizing vocals and quick rap delivery as heard in their 1993 album, E
1999 Eternal. In the 1990s and after, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and St.
Louis also developed rap identities and groups.
D. A variety of themes can be found in the early raps of East and West Coast
performers. For example, Cypress Hill criticizes inner city crime by
sampling the “Duke of Earl” in their song “Hand on the Pump,” and Ice-T
does the same in “New Jack Hustler,” “Pain,” and “Colors.” Power to the
people is also a common theme, as presented by Public Enemy in “Power to
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the People” and “Fear of a Black Planet” and in N.W.A's “Straight Outta
Compton.” Gender issues are addressed by Salt-N-Pepa in “Tramp” and
“Let's Talk About Sex,” and in Notorious B.I.G's “Nasty Girl” and
“Hypnotize.” Life, drugs, and cops are addressed by 2Pac in “Soulja's
Story.” In “A Bird in the Hand,” Ice Cube discusses the making of a drug
dealer, and in “I Wanna Kill Sam,” he discusses gang warfare in America.
E. Rap Styles
1. Freestyle: When one improvises the text on the spot.

2. Storytelling rap: A general classification that includes any rap that tells a
story, contains a metaphor, or gives advice or lessons for living.
3. Message rap: This classification overlaps with storytelling, but usually
implies that self-destruction will occur if you do wrong, or do not listen.

From its beginnings in the early 1970s to 2013, innovation and criticism have
been consistent in dialogues about hip hop and rap. In the early years, critics of
the style and its practioneers were labeled anti-White, anti-police, and anti-
establishment. They were also criticized for glorifying violence, for using
denigrating words like “ho,” and for misogyny representations. While the
previously mentioned criticisms remain, new criticisms are also emerging from
young producers who are challenging the creativity of the old guard. In this
case, the old guard is Jay-Z and Kanye West. Hudson Mohawke, who is
associated with Kanye West, and a producer of Yeezus, a 2013 recording that
received good press, has labeled Jay-Z's latest album lazy, not inspiring or
creative. In addition to Mohawke, Sean Fennessey underscored Mohawke's
assessment of Jay-Z's latest album, and penned that old titans like Jay-Z and
West have become addicts to other underground aesthetics and sounds. Since
the Internet arrived, hip hop and rap underground are churning out a myriad of
new approaches, ideas, and creativity, and titans like Jay-Z, West, and many
others, whose success is often tied to their celebrity, are in a difficult situation.
To combat the criticism that is emerging from the new guard, both Jay-Z and
West have adapted new approaches to advertising and diffusing their art. For
example, in the release of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, West hosted an
album playback event that featured a Vanessa Beecroft piece assisted by dozens
of nude models. Also, West is being criticized for using “Strange Fruit,” a
Billie Holiday recording about the hanging of Blacks, in a rap that denigrates
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gold digging women. In the same vein, Jay-Z rapped “Picasso Baby” to Marina
Abramovic and to Jerry Saltz, an art critic, and much of the conversation about
his Magna Carta Holy Grail, although it has sold over two million units at this
writing, is not about the album's creativity; instead, people are focused on a
credit that Wondagurl, a teenage Canadian producer, received.
Overall, it seems that whatever positive comments one can make about the
recent Jay-Z and West releases stem from the creativity of others. Thus, being
trapped in a material culture and creative basement, the warning signs are on
the horizon, specifically that the old guard must introduce themselves to the
new hip hop and rap, especially its issues, language, and creativity, in order to
remain on the cutting edge of what the culture and style are about. Whereas
Jay-Z and Kayne West were adapting new approaches to advertising and
marketing their art in 2013, by 2014 Kendrick Lamar emerged as the new icon
of rap music.
Since its beginnings in the 1970s, rap has had many significant contributors,
emanating from throughout the country. Whereas contributors like Tupac,
Snoop Dogg, NWA, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, the Notorious B.I.G., and others
dominated the genre before 2015, since that time new artists have emerged as
icons of the style. One such artist who currently reigns as a creative genius in
rap is Kendrick Lamar. Lamar's ascent to stardom was enhanced and nurtured
in the rap cultural oasis of Compton, California, where he was born in 1987 and
raised. While there is no direct evidence that Lamar was tutored by any of the
aforementioned artists, there is little doubt that he has studied the musical ideas
employed by his Compton musical peers, including Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Dr.
Dre, Eazy-E, and DJ Yella. Lamar has also achieved success by collaborating
with musicians like Thundercat, Terrace Martin, and Kamasi Washington, and
producers/artists DJ Dahi, Zacari Pacaldo, and Anna Wise. Also, similar to his
predecessors, Lamar's creative skills are the outgrowth of his openness to
change, refusal to exclude outside musical ideas, and collaborations from
artist/producers who represent both rap and other musical traditions. The
combined body of knowledge has made Lamar the most creative contemporary
artist in today's rap. In my opinion, Lamar's recent success has expanded his
stature to the most creative rap artist of all time because he was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for his 2017 recording Damn during a ceremony at Columbia
University in New York City on May 30, 2018. The distinction made Lamar the
first non-classical and jazz artist to receive the honor. In the Pulizer board's
original announcement, Damn, Lamar's fourth album, was recognized as a
virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity that includes
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vignettes that capture the complexity of African American life. The album also
won the Best Rap Album, and was nominated for Album of the Year at the
2018 Grammy Awards. The success and critical acclaim received before the
Pulizer Prize was awarded is due, in part, to the successful release of the three
singles “Humble,” “Loyalty,” and “Love.” “Humble” became Lamar's first
number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100 as a lead artist.
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Religious Music
Spirituals
Today, the meaning of the term “spiritual” is clouded by both its
misapplication to another African American religious music—gospel—and the
mystery surrounding its origin. (Differences between “spirituals” and “gospel”
will be discussed later in this chapter.) The term “spiritual” has come to mean
any antebellum African American religious composition, although prior to
1909, it was mentioned in very few sources. (The only writers who used the
term prior to 1909 were those who collected most of their songs in South
Carolina and Georgia.) The expressions “slave hymns,” “plantation hymns,”
and “cabin songs” were often used in different geographical regions to denote
the same religious music commonly known as “spirituals” in South Carolina
and Georgia. For example, collections such as Hampton's Cabin and Plantation
Songs made no mention of “spiritual” in editions prior to 1909 (see Mary
Frances Armstrong and Helen Ludlow, Hampton and Its Students). Instead, the
expression “slave hymns” is used. In addition, William E. Barton does not
mention the term in Old Plantation Hymns nor does John Mason Brown refer to
the term in his article “Songs of the Slave,” published in 1868.
Perhaps, one of the most important questions one should ask is: Why was the
term “spiritual” known and used in some geographical areas and not in others?
At least two possible answers come to mind: (1) perhaps there was little or no
contact between South Carolina and Georgia slaves and those in other
geographical regions. Even if limited contact did take place (through the sale of
a slave, for example), there is no evidence to suggest the new slave could or
would supplant the terminology and practices already in place; and (2) perhaps,
if contact did occur, the new arrival might not have felt a need to suggest new
terminology, because the actual music performance was more important than
the term used to identify it. It is also logical to assume that the new arrivals had
a hierarchy of concerns about their new situation, and labels to identify musical
genres were not as important to them as were issues related to family, work,
and slave discipline.
Nevertheless, “spirituals” have taken on a life of their own. A thorough
analysis of their texts and other religious texts reveals that “spirituals”
functioned in both secular and sacred contexts. Specifically, “spirituals” were
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often used as a way and means of conveying secret messages, as escape songs
demonstrate. The desire to escape to freedom constituted a major theme in
spirituals, and can be heard in the following: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”
(sung when the great liberator Harriet Tubman was in the vicinity to lead slaves
to freedom); “Follow the North Star” (directions to escape to freedom); “Goin'
to Canaan” (escape to Canada) and “Steal Away” (also sung to indicate the
presence of Harriet Tubman).
In addition to escape themes and meanings, spirituals were used for other
secular reasons. The spiritual, “Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray,” for example, was
sung by a house slave to apprise others that neither the slave master, overseer,
nor driver heard the prayer meeting that transpired the night before. (Since open
oral communication was not allowed in work situations, slaves used whatever
means they had to communicate their feelings and messages—the reason why
non-religious messages were coded in spirituals.) Spirituals were sung and
composed by leaders who possessed a melodic gift, talent for poetry, strong
voice, good memory, and creativity. Since the leader had the ability to
improvise, the text could change each time a song was sung. It is believed that
slaves, who were either sold or had contact with other plantations, might have
contributed to the music of their new situations, because the same text appears
in several spirituals.
Antebellum spirituals contained vivid lyrics and were permeated with
truisms like “no more whips cracking,” and aspirations for freedom
camouflaged in biblical text like “I will be free when I cross the ribber [river]
Jordan.” The songs could be sung either syllabic or melismatic, and were
permeated with both syncopation and body rhythms (swinging of head and
body and patting of hands and feet). They also featured hocketing (breaking the
melody up among the group), and heterophony (straying away from the
melodic line), from unison to harmony, as in the spiritual “Steal Away.”
Regarding uses, functions, and meanings of spirituals, Du Bois (1994: 155–
165), in a reprint of the original classic, The Souls of Black Folk, coined a list of
songs that he labeled “Sorrow Songs,” and described the use, function, and
meaning of them as follows:
A. “The Coming of John,” a song of exile, rootlessness, and lack of control.
B. “Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen,” an outgrowth of the United States'
refusal to fulfill its promise of 40 acres and a mule to the freed slaves.
C. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a cradle song of death and an escape song to
denote the presence of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth
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D. “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” a song with many interpretations, meanings, and
waters.
E. “Wings of Atlanta,” an escape song that includes some directions.
F. “Been-a-Listening,” an escape song where the slave was required to be alert
to both news and directions.
G. “My Lord What a Morning,” concerning the end of slavery and the
beginning of freedom.
H. “Dawn of Freedom,” a song of anticipation, hopeful and anxious to know
what lies ahead.
I. “My Way's Cloudy,” a song denoting that one is unclear about their future,
groping, and is inquisitive to know what's next.
J. “Wreslin' Jacob,” a song that portrays time of contemplation because
daylight is near, and there is a need to make a decision before a specific
time.
K. “Steal Away,” an escape song that was sung to announce the presence of
liberators like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth; a song of hope for the
future.
In most spirituals, the melodies were constructed on three to seven tones and
prominently featured pentatonic, hexatonic, and pentatonic scales, which were
permeated with lowered, raised, and bent tones. Several forms can be found,
most often with leader and response, leader-response-leader, and chorus
followed by the leader.
The controversy surrounding the origin of spirituals is worth discussing (see
John Lovell, Black Song: The Forge and the Flame). After the Fisk Jubilee
Singers' successful European tour made the spiritual famous, a debate over its
origin ensued. Writers such as George Pullen Jackson and Newman White
believed the African American spiritual evolved from the Anglo-American
hymn tradition. Others, however, including John Work, Frederick Hall, and
William Fisher, disagreed. Work disagreed with Jackson on three points. First,
on form, Work observed that two-thirds of African American spirituals are call
and response. He challenged Jackson and White to cite a single indigenous
Anglo-American song in this form. Second, concerning scales, Work noted that
the two groups of songs differ radically in the employment of scales. Finally,
on text, although Work accepted the Bible as a common source of some text, he
insisted that the metaphors used in African American spirituals were unique to
that culture and that frequent references were made to freedom (“Goin' to
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Canaan,” “Over the River Jordan”). Work also argued that, because Jackson
found 15 or 20 song resemblances between the two groups, he was naive to
conclude that 600 or 700 songs were imitations.
One can take Work's conclusions further because most spirituals were passed
down orally from generation to generation, and their composers were unknown.
It would seem likewise naive to assume that African Americans would adapt an
entire religious repertoire from their oppressors rather than create songs to fit
their specific concerns. This point is significant because few African Americans
were baptized into Christianity during the antebellum period, although biblical
teachings were often used to imbue both obedience and submission to slave
owners. (Significant numbers of African Americans were not baptized because
both the clergy and slave owners felt that baptizing them would put them on the
same level as the slave owners, thereby raising serious moral and religious
questions.)
Among the most prominent composers and performers of spirituals are the
Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Hampton Institute Singers, the Tuskegee Institute
Singers, Nathaniel Dett, John Work, Harry T. Burleigh, Marian Anderson, Paul
Robeson, James Rosamond, and James Weldon Johnson. It is commonly
accepted that spirituals rank second in popularity to gospel music in many of
today's African American churches, but because they are an outgrowth of the
slave era in the United States, it is important for all students to be cognizant of
their birth and connection to the history of African Americans in North
America.
Gospel
The roots of “gospel music” (gospel means “good news”) date to the
nineteenth century. Gospel music is a genre permeated with modern text and
instrumentation, including electronic instruments, complex polyrhythm, and
energetic, vibrant, and creative soloists and choirs. In musical terms, today's
gospel music dates to the “Jubilees,” a religious song that became popular
before the emancipation, and to the “Church Songs” heard during the late
nineteenth century. Church songs contained four lines of poetry, the second and
fourth lines being the same or nearly the same. They contained few words,
limited melodic range, and very complex rhythms. At the turn of the century,
however, Rev. Charles A. Tindley introduced a novelty to church songs by
setting hymn-like verse to the melodies and rhythms. From the synthesis, three
famous gospel songs emerged: “When the Storm of Life Is Raging,” “Stand By
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Me,” and “I'll Overcome Some Day” (the predecessor of the Civil Rights
anthem “We Shall Overcome”).
Gospel music roots can clearly be dated to 1885, the year the Holiness
Church (closed to outsiders until 1940) was organized. From 1885–1940, the
musical practices of the church became permeated with improvisation, body
rhythm, call-and-response patterns, and some instruments (especially drums,
and tambourines, and, later, the organ and the piano). Today, African American
gospel music is a specific body of religious music that reflects the past and
present social, political, and cultural traditions of African Americans.
Following is a concise chronology of gospel as researched by the authors,
Jacqueline C. DjeDje, Pearl Williams-Jones, and others since circa 1900
(limited primarily to the Midwest).
1900–1930
Fueled by African American migrations from the South, a plethora of
storefront and other small churches in several northeastern and midwestern
cities (including Washington, New York City, St. Louis, and Chicago)
emerged. Indigenous musical traditions were maintained in the fundamentalist-
type churches, which were not geared to traditional liturgy and formality of
worship (Baptist, Pentecostal, and Holiness).
1930s
A period characterized by excellent gospel composers: Thomas A. Dorsey,
Lillian Bowles, Lucie Campbell, Theodore Frye, and Sallie and Roberta Martin.
Among these, Thomas A. Dorsey was labeled the “Father of Gospel Music,”
although the title is better suited to Rev. Charles Tindley. Dorsey's
compositions combined the style of Tindley with the praise songs and the
contemporary popular style of the period. Among his most popular
compositions are “Precious Lord Take My Hand,” “When I've Done the Best I
Can,” and “Peace in the Valley.” In addition to composed gospel songs, both
rural Southern and urban metropolitan congregations continued to utilize
improvisations in some of their songs. The preacher, song leader, and
congregation all shared equally in the music-making process.
1940s
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This era was characterized by a continuation of composed gospel songs, an
increase in gospel recordings, and the emergence of numerous gospel quartets
and ensembles. To the continued excellence of Thomas Dorsey, Sallie and
Roberta Martin, and Lucie Campbell, one can add the name of Rev. W. Herbert
Brewster, a Memphis preacher. Two of his most popular compositions are
“Move on Up a Little Higher,” and “Surely God Is Able.” By 1940, gospel
music (not just its prominent composers) was known throughout the United
States. Its spread was enhanced by the “race records” devoted to recording
African American music (labels which recorded only African American music).
The labels included Apollo, Savoy, and Specialty. This was also the era that the
Hammond organ was added to gospel instrumentation. The 1940s were also
characterized by the quantity and quality of gospel groups, especially quartets,
which were very popular and traveled throughout the country. They appealed to
all segments of the community, and sang songs with text ranging from social to
sacred. Their music served as a contrast to the more church-oriented
arrangements sung by other gospel communities.
1950s
This decade was characterized by a continuing proliferation of gospel
quartets and ensembles. Gospel ensembles, commonly referred to as “groups,”
could be either all female, male, or mixed, and were accompanied by
Hammond organ or piano and on some occasions by a tambourine. The groups
featured call-and-response patterns, close harmonies, and improvisation by the
lead singers. The 1950s also witnessed greater distribution of gospel music,
from its natural habitat in the church to more concert settings in large concert
halls in limited situations, and social venues like Las Vegas, and on radio. In
short, some gospel performers felt they should take their music to all venues,
social or sacred, in order to convert persons to Christianity. Within this context,
the Clara Ward Singers performed on both The Ed Sullivan Show (television
variety show) and in Las Vegas. In addition, they recorded the first million-
copy-seller gospel record, “Surely God Is Able,” composed by Rev. W. Herbert
Brewster. This era also witnessed the birth of other great gospel groups and
soloists. The Staple Singers introduced a style that was characterized by a
measured rhythm, unlike the fast-moving, highly syncopated styling of groups
like the Clara Ward Singers. Mahalia Jackson introduced a full-throated style
with a wide vocal range, permeated with emotional fervor and bending of tones.
586
1960s
The 1960s were characterized by the fame of gospel groups like the Staple
Singers and the Edwin Hawkins Singers. By then, gospel music was permeated
with rock, soul, and jazz influences, instrumentation, and musical
characteristics. The Hawkins Singers produced a stunning success, which led to
the commercial cross-over recording “Oh Happy Day.” The recording was
successful in both popular and religious communities, and achieved a number
one rating on both popular and religious music charts. The Hawkins's style
represented a synthesis of religious text and contemporary rock, soul, and jazz
musical characteristics, and instrumentation. Both the Fender Rhodes bass and
bongo drums were used by Edwin Hawkins, along with traditional gospel
instruments like the Hammond organ, the piano, and the tambourine. In
addition to these developments, the success of composers/gospel choir directors
like the Voices of Tabernacle (James Cleveland), the Abyssinian Choir
(Professor Alex Bradford), and the Chicago Community Choir (Jessy Dixon)
was remarkable. Experimentation with “classical” music idioms was also
evident, as classically trained musicians like Myrna Summers and Horace
Boyer began to make significant contributions to gospel music. Gospel soloists
also continued to proliferate during the era.
1970–2017
Since 1970, gospel music has taken a quantum leap into the musical
spotlight. The music is no longer characterized by a soloist or group primarily
in sacred settings. During this era, gospel performers became more
commercially oriented (instrumentation and music). Both soloists and groups
were more open to crossover musical influences emanating from other musical
genres: Johnny Taylor, from the Soul Stirrers to soul music; The Staple Singers,
from gospel music to soul; Yolanda Adams and Andre Crouch, billed as a
gospel singers, incorporated a synthesis of gospel and soul music into their
music; and Aretha Franklin, from soul to some gospel singing. Also beginning
in the 1970s, we see the use of terms like “contemporary gospel” and “urban
contemporary” to describe the change that was transpiring in gospel music.
Musically, the new gospel embraced the elements and tends of the blues, R&B,
soul, and funk music of the time. Although the new gospel music of the time
evolved gradually, by the 1980s it was entrenched, because of the endemic
influence of recordings like Aretha Franklin's “Amazing Grace,” Edwin
Hawkins's “Oh Happy Days,” Andrae Crouch's “Take Me Back,” and later
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Marvin Sapp's “Never Would Have Made It.” Generic musical features include
blues, gospel, and R&B harmonies and melodic structures, strong backbeat and
other rhythmic influences, vocal inflections that include bending notes, sliding
into and off notes, emotional intensity and feeling, and the ability to improvise
text.
Also, of special note is two recordings by Franklin that were first
recorded/composed by pop artists, “You Have a Friend,” by Carol King, and
“Wholly Holy,” by Marvin Gaye. In both cases, Franklin improvised the text
from secular to sacred. In turn, the ability to interchange text without losing the
emotion and feeling of the song is an attribute of today's African American
“contemporary gospel” and “urban contemporary,” music. In addition to the
aforementioned trendsetters, Yolanda Adams, Tramaine Hawkins, Fred
Hammond, Donnie McCkurkin, BeBe, CeCe, Marvin and Vickie Winans, and
Marvin Sapp have also made significant contributions to the new gospel style.
To this list, one must add Kirk Franklin, perhaps the most influential single
exponent of the new style. His style is characterized by a fusion of blues, R&B,
funk, and rap musical elements and practices. “Stomp” became a crossover
phenomenon that followed the immense success of Edwin Hawkins's “Oh
Happy Day.” His call-and-response style was perfected by his seventeen-piece
group, “The Family,” in 1992. His early albums Kirk Franklin and the Family,
Whatcha Lookin'4, and God's Property from Kirk Franklin's Nu Nation are
imbued with the same musical elements and feel of his mega hit, “Stomp,”
which featured Cheryl “Salt” James of “Salt-N-Pepa, a significant rap group
that gained fame with their hit “Tramp” in the 1980s.
Although Franklin's text are deeply religious, his albums are excellent
examples of a contemporary gospel composer and performer who has openly
adapted and used popular musical elements, and in at least one case, a
performer in his musicking. To this end, his openness to fusing diverse musical
elements into his religious music underscores the importance of Thomas
Dorsey, who championed this concept in Chicago in the 1930s. Today, Franklin
might be the most emulated gospel artist since Mahalia Jackson, although his
call style is stated, but not vocalized, followed by a vocalized response from his
group. However many of today's choirs, ensembles, and soloists that have been
influenced by Franklin can both speak and vocalize the call, thereby expanding
one of Franklin's favorite performance techniques to fit individual needs.
In addition to the previously mentioned gospel composers and performers,
during this period one witnessed the birth of groups like Take Six, a gospel
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group that uses sophisticated harmonies and a cappella singing to perform
gospel music in both sacred and secular settings throughout the world. Thus,
from the 1970s to 1990s, it was common to hear both traditional and
contemporary instrumentation, including electronic instruments, in gospel
music. Gospel groups and soloists continued to proliferate in churches
throughout the country. Whereas some religious people, gospel composers, and
performers have voiced concern regarding the close relationship between
African American sacred and secular musics and performers, measuring the
truthfulness of gospel composers and performers has been done by (1)
determining whether they are committed to Christian dogma and ethics in
theory and practice, (2) by determining whether they have provided witness to
their personal experiences, testified, prayed, and been baptized, and (3)
determining whether they have made an attempt to convert others to Christian
dogma, ethics, and practice, and (4) determining whether a person or group
have donated some of their profits to a religious cause or institution.
As of 2018 gospel music has continued its entry into the academic world, a
trend that also dates to the 1970s. To this end, one see the continuing expansion
of gospel choirs into both high school and the college/university, nationally and
internationally. We have also witnessed a rise in scholarly research devoted to
African American religious music and practices, including theses and
dissertations by institutions and via the publications of scholars such as Horace
Boyer (University of Massachusetts), Mellonee Burnim (Indiana University),
Jacqueline DjeDje (UCLA), Birgitta J. Johnson (University of South Carolina),
and Jean Kidula (University of Georgia). Among the commonalities shared by
spirituals and gospels is the use of call-and-response vocals and hocket and
heterophony performance practices.
589
One of the most invigorating aspects of African American music is the
diversity and excellence of it practioneers in all phases of music. Whereas
knowledge of blues, jazz, gospels, spirituals, and popular artists have been well
documented, knowledge of African American achievements in Euro-American
classical music are less known. Therefore, my purpose is to introduce some of
the many artists who have excelled in this space, past and present. And because
of their importance to African American musical identity during and after
slavery, the author will cite their birth and death dates, where known, as a way
and means of providing the context of their immense musical contributions. To
this end, the scholarly research of Eileen Southern is indispensable to achieve
the previously mentioned objective (Southern 1997: 100–124, 265–296).
Among the female concert artists who excelled within the context of slavery
were Nellie Brown Mitchell (1845–1924), who attended the New England
Conservatory of Music, and Marie Selika Williams (1849–1937) who hailed
from Natchez, Mississippi, and Cincinnati, Ohio, studied voice in San
Francisco, and sang for Queen Victoria; she was labeled the “Queen of
Staccato.” One of the premier concert vocalists born immediately before the
Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 was Flora Batson Bergen (1854–1906),
who toured extensively; among the dignitaries that she sang for are Queen
Victoria, the Royal Family of New Zealand, Pope Leo XIII, and Queen
Liliuokalani of Hawaii. Rachael Walker (1873–c. 1943), originally from
Cleveland, Ohio, settled in Europe in 1897. She toured under the name, “Lucie
Lenoir, The Creole Nightingale.” Because of World War I, her career was cut
short, and she was forced to return to the United States. Matilda Sissieretta
Jones (1860–1933), from her origins in Virginia, migrated to Providence,
Rhode Island, and thereafter studied at both the Providence and New England
conservatories of music. She toured Africa, Asia, and Europe, performed before
many heads of state, and used the tour name, “Black Patti's Troubadours.”
Anna Madah (1855–1925), and Emma Louise (1853–c. 1897) were also active
and productive vocalists during this time.
Male vocalists were also active immediately before and after Emancipation.
Sidney Woodward (1860–1924), William L. Brown, and Henry Williams
toured extensively inside and outside the United States. In Williams's case, he
toured and studied abroad in 1886. Also noteworthy is Theodore Dury's
organizing of an opera company in 1889. Concurrent to the accomplishments of
590
female and male concert artists and others, we witness the achievements of
several male quartets, including the Lew Male Quartet, McAdoo's Jubilee
Singers, and the Golden Gate Quartet of Baltimore, Maryland.
In addition to the female and male vocalists, Southern has chronicled the
achievements of several world-class instrumentalists. Beginning in the colonial
era, Sy Gilliat, a violinist, performed in the Richmond, Virginia, area in the late
seventeenth century, and was accompanied by London Briggs on clarinet and
flute. Around 1680, in Virginia, George Walker, also a violinist, became the
heir apparent to Gilliat. Among the other African Americans who performed
Euro-American classical are music was Thomas Green Bethune (1849–1909),
better known as “Blind Tom” because he was sight impaired, who was a genius
pianist who possessed perfect recall. He memorized musical scores,
concertized, and was pimped in piano competitions with Whites. His slave
owner maintained control over him after 1863. John William Boone (1864–
1927) toured as “Blind Boone,” throughout the United States and twice in
Europe. Concert violinists include John Thomas Douglas (1847–1886), who
toured with the Hyler Sisters and the Georgia Minstrels, and Walter Craig
(1854–1933), of New York, who was the first African American musician to be
admitted to the New York Musicians' Mutual Protective Union. Of particular
note to scholars and students of African American music are the contributions
of non-blues, jazz, and popular music New Orleans artists.
Based upon historical sources, we know New Orleans had a symphony
orchestra as early as the 1830s, and because the Black Codes were not fully
enforced until the late nineteenth century, some Creoles sent their children to
Paris to study music and other subjects. To this list, we can add pianist Victor
Eugene McCarthy (1821–1881), violinists Jacques Constantin Deburque
(1800–1861) and Edmond DéDé (1827–1903), and pianist Basile Bares (1846–
1902), who studied with Eugene Provost, director of the French Opera
Company. Also during the nineteenth century, Frank Johnson (1792–1844) was
recognized as an excellent band and social orchestra conductor who spent time
in England and also served as an inspiration for other Philadelphia composers,
including William Appo (1808–c. 1888), Issac Hazzard (1804–1865), and
James Hemmenway (1800–1849). After around 1840, Henry Williams (1813–
1903), of Boston, Joseph William Postelwaite (1827–1889), and Justin Miner
Holland (1819–1897) were recognized as excellent composers of Euro-
American classical music.
The twentieth century has produced several world-class composers of Euro-
591
American classical music, including Thomas Jefferson Anderson (1928–),
Ulysses Kay (1917–1995), Julia Perry (1924–1979), and Olly W. Wilson
(1937–2018). Anderson's career includes a PhD from the University of Iowa
and professorships at Tennessee State University, Tufts University, and Duke
University. Among his published works are Squares in 1965, Variations on a
Theme by Alban Berg for viola and piano in 1978, and the opera Soldier Boy,
Soldier in 1982, and he scored Scott Joplin's Treemonisha for its world
premiere in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1972. Kay hails from a musical family; his
uncle was Joe “King” Oliver, the famous New Orleans jazz trumpeter, who
graduated from the University of Arizona and has won several notable prizes
for his compositional expertise. Like Anderson, Price, and Wilson, Kay was
also a distinguished academic; in his case, he was Distinguished Professor of
Composition, Lehman College, City University of New York from 1968 until
his death. Among his compositions are Serenade for Orchestra in 1954,
Markings in 1966, and Southern Harmony in 1975.
Wilson (1938–2018), taught at Florida A & M University and Oberlin, and
retired as professor of composition from the University of California, Berkeley,
and was a three-time Guggenheim winner and one of the most significant
composers of the twentieth century. Like Anderson and other African American
composers, he freely incorporated blues, jazz, and spirituals music into his
compositions. Wilson composed for small and large instrumental groups, and
for female and male voices; among his most recognized compositions are
“SpiritSong” in 1973, “Reflections for Symphony Orchestra” in 1978, and
“Cetus” in 1967, a composition that won The International Electronic Music
Competition held at Dartmouth College.
Perry was somewhat unusual among her musical peers because she spent
many years studying abroad, and because unlike Anderson, Wilson, and others,
she was not immersed in blues and jazz. After matriculating at the Westminster
Choir College and the Julliard School of music, she studied with Nadia
Boulanger, Luigi Dallapiccola, Henry Switten and others during her 1951 to
1959 years in Europe. She was acclaimed for several compositions, including
“Stabat Mater” in 1951, “Homage to Vivaldi” in 1954, and for the opera, The
Cask of Amontillado in 1954. Among the numerous others noteworthy African
American composers of Euro-American classical music that deserve mention,
and whose music continues to be programmed today, are Mark Fax (1911–
1974), Adolphus Hailstock (1941–), Thomas Kerr (1915–1988), Wendell
Logan (1940–2010), Noah Ryder (1914–1964), Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson
(1932–2004), Hale Smith (1925–2009), Howard Swanson (1907–1978), and
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George Walker (1922–), to name a few (Southern 1997: 523–567).
593
Summary
This chapter attempted to introduce the student to the musical experiences of
the African American community: jazz, blues, spirituals and gospel music,
Euro-American classical music, hip hop/rap, and popular styles like R&B, soul,
funk, and neo soul. Jazz is a diverse musical genre whose origins date as far
back as the late nineteenth century. Although most scholars cite the late
nineteenth century as a possible time of origin, some, including this writer,
believe jazz existed in the antebellum period and that the descriptive term
“jazz” was coined to identify this unnamed genre sometime during the late
nineteenth century.
Both geographical and collective jazz styles can be traced, which include the
New Orleans, Chicago, swing, bebop, hard bop, third stream, avant garde-
creative music, and a plethora of fusion styles. The origin of blues is also
clouded in controversy. While most scholars cite the late nineteenth century as
a possible time of origin, evidence exists to trace its origins to the antebellum
period. Blues is a musical genre defined by its harmonic structure, not by its
mood or tempo. It, too, underwent an evolutionary process. Whereas country
blues performers used acoustical guitars, harmonicas, and, occasionally, a
piano, their classic and urban blues counterparts used trumpets, saxophones,
trombones, a varied harmonic pattern and form, and, from the vocalist, a text
that espoused urban concerns. (The first blues, “Crazy Blues,” was recorded by
Mamie Smith on August 10, 1920.)
The African American experience, certainly incorporating the African
experience, has given birth to two religious musical genres, spirituals and
gospel music. Spirituals date to the antebellum period. While, prior to 1909, the
term spiritual was used primarily in Georgia and South Carolina, other terms
like “slave hymns,” “plantation hymns,” and “cabin songs,” were also common
and referred to the same musical repertoire. Although most spirituals were
religious in context, some were also used as escape songs, especially in
situations where open communication was either dangerous or forbidden.
Antebellum spirituals were sung a cappella and featured vivid texts, melodies
based on three to seven tones, including pentatonic, hexatonic, and heptatonic
scales, call-and-response patterns, as well as several additional musical
characteristics and performance practices.
Among the most significant nineteenth century exponents of spirituals were
594
the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Hampton Institute Singers, and the Tuskegee
Institute Singers. One should not fail to note both the controversy surrounding
the origin of the spiritual and the rebuttals presented against unproven claims.
Specifically, George P. Jackson and Newman White advocated that the African
American spiritual was copied from Anglo-American religious songs. Scholars
such as John Work, however, refuted this theory on three levels: form, scales,
and text. The popularity of spirituals has been supplanted by the preference for
gospel music in many African American churches and religious settings.
Unlike the a cappella performance of spirituals, gospel should be performed
with instruments, including organs, pianos, guitars, bass, and drums. They
vividly reflect the contemporary religious concerns of African Americans, and
date as far back as the Church Songs of the nineteenth century and the turn-of-
the-century arrangements/compositions of Rev. Charles A. Tindley. Since its
documented history, around 1885, America has witnessed the creation,
expansion, and development of gospel compositions and groups. In addition to
Rev. Charles A. Tindley, Thomas Dorsey, W. Herbert Brewster, Sallie and
Roberta Martin, Edwin Hawkins, and Rev. James Cleveland have written
numerous gospel compositions which have become standards in the repertories
of both gospel soloists and choir/ensembles. Since around 1900,
instrumentation has evolved from piano and drums to bass, organ, and
electronic instruments and devices, including synthesizers. Today, gospel music
performers can be seen on television (as is the case of Bobby Jones) and can be
heard or seen in large concert halls, or at jazz festivals—unlike in its early
history when it was heard primarily in churches. Gospel music choirs are also
common in high schools, colleges, and universities. Today, gospel music is
reflective of the diversity of social, political, and religious attitudes of the
African American community and continues to evolve and to incorporate new
musical text and ideas, while maintaining close religious ties to its audience.
In addition to religious music, African American genres like blues, jazz, and
a myriad of popular musical styles have been introduced and deconstructed, and
are important because they have become the standard of global popular culture.
To that end, one notes the impact of blues and jazz on British artists like Eric
Clapton and Evan Parker respectively, and the global impact of blues, jazz,
rhythm and blues, soul, funk, and neo soul in England, France, and Spain has
been well documented. However, we may conclude that the global impact of
the previously mentioned genres has not exhausted the immense artistic
contributions that African Americans continue to make to world culture.
Specifically, regarding this point, since its origins in the 1970s hip hop culture
595
and rap music have become the latest African American cultural and musical
creations to dominate global popular culture.
African Americans have also excelled in old-time music, especially as
banjoists, flutists, guitarists, and fiddlers, in a myriad of popular styles
including blues, soul, funk, neo soul, and hip hop/rap. Therefore, because of
creativity, need, and a constant thrust to innovate, African Americans will
continue to make significant contributions to the world of music.
596
1. Define the role of the instruments in five-man and seven-man New Orleans
jazz groups.
2. Discuss the musical difference between seeing and bebop.
3. What are the differences between country, classic, and urban blues?
4. Identify the three arguments that John Work gave to rebut Newman White's
contention that the African American spiritual evolved from the Anglo-
American spiritual.
5. Discuss the history of gospel music from 1885–1990, mentioning
composers, performers, styles, and innovations.
6. Identify and discuss the uses and functions of W.E.B. Du Bois' “Sorrow
Songs.”
7. Compare the Motown and Stax musical elements and philosophies.
8. Identify the three stages of Motown's development.
9. Identify and discuss the four original elements of hip hop culture.
10. Name five composers of Euro-American classical music.
11. Identify and compare the forms, text, musical elements, and uses and
functions of spirituals and gospel.
597
Selected References
African Origins, Retentions, Transformations, and
Reinterpretation
Jason Berry. “African Cultural Memory in New Orleans Music.” Black
Music Research Journal, vol. 8, 1,(1988): 3–15.
Jacqueline C. DjeDje. “African-American Music to 1900.” In David Nichols
(ed.). The Cambridge History of American Music. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998: 103–134; 577-580.
Lazarus Ekwueme. “African Music Retention in the New World.” The Black
Perspective in Music, vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1974: 128–145.
David Evans. “Africa and the Blues (A critique of Paul Oliver's Savannah
Syncopators: African Retention in the Blues).” Living Blues, no. 10, 1972:
27–29.
__________. “African Elements in Twentieth Century Black Folk Music.”
Jazzforschung, no. 10, 1978: 86–88.
Portia K. Maultsby. “Africanisms in African-American Music,” in
Africanisms in American Culture. Joseph E. Holloway (ed.). Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1990: 185–211.
Eddie S. Meadows. “African Retentions in Blues and Jazz,” in Talmadge
Anderson (ed.). Black Studies: Theory, Method, and Cultural
Perspectives. Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1990:
209–216.
Jeannette R. Murphy. “The Survival of African Music in America,” in Bruce
Jackson (ed.). The Negro and His Folklore. Reprinted from Popular
Science Monthly, 55 (New York, 1899). Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 1967: 660–672.
J.H. Kwabena Nketia. “The Junction of the Social and Musical: The
Methodology of Cultural Analysis,” unpublished manuscript, 1980.
Paul Oliver. “African Influence on the Blues,” in Living Blues 8, Spring
1972: 13–17.
__________. Savannah Syncopations: African Retentions in the Blues. New
York: Stein and Day, 1970.
John Storm Roberts. Black Music of Two Worlds. New York: Praeger, 1972.
598
Gunther Schuller. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. New
Olly W. Wilson. “The Significance of the Relationship between Afro-
American and West African Music.” The Black Perspective in Music, vol.
2, 1, Spring 1974: 3–22.
__________. “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African-American
Music,”in New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen
Southern. Josephine Wright and Samuel Floyd, Editors. Warren,
Michigan: Harmonie Park Press, 1992: 327–341.
The reader should also consult the research of Ernest Brown, Dena Epstein,
Portia Maultsby, Eddie S. Meadows, and J.H. Kwabena Nketia.
General
Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby (Eds.). Issues in African
American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation. Digital Book.
New York: Kindle Books, 2017.
__________. African American Music: An Introduction. New York:
Routledge, 2006.
Maurice Peress. Dvorák to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America's
Music and Its African AmericanRoots. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004.
Hildred Roach. Black American Music: Past and Present. New York:
Crescendo, 1973.
Margaret R. Simmons and Jeanine Wagner (eds.). A New Anthology of Art
Songs by African American Composers. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
Eileen Southern. The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3rd ed. New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997.
__________. (ed.). Readings in Black American Music, 2nd ed. New York:
W.W. Norton and Company, 1983.

Duke Ellington. “Duke Ellington Says Swing Is Stagnant,” in DownBeat,
February 2, 1939A: 16–17.
__________. “Situations between the Critics and Musicians Is Laughable,”
599
in DownBeat, August,1939B: 4,9.
__________. “Duke Ellington Concludes Criticism of Critics,” in DownBeat,
May, 1939c: 14.
__________. “Duke Ellington Becomes a Critic,” in DownBeat, July,
1939D: 8,35.
Mercer Ellington and Stanley Dance. Duke Ellington in Person: An Intimate
Memoir. London: Hutchinsons, 1978.
John Hasse. Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Eddie S. Meadows. Bebop to Cool Context, Ideology, and Musical Identity.
New York: Praeger Publishers, 2004.
__________. “Affecting Presence: Horace Silver's Funky Style,” in Jazz
Scholarship and Pedagogy (3rd Edition). New York and London:
Routledge, 2006: xv–xxi.
__________. Jazz Reference and Research Materials. New York: Garland,
1981.
__________. “Interview of Randolph E. Weston.” Cambridge: University of
Cambridge, England, 2005.
__________. “Duke Ellington and World Jazz Composition,” in Kimasi
Browne and Jean Kidual (eds.). Resiliency and Distinction ... Beliefs,
Endurance, and Creativity in the Musical Arts of Continental and
Diasporic Africa. Richmond, CA: MRI Press, 2013: 375–415.
Ken Rattenbury. Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer. London and New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1990.
Gunther Schuller. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. New
__________. The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz 1930–1945. New
Billy Taylor. Jazz Piano: History and Development. Dubuque: William C.
Brown, 1982.
Mark Tucker (Ed.). Duke Ellington Reader. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993.
Norman C. Weinstein. A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz.
Metuchen, NJ and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1992.
The reader should also consult the research of Douglas Daniels, Eddie S.
600
Meadows, Thomas Owens, Gunther Schuller, and Dempsey Travis.

Ron Bowman. “Stax,”in African American Music: An Introduction.
Mellonee Burnim and Portia Maultsby, eds. New York: Routledge, 2006:
470–491.
John Broven. Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans. Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1978.
David Evans. Big Road Blues. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1982.
William Ferris. Blues from the Delta: An Illustrated Documentary on the
Music and Musicians of the Mississippi. Garden City, NJ: Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1978.
John A. Jackson. “Philadelphia International,” in African American Music:
An Introduction.
Mellonee Burnim and Portia Maultsby (eds.). New York: Routledge, 2006:
470–491.
Charles Keil. Urban Blues. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966.
Cheryl Keyes. Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Music in American
Life). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
Eddie S. Meadows. “A Preliminary Analysis of Early Rhythm and Blues
Musical Practices,” in The Western Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 7, No.
3, Fall 1983: 172–183.
__________. “Research Trends: Blues, Funk, R&B, Soul, Hip Hop and
Rap,” in Blues, Funk, R&B, Soul, Hip Hop, and Rap. New York and
London, 2010: xv–xxviii.
Paul Oliver. Savannah Syncopations: African Retentions in the Blues. New
York: Stein and Day, 1970.
__________. Story of the Blues. Philadelphia: Chilton Book Company, 1969.
Bengt Olsson. Memphis Blues. London: Studio Vista, 1970.
Harry Oster. Living Country Blues. Detroit: Folklore Associates, 1969.
Gwendolyn D. Pough. Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip
Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere. Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 2004.
Emmett G. Price, III. Hip Hop Culture. Santa Barbara, California: ABC Clio,
2006.
601
Robert W. Stephens. “Soul: A Historical Reconstruction of Continuity and
Change in Black Popular Music,” in The Black Perspective in Music,
Vol.12, No. 1, Spring 1984: 21–44.
Charles Sykes. “Motown,” in African American Music: An Introduction.
Mellonee Burnim and Portia Maultsby, eds. New York: Routledge, 2006:
431–452.
William Tallmadge. “Blue Notes, and Blue Tonality,” in The Black
Perspective in Music, Vol.12, No.2, Fall 1984: 155–166.
Jeff Titon. Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis.
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Steven C. Tracy (Ed.). Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1999.
Ted Vincent. “The Social Context of Black Swan Records,” in Living Blues
86, May/June, 1989: 36–40.
Spirituals
Mary Frances Armstrong and Helen Ludlow. Hampton and Its Students: By
Two of Its Teachers with 50 Cabin and Plantation Songs, arranged by
Thomas P. Fenner. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1874.
William E. Barton. “Old Plantation Hymns.” New England Magazine,
December 1898.
John Mason Brown. “Songs of the Slave.” Lippincott's Magazine,
Philadelphia, December 1868.
W.E.B. DuBois. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover Publications,
Inc., 1994 (reprint of 1903 book).
Dena Epstein. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil
War. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Miles Fisher. Negro Slave Songs in the United States. New York: American
Historical Association, 1953.
John Lovell. Black Song, The Forge and The Flame: The Story of How the
Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out. New York: Paragon House
Publishers, 1972.
Portia K. Maultsby. “The Use and Performance of Hymnody, Spirituals, and
Gospels in the Black Church,” in Western Journal of Black Studies,
Vol.7., No. 3., 1983: 161–172.
602
The reader should also consult the research of Nathaniel Dett, Frederick
Hall, Portia Maultsby, Hall Johnson, James Weldon and J. Rosamond
Johnson, and John Work.
Gospel
Horace Boyer. The Golden Age of Gospel (Music in American Life). Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Jacqueline DjeDje. “An Expression of Black Identity: The Use of Gospel
Music in a Los Angeles Catholic Church,” in Western Journal of Black
Studies, Vol. 7., No. 3., Fall1983: 148–161.
__________. Black Religious Music from South Georgia. Birmingham, AL:
Alabama Center for Higher Education, 1979.
Tony Heilbut. The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times. New York:
Simon & Shuster, 1971.
George Robinson Ricks. Some Aspects of the Religious Music of the United
States Negro: An Ethnomusicological Study with Emphasis on the Gospel
Tradition. New York: Arno Press, 1977.
The reader should also consult the research of Irene Jackson and Pearl
Williams-Jones, and additional research of Mellonee Burnim, Horace
Boyer, and Jacqueline C. DjeDje.
1. J. H. K. Nketia. “The Juncture of the Social and Musical: The Methodology of Cultural
Analysis,” unpublished manuscript, 1980, p. 3.
603
16
The Art of Africa and the Diaspora

Sharon Pruitt
604
Introduction
The art produced by persons of African descent both on the African continent
as well as in the diaspora is becoming more visible in global art history survey
books. Ancient Egyptian art of North Africa, which serves as the catalyst for
ancient Near East art, at present is accompanied by additional examples of
artworks from other parts of Africa and the diaspora in these books. By
incorporating previously marginalized cultures of the African diaspora, such as
traditional and contemporary West and Central African art as well as African
American art, the awareness of a larger African artistic production is expanded.
While this is a valiant effort to advance public perceptions and knowledge of
these cultures, the discussions about the art forms sometimes have
shortcomings; for example, the discourse may be limited to a description of an
individual artwork rather than to the artwork's cultural relationships.
This chapter presents a broad view of the art of Africa and the diaspora
spanning diverse regions during various time periods. Unlike the inclusion of
ancient Egyptian art in art history survey books, this chapter omits this specific
artistic era. Instead, it examines more carefully those areas in survey books
which tend to be partially discussed (i.e., traditional West African and modern
African American art) or completely omitted (i.e., Caribbean art). The chapter
begins with an exploration in understanding traditional African art from various
regions in a manner that is not normally addressed in a survey book on global
art. It is followed by a study of traditional media (or materials) as well as the
ancient art of Nigeria, West Africa. The chapter proceeds with an examination
of both traditional and contemporary African art, including practices and
stylistic expressions. This is followed by analyses of the contributions made by
both pioneering African American and Caribbean artists.
Because of the magnitude of the geographic areas and time periods covered
in this chapter, the information presented here is appears incomplete. However,
this chapter's objective is to highlight the accomplishments of numerous
uncelebrated artists and artworks in the African diaspora as well as to generate
encouragement for the pursuit of continuing research and study in the visual art
productions of these cultures.
Major terms and concepts: media, rock paintings, traditional African art
style, ethnographers, ritual libations, cire perdue, ancient Nigerian art, canons
of representation, Oshogbo workshop, Africanisms, limner, New Negro
605
Movement, vodun.
606
Toward an Approach to Understanding Traditional
African Art
Africa's past and present art manifests ideologies of both tradition and
change. In its transformation over time, the art reflects both external influences
and internal nuances of cultural dynamics which led to expressions of
alterations made in style, techniques, media, and function. The intermingling of
traditional practices with the modern developments in today's society indicates
that an appropriate manner in which to study the art is to classify it under two
categories: traditional and contemporary.1 Traditional art, such as wood masks
and figural sculpture, continues to thrive during Africa's contemporary era.
Their date of origin is unknown. However, masks and masqueraders appear in
rock art paintings (i.e., not inside of caves, as in Europe, but on exposed rock
exteriors such as cliffs, sometimes with large rock overhangs which can provide
shelters), and date as far back as 6000 BC.
The majority of African art that is exhibited in the permanent collections of
fine arts and anthropology museums in the United States and Europe may be
classified as traditional art. Their purposes for creation and meaning are steeped
in traditional values, including religious and philosophical belief systems.
These art objects require understanding and appreciation based on their own
cultural context. However, by their mere placement in Western museums,
African artworks are sometimes presented devoid of their original cultural
context or presented with a limited frame of reference.
Masks displayed in Western museums, which are reproduced in survey
books, represent one example of misjudgment or misinterpretation of African
artworks whenever viewed out of context. In their original context, masks are
not seen as static objects as displayed in interior Western museums but are
worn by masqueraders performing outdoors and in rhythmic dance movements,
accompanied by the music of drums. It may be argued that one of the museum's
functions is to preserve artifacts from various parts of the world; however, the
African artworks, in a Western museum, are frequently viewed in an entirely
different contextual framework. Currently, in order to enhance the viewer's
cultural understanding, some Western museums and survey books include
additional resources, such as photograph(s) and videos of masqueraders
performing in ritual attire or African artists creating artworks in their own
environment.
607
African art is not unique in its limited contextual transformation within the
milieu of museums. To the uninformed viewer, cultural references which
require understanding of the object's original context may be problematic. For
example, in a museum exhibition, because of its Christian religious images and
its association to a Western viewer's cultural experience, a European medieval
painting on an altarpiece provides more relevance and comprehension.
However, the African artwork does not necessarily offer the viewer the same
familiarity of religious significance. Because of the metamorphosis in cultural
displacement in a Western museum, the interpretations associated with the
African artworks become more intellectually incomplete. Perhaps, the cultural
distortions of the interpretations of African artworks is less the fault of museum
personnel, who may provide contextual information, but rather results from the
viewer's perception of years of professed superior attitudes of Western cultures
to Third World cultures, reflected in Western literature and education.
Despite their displacement in a foreign arena such as a museum, African
artworks withstand critical scrutiny and meet or sometimes exceed their
expected aesthetic impulses by viewers. For, indeed, some of their forms of
smooth, shiny surfaces as well as their skillfully sculpted angular and rotund
shapes are pleasing constructs even to the uninformed Western viewer. But
frequently, the presentation of the object without contextual information places
African art in a position subordinate to Western art. The reasons for this relates
to our aesthetic education. Grounded in a Western artistic perception which
favors realistic representations of images and a tradition of illusionism, our
conventional and initial response to African art may evoke terms such as
simple, crude, or “primitive.” When this same art is examined within its own
cultural setting, one realizes the need to alter terminology which fosters
derogatory concepts and acknowledge findings which emphasize the art's
sophistication, complexity, and mystery.
Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, the modern European
artists' interest in African art served as a catalyst for approaching African art
from an aesthetic perception and distinguishing its validity as worthy of further
inquiry. They recognized the vitality of its unnaturalistic forms during a period
when ethnographers, whose methods of field research were developed into the
study of current cultural anthropologists, were still debating the primal
evolution and “primitiveness” of its structure. Rejecting the Western tradition
of illusionism and realistic representation, modern European artists admired the
unique, distorted forms of African art and derived inspiration from it to create
new styles of abstraction which changed the course of European art. European
608
artists such as Maurice Vlaminck, André Derain, Pablo Picasso, George
Braque, Henri Matisse, Ernest Ludwig Kirchner, and Emile Nolde observed
examples of African art in curio shops, ethnological museums, or in their own
or other artists' private collections. As a result of their fascination with
interfacing African art forms into modern expressions, these artists sparked
public interest and curiosity to the extent that fine art museums began to
include African artworks in their collections.
Individual dates for African artworks, particularly wood sculpture, are often
problematic. The lack of available dates may be attributed to natural weathering
principles as well as to the European travelers' early methods of collecting and
recording. The wood sculpture is produced in a tropical climate of forested
regions. Once the wood is cut from the tree for the artwork, the climate would
only allow for the wood to survive for a certain time frame. The date of creation
of many works is believed to be no more than 100 years prior to the date of
their discovery by Westerners. Therefore, much of the traditional wood
sculpture dates to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, coinciding with the
flourishing collecting by Westerners in the twentieth century.
The collection of West and Central African art by Europeans dates as far
back as the thirteenth century. However, amassing objects as curios, or as bona
fide artworks, by European travelers began in earnest in the fifteenth century.
Throughout this period, recorded information revealed the existence of an
overwhelming array of objects and riches. The textual material was
subsequently altered, falsified, or held from publication until the seventeenth
century. For two centuries, fears abounded among profiteering merchants who
sought to reduce the number of potential competitors by advertising scant and
erroneous information regarding Africa's resources. However, in the
seventeenth century, when the economic interest turned to trading in slaves,
public knowledge of Africa's riches no longer posed a threat to the merchants.
European travelers did not actively turn their attention to collecting African art
as curios again until the nineteenth century after the demise of the slave trade.
At the turn of the century, European ethnographers began to systematically
collect and study African objects as important artifacts of material culture and
preserved them in ethnological museums.
During the fifteenth century, European travelers' economic strategy for
falsifying documents was not the only factor which had a detrimental effect on
perceptions of African art. It was during this period that taxonomy in the
European artistic community was introduced. Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian
609
Renaissance artist, established a classification system which elevated the media
of painting to the highest level of artistic achievement, while simultaneously
relegating sculpture and other fine arts media to a subordinate status. Since
sculpture was abundant in African societies and painting was believed to be
nonexistent by Western scholars, African art was considered inferior to
Western art. This perception has persisted despite the acknowledgement of the
existence of African paintings on rock surfaces in Namibia, South Africa
(dating ca. 27,000 BC) and Algeria, North Africa (dating ca. 6000 BC) as well as
on Africans' human bodies, masks, and architecture.
Regardless of these developments, a thorough study of the art is often
plagued by obscure or non-extant data, such as the artist's name, the location,
dates, function, and other contextual information. This information was
frequently not collected by or of little interest to early traders and
ethnographers; therefore, a huge gap exists in acquiring discernible facts, and
one's complete understanding of African art is hampered. Nevertheless, the
literature available allows one to begin to appreciate African art and become
intrigued with its aesthetically pleasing forms. And if one is willing to take the
challenge further, one will find writings by cultural anthropologists and art
historians dating to the late twentieth and early twentieth centuries that provide
a quest for the meaning, purpose, and stylistic achievements of African art
within its own cultural milieu.
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Traditional African art consists of a variety of media. Besides sculpture and
painting, it includes pottery, beaded and metal jewelry, textiles, household
objects, and architecture. Traditional African art, which is frequently suspended
in a complex web of spiritual essence, is produced to enhance the cycle of life
experienced by members of the society. It portrays and embodies themes of
fertility, rites-of-passage (e.g., transition from youth to adulthood or passing
from the realm of life to death), and the constant permeation of vital, spiritual
forces, including powers of deceased ancestors, in the lives of the present
inhabitants of the society. The art supports the collective community's
philosophical ideas and reaffirms its social, religious, political, and economic
values. The artwork represents humankind's need to harmonize with nature and
the cosmic universe.
The predominance of the appearance of this art in wood results from its local
availability. Heavily forested regions exist in West and Central Africa, and
many traditional wood sculptures housed in Western museums come from this
region. The nearby forest offered a vast supply from which the artist, assisted
by the counseling of a diviner (trained to interact with the spirits), could select a
specific tree. Before cutting down the tree for sculpting, the diviner engages in
pouring libations, such as animal blood, palm oil, or millet, around the tree. The
diviner performs a ritual ceremony in order to appease the spirits believed to
embody the tree as well as to ultimately heighten the spiritual powers of the
soon-to-be-created wood sculpture. This ritual ceremony echoes the traditional
African religious philosophy that vital, spiritual forces permeate all aspects of
life and nature, including rocks, hills, and animals.
Before an individual, family, or community ritual ceremony begins by using
a wood figural sculpture on an altar, ritual libations are also poured on the
artwork. The frequent application of substances used in ritual ceremonial
libations creates encrustations, which may shorten the life span of the wood.
Other elements which create deterioration of the wood sculpture include the
tropical climate and infestations caused by termites or other insects.
During ancient periods, which yielded art forms that are no longer produced
today, wood was not the only material used for sculpture. Stone, terracotta (or
low fired clay), and various alloys of metal constituted other ancient sculpture
media; these materials often yield better results for dates. It should be noted that
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with the exception of the stone sculpture from Ancient Egypt, the chronological
sequences of dates for the history of art in numerous African countries is either
non-existent or is extremely incomplete. Ancient Nigeria, where terracotta and
metal sculpture were created for reigning kings or other royal rulers, offers a
slight exception. Despite the gaps in the time frame between the four cultures—
Ancient Nok, Ancient Igbo-Ukwu, Ancient Ife, and Ancient Benin—they are
briefly presented below.
Nok culture (500 BC–200 AD) was located near the Jos Plateau in northern
Nigeria. It is characterized by terracotta human heads, measuring from 3–14
inches in height, with expressive, large eyes, slightly opened mouths, and
cascading hairstyles. The purpose for these stylized (the emphasis and/or de-
emphasis of an object, creating distortion) terracotta heads is uncertain. Some
display elaborate simulated headdresses and beadwork. Because of this, they
are believed to have served a political leader. Although not much is known
about the Nok culture, archaeological evidence demonstrates that its clay firing
technique was highly sophisticated.
From the burial site of Igbo-Ukwu (ninth to tenth century) in southeastern
Nigeria, lead bronze vessels and staves with intricate geometric patterns,
zoomorphic designs, and stylized human figures were found. These objects
were probably used in activities for the king, who ruled by divine right. A
sophisticated casting technique known as cire perdue (or lost-wax, in which
wax formed around a clay mold was ultimately melted) was used in the
production of these artworks.
Similar to the art of Nok, the sculpture from the Ife Kingdom (eleventh to
fifteenth century) of southwestern Nigeria is characterized by numerous human
heads and only a few full-figured sculptures. The heads are either terracotta
using the additive technique or cast in brass (a type of bronze which is an alloy
of copper and zinc) using the cire perdue technique. They display elaborate
simulated beadwork and headdresses, signifying royalty. The heads may have
served as symbolic portraits of the ruler, or Oni, or other members of the royal
court. Unlike the Nok examples, the Ife heads are extremely naturalistic.
Benin Kingdom's art (fifteenth century to 1897) from central Nigeria consists
primarily of brass and ivory sculpture. These brass heads are more stylized than
Ife heads and portray simulated strands of coral beads, reserved for royalty that
are worn as necklaces and crowns. The brass heads of the king, or Oba, were
surmounted by an ivory tusk with low-relief images symbolizing the king's
political and religious power. The heads were placed on the clay altars in the
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courtyard of the royal palace. Other art created during the Benin period
includes brass plaques depicting royal activities with the king's military
entourage, brass musicians, brass equestrian figures, ivory leopard aquamaniles,
and ivory bracelets. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the
Benin kings traded heavily with the Portuguese. Slaves, ivory, pepper, and salt
were traded for Portuguese brass manillas. Ivory saltcellars produced by Benin
sculptors were created specifically for the Portuguese market.
Three of the cultures—Nok, Ife, and Benin—have a preponderant number of
images portraying human heads. Placing emphasis on the head is also prevalent
in the style of wood figural sculpture from various parts of Africa. The
significance of the head is that it is the physical location of intellectual and
spiritual powers; it is this part of the human body which defines the identity and
the character of the individual. In figural sculpture, the emphasis on the head is
portrayed in terms of its enlarged scale and its decorative coiffure or headgear.
In comparison to the rest of the body, the head is often expressed in a numerical
ratio of 1:3 or 1:4. Other qualities typically found in African sculpture,
including ancient Egyptian stone sculpture, are a rigid, erect posture, frontal
presentation, symmetrical composition, and placement of the hands alongside
the body. This conventionalism of form reflects the numerous years of training
by the artist in an apprenticeship program, which promoted the established
canons of representing traditional styles.
In addition, the canons of representation relate to the spiritual functions of
the artworks. Figural sculptures and masks often embody the vital, spiritual
forces of the community, nature, and the cosmos. In traditional societies, the
figural sculpture, often displayed on altars or shrines, served as a mediator
between humankind and the spirit world. The masquerader, donned in a mask
and costume, also served as a medium through which members of the society
communicate with the spirit world for social control. The severe, abstract style
expresses an anthropomorphic form, which is not intended to imitate human
likeness but instead represents a concept about spiritual forces.
Unfortunately, the traditional arts of East and South Africa are too
infrequently examined in global survey books. As was mentioned earlier, West
and Central African regions offer the most extensive amounts of wood
sculpture where local supply of available resources is sustained by an ecology
which yields thriving forested areas. Contrary to this phenomenon, regions in
other parts of Africa are not as fertile with vegetation. For example, in East
Africa, the climate is arid and forested and savannah regions are scattered
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throughout. Many traditional ethnic groups, such as the Maasai of Kenya, are
nomadic pastoralists and therefore create art objects which are light-weight,
small in scale, and portable. Rather than focusing on figural wood sculpture,
Maasai art is characterized by an abundance of beaded jewelry, paint applied to
the body, and brightly colored textiles.
Personal adornment satisfies the artistic urge in many nomadic cultures. The
human body is perceived as a sculptural three-dimensional form; it is
transformed into an artistic expression by carefully applied colored pigment and
ornate jewelry which, when active and in motion as in a ritual dance
performance, possesses a vital force of its own. The significance associated
with this art form is evident by the numerous hours spent by both men and
women in its production. The manner in which the body is embellished
indicates the individual's social status within the society. For example, an
initiated male is identified by long hair accentuated with reddish clay. A
warrior wears beaded earrings and necklaces given to him by his mother or
girlfriend. A married woman wears beadwork and clothing different from that
of a single woman.
Today, many traditional African artworks are not produced. Reasons for their
termination reflect the changing practices in societies. The intervention of two
religious doctrines contributed to this decline of traditional arts: Islam, with its
strong denunciation of graven images; and Christianity, whose adherents
believed that traditional African religions and art represented heathenism and
should be abandoned and destroyed. However, with African colonies'
independence from European powers and continuous contact with the West,
new techniques, training programs, and materials have been introduced, which
has spawned the creation and production of art forms with innovative
expressions that compete with contemporary art on the international scene.
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Of all the African countries, the largest number of renowned practicing
contemporary artists have historically emanated from Nigeria. This
phenomenon is relatively recent, dating to the early 1960s, and includes
painters, sculptors, and graphic artists. Two factors served as catalysts for
inspiring new trends in contemporary Nigerian artistic development: the
Nigerian heritage and Western education. First, Nigeria's known traditional
artistic heritage is strong, dating as far back as 500 BC, while contemporary
artistic development took root in the early twenties. Unlike contemporary
Western artists, who derive inspiration from their past heritage through
research, publications, or museum and gallery visits, the contemporary
Nigerian's knowledge of a past artistic legacy stems from oral traditions or
traditional ceremonies and festivals. Even today in Nigeria, a minimum
quantity of historical artworks are on view in the country's museums, which
opened in the early fifties.
The numerous art training programs offer another stimulus for the occurrence
of the abundant growth of artistic production in Nigeria. An artist trains in a
program based on the traditional apprenticeship method or the Western studio
system; the latter includes workshop programs and fine arts programs in
academic institutions. Even though the majority of artists are educated in
African art schools, many, often as recipients of government scholarships,
studied in Europe or America, where they were exposed to Western art history
styles and media. Regardless of where they trained, many pioneering
contemporary Nigerian artists, such as Chief Aina Onabolu and Ben Enwonwu,
received instruction not from their own countrymen but from European
teachers. Since independence in 1960, the number of Nigerian art teachers
within the country has increased. Their Nigerian teachers are versed in
international art. After receiving their education abroad, many artists returned
to the universities and polytechnic schools in their own country to teach. As a
result, in their artistic representations, especially in painting, the present
university art students' artworks have more in common with their Western art
teachers than with their own ancient or traditional African art predecessors.
Although to some extent the traditional apprenticeship program is still
utilized in some areas of Nigeria, its practice in large part has been supplanted
by academic or Western forms of art education. In Nigeria, the most notable
contemporary pioneering fine arts programs are the following three, two of
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which are associated with prominent individuals: (1) Aina Onabolu, (2)
Kenneth Crosswraithe Murray, and (3) Ahmadu Bello University, formerly the
Nigeria College of Art, Science and Technology.
The Western method of drawing directly from a model is a technique that is
foreign to the traditional Nigerian artistic practices. When Western education
was introduced to Nigeria by Christian missionaries in the early nineteenth
century, the prospect of adding art to schools' curricula was held suspect and
adamantly resisted. Because art education was viewed as insignificant for
inclusion, fine art programs developed slowly, and the rapid emergence of
contemporary art and artists was thwarted.
In the early 1920s, the successful addition of art programs to the curricula of
Nigeria's secondary schools and colleges may be attributed to the relentless
pursuits of Chief Aina Onabolu, a Yoruba painter and art educator. Onabolu
coerced colonial government officials to implement art programs into the
school systems all over Nigeria. His proposal was approved, and, in 1922, he
was the first art education teacher in Nigeria. Simultaneously, Onabolu
embarked upon a rigorous campaign to hire experienced, Western-trained art
teachers. The early art teachers, such as Kenneth C. Murray, came from
England and, obviously, were well versed in European aesthetics. Throughout
his career, Onabolu was also a proponent of the Western aesthetic tradition.
Having taught himself the technique of creating spatial illusions of depth and
perspective on a two-dimensional surface by manipulating light-and-dark areas,
Onabolu produced realistic paintings and drawings for two decades before
studying art abroad. From 1920 to 1922, he trained at the academies of London
and Paris and pursued courses in drawing, painting, and design. He is revered
as the first African to study art in England and is the first known African artist
to produce illusionistic portraits; his paintings and drawings captured the
features of prominent Nigerian and British personalities. Thus, in his own
artwork, Onabolu neither incorporated the abstract style of traditional arts from
his heritage nor the abstract stylistic trends prevalent in modern European art of
the time. Instead, his efforts were devoted to proving the skillful capability that
contemporary African artists possessed in producing an illusionistic aesthetic
tantamount to the achievements made by their European counterparts.
After the Nigerian Civil War, curricula changes were made in the nation's
institutions of higher learning in which the model used in the British
educational system was abandoned. Nigeria's oldest university fine arts
program is that initiated at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) in Zaria.
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Originally, it was founded under the name of Nigeria College of Art, Science
and Technology in Ibadan in 1953, and was part of the Department of
Education. In its new location, the fine arts program became a separate school,
offering courses in painting, sculpture, graphic design, textile design, and art
history.
Many of Nigeria's leading contemporary artists received their diplomas from
Zaria and, after completion, some continued their education abroad.
Dissatisfied with the British art lecturers' European orientation and heavily
influenced by current discourse emanating from major cultural and political
centers on “the African personality,” the students challenged themselves to
rediscover their heritage and recognize their African identity. Organized under
the rubric of the Zaria Art Society in 1958, some of its earliest members
included presently eminent Nigerian artists as Uche Okeke, Yusuf Grillo,
Demas Nwoko, Simon Okeke, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Oseloka Osadebe, and
Emmanuel Okechukwu Odita. In the creation of their artworks, the members
vowed to follow the society's manifesto, which involved an appreciation of and
willingness to promote natural syntheses of the aesthetics of traditional African
art, the aesthetics of Western art, and contemporary African cultural
experiences.
Workshops offered in Nigeria are alternative art training opportunities for
promising artists, who might neither afford nor have the proper credentials to
enroll in a university program. Unlike the fine arts program but similar to the
traditional apprenticeship program, the workshop does not require students to
take examinations or earn a degree or certificate. In addition, completion of the
program is not set according to a prescribed schedule; the participating student
elects to engage in the program as long as he or she chooses.
Of all the art workshop programs in Nigeria, the Oshogbo workshop called
“Mbari Mbayo,” which was formed in 1962, received the most international
recognition. It was modeled after the summer art workshops which were part of
the Mbari Writers' and Artists' Club, established in Ibadan in 1961. Unlike the
group of intellectuals who comprised the Ibadan Mbari Writers' and Artists'
Club, the Oshogbo workshop attracted individuals who were either primary
school dropouts or had not received any formal Western training. Its founder,
Ulli Beier, an Austrian living in Nigeria at the time, fostered a philosophy that
sought to nurture the fresh, untainted imagination and ability of promising,
uneducated artists. It was his attempt to promote the African essence in the
artworks of the students.
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Like the original fine arts programs in the university, the workshop was
organized and run by Westerners. Beier selected and invited the teachers. Even
though most of the teachers were from Europe, two non-Europeans, Dennis
Williams (a West Indian artist) and Jacob Lawrence (an African American
painter discussed below) led programs during the tenure of the workshop.
The workshop approach to training students was very informal. Students
were not introduced to art theories. They were given very inexpensive
materials, such as hardboard and emulsion, and were allowed considerable
freedom to experiment on their own. Nevertheless, the students' artworks were
judged and critiqued; at the end of each day, the teacher hung what was
considered the best works and offered suggestions for improvement.
Although the Oshogbo workshop became defunct because of lack of funding
in the late sixties, it produced numerous students who became internationally
recognized. Artists, such as Jacob Afolabi, Rufus Ogundele, Twins Seven,
Muraina Oyleami, Adebesi Fabunmi, and Jimoh Buraimoh, have had works
exhibited in Africa, Europe, and the US. They produced an impressive
following of students, whose artworks have also been included in international
exhibitions.
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The occurrence of Africanisms or African retention in African American arts
is more prevalent in music, dance, literature, and drama than in the visual arts.
The early art produced by slaves offers us some artistic links to Africa's
traditional heritage. Artistic retention survived in regions of South Carolina and
Georgia and includes utilitarian objects of personal use. Traditional African
motifs and techniques occur in textiles, baskets, wood canes, clay jugs, wrought
ironwork, wood cabinet designs, musical instruments, and architecture. For
example, the appliqué technique used in American quilts, in which cut-out
pieces of cloth are sewn onto a cloth backing, is derived from appliquéd textiles
produced by traditional artists in West Africa, such as the Fon in the Republic
of Benin (formerly, Dahomey).
Africans that were transported to the Americas were forced to adjust to a new
lifestyle which involved the loss of freedom, religion, and family. The
communal and kinship systems that were fostered in their African homeland
were replaced in the US by separations of the familiar group, strict
confinement, and lack of mobility, which were adopted into America's Slave
Codes. This adverse lifestyle was completely contrary to the African communal
system which prompted the production of the religious, social, or political
figural sculptures, masks, and other artworks. For the African slave in America,
social changes, denial of practicing traditional African religions, and total
absence of political and economic power resulted in the dissipation of
traditional African art, and instead spawned the development of new art forms
which catered to a new patron—the white slave master.
American art, whether created by African Americans or white Americans,
developed slowly. In colonial days, all artistic endeavors were adjusted to the
needs of the new environment. White Americans had strong cultural ties to
their mother countries and yearned for the personal possessions to which they
had been accustomed in their old homeland. Wealthy white Southerners
produced few of their own personal belongings and depended on the
importation of necessary commodities from Europe. However, this venture
proved to be ineffective because foreign merchandise was expensive and the
transportation of these goods from Europe was too infrequent. Eventually,
skilled European craftsmen were transported to America to establish
apprenticeship programs for local artisans. Both white and slave artisans
participated in these programs, especially in the eighteenth century. They were
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trained as goldsmiths, silversmiths, dressmakers, cabinetmakers, printers,
engravers, and portrait painters. These artisans' skills proved profitable for their
slave masters who would sometimes hire them out for service. Sometimes, a
white artisan would even buy, train, and then sell a slave artisan for profit.
An alternative to apprenticed artisans was self-taught artists and artisans. Art
programs were not officially incorporated into the art curricula of formal
schools until the mid-nineteenth century. During the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, a few African American artists achieved personal recognition. They
were mostly in the northern cities where white abolitionists funded and
supported their profession. The African American artists acculturated Western
techniques and aesthetic concepts in an attempt to merge with mainstream
artists.
Some of the earliest African American professional artists were printmakers.
Scipio Moorhead, a slave active around 1773, is among the most notable. He
resided in Boston with Rev. John Moorhead, his slave master and a minister
who allowed Scipio to receive training in art from his wife, Sarah Moorhead, an
art teacher. Although artworks by Scipio Moorhead do not survive today, it is
believed that he was a favorite artist of Phyllis Wheatley, a renowned African
American poet, who dedicated one of her poems to him; speculations abound
that the unsigned portrait engraving of Wheatley which appears in several of
her publications is by Moorhead.
Joshua Johnston, who was active from 1796 to 1824, is an eminent African
American artist, who in the past has been included in survey books dealing with
American limner painters without identifying him as a mulatto. He was the first
African American artist to gain recognition as a portrait painter in oil. Most of
the known limner portrait painters were white Americans. The procedure for
painting in the limner style entails that the artist first paints the background,
which includes props such as furniture, pet dogs, and books; then, he carries his
rolled-up canvases around with him and paints sitter's portrait in last. As
Johnston moved around Baltimore where he resided, he was commissioned to
do portraits of wealthy slaveholders and other aristocrats, a subject matter
which was also popular among white artists. Although his background is
obscure, it is believed that he was a slave who was self-trained and had the
privilege of seeing works by white limner painters in Baltimore, particularly
those of Charles Peale Polk, Charles Wilson Peale, and Rembrandt Peale.
None of Johnston's artworks are signed or dated; they are only known by his
distinctive style. He portrays figures as stiff, rigid, and expressionless with
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pudgy hands. The sitter is depicted from a three-quarters viewpoint with taut
lips and eyes gazing directly out at the viewer. The representation of space is
sometimes awkward and indicates limited knowledge of linear perspective.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, African American artists
who were descendants of white slave owners enjoyed special privileges in
terms of free mobility, as Johnston experienced, and formal education, as Julien
Hudson received. Hudson, the son of a wealthy slaveholder, was a free man
living in New Orleans in the nineteenth century. He was exposed to the French
tradition both in New Orleans and in Paris, where he visited briefly. Hudson
became a teacher and painted miniature portraits in oil. His portrayals were
more realistically and accurately rendered than those of Johnston.
Besides portraits, other subjects which African American artists represented
were landscape scenes, again echoing the major concerns of their white
counterparts. In the nineteenth century, both Robert Duncanson and Edward
Bannister expressed the adored American land and nature in their oil paintings.
Duncanson was a mulatto from New York State who was educated in Canada
and traveled to Europe. He settled in Cincinnati, where he received many
commissions for portraits and landscape murals from prominent families but
never did portraits of blacks. He studied the “classical tradition” in Italy and
demonstrated a keen understanding of the Romantic sensibility used in the style
of American Hudson River School painters who expressed the awesome
vastness of nature. Duncanson is reputed to be the first African American artist
to be recognized internationally.
Edward Bannister was born of mixed heritage—the son of a West Indian
father and a Canadian mother—and studied art at Lowell Institute in Boston.
Associated with the Barbizon School of American Regionalist Painters, he
received national recognition for his work and was awarded a bronze medal in
the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 for his painting entitled Under the Oaks; at
the time, this work sold for $1,500 but its present location is unknown.
Another African American artist who exhibited in the Centennial Exposition
of 1876 was Edmonia Lewis, an internationally celebrated sculptress. Born of a
mixture of Chippewa Indian and African American, Lewis was always
considered to be free-spirited and had a yearning to sculpt since childhood. She
studied at Oberlin College in Ohio for three years, pursuing course work in the
classics, until she encountered a racial incident which forced her to leave the
city. She went to Boston and trained under Edmund Brackett, a local sculptor.
There, she modeled clay sculpture and designed a medallion of John Brown, an
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abolitionist associated with Harpers Ferry, as well as a bust head of Colonel
Robert Shaw, a Civil War hero. The latter was purchased by members of the
Shaw family and exhibited at the Boston Fair for Soldiers' Fund. Copies of
Lewis's work were sold; with the proceeds and with additional financial
backing from other Boston patrons, Lewis was able to accumulate enough
funds to travel to Rome in 1865. There, she was influenced by white American
expatriates—Harriet Hosmer and Hiram Powers—which reflected her interest
to conceive sculptural forms in the neo-classical style. Her artwork displays
characteristics similar to Greco-Roman sculpture. Proportionately, the figures
are accurately rendered. Their smooth, polished marble surfaces reveal a
concern for fleshy illusionism.
Lewis's subject matter was diverse. It ranged from political themes, such as
Forever Free (1867), which depicts a couple celebrating their freedom and was
inspired by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution forbidding
slavery, to more gentle, whimsical themes such as the playful, cherub-like
infants portrayed in Asleep (1971) and Awake (1972). Lewis represented her
own Indian heritage in The Old Indian Arrow Maker (1872), biblical themes in
Hagar in the Wilderness (1892), and an Ancient African Egyptian theme in The
Death of Cleopatra (1976). Despite a seemingly emotional subject matter, the
marble sculptures exude expressions of calmness and serenity. This may be
attributed to the Neo-classical style which they imitate; for this style is
characterized by clarity of form, stoic and expressionless features, order, and, a
complete sense of harmony. However, to these traits, Lewis added a sense of
grace, elegance, beauty, and extreme naturalism to her sculptural figures.
Although Lewis had received both national and international honors for her
artwork, she was still chided by American journalists as not being equal in
ability and sculptural skill to her white American counterparts.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, a prominent painter during the nineteenth century,
attended the Centennial Exposition of 1876. After viewing works produced by
two African American artists—Bannister's painting Under the Oaks and
Edmonia Lewis's sculpture Cleopatra—Tanner reaffirmed his belief that his
people could achieve major accomplishments in art. Born in Pittsburgh to the
son of a bishop in an African Methodist Church, Tanner attended the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and trained under Thomas Eakins, an
esteemed American realist painter and teacher. From Eakins, Tanner learned to
concentrate even more than he had before on the world around him and to focus
on the psychological nature of man. His aim was to integrate movements and
gestures with psychological expressions of figures.
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Tanner began his career portraying African Americans in his own portrait
studio in Atlanta, Georgia. He was an avid photographer of the regional
environment and rendered colorful sketches of landscape and local residents.
Although he taught at Clark College (presently Clark-Atlanta University), he
was funded by patrons to travel to Paris to study art. For five years, he studied
at the Académie Julien, where his style matured. He was able to synthesize
clarity of form which he had constantly explored under the tutelage of Eakins
along with color theories, paint applications, and the manipulation of light and
dark that illuminated the works of European masters.
Although Tanner felt at ease in France, the effects of the uncomfortable
environment full of racial discrimination which he experienced upon his return
trips to the US, frequently plagued him throughout his career. At the beginning,
he produced genre paintings depicting African Americans but eventually turned
to religious subjects using white images, including those of his own white
American wife, who often posed as his model. Tanner was continuously
criticized by his own people for abandoning the African American subjects in
his works, but, this did not dissuade him from persisting in producing the
religious works with non-African American images which seemed to win
recognition for him in the American mainstream and abroad. For example, his
painting entitled The Raising of Lazarus (1896) won that year's Paris Salon's
Gold Medal; in addition, it was purchased by the French Government and
placed in the Luxembourg Palace.
The Harlem Renaissance (or The New Negro Movement) of the 1920s
ushered in a new era for the African American intelligentsia to study and
receive inspiration from their own heritage rather than merely imitating the
modern European models. As a result of this movement, African American
artists such as Aaron Douglas researched and portrayed both African and
African American history and images. Although Douglas was born in Topeka,
Kansas, and received a BFA from the University of Nebraska, his early artistic
career in the Midwest was eclipsed by his move to New York City, where he
became the harbinger of the New Negro visual art expression. In both his black-
and-white graphics illustrating books and playbills written by African
American literary artists as well as in his colored paintings exploring historical
or biblical events, Douglas used flat, silhouetted, angular figures, which are
reminiscent of both Ancient Egyptian figural paintings and traditional West
African wood sculpture and masks. In reference to the movement, his earliest
published illustrations appeared in Alain Locke's seminal book entitled The
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New Negro (1925).
One of Douglas's most well-known works is his four-paneled, colored mural
paintings entitled Aspects of Negro Life (1934), commissioned for New York
Public Library's Countee Cullen Branch by the Works Progress Administration
(WPA). This series reflects both the African and African American milieu
including: an African setting with figures dancing in pulsating rhythm to
African music, a panoramic view from slavery to reconstruction, a scene of
idyllic, rustic life, to finally a vista representing the concept of migration from
the South to a Northern metropolis where jazz dominated. Throughout the
compositions in the four paintings, the flattened figures display approachable,
decorative design-like qualities, evoking the Art Deco (Decorative) style of the
American modern art era, rather than scenes of graphic horror and disgust.
Repeated concentric circles (or pulsating orbs) surround specific forms in the
paintings and define didactic lessons about significant historical events. By
creating a new style combined with concepts about a new era, Douglas forged
an innovative path for future artistic expression within the African American
visual art community.
Jacob Lawrence, one of America's most renowned modern African American
artists, created paintings that recall the flat, silhouette figural forms of
Douglas's artworks. Unlike Douglas, Lawrence's art style exhibits forms that
contain more dramatic color executed in a more direct but minimized
decorative, design-like manner. Lawrence continues the exploration of subject
matter defined by the movement. He met and was inspired by many of the
Harlem Renaissance (or New Negro Movement) visual and literary artists. Born
in Atlantic City, New Jersey, he studied at community workshops in Harlem.
As a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project recipient, Lawrence
received instruction at the Harlem Art Workshop from Charles Alston, an
African American painter who represented the human conditions of African
Americans. Lawrence attributes his artistic development throughout much of
his early career to the continuous support of Augusta Savage, an African
American sculptress who was very influential among the Harlem art
community in the 1930s and who offered guidance to many African American
artists.
Although not formally educated, by the time Lawrence was twenty-one years
old, he was already recognized as a serious painter; his series of forty-one
mural panel paintings about the black Haitian General Toussaint L'Ouverture
(1937–1938) was shown along with works by other African American artists in
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an exhibition which was co-sponsored by the Harmon Foundation and the
Baltimore Museum of Art. Later, he painted mural series depicting the
achievements of Frederick Douglass (1938–1940), an African American
abolitionist, and Harriet Tubman (1938–1940), a leader in the Underground
Railroad movement.
Perhaps, Lawrence's most publicly acclaimed series at the beginning of his
career was The Migration of the Negro (1940–1941)—tempera paintings that
represented the relocation of African Americans from the South to the North
during the early part of this century. In sixty panels, he depicted their social
struggles in the US and their dreams and frustrating attempts to obtain a better
economic and educational status in the urban North. In short, Lawrence's
interest was to portray the toils, the hopes, the disappointments, and the
achievements of his people. His paintings reveal an intense understanding of
and a sincere commitment to preserving African American social history,
which he researched at the Schomburg Library (presently, the Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture).
Although his figures are stylized—bordering on abstraction—and are
reduced to their minimum essences, Lawrence's paintings are didactic, easy to
read and understand. The images are flat, distorted silhouettes that are
sometimes placed within complex compositions. Linear thrusts (especially of
diagonal lines) throughout his paintings create intriguing patterns and
sometimes suggest the interplay of tension between two-dimensional and three-
dimensional spatial planes. As a result of Lawrence's style, his delicate
treatment of the atrocities and sufferings experienced by African Americans
throughout their history prompted an artistic exercise which stressed design, the
dynamics of the picture plane, color, shape, and space.
Over the years, Lawrence's style maintained its basic components but
became more sophisticated. His painting style reflects a background of artistic
exposure which is varied, including experiences such as teaching, during the
summer of 1946 at Black Mountain College (a small avant-garde school in
North Carolina) where he was the only African American teacher; reaffirming
his commitment to portraying the social conditions of the downtrodden by
observing paintings by revolutionary artists such as José Clemente Orozco, a
Mexican muralist, and teaching at the Oshogbo workshop in Nigeria. Besides
this aggregate of experiences, Lawrence is further distinguished as belonging to
the first generation of African American artists who received early training in
the fine arts from African American teachers and was nurtured by the African
625
American artistic community in Harlem.
Presently, the works of African American artists cover a gamut of styles;
they are realistic, abstract, or non-representational without identifiable objects.
Both subjects and themes traverse a variety of concepts. Some artists chose to
stay in the mainstream so that their works will be accepted by established
patrons through exhibition or purchased. Others renounce the need for this type
of recognition and profess to produce art for the pure enjoyment of expressing
their creative urges. Therefore, similar to the consequences resulting from the
contemporary developments made in the art in Africa, contemporary African
American artists are abundant in number and need to be documented for
posterity.
626
Caribbean art is full of vitality and vigor. Each region's art is slightly
different based on the culture of the original inhabitants, the impact of the
Western colonial powers that settled there, and the importation of slaves from
various parts of Africa. Therefore, artistic, religious, and other cultural ideas
merge to form new nuances of expressive liveliness. The Haitians had their
own religion, oral history, and other cultural idioms prior to the arrival of
Columbus in 1492. After this date, the Spaniards ruled Haiti and its Indian
population. As early as 1503, African slaves were brought to work in the mines
in Haiti. Part of Haiti was acquired by France in a 1697 treaty with the
Spaniards.
Many of Haiti's present inhabitants have ancestors from Africa—the Congo,
Angola, Mali, Nigeria, and the Republic of Benin (formerly, Dahomey). The
creole culture evolved out of the merging of the various religions of these
Central and West African regions into vodun, a religion that becomes
interchangeable with Roman Catholicism. Both religions had their own powers
and rituals. For example, Dahomean influences on Haitian religion may be
observed in examples such as Gu, the deity of war, fire, and iron, a derivative
of Ogun, the Yoruba (Nigerian) god of iron and war. In Haiti, Gu became Papa
Ogáun, who is identified with the warrior saints of the Roman Catholic Church.
The French Catholic priests of the Church provided to the slaves prints of these
saints, which served as teaching materials.
Haitian art is closely interwoven into the belief system of vodun, which is a
socio-religious custom that reflects a mixture of African and West Indian
religions. In secular art, symbols associated with religion such as flowers, birds,
and animals are frequently used. For religious art, Robert Farris Thompson
acknowledges the links between the African and West Indian cultures and
indicates that wrought iron crosses used for Baron Samedi, the graveyard deity,
echo the patterns of ground paintings of vodun—vàevàe. To Thompson, both
traditions appear connected to the Congo cosmogram drawn on the earth to
signify “the boundary between two worlds and the moral watchfulness of God
and the dead.” He further states that the complete symbolism was lost in its
transformation in Haiti.2
African retentive objects which survived in Haiti include drums, ironwork,
sculpture in cloth and wood, painted calabashes, and textiles. Many of the
627
modern works reflect an interest in the abstraction of the figural form similar to
African sculpture as well as include vivid colors, apparent in the bright textiles
that are part of the heritage of West African people.
Dynamism is present in works by Haitian modern artists. The Haitian artist
combines the knowledge of Haiti's cultural pluralism with observations of
nature and produces a painting tradition which is not illusionistic like Western
art but maintains the integrity of a non-Western aesthetic tradition. Images are
represented in vibrant colors, distorted shapes, often flat forms, and multiple
viewpoints. The artists work directly on the surface, without preliminary
sketches. This type of uninhibited approach to art and the candid
representations which stem from it are accepted by Western observers who
have become tempered by a style and approach that is reminiscent of the
concerns of modern European artists, who lauded and derived inspirations from
traditional art of Africa and Oceanic cultures. Exhibitions and purchases of
Haitian art have tended to come more from international rather than domestic
sources. Critics contend that this outside support has encouraged
commercialism in the art. Despite this phenomenon, Haitian art maintains its
variety, excitement, and spontaneous genre scenes of everyday activities. The
old masters of Haitian art, including such personalities as Hector Hyppolite (a
vodun priest), Rigaud Benoît, and Wilson Bigaud, have managed to inspire
younger generations of promising artists.
In the literature on Caribbean art, Haitian art dominates. Research on art
from other islands is limited because interests are devoted elsewhere or political
restraints deny access to artists and their work. Few publications portray the life
of an individual Caribbean artist, especially a non-Haitian. One exception is
Geoffrey MacLean's (1994) catalog on Boscoe Holder, a Trinidadian artist who
painted portraits and nudes.
Finally, Middle America art impacted upon the art of the African diaspora.
During the nineteenth century, Mexico had a flourishing group of artists in
landscape, portraiture, and religious paintings. However, the academically
trained Spanish artists had a powerful influence upon these artists' development
well into the early part of the twentieth century. Politically inspired artists such
as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros produced
works with messages that dealt with human and class sufferings. Their mural
paintings served as poignant reminders of the decadence of their culture. They
also functioned as didactic tools to reprimand the wealthy and powerful about
their greed as well as to evoke empathy for the poor, destitute, and illiterate
628
who deserve better social conditions. By doing so, these artists were considered
revolutionary. Their subject matter emphasizing the socio-economic and
political plight of marginalized people influenced the visual imagery in
artworks by African American artists, such as Aaron Douglas and Jacob
Lawrence.
629
Summary
The art produced by the traditional Africans, the contemporary Africans,
African Americans, and the Caribbean people may be difficult to discern in its
entirety because the artists in the latter three categories assimilated Western
cultures. This phenomenon does not suggest a need for exclusion of these
artists from study but rather points to a crucial necessity for their inclusion.
However, despite their Western connections, their placement in the study of
global art is somewhat limited. The paucity of understanding and resources on
the subject requires a broader awareness and more intense research.
Furthermore, although the artistic connections between Africans on the
continent and in the diaspora may appear to be shrouded in obscurity, clarity is
being achieved through more exposure and discussion of these cultural
expressions. Many African American artists are making a concerted effort to
acknowledge African retentions in their artworks. For them, the continuities
exist more so than a delineated breach in the aesthetic tradition of their African
ancestors. Whether the representation of the artists' philosophies is achieved or
even expressed here may be debated. However, the overall attempt of this
chapter was to present artists of African descent from various parts of the
world.
630
1. Discuss some of the past and present misconceptions about African Art.
What are some of the problems in the study of African Art?
2. Discuss various traditional African art forms, media, and their functions.
3. What types of training did contemporary pioneering Nigerian artists receive?
What style did their artworks express? What was their major media?
4. Discuss reasons that contributed to changes in African American art that
fostered modern art forms of visual expression.
5. What considerations should be given when judging African American art?
6. Name some of the most prominent pioneering African American artists and
discuss their artistic contributions.
7. What types of African retentions exist in both African American and
Caribbean art?
631
References
Beier, Ulli. Introduction: Contemporary Art in Africa. New York: F.A.
Praeger, 1968.
Bolden, Tonya. Wake Up Our Souls: A Celebration of Black American
Artist. New York: H.N. Abrams: Published in association with the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2004.
Brown, Evelyn. Africa's Contemporary Art and Artists. New York: The
Harmon Foundation, 1966.
Chase, Judith Wragg. Afro-American Art and Craft. New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold, 1971.
Cosentino, Donald J., ed. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Los Angeles: UCLA
Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995.
Dash, Michael J. Culture and Customs of Haiti. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing Group, Inc., 2000.
Eyo, Ekpo, and Frank Willett. Treasures of Ancient Nigeria. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
Farrington, Lisa E. Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-
American Women Artists. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press,
2005.
__________. African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History. 1st
Edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Ferris, William. Afro-American Folk Art and Crafts. Jackson and London:
University Press of Mississippi, 1983.
Hassan, Salah. “Review on ‘Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art.’”
African Arts, vol. 25 2(January 1992): 36–37, 95–96, 100.
Hill, Grant. Something All Our Own: The Grant Hill Collection of African
American Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Janson, H. W., and Anthony Janson. History of Art, 6th ed., 2 vols. Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2004.
Kennedy, Jean. New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists
in a Generation of Change. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1992.
Kleiner, Fred S. Gardner's Art through the Ages: Non-Western Perspectives,
13th ed. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 2010. (Divides Africa sections
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into before 1800 and after 1800. African art chapters are currently being
updated.)
LaGamma, Alisa. Echoing Images: Couples in African Sculpture. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Laude, Jean. The Arts of Black Africa. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1971.
Lewis, Samella. African American Art and Artists, 3rd ed. Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003.
__________, Floyd Coleman, and Mary Jane Hewitt (eds.). African
American Art and Artists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
MacLean, Geoffrey. Boscoe Holder. Trinidad and Tobago: MacLean
Publishing Limited, 1994.
Messinger, Lisa Mintz, Lisa Gail Collins, and Rachel Mustalish (eds.).
African-American Artists, 1929–1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Yale University Press, 2003.
Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Eds. Okwui Enwezor, Salah M.
Hassan, and Chika Okeke-Agulu. Durham, NC: Duke University Press on
behalf of Nka Publications. Inception 1994.
Patton, Sharon F. African-American Art. Oxford and New York: Oxford
Robbins, Warren, and Nancy Nooter. African Art in American Collections.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.
Sieber, Roy, and Roslyn Adele Walker. African Art in the Cycle of Life.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987.
Smethurst, James Edward. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism
in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2005.
Stebich, Ute. Haitian Art. New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1978.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art
and Philosophy. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
__________. “The Flash of the Spirit: Haiti's Africanizing Vodun,” in Ute
Stebich (ed.). Haitian Art. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1978.
Vlach, John Michael. The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts.
Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
Vogel, Susan M. Art/Artifact. New York: The Center for African Art, 1988.
633
__________. Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art. New York: The
Center for African Art, 1991.
Willett, Frank. African Art: An Introduction, Reprinted. New York: Thames
and Hudson, 1985.
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Images in Videos and Website Articles of Artwork for the
Early Part of This Chapter
Rock Art
Harper, Peggy, and John Picton. “African Dance.” Encyclopedia Britannica.
Retrieved Jan. 14, 2018, from https://www.britannica.com/art/African-
dance.
Diolé, Philippe. “Tassili N'Ajjer: The Most Beautiful Desert of All: Sefar.”
FJExpeditions. (Other Algerian rock paintings may be viewed by clicking
on the forward arrow at the bottom.) Retrieved Jan. 14, 2018, from
http://www.fjexpeditions.com/tassili/frameset/sefar.html.
Crosset, Patrick. “Supernatural Sahara's Rock Paintings in Sefar (Algeria).”
Quora. Retrieved Jan. 14, 2018, from
https://africa.quora.com/Supernatural-Saharas-Rock-Paintings-in-Sefar-
Algeria.

“#1 African History—The Nok.” YouTube. Retrieved Jan. 14, 2018, from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVT—v-fAKw.
“Inside the Kingdom of Ife at the British Museum.” YouTube. Retrieved Jan.
13, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufaMhIKTf_s.
“#2 African History—Ile Ife.” Retrieved Jan 13, 2018, from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB4TVq8ek8s.
Curnow, Kathy. “Jostling for Power in the Art and Life Nigeria's Benin
Kingdom.” Penn Museum Lecture. May 2008. Retrieved Jan. 13, 2018,
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4MaBsqbLMw.
Maasai
“Maasai Beaded Bracelet.” YouTube. Retrieved Jan. 13, 2018, from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__tXlJyCENQ.
“Maasai Jumping Dance.” YouTube. Retrieved Jan. 13, 2018, from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYoTf0OyMzI.
“Kenya Masai Tribe Singing and Dancing.” YouTube. Retrieved Jan. 13,
635
2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM3LXzJYHEI.
1. While some Africanists such as Salah Hassan and Ola Oloidi feel an appropriate
substitution for the rubric contemporary art would be modern art, others such as Susan Vogel
argue for further subdivision of this twentieth century art into categories which are more
inclusive.
2. Robert Farris Thompson, “The Flash of the Spirit: Haiti's Africanizing Vodun,” in Ute
Stebich, Haitian Art. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1978.
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17
Literature in Africa and the

Caribbean
Tanure Ojaide
637
Introduction
Literature is a major art form through which people exhibit their culture. It
often expresses the multifarious experiences and living realities of the people
through the artist's viewpoint. In modern times, literature has become one of the
black world's major contributions to the intellectual world. Africa and the
Caribbean have produced literatures that reflect the realities of black peoples in
their respective areas in socio-cultural, economic, political, and individual
spheres. Oral or written, African and Caribbean literatures have gained
recognition worldwide. Africa boasts of such literary classics as the Mandingo
epic Sundiata, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), Ngugi wa Thiong'o's
Weep Not, Child (1964), and Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman
(1975). Similarly, the black Caribbean has enriched humanity with such literary
contributions as Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939),
Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew (1941), Edward Kamau Brathwaite's
The Arrivants (1973), and Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990). The winning of the
Nobel Prize for Literature by Nigeria's Wole Soyinka in 1986, Egypt's Naguib
Mahfouz in 1988, and both Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee of South Africa
in 1991 and 2003, respectively, and Derek Walcott from Saint Lucia in 2002,
has drawn further attention to the nature and the role of literature on the
continent of Africa and in the Caribbean. In recent times, Brathwaite's Born to
Slow Horses (2005) won the International Griffin Poetry Prize (2006). Both
Brathwaite and Edwidge Danticat have won the prestigious Neustadt Literature
Prize (1994 and 2017 respectively), as Nigeria's Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's
Half of a Yellow Sun also won the prestigious British Orange Prize for Fiction
(2007).
In Africa, two types of literature have flourished simultaneously: traditional
oral literature and modern written literature. Traditional African literature is as
old as the African people themselves. From the beginning of their history,
Africans have always tried to understand their environment and interpret
natural phenomena through myths. They sing about their experiences and teach
the younger generations about morality, ethics, culture, and history with tales,
myths, and legends, all of which have become part of a literary repertoire. With
the general acceptance of oral literature as valid by Western scholars during the
1950s, the field of African literature has recently become so vast and complex
that the following discussion is designed to provide the beginning student with
only a general understanding of the nature of African literature—the genres,
638
major developments over the past decades, uses, themes, and future prospects.
Major terms and concepts: written and oral literature, orality, folklore,
myth, legend, didactic, fairy tale, epic, proverb, riddle, improvisation, poetry,
prose, Negritude, literature, Caribbean, Afro-Caribbean, patois, Creole, black
consciousness, anthology, novel, poem, expatriate.
639
Definition
The literary scholar Abiola Irele once said that there was “no satisfactory
definition” of African literature. He noted that:
The term ‘Africa’ appears to correspond to a geographical notion but
we know that, in practical terms, it also takes in those other areas of
collective awareness that have been determined by ethnic, historical and
sociological factors, all these factors, as they affect and express
themselves in our literature, marking off for it a broad area of reference.
Within this area of reference then, and related to certain aspects that are
intrinsic to the literature, the problem of definition involves as well a
consideration of aesthetic modes in their intimate correlation to the
cultural and social structures which determine and define the
expressive schemes of African peoples and societies. [author's
emphasis]
This definition of literature takes note of place and people with their “aesthetic
modes” and “cultural and social structures.” Language, Irele adds, is not the
prime focus in his definition of literature, whose “essential force” is its
“reference to the historical and the experiential.” One other attempt at defining
African literature is made by Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu
Madubuike. It is quite clear to them that:
Works done for African audiences, by Africans, and in African
languages, whether these works are oral or written, constitute the
historically indisputable core of African literature. Works done by
Africans but in non-African languages, and works done by non-
Africans in African languages, would be among those for which some
legitimate doubt might be raised about their inclusion or exclusion from
the canon of works of African literature.
Their definition recognizes the primary audience of a literature as defining
that literature. Thus, if African countries adopt English, French, Portuguese, or
Arabic as official languages, Africans writing in these alien languages primarily
for Africans are African writers and their works are part of African literature.
Whatever definition one adopts, however, there is agreement that African
literature is that which is written by Africans for Africans who share the same
sensibility, consciousness, worldview, and other aspects of cultural experience.
In short, the writer must share in the values and experiences of African people
640
for the writing to be classified as African.
The body of African literature written in indigenous African and non-African
languages is rapidly growing. For example, there is a relatively large body of
Yoruba, Hausa, Ibo, Swahili, Kikuyu, and Zulu literary works. Writers such as
Mazisi Kunene, Ngugi wa Thiongo, and the late Okot p'Bitek have produced
poems, plays, and novels in African languages before they were translated into
English. At the same time, most modern African writers have used primarily
English, French, Portuguese, and Arabic to express their ideas and feelings.
While the attempt to express one's inner feelings and thoughts in a foreign
language will remain a perennial problem for African writers, writing in a
vernacular, which most readers are not trained to read, will equally continue to
hinder their effectiveness. In addition, writing in African languages does cause
the writer to lose not only other African readers but also Western audiences and
readership entirely, and precludes financial reward for those authors who write
for profit and to make a living, as many do.
641
Prior to colonialism, traditional Africa was predominantly made up of non-
literate societies among which orality was the major means of expression and
communication. Songs were sung and tales told and were orally passed from
one generation to another. Because of its orality, therefore, traditional African
literature depended heavily on memory for its transmission from person to
person, from place to place, and from generation to generation. Yet, such
literature always had an important function to perform in society. Indeed,
African literature has, by and large, remained didactic over the centuries, and is
used by the elders in teaching social mores and ethics and in the community's
transmission of its most important traditions. In the days when there were no
schools of the Western type, parents gathered their children by the fireside after
the day's hard work, in the evening, and told them different types of tales:
folktales, fairy tales, myths, legends, and epics. For instance, tales of the greedy
tortoise are meant to teach children about selflessness, while those of the
trickster Anansi (spider, in West Africa) and the rabbit (in East Africa) are
designed to tell youngsters that cleverness is not a substitute for honesty and
caring for others. Though many African tales have animal characters, their
experiences are human, and everyone learns from them how to live and behave
in a communal society.
The forest or grassland setting is the world in which many Africans live, and
tales are meant to teach how one must treat others and the environment. The
tales, especially the myths and epics, likewise inculcate the values and mores of
the group into young ones, who imbibe the consciousness and sensibility of the
race. Myths, for instance, explain natural phenomena. In African folklore, there
are tales explaining why pigs always look downward, why the sky is so high
from the earth, why man and woman cause each other problems but cannot do
without one another, and why people must die. While legends and epics are told
to inspire youngsters into heroic deeds, proverbs, riddles, and other rhetorical
forms are learned to enhance verbal communication, sometimes to make one an
orator, and to sharpen one's thinking skills.
Music is also an important part of African traditional literature. There is
music or song for almost all daily activities and rites of passage, from birth to
adulthood, and from marriage to death. There are lullabies to put children to
sleep, work songs, play songs, initiation songs, and religious songs. Within
each category, such as in work songs, there are some that are sung when men
642
clear the farm and some that are sung by women weeding the field. In addition,
some songs are for planting and harvesting, for paddling the canoe to fish,
grazing cattle, and others for shelling groundnuts, grating cassava, and
pounding yams. In short, song permeates the entire life of the African.
In contrast to Western tradition, African oral literature is a live art. It is
performed, and each moment of performance is a “text” of its own. The
narrator or the poet must simultaneously be an expert performer, which is not
always the case in the West. In oral literature, memory is the most important
medium of transmission of messages. However, because memory wears out
with the passing of time, there is an inherent problem with oral literature. Thus,
the same oral tale or song might have different versions or variants, as each
performer tries to embellish or fill up the work to suit a particular audience and
his own talent. Consequently, improvisation is very important in oral literature,
as the performer introduces new elements and stamps his or her own mark on
the tale. As a live art, oral literature maintains a symbiotic relationship between
the performer and the audience. The audience participates in the songs in a tale,
sings the refrain, and claps hands as an accompaniment, elements that are not
always present in Western tradition, as when the poet is on the stage reading his
work to the sitting audience.
Equally significant in oral literature is the very thin line in genre
differentiation. A folktale may have songs (which are poems) at various
sections; it also has narration and description, and much drama, as the
performer mimics the action of animals or any other characters in the tale.
Poetry and prose, on the one hand, are almost inseparable in the proverbs,
axioms, riddles, and other rhetorical figures. Oratory, on the other hand, is
highly cherished by the audience in Africa. The syncretic nature of traditional
African oral literature is best expressed by festivals, which are theatrical,
dramatic, ritualistic, and poetic reenactments of the people's myths and legends,
accompanied by music, artistic expressions and use of artifacts, and dance. One
may say, therefore, that traditional African literature is genre inclusive, unlike
Western literature, which is compartmentalized.
There are other important, often denied, qualities of traditional African
literature in the poets and the singers of tales. For example, contrary to common
misinformed impressions, the traditional artist in literature (or art) has an
identity, and his or her work is not anonymous in the community. People are
able to identify, for example, the person who produced a song. Thus, in the
African oral tradition, individual oral artists exist with their unique
643
compositions, which may have been edited in a communal “workshop,” as in
the case of udje dance songs among the Urhobo people of Nigeria's Delta State.
It is not true, therefore, as Ruth Finnegan notes, that “the poetry of non-literate
peoples” in Africa arises “directly and communally from the undifferentiated
folk.” The author's experience confirms the fact that each song bears the
signature of its poet not only in its formulas and themes but also in the role and
mission of its creator.
As Janheinz Jahn observed, the history of African literature corresponds with
the history of the continent, a claim that has been reinforced by studies done by
scholars such as Romanus Egudu on the writers' reflection of the historical
reality of their people. Modern African literature started with the introduction
of the script and the adoption of European languages by Africans in colonial
times, notably during the nineteenth century. The Life of Olaudah Equiano,
published in 1789, can be considered the first work of written African literature.
It describes the traditional life and customs of the Igbo people and Equiano's
capture, sale into slavery in Barbados, and subsequent travels to the United
States, Britain, and Africa, among other places. However, since it was written
by an expatriate, in some circles it may not earn the honor of having been the
first.
Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) is one of the early works of
fiction to come out of Africa. It tells the story of a palm-wine drinker who
searches for his dead palm-wine tapster in the “Deads' Town,” where he finds
him but cannot bring him back to life because the dead are dead. It is with the
publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in 1958, however, that
written African literature became recognized worldwide. In the novel, Achebe
tells, in a masterly way, the tragic story of how the distinguished Okwonko and
his Ibo village of Umuofia were destroyed by the arrival of the Europeans into
the village. Like many educated Africans of the 1950s, Achebe had been
bothered by such European writers as Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
(1899) and Joyce Cary in Mister Johnson (1939), who, as a result of their deep-
rooted prejudices, distorted the true African cultural image, and justified
European colonialism as an agent of enlightenment rather than the economic
exploitation that it was. Achebe thus wrote Things Fall Apart to show that
“African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that
their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth
and value and beauty; that they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity”
(Achebe). Achebe realistically exposes African culture to Europeans and to
those who are ignorant of it and asserts the dignity of the African past.
644
Although most of the examples provided above refer to Anglophone Africa,
French-speaking Africa was no less prolific, beyond the Negritude writers
discussed below. Among the early most-known works are Camara Laye's novel
The African Child, published as early as 1952, which tells of Laye's life as a son
of a goldsmith in his Muslim village and society, and Cheik Hamidou Kane's
novel Ambiguous Adventure (1962), an account of the dilemma of a young
Muslim student who faces the secular temptations of Western education and
culture in Paris. There were others in South Africa and North Africa, and
lesser-known writers in Lusophone Africa during the 1950s that should be
counted among the pioneers of modern written African literature.
Within the context of exposing and restoring the dignity of African culture
was Negritude, a literary movement started by Francophone African and
Caribbean students, including Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Leon Damas of
French Guyana, and Aimé Césaire of Martinique, in Paris in 1934. Sustained by
its journal L'Etudiant Noir, Negritude was a popular movement in Francophone
Africa and the West Indies during the 1940s and 1950s. Abiola Irele describes
Negritude as “the literary and ideological movement of French-speaking black
intellectuals, which took form as a distinctive and significant aspect of the
comprehensive reaction of the black man to the colonial situation, a situation
that was felt and perceived by black people in Africa and in the New World as a
state of global subjection to the political, social, and moral domination of the
West.” Though Negritude has been defined in different ways, essentially it
means “the expression of blackness.” In this sense, it is similar to the
expression of the African personality in Anglophone Africa. It is generally
acknowledged, furthermore, that Negritude was a move away from the themes
of colonial oppression common among English-speaking African writers of the
time.
In fact, Negritude brought forth African traditional culture vividly, exposed
colonial exploitation and oppression, especially on the cultural level, and
celebrated black dignity. Leopold Sedar Senghor (former president of Senegal),
in particular, expounded the concept in various collections of poems and
essays. While many Anglophone Africans, including South African Ezekiel
Mphahlele, Malawian David Rubadiri, and Nigerian Wole Soyinka, have
condemned Negritude (“a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude; it pounces,”
Soyinka once wrote sarcastically), it has historical validity as it afforded
Africans in colonial times the opportunity to assert their Africanness. Indeed, in
both Anglophone and Francophone Africa, literature was a vehicle of cultural
645
nationalism in the colonial period and the years following independence.
To the extent that modern African literature is defined as the written
literature started during colonial times, when Africans who had gone to
Western schools began writing poems, novels, short stories, and plays, it is
expressed in two important forms: one in foreign European languages and the
other in indigenous languages. The latter is not well-exposed yet, and appears
in languages such as Yoruba, Zulu, Hausa, and Ibo, which are almost unknown
outside their geographical frontiers. In any case, the written literature of Africa
is new compared to the indigenous oral literary tradition, which has always
been on the continent, and is still very much alive today. Although modern
African literature started as derivative and imitative of European forms, it has,
over the past several decades, grown to be, in a true sense, very African.
The nature of the origin of modern African literature has often succumbed to
the Eurocentric temptation of seeing the literature from the continent as a part
of European literature. However, as this author has had a chance to observe, in
the aftermath of
modern imperialism, language alone cannot be the definer of a
literature. A people must share common cultural and historical
experiences, a value system, and aspirations, which condition their
responses to reality. These considerations bear a distinctive imprint on
their literature.
In many ways, however, modern African literature is a blending of
traditional African “literary” techniques and borrowed European writing styles.
Thus, the works of most of the best-known African writers such as Chinua
Achebe, Wole Soynka, and Ngugi wa Thiongo, have effectively combined the
two worlds to bring out something that is simultaneously distinctively new and
reflective of modern Africa.
Most African countries became independent between 1957 and 1963.
Following the euphoria of independence, however, Africans realized that most
of their rulers were politically corrupt and incompetent, and generally failed to
meet the expectations of their people. Embezzlement of government funds,
ethnic favoritism, nepotism, and the rulers' dictatorial tendencies led to the
African writers' preoccupation with expressing their views through biting satire.
Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Soyinka's The
Interpreters (1965), Achebe's A Man of the People (1966), and Ngugi's Petals
of Blood (1977) reflect this period of promise, on the one hand, and
disappointment, on the other.
646
The 1970s and later years witnessed a shift from cultural and political issues
to socio-economic concerns among most African writers. With African
economies on the downturn since the global oil crisis of 1973, a new breed of
African writers, more radical in perspective, began writing about the conditions
of the common people. Thus, the poor, the underprivileged, and the socially
marginalized became the focus of poetry, fiction, and drama. As Ojaide noted
(1990), what is said of the new poetry is true of all the genres in contemporary
African literature, for:
Contemporary African poetry is marked by a shift from culture, nature,
individualism and lyricism of the late 1950s and the early 1960s to the
national socio-economic, political and class awareness of the 1970s and
1980s.... There is movement away from Western modernist influences
of fragmentation, allusiveness and difficulty to the traditional African
oratorical clarity and simplicity. The poetry is gradually “decolonized”
in the shedding of the poetical in diction and syntax. There is also
movement from the private self, the individualistic and the universal to
the public and socially relevant. This by itself is movement from a non-
political conservative stance to a radical ideological posture. There is a
new nation-oriented, audience-conscious rhetorical and didactic poetry.
The best-known works that represent the new direction of African literature
include Festus Iyayi's novel Violence (1979), Femi Osofisan's Morountodun
and Other Plays (1982), Jared Angira's poems in Cascades (1979), Niyi
Osundare's poems in The Eye of the Earth (1986), and Tanure Ojaide's The
Fate of Vultures and Other Poems (1990). It is clear, therefore, that, as
elsewhere, African literary writing reflects the period of history and the stage of
development in which people find themselves. Within such a context, although
modern African literature is written in foreign languages, it strongly mirrors
traditional indigenous culture and is “marked by teaching and satire.” Since the
writer in Africa has been nurtured in a communalistic society (one which gives
prominence to the community rather than the individual, where sharing is more
cherished than owning and enjoying property privately), African literature is
socialized.
Since the mid-1990s, there appears to be a resurgence of African literary
creativity across the continent. Many prize-winning and other great works have
raised the profile of the African novel. South African Zakes Mda has two of his
novels—Ways of Dying (1995) and The Heart of Redness (2002)—highly
praised. Similarly, the Ethiopian Nega Mezlekia's The God Who Begat a Jackal
647
(2002) is a novel of epic proportion. Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles
(2000) received high commendations. In West Africa, the Nigerian
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Sefi Atta's
Everything Good Will Come (2005) have raised the profile of the African
female writer. Yvonne Vera of Zimbabwe produced fine works before her
untimely death in 2005.
Though fiction appears to have overshadowed both poetry and drama, the
latter two genres are still vibrant. In the poetry, there is diversification of
themes as never before. The times of racial/cultural conflicts have passed. The
ideological edge of the 1980s seems to have waned and poets express an array
of themes as seen in diverse works by Uche Nduka, Reesom Haile, Lupenga
Mphande, Chimalum Nwankwo, and Ogaga Ifowodo. There is emphasis on
performance techniques and a balanced attention paid to form and content.
There is a combination of public and private/individual experiences, taken from
different perspectives that reflect the complexity of modern African experience.
This discussion could not be complete without mention of the expanding role
of African women writers in modern literature. Long disadvantaged by
European colonial preference for the education of males as well as the tendency
of African societies to promote boys over girls, African women's writing is
promising and will likely go beyond the current brand of feminism and focus
on family problems such as male marital infidelity, wife-abuse, and male-
female relationships, and forcefully embrace other themes based on women's
rich experience and the woes and positive qualities of their societies.
Indeed, at present, most women's writing seems generally caught up with
domestic themes. Mariama Ba, Aminata Sow Fall, Flora Nwapa, Zainab Alkali,
Buchi Emecheta, and Ama Ata Aidoo, in one way or another fall in this
category, of course, with degrees of treatment of this major theme, which
ranges from the more vitriolic Emecheta and Mariama Ba to the more subtle
but equally critical and poignant Fall and Nwapa. However, there is already a
slow movement away from this penchant, exemplified by Kenyan writers
Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye (in Street Life, 1978) and Grace Ogot (in Land
Without Thunder, 1988), whose works in the short story and other forms reflect
more general themes based on Kenyan society. Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy
(1977) and Abena Busia's Testimonies of Exile (1990), for example, are moving
in this new direction.
The future of African women's writing is bright in output and quality.
However, worsening economies will affect publication outlets in scaled-down
648
magazine and book media. The African world realizes more than ever before
that women's and men's contributions are equally essential, and that women
writers are rapidly occupying and will continue to occupy their due place in
African written (and oral) literature.
Undoubtedly, African literature, both oral and written, has come a long way,
to use a common expression. Nonetheless, African writers have yet to
overcome several obstacles, from the constraints of the medium of expression
(European languages) to denial of the freedom of expression by African rulers
(several writers have been incarcerated), and from the paucity of publishing
houses on the continent and their lack of adequate resources to the continued
control of the field of literature by Western scholars.
649
Afro-Caribbean writers have, in modern times, produced some of the best
literary works in English. Wilson Harris, George Lamming, Michael Anthony,
Derek Walcott, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, among others, have established
themselves internationally as classic writers in their respective fields. Yet, what
Bruce King said of Caribbean literature as a whole is true of Afro-Caribbean
literature in English: “not until the early part of this century [did] authors of real
ability began to appear.” Thus, Caribbean literature is relatively young and is
basically “the product of a society descended from European landlords ...
African slaves, and indentured Indians.” Unlike African literature, which has
individual national characteristics—one speaks of Nigerian, Ghanaian,
Malawian, and South African literature, for example—Caribbean literature is
regional, the reason being that the island-states, generally tiny, have not been
able to forge a literary identity of their own. The small output of each of the
islands has also reinforced regional rather than national identity.
This section intends to bring out only the major features of Afro-Caribbean
literature in English, especially those related to history, place, and people, and
briefly outline its evolution from an imitative literature to one that has found its
own regional identity. The history of the Caribbean is a complex one, but the
experiences of the Afro-Caribbean islands are essentially the same, reflected
vividly in their literature. As G. R. Coulthard observes, they have all
experienced European conquest and colonialism, exploitation, poverty, racism,
and cultural subjugation, coupled with the extermination of Indians whose labor
on sugar plantations and estates was replaced with that of Africans, before
emancipation and independence during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
respectively.
From the time of the so-called discovery by Columbus, toward the end of the
fifteenth century, through slavery and the arrival of East Indians, to the present
“post-colonial” state, the Caribbean region has had a painful history. The
multicultural nature of the place and the white-black relations, in particular
have caused what Wilson Harris (quoted in William Walsh, Commonwealth
Literature) has described as a “victor-victim stasis.”
Bruce King in West Indian Literature notes that in the 1950s and 1960s,
Caribbean literature reflected “growing nationalism, hopes of a regional
federation, feelings of anti-colonialism, and interest in local culture.” Roger
650
Mais and Martin Carter were examples. However, by the early 1970s, King
tells us once again:
Many writers had become involved in the debates concerning ideology,
neo-colonialism, black consciousness, folk traditions and an African
heritage which resulted from the failure of independence to bring into
being social justice and authentic national culture.
The physical environment has been a strong factor in the literature of the
Caribbean. The sense of place, which the island condition affirms, gives its
literature a spatial setting that is uniquely concrete. Living in tiny islands in the
Atlantic, and as heirs to the slave past, Afro-Caribbean people look to Africa
for their roots, to their erstwhile European colonial metropolis for education,
and to the United States for better economic opportunities. While they also look
to themselves, especially to Cuba and Brazil for pride and inspiration, Afro-
Caribbeans generally look outward for their identity.
Perched on volcanoes and coral reefs rising from the Atlantic, life on these
islands is closely related to the sea. Whether it is in his poetry, as in The
Castaway and Other Poems (1965), The Gulf (1970), Sea Grapes (1976), The
Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), The Fortunate Traveller (1981), and Omeros, or
his play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), sea imagery constantly recurs in
Derek Walcott's writings. Similarly, in Brathwaite's The Arrivants and George
Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin (1953), the physical environment is an
important factor. Images of islands, the sea and water, fish, plants, and
occupations such as fishing and sailing are common. Fiction, in particular, has a
picturesque quality, as characters move from place to place.
As elsewhere in the world, Afro-Caribbean literature is a reflection of the
people and their lifestyles. The small size of each of the island-nations provides
few resources. Tourism brings in some capital, but the people here are generally
poor. Thus, emigration, necessarily a common phenomenon, is also reflected in
the literature. Whether working in the building of the Panama Canal or in North
America and Europe, Afro-Caribbeans have expatriated themselves
considerably. With Claude McKay, George Lamming, Edward Brathwaite,
Paule Marshall, and John Berry, among many others, one can understand why
the theme of exile is common in local literature. As Walsh puts it, “in many
ways the literature of the West Indies is, with notable exceptions, an expatriate
literature.” In Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, the young boys look to
America. In The Arrivants, Brathwaite writes of blacks of the region leaving for
the United States, Canada, Britain, and Switzerland, where they face racism and
651
hostility. Though Samuel Selvon is of Indian origin, his black characters in The
Lonely Londoners (1956) have migrated to London in search of economic
opportunities.
The migration of men for economic reasons has compelled Afro-Caribbean
women to stay at home and take care of the children. This condition, together
with the resilient practices of the slave days, has created a matriarchal social
structure in the region. In recent years, women writers, in particular Grace
Nichols, Michelle Cliff, and Lorna Goodison, have been addressing this issue in
their poems. In Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin and Michael Anthony's The
Year in San Fernando (1965), mothers are more visible and dominant in the
upbringing of children than fathers, who tend to travel abroad and make money
to send home to their families. This persistent absence of men from home
explains in part the abundance of novels with themes of childhood. In the
Castle of My Skin and The Year in San Fernando are good examples of novels
expounding this theme. Indeed, the black people of the Caribbean and their
lifestyle have always formed the core material for the regional literature.
History and environment, therefore, act themselves out in the people's way of
life. Walsh appropriately comments that:
The crackling life of the people, their nimbleness of wit, their great and
disillusioned tolerance, their response to rhythm, their riddling
uncertainties, and the one splendid instrument they developed for
ordering a sad, comic, muddled universe, the language, all inform and
shape the fiction of such West Indian novelists as George Lamming
himself, Andrew Salkey, and Samuel Selvon.
In general, writers have attempted to capture the Afro-Caribbean reality in
their works by portraying, for example, the folk-peasant life with its poverty,
superstitions, love of cricket, and color discrimination. Brathwaite encompasses
the tourism, calypso music, rum, emigrants, and the patois, which are
significant features of Afro-Caribbean life. Walcott treats the poor folk theme
in his Dream on Monkey Mountain, where the sick and poor are exploited by
Makak's men; George Lamming, Michael Anthony, and Samuel Selvon also
depict the poor peasants in their novels.
Closely related to the folk theme in Afro-Caribbean literature in English is
the use of the Creole dialect. Arising from the multiplicity of peoples from
different parts of the world with their own cultures and languages, the masses
of the Caribbean have tried to survive in this cultural melee by developing a
dialect in English and French that is a conglomeration of their ethnic origins in
652
Africa, together with absorptions from languages of their new neighbors. With
their indigenous African languages suppressed by the white masters in slave
times, Africans had to use English, but, in Ashcroft's words, “found that
psychic survival depended on their facility for a kind of double entendre.”
Creole is a product of a mixture of African languages, English, French,
Portuguese, and Spanish. Brathwaite, Walcott, Lamming, Selvon, and others
use Creole or patois in their literary work to reflect the true conditions of the
peasants, the poor, and the common people.
Two major cultural trends that have caused much debate are also reflected in
Afro-Caribbean literature and are linked to the compulsive quest for identity
among the Afro-Caribbeans. One trend affirms African culture, as in the works
of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and the other, expounded by both Wilson Harris
and Derek Walcott, portrays a hybrid Caribbean culture. The common themes
of alienation and deracination arise from the slave origins of Afro-Caribbeans,
who were forcibly brought to a new environment. Along with assuming an
identity that gives meaning to their lives, many Afro-Caribbeans also wish to
live an African cultural lifestyle.
Thus, Brathwaite of Barbados, who lived among the Akan/Ashanti people in
Ghana, West Africa, for some eight years, preaches immersion in traditional
African ways. Like most Africans, he attempts to forge a relationship between
the individual and the spiritual world of the community through African
symbols and images of masks and drums. He likewise uses African myths,
legends, music, language, and ritualistic patterns. It is for his acceptance of
Africa that he is identified with the mother continent and, in King's view, he “is
perhaps the finest poet in English to express the ‘black consciousness’ of the
sixties and seventies through sophisticated literary techniques.”
Taking a different position is the poet and dramatist Derek Walcott, who,
perhaps because he is a mulatto, expounds a Caribbean identity, a multicultural
potpourri made up of the different races and cultures of the region. In Walcott's
poetry, the African and the European are brought together. As Bill Ashcroft and
others in their study of the post-colonial era put it,
The present-day population of the West Indies consists of a variety of
racial groups all more or less in ancestral exile, and all still subject to
the hegemonic pressures of their former European owners, and, more
recently, to that exercised in the region by the USA.
The reality of this “cultural heterogeneity,” as Ashcroft adds, has made black
writers like Wilson Harris and Derek Walcott to accept “cross-culturality,
653
Creolization, hybridization, and catalysis” as the Caribbean historical reality.
No matter the writer's individual choice, the “African theme” appears
frequently in the literature. Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain deals
copiously with the identity issue which involves, in its exaggerated way, a
return to Africa. In the play, the protagonist Makak looks toward going back to
Africa, but since he cannot cross the ocean on his own, he goes home. Home in
Afro-Caribbean literature is both Africa and the Caribbean.
654
Summary
With the writer in modern-day Africa assuming the role of the conscience of
his or her society, many works of African literature satirize the corruption and
incompetence of modern governments, reminding readers and the entire society
of the high cultural ethos that must be upheld. Because the literature is
functional, modern African literature is the repository of the cultural life of the
people and is a major source of education for the young everywhere, as well as
many urban people who have lost touch with their roots. Consequently, African
writers consider themselves to be the cultural standard bearers of their people
and use the medium of literature to assert and preserve “cultural independence.”
Oral and written African literatures have flourished simultaneously on the
continent. Despite the fact that the modern literature is written, the
contemporary writer is carrying out the timeless mission of the oral artist of
defending the cultural ethos of the people. Within this context, therefore,
modern African literature informed by African culture is utilitarian, more
socialized than based on individual psychology; it is community-oriented,
didactic, and ethically and morally instructive; it is mystical, land-based, and
rich in folkloric forms and rhythms; and it is peculiar as a linguistic mode. On
another important level, modern African literature is a reflection of the
profound reality of the African people. Even when written in foreign-derived
languages which are now extra-territorial, as is the case with English, African
literature is richer for its cultural uniqueness.
Unfortunately, the problems facing African writers are still many. Although
African writers have excelled in their fields and have mastered the former
colonial languages, both the European and the indigenous African languages
limit their ability to express themselves comfortably or to reach the widest
audience possible, respectively. The restraints on the freedom of expression and
the press in most African countries, on the one hand, present a dilemma for
them: they are constantly threatened if they bring out the truth in whatever
genre they might be writing. This dilemma is compounded, on the other hand,
by the fact that the field of literature is still controlled by Western scholars who
also exercise control over the publishing houses.
Afro-Caribbean literature in English, meanwhile, is relatively young.
Recently, moreover, new significant voices like Andrew Salkey, Tony McNeil,
Grace Nichols, and Lorna Goodison have appeared. Women writers, including
655
Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde, Grace Nichols, and Lorna Goodison, are also
becoming more visible. New anthologies and individual works of poetry and
fiction in the West Indies itself, the United States, and Britain, put out by such
publishers as Heinemann and Longman, presage a vigorous literary future that
will continue to reflect the history, the place, and the people of the Caribbean.
Expatriation, loneliness, longing for home, the quest for self-identity, the
attention by mainly middle-class writers to the poor, and the attempt to capture
African roots to enhance the Caribbean reality will continue to appear as
common themes, making Caribbean literature unique. Writers such as Harris,
Brathwaite, and Walcott have achieved worldwide renown in their field.
Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. However, their pan-
African links become clear when their work is compared with that of Africans
and African Americans. In short, Afro-Caribbean literature in English, which is
a part of the black literary heritage, is deeply rooted in and passionately
expresses the condition of black Caribbeans in vivid, concrete images, and in
diversified artistic forms.
656
1. How has the African writer reflected the realities of the community over the
centuries?
2. Compare and contrast African oral literature and written literature on the
continent.
3. Do research on three African writers who write in English and French, and
outline their major themes from the 1960s to the present.
4. Do further reading on Negritude, define it, and determine the major reason
why it has been downplayed by some scholars.
5. Discuss one Afro-Caribbean writer whose work has dealt with the African
origin of the Caribbean people.
6. What factors have influenced Afro-Caribbean literature to date?
7. How has Afro-Caribbean literature reflected the Caribbean experience?
657
References
Chinua Achebe. A Man of the People. London: Heinemann, 1966.
__________. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958.
Jared Angira. Cascades. Burnt Mill, Harlow: Longman, 1979.
Michael Anthony. The Year in San Fernando. London: Longman, 1953.
Kwei Ayi Armah. The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. London:
Heinemann, 1975.
Bill Ashcroft, with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London:
Routledge, 1989.
__________ (eds.). The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London and New
York: Routledge, 1995.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite. The Arrivants. London: Oxford University
Press, 1973.
Laurence A. Breiner. An Introduction to West Indian Poetry. Cambridge,
UK, & New York: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Joyce Cary. Mister Johnson. New York: Time, Inc., 1962.
Mbye B. Cham. Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Trenton, NJ: Africa
World Press, 1992.
Patrick Chamoisseau. Texaco. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.
Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike. Toward the
Decolonization of African Literature, vol. I. Enugu: Fourth Dimension,
1980.
Mary Conde and Thorunn Lonsdale, eds. Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction
in English. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness. New York: Norton, 1971.
O. R. Dathorne. African Literature in the Twentieth Century. London:
Heinemann, 1975.
Carole Boyce Davis and Elaine Fido, eds. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean
Women and Literature. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990.
Romanus Egudu. The Life of Olaudah Equiano. Burnt Mill, Harlow:
Longman, 1970.
John Figueroa (ed.). Caribbean Voices. Washington: R.B. & Luce Co., 1973.
658
Ruth Finnegan. Oral Literature in Africa. Nairobi: Oxford University Press,
1976.
C. L. Innes and Bernth Lindfors (eds.). Critical Perspectives on Chinua
Achebe. London: Heinemann, 1979.
Abiola Irele. The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. London:
Heinemann, 1981.
__________. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black
Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001.
Festus Iyayi. Violence. Burnt Mill, Harlow: Longman, 1979.
Janheinz Jahn. A History of Neo-African Literature. London: Faber and
Faber, 1968.
Cheik Hamidou Kane. Ambiguous Adventure. New York: Farrar, Strauss and
Giroux, 1954.
Bruce King (ed.). West Indian Literature. Hamden, CT: Archon Books,
1979.
George Lamming. In the Castle of My Skin. London: Longman, 1953.
Camara Laye. The African Child. New York: Walker and Co., 1962.
Tanure Ojaide. “African Literature and Cultural Identity.” African Studies
Review, vol. 35, no. 3, 1992, pp. 43–57.
__________. The Fate of Vultures and Other Poems. Lagos: Malthouse,
1990.
__________. Poetic Imagination in Black Africa. Unpublished Manuscript,
1990.
Femi Osofisan. Morountodun and Other Plays. Burnt Mill, Harlow:
Longman, 1984.
Niyi Osundare. The Eye of the Earth. Ibadan: Heinemann Nigeria, 1986.
Kirsten Holst Peterson and Anna Rutherford, eds. A Double Colonization.
Denmark: Dangaroo Press, 1986.
Kenneth Ramchand. The West Indian Novel and Its Background. London:
Heinemann, 1983.
Andrew Salkey. Breaklight: The Poetry of the Caribbean. Garden City, NY:
Anchor/Doubleday, 1973.
Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray. A Companion to Postcolonial Studies.
London: Blackwell Publishers, 2004.
Samuel Selvon. The Lonely Londoner. London: Longman, 1956.
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Wole Soyinka. The Interpreters. London: Heinemann, 1965.
Ngugi wa Thiongo. Petals of Blood. London: Heinemann, 1977.
__________. Weep Not Child. London: Heinemann, 1964.
Derek Walcott. Collected Poems: 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1986.
__________. Dream on Monkey Mountain. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1970.
__________. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990.
William Walsh. Commonwealth Literature. London: Oxford University
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18
African American Literature: A

Survey
Trudier Harris
661
Introduction
Two early forms of African American expressive culture have shaped
African American literature: the oral tradition of folk culture and the
slave/freedom narrative. Those traditions inform the written literature and the
development of each genre (poetry, fiction, drama). Issues central to the
literature begin with the role of the African American writer in relation to his or
her community. Should a literate black individual devote a career to trying to
improve the condition of the group, or should that person feel free to write out
of individual desires and wishes?
This intersection of politics and art dominated discussions of African
American literature well into the twentieth century. Issues include the
representation of black characters: Should they always be complimentary or
should they be realistic, even when they run the risk of damaging the group
socially? In what language should literature be composed—black English or
Standard English? What of nationalism (the Black Aesthetic)? Who should
teach the literature? African Americans? White Americans? Others? Where
should it be taught? English departments? Black Studies departments? Others?
To whom should black writers address their works? The problem of ghettoizing
the African American creative effort was also raised in the twentieth century;
black writers complained that critics discussed them only in connection with
other black writers, not with the larger traditions of literary creativity. The
relevance of critical theories to discussions of African American literature
dominated the energies of many scholars during the late twentieth century.
Today, discussions of Afrofuturism, specifically in the context of speculative
and science fiction and horror narratives, captivate numbers of scholars.
Major terms and concepts: The roles of writers in their communities,
influences on literary creativity, folklore, oral tradition, slavery, slave/freedom
narratives, Christianity, racism, identity, the shortcomings of democracy,
double consciousness, miscegenation, assimilation, passing, Harlem
Renaissance, protest literature, Black Aesthetic, Black Arts Movement,
Southernness and Southern culture, Afrofuturism, horror narratives, speculative
and science fiction.
662
Oral narratives and slave/freedom narratives were crucial to African
American literary development. Africans brought to the United States and
enslaved were obviously valued for their bodies, not their minds. They were not
expected to produce poems, plays, short stories, and novels. Nor was there any
concern on the part of their captors that African Americans would perpetuate
their own cultural traditions. Thus thrown into circumstances where their labor
was emphasized over their imaginations, and where the usual bonds of
language were absent, enslaved Africans adapted the English language and
used it to communicate as best they could. Through this hybrid, they passed on
what they remembered of their own cultures, combined it with what they
witnessed on new soil, or created something totally new. What they
communicated in the patterned forms known as folklore reflected the best of the
values they wished to pass on.
Their narratives, legends, jokes, songs, rhymes, and sayings recorded a world
in which they reacted to their circumstances as an enslaved group and in which
they passed on imaginative ways of interacting within that world. Early tales
reveal, for example, the discrepancies in the economic conditions of enslaved
persons and those who presumed to be their masters. In 1853 in Clotel; or, The
President's Daughter, the first novel by an African American, William Wells
Brown recorded one of the earliest documented folk rhymes:
The big bee flies high,
The little bee makes the honey;
The black folks makes the cotton
And the white folks gets the money.
It captures the thematic essence of the protest tradition that Richard Wright and
other writers of the twentieth century would advocate so fervently. In a land so
rich in resources and which professed to believe so strongly in democracy, it
was unconscionable, these folk artists and literary writers would argue, for an
entire group of people to be excluded from those resources, especially when
those individuals had played a key role in the building of the country.
The song tradition, whether in spirituals, blues, or Gospel, similarly
portrayed a people on the lower echelon of the social stratum who hoped for
resolution of their plight in the afterlife if not in this world. Spirituals frequently
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suggested being done with “de troubles of the world” and going home to live
with Jesus. While writers may not have advocated a literal interpretation of that
tradition, the general tenet of the need for rectification of social conditions
became a common theme in the literature. Music as an expression of the ability
to deal with the troubles of the world similarly informs the literature, whether it
is a Richard Wright character soothing her worries by singing in “Bright and
Morning Star” (1938), or a character in James Baldwin's “Sonny's Blues”
(1964) similarly singing to ease the burden of bearing her troubles, or Maya
Angelou's grandmother singing to calm her rage in the face of insults by
impishly disrespectful young white girls in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
(1969). Music captured the general weltschmerz (pessimism at the state of the
world; literally, “world pain”) of being African and American in a country
where simply being American was preferable.
Not only were the themes common to the written literature that African
Americans passed on in the oral tradition, but the structures as well. In the
1920s, Langston Hughes, in addition to adapting the themes of the blues,
adapted the AAB rhyme scheme of the genre as one of his primary literary
structures. Thus, compositions such as the following one from his “Miss
Blues'es Child” became common:
If the blues would let me,
Lord knows I would smile.
If the blues would let me,
I would smile, smile, smile.
Instead of that I'm cryin'—
I must be Miss Blues'es child.
In addition to the blues, folk narratives also provided the shaping force for
literary creativity. The structure of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), for
example, is based on an African American folktale. Also, Rita Dove's Thomas
and Beulah (1986) echoes the call and response tradition that is key to
understanding blues performance and folk preaching traditions.
Numerous writers drew upon the African American folk tradition for
characters and concepts. “Badman” heroes, as one example, pervade the
literature from Charles W. Chesnutt's Josh Green in The Marrow of Tradition
(1901) to Appalachee Red in Raymond Andrews's Appalachee Red (1978).
Conjure women and other healers modeled on characters from the folk tradition
make their debut in Brown's Clotel, continue through Chesnutt's The Conjure
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Woman (1899), get transformed in Alice Walker's “The Revenge of Hannah
Kemhuff” (1970), and emerge with true supernatural powers in Toni Morrison's
Beloved (1987) as well as in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988). Other writers
and works that draw upon this tradition of characterization include Charles R.
Johnson, Faith and the Good Thing (1974); Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt
Eaters (1980); Tina McElroy Ansa, Baby of the Family (1989), and Phyllis
Alesia Perry, A Sunday in June (2004). Traveling bluesmen are the subject of
Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter (1930) and Albert Murray's Train
Whistle Guitar (1974). The man-of-words tradition, as exemplified in
Muhammad Ali's rhymes, such as “Float like a butterfly/sting like a bee/That's
why they call me/Muhammed Ali,” joins the preaching tradition as the focus of
such works as Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), where mastery of language is the
measure of reputation and effectiveness in the society. Other writers simply
saturate their works with an aura of the folk tradition; these include Zora Neale
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ernest J. Gaines, The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), Charles R. Johnson, Middle
Passage (1990), and Phyllis Alesia Perry, Stigmata (1998).
The slave/freedom narrative tradition, in which the protagonist documents (in
the first person) his or her movement from slavery to freedom and from South
to North, defines the autobiographical tradition that so informs the literature as
well as the archetypal pattern of movement for literary characters, that is, from
the South to the North. Perhaps the most exemplary of the slave/freedom
narratives is Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass:
An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), though Harriet Wilson's Our
Nig (1859) and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1860) have
gained prominence in recent years. Although it is technically classified as the
first novel written by an African American woman, Wilson's Our Nig
nonetheless documents the atrocities of enslavement; since the action is set in
the Boston area, the book is especially interesting for providing a look at
bondage on other-than-Southern soil.
Douglass and Jacobs fit the tradition of documenting atrocities during
slavery, the process by which they learned how to read and write, how they
became dissatisfied with their dehumanizing conditions, the aid they enlisted in
planning and executing escapes, and the free existences that awaited them on
northern soil. Douglass's work is as much literary as it is historical, for he is an
effective storyteller who molds characters and circumstances to best advantage
in making his points about slavery. He is also a master of the figurative
language usually identified with poetry and other consciously created
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imaginative works. Jacobs's narrative is particularly important for documenting
the creation of a female self against the backdrop of sexual abuses during
slavery. It, like Douglass's narrative, also recounts the process of literary
creation, the assistance these early writers received in structuring their works
and in getting them published.
The major theme of slave/freedom narratives, therefore, found a counterpart
in the consciously created literary works. The progression from slavery or
restriction (the South) to freedom and opportunity (the North) provides a
prevailing pattern in the literature. The Great Migration that led to the tripling
and quadrupling of African American populations in various northern cities
between 1900 and 1930 illustrates the historical pattern as well. Writers who
have their characters leave the South for presumed opportunities in the North
include Rudolph Fisher in “The City of Refuge” (1925), Wright in “Big Boy
Leaves Home” (1938), Ellison in Invisible Man (1952), John Oliver Killens in
Youngblood (1954), and a host of others.
Folklore and slave/freedom narratives, therefore, addressed the basic
condition of black existence in the United States, of the discrepancy between a
theoretical democracy and the reality of the failure of democratic principles. As
the genres of the written tradition developed, they in turn were conceptualized,
especially in the early years of development, with the larger issues of black life
and culture in mind. Brown's Clotel, for example, is as much a treatise against
slavery as it is a novel; it includes advertisements for runaways, accounts of
dogs chasing the recently enslaved, abolitionist discussions, and characters who
espouse one side of the slavery issue or the other. When Brown completed The
Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom in 1858, that first drama by an African
American also found its subject in slavery. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who
published Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects in 1854, became a popular
abolitionist lecturer, as did Brown. Her poems, such as “Bury Me in a Free
Land” and “The Mother,” depict the consequences of slavery on the family life
of African Americans.
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Although the poetry in the latter part of the nineteenth century would be
engaged with political issues, that was less true of the first verses African
Americans composed. Lucy Terry, who is credited with composing the first
poem by an African American in 1746, centered her composition upon an
Indian raid in Deerfield, Massachusetts. As an enslaved woman in a Deerfield
home, she naturally identified more with the whites than with the “savage”
Indians; the poem, “Bars Fight,” reflects her identification. It was not
published, however, until 1895. The first African American poet to publish a
work in the United States was Jupiter Hammon, whose broadside entitled An
Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries, appeared on
Christmas day in 1760. Phillis Wheatley, perhaps the best known of the early
poets, published her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773.
Brought as a child to the United States, Phillis grew up learning English and
being encouraged to compose poetry in the Wheatley house in Boston. Her
poems treat subjects as diverse as Africans being brought to America, the antics
of students at Harvard, the military successes of George Washington, and the
reception she received from the Countess of Huntington when she traveled to
England. George Moses Horton, who was enslaved in a small community near
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, put his poetic talents to use in the service of the
students at the University of North Carolina. He composed love poems,
especially acrostics, and other sentiments at their requests. His first volume,
The Hope of Liberty, appeared in 1829; a second volume, The Poetical Works
of George M. Horton, The Colored Bard of North Carolina, appeared in 1845,
the same year as Douglass's narrative.
It was Frances Harper, however, who retained the reputation as America's
best-known African American poet until Paul Laurence Dunbar's reputation
overshadowed hers in the last few years of the nineteenth century. Dunbar, born
in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872, began publishing poems in 1893, when his Oak and
Ivy appeared. A combination of standard English and dialect poems, the volume
was well received and was followed thereafter by Majors and Minors (1896),
Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), and several other volumes. He also wrote novels,
the most famous of which is The Sport of the Gods (1902), which appeared just
four years before his death in 1906.
African American poetry in the twentieth century has varied widely. It began
with the dialect tradition that Dunbar institutionalized, the remnants of which
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were around well into the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. James Weldon
Johnson, whom Dunbar knew well, included dialect poems such as “Sence You
Went Away” in his first compositions at the turn of the century, yet he
recognized the limitations of the medium. James David Corrothers and James
Whitfield Campbell also wrote dialect poetry. The tradition finally led Johnson
to complain in the introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922),
which he edited, that dialect had “but two full stops, humor and pathos.” He
longed for the day when African American poets would be able to represent the
complexity of black life and experience without resorting to “the mere
mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation.”
Certainly Langston Hughes's blues poetry in the 1920s was a move in a new
direction, as was the folk poetry of Sterling Brown in the 1930s. Although
Brown resorted to folk patterns of speech in Southern Road (1932), he did not
rely on caricature and phonetic distortion. His characters, like those of Hughes
in poems such as “Mother to Son,” were able to retain a certain dignity and
garner the respect of readers. Brown's successes in being more expansive in
capturing the nuances of black language and life led Johnson to write a brief
introduction to Southern Road. Another trend in poetry during the Harlem
Renaissance was reflected in the works of Claude McKay, perhaps one of the
most militant voices of the era. McKay's militancy derives not only from the
sentiments he expresses but from his transformation of the traditional forms in
which he writes. Using the Shakespearean sonnet, a form usually reserved for
lofty sentiments of love, McKay documented the failures of democracy, painted
the violence of societally sanctioned crimes such as lynching, and called upon
African Americans to take up arms against all who sought to destroy them. In
his signature poem, “If We Must Die,” he urges oppressed people to “meet the
common foe” and to “deal one deathblow!” for the thousand blows of the
enemy. He concludes the poem with this couplet: “Like men we'll face the
murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” His
poetry certainly did not distort African American experience in the way that
Johnson believed dialect poetry did.
Perhaps Johnson's call for a different kind of poetry was more fully realized
in the academic verses of Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks in the 1940s.
These poets, steeped in the Western traditions of verse, structure, composition,
and density of language, were judged to be successful by the more literary
poetic establishments in the country. Hayden published Heart-Shape in the
Dust in 1940, which picks up some of the themes of the writers of the Harlem
Renaissance, especially questions of identity. By 1948 and his publication of
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The Lion and the Archer, however, he had dramatically altered his style to
reflect the influence of such poets as Gerald Manley Hopkins, Stephen Spender,
C. Day Lewis, and Rainer Maria Rilke; the result was six poems generally
judged to be “baroque” in structure and execution. These include “A Ballad of
Remembrance” and “Homage to the Empress of the Blues” (Bessie Smith). A
later poem, “Middle Passage,” which describes the transportation of Africans to
the West Indies and other parts of the New World for purposes of enslavement,
is one of the most anthologized of Hayden's works. Like Hayden, Brooks
preferred the density and structure of poetry that reflected white Western
influences upon her. Her subjects are certainly those of African American life
and experience, but they are shrouded in styles that appear at times to be
antithetical to the very experiences she records. Her first volume, A Street in
Bronzeville (1945), focuses on black people on the South side of Chicago and
recounts occurrences in their everyday lives; narrative is the major technique
she employs. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen (1949), which is
loosely based on the Aeneid; it follows a young girl growing up in a Chicago
tenement. Although the volume was judged to be difficult and self conscious, it
nonetheless received more praise than not. After a 1968 encounter with poets of
the Black Arts Movement, Brooks loosened up her poetic forms and became
more overtly political in her works. One of her last published poems reflects the
times in its title: “To an Old Black Woman, Homeless and Indistinct” (1993).
The New Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s brought a poetic
revolution in its wake. It introduced a group of poets who are still publishing
today. Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti (formerly Don L. Lee), Amiri Baraka
(formerly LeRoi Jones), Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, and others fashioned
the poets' response to social change during this period. Advocating a
nationalistic approach to literature, they called upon black people to take an
active role in freeing themselves from a racist, undemocratic society. They also
provided the path by which blacks were to arrive at being a nation of African
Americans. They were to change their hair and clothing styles, their patterns of
behavior, and even their names; it became the age of dashikis and afros. The
nationalistic bent was reflected in the language of the poetry itself; it attempted
to imitate speech patterns and colloquialisms of common black folk, and it
consciously sought to dissociate itself with the conventions of Western poetry.
New words were created (“blkpoets,” “nationbuilding,” “u,” “bes”), and
structures were designed to resemble African American cultural forms such as
jazz, not traditional sonnets or free verse.
There were still poets during this period who continued in the more
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traditional veins, including Robert Hayden, Melvin Tolson, and Michael
Harper. Like Madhubuti and others, however, Harper did give attention to
African American themes and structures, including adapting stanzaic forms
based on compositions by jazz great John Coltrane. The difference is that
Harper did not alter his poetry as radically as did some of the younger poets;
nor was he as consciously militant. Brooks joined the younger poets in
reevaluating her role in relation to the black community as well as in modifying
her stanzaic forms. She published several small volumes for children in the
1960s and 1970s and wrote a poem on the occasion of Harold Washington's
being elected major of Chicago, a first for a black politician.
Brooks's success in winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for Annie Allen (1949)
was matched in the mid-1980s when newcomer Rita Dove won the Pulitzer
Prize for her volume, Thomas and Beulah (1986). Focusing on the relationship
between a man and his wife over decades that showcase courtship, marriage,
children, grandchildren, and death, the volume alternates voices between
Thomas and Beulah, allowing them to recount and record their own
perceptions. The collection illustrated that less self-conscious structures and
themes in poetry could be equally appealing to a panel of judges for one of the
most prestigious literary prizes currently available.
Two other African American poets, Yusef Komunyakaa and Natasha
Trethewey, have also garnered the coveted Pulitzer Prize. Author of a dozen
volumes of poetry, including Dien Cai Dau (1988), which focuses on the
experiences of soldiers in Vietnam; Magic City (1992), mostly about
Komunyakaa's hometown and family; Thieves of Paradise (1998), about the
last survivor of a Native American tribe in California; and Talking Dirty to the
Gods (2000), which reconceptualizes many myths about the supernatural
throughout the world, Komunyakaa won the Pulitzer for Neon Vernacular, a
collection of his poetry that appeared in 1993. In 2001, Komunyakaa's works
were collected in Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems. Additional
Komunyakaa volumes include The Chameleon Couch (2011), Testimony: A
Tribute to Charlie Parker (2013), and Emperor of Water Clocks (2015). Early
in 2007, Natasha Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for Native Guard (2006), a
volume that also focuses, among other things, on the experiences of black
soldiers in a southern outpost in Louisiana during the Civil War. It also features
poems about Trethewey's native Mississippi and her legacy from the conflicts
of color and racism that were attendant upon her white father and black mother
getting married and trying to live there. Before Native Guard, Trethewey had
published Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), in which she imagines the life of a
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prostitute in New Orleans from the photographs that E. J. Bellocq took of her.
Other contemporary poets include E. Ethelbert Miller (who has perhaps
strongest ties to Black Arts poets of the 1960s), Toi Derricote, Cornelius Eady,
Kevin Young, Kevin Powell, Nikky Finney, and many, many others; indeed,
some of these poets have published anthologies of the work of their peers.
Derricote and Eady are the primary movers behind Cave Canem, a poets'
collective, which has nurtured such poets as Elizabeth Alexander and Evie
Shockley, who are now major poets in their own right. Finney joined the list of
award winners by garnering the National Book Award for Head Off & Split
(2011).
Of all the genres of African American literary expression, poetry is perhaps
the most vibrant currently, for it has reached into popular culture in the spoken
word mode and has inspired creativity in many who are not traditionally
associated with colleges and universities. Their work is much more likely to be
heard in bars, clubs, on CDs, and on the Internet than read in books. Many of
these poets, as well as those who publish through traditional means, responded
by composing poems about the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans in
2005; indeed, The Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University
produced a CD of such compositions (2007).
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Fiction moved from its dual function as slave/freedom narrative and
literature in the mid-nineteenth century to romance and imitation of white
writers in the late nineteenth century, to the autobiographical mode and more
consciously designed protest novels in the twentieth century. Chesnutt explored
the color problem in The House Behind the Cedars (1900), a novel focusing on
a light-skinned black woman whose brief attempt to pass for white ends in
disaster. He also reflects social concerns in The Marrow of Tradition (1901), a
novel about the Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot of 1898. On that
occasion, black people who tried to vote were attacked and many of them killed
by the whites who were intent upon preserving white supremacy.
The influence of the slave/freedom narrative upon the novel form can be seen
in the autobiographical mode of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
(1912), which James Weldon Johnson published anonymously. Johnson
executed the first-person narrative device so well that readers believed the
novel was indeed the historical life story of its author. The novel follows the
life of a talented mulatto musician who is caught between the opportunities his
talent offers and the limitations his classification as a Negro ultimately brings.
He finally opts to deny his black ancestry and “pass” for white. It was only
when Johnson acknowledged authorship of the book in 1927 that tales of its
authenticity abated. Indeed, Johnson recounted attending a party prior to 1927
in which one of the guests “confided” to the gathering that he was the author of
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
Fiction that writers of the Harlem Renaissance published ranged from Jean
Toomer's Cane (1923), which (to a degree) romanticizes black life in Georgia,
to Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1929), an account of the adventures of a
fun-loving world traveler. It also included the genteel tradition of fiction
writing represented by Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929),
and Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun (1924). Fauset, who assisted W. E. B. Du Bois in
editing the Crisis magazine in which many of the Renaissance writers were
published, held salons at her Harlem apartment at which invited guests were
expected to hold conversations in French about the latest developments in
literature or world affairs.
One problem with these early novels was that very seldom were African
Americans represented realistically in them. Indeed, there was a general
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movement in the first three decades of the twentieth century that might be
referred to as “the best foot forward” tradition; writers were encouraged to
portray complimentary images of African Americans. Characters should be
engaged in pursuits that were in keeping with the objectives of the larger
society. Therefore, general principles of democracy were to be upheld and
education was a goal to be valued, as were habits of morality and cleanliness.
“Bad niggers,” whether male or female, were best left out of the literature. The
belief that such positive images were important led in 1926 to a forum in Crisis
magazine. It was entitled “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed? A
Symposium.” The forum received responses from Sherwood Anderson,
Benjamin Brawley, Charles W. Chesnutt, Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois,
Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alfred A. Knopf,
Sinclair Lewis, Vachel Lindsay, H. L. Mencken, Joel Spingarn, and Walter
White.
Fictional portraits of African Americans began to be more realistic in the
decade of the 1930s. Zora Neale Hurston depicted a black preacher in Jonah's
Gourd Vine (1934) that any reader would recognize. Her portrait of Janie
Crawford Logan Starks Killicks in The Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
brought a new dimension in realism to portraits of African American female
characters. Janie is a working-class woman who prefers spiritual fulfillment to
gentility. After two disastrous marriages, she finally finds happiness with an
itinerant laborer who takes her to pick beans in the Florida muck. The novel
does not raise large political issues, although the social issues of woman's place
in the society and what sacrifices she must make to find personal happiness are
certainly important ones. The enduring power of the novel is evidenced by its
having been made into a television movie in 2005, with a screenplay by famed
dramatist Suzan-Lori Parks.
Hurston's more individually focused issues gave way to the politics of
Richard Wright, who dismissed her work because she did not write as
consciously in the protest tradition as he wanted. For Wright, any black author
should use his or her pen to point out the hypocrisies in American democracy,
how black people were ground under the heels of white privilege and prejudice.
He began such depictions in his first collection of short stories, Uncle Tom's
Children, which was published in 1938. Almost all the stories are violent, and
at least two of them embrace the communist philosophy to which Wright was
becoming attracted at this time; he believed that African Americans had a better
chance of obtaining democracy in America through that philosophy. His stories
document black people being lynched and shot, denied medical services or the
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sympathy that should attend them, beaten by mobs, and burned alive. The few
who decide to fight back, such as Silas in “Long Black Song,” only end up
being killed more dramatically. However, in “Fire and Cloud,” one of the
stories that embrace communist philosophy, Reverend Taylor is able to gather
white and black working-class people together to put pressure on a city
government to provide food during the Depression. Before that possible hope,
though, characters such as Big Boy in “Big Boy Leaves Home” and Mann in
“Down by the Riverside” are simply buffeted by the misfortunes of the
societies in which they live. They must either escape to the North or die in the
attempt.
Wright's hard-hitting approach to fiction continued in 1940 with the
publication of Native Son, his most famous work in the protest tradition. It
posits that black men in America are so confined physically and
psychologically that the fear they sometimes experience can drive them to kill
almost instinctively. Bigger Thomas does just that when he is found in the
bedroom of his white employer's daughter, whom he has helped there because
she was in a drunken stupor. Smothering Mary Dalton to death gives him a
feeling of horror, but also one of exhilaration, for it is the first time in his life
that he has acted against the wishes of the white power structure.
Other novels from the forties that fit into the protest tradition include Chester
Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), about a black man forced to join the
military or be sent to prison because he was accused of raping a white woman,
and Ann Petry's The Street (1946), about a black woman who suffers the stings
of poverty and sexual politics when she tries to rear her son alone in Harlem.
Such literary voices did not portend a particularly inviting future for African
Americans. It would be the next decade before writers could assert with
authority that the promise of American democracy did indeed apply to African
Americans.
That authoritative voice belonged to Ralph Ellison, who asserted in Invisible
Man (1952) that blacks should “affirm the principles on which the country was
founded”—even when the day-to-day execution of those principles seemed to
leave them out of the great American experiment. His optimistic voice for the
larger nationalist agenda led into the cultural nationalism that would inform the
fiction of the 1960s, such as John A. Williams's The Man Who Cried I Am
(1967), which asserts that blacks must fight as best they can against the forces
of repression.
More focus on the black community tended to occupy fiction writers in the
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1970s, which began with Toni Morrison's publication of The Bluest Eye. That
novel indicts the entire society for judging little black girls by standards of
beauty that are culturally antithetical to them, but it especially places the blame
on unthinking, unfeeling members of the black middle class. The pattern of
focusing on black communities continued in the 1980s with Toni Cade
Bambara's The Salt Eaters (1980), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982),
Terry McMillan's Mama (1987) and Disappearing Acts (1989), Tina McElroy
Ansa's Baby of the Family (1989), and Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits
(1989).
A strong sub-category in African American fiction since the late 1960s is that
of the neo-slave narrative. Many African American writers revisit slavery to
give their characters agency that history suggests they did not have. That
pattern in the fiction began with Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966). It continued
with Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975), Alex Haley, Roots (1976) and Queen
(1993), Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (1976), Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)
and Wild Seed (1980), Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings (1979), David
Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose
(1986), Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987), Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale
(1984) and Middle Passage (1990), J. California Cooper, Family (1991), Louise
Meriwether, Fragments of the Ark (1994), Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River
(1994), John Edgar Wideman, The Cattle Killing (1996), Phyllis Alesia Perry,
Stigmata (1998), Edward P. Jones, The Known World (2003), and Dolen
Perkins-Valdez's Wench (2010). All of these works feature characters who are
enslaved, those in the twentieth century who are drawn back into the
antebellum South and who share the slavery of their ancestors, and/or those in
the twentieth century who are haunted by slavery. Perhaps more scholarship has
been completed on the neo-slave narrative tradition than on any other in recent
years.
Another new trend in fiction has been that of commercially successful novels
such as those of Terry McMillan and E. Lynn Harris. McMillan began her
career with the publication of Mama (1987), copies of which she resorted to
selling herself. Quickly discovered and made into an industry, she has
published, among others, Disappearing Acts (1989), Waiting to Exhale (1992),
How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996), A Day Late and a Dollar Short
(2001), Getting to Happy (2010), Who Asked You? (2013), and I Almost Forgot
About You (2016). Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back
were made into very successful movies. E. Lynn Harris earned a following for
his portrayals of very middle-class gay black males and their adventures in
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novels such as Invisible Life (1994), Just as I Am (1994), If This World Were
Mine (1997), Abide with Me (1999), and Just Too Good to Be True (2008).
Connie Briscoe, Eric Jerome Dickey, Sapphire, and Sister Souljah are other
writers who have achieved success in the commercial publishing arena.
Scholars, readers, and students are equally captivated by Afrofuturism and
horror studies. Much has been written on the ties between Afrofuturism and
science or speculative fiction, and the narratives of Octavia E. Butler seemed to
have served as the primary focus for many of these efforts. Increasingly,
African American writers, especially women, are being subsumed into or
discussed within connotations of horror. This has invited the re-reading of
authors such as Toni Morrison, whose novel Beloved and the actions of Sethe
are incorporated in the budding tradition of horror narratives. Such tales include
treatments of vampires and similar otherworldly phenomena. Thus, Jewelle
Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) fits, and Phyllis Aleshia Perry's Stigmata
(1998) with its emphasis upon deceased characters who transcend time and
space to haunt those in the present fits equally well. Indeed, the focus on horror
narratives is growing so rapidly that there are conferences on the topic and
collections of essays on it as well. A forthcoming volume, edited by Kinitra
Brooks and Susana Morris, is Toward a Black Women's Horror Aesthetic:
Critical Frameworks. Among the major authors who are treated routinely in
this category are Linda D. Addison, L. A. Banks, Darlene Black, Pearl Cleage,
Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Jemiah Jefferson, N. K. Jemisin, Morrison,
Helen Oyeyemi, A. L. Peck, and Dia Reeves. Narratives defined in this genre
generally reassess what it means to be human, articulate patterns and actions
that go beyond the human, and give more-than-human—or at least unusually
human—powers to their characters.
African American drama since 1980 has been particularly noteworthy, which
means that the dramatic scene is a far cry from where it started in 1858 with
Brown's The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom. Brown's play was written to be
read rather than produced; it was not until the musical comedy era of the 1880s
and 1890s that black playwrights saw their works on the stage. One of the
earliest such achievements was a collaboration between James Weldon Johnson
and Paul Laurence Dunbar. They wrote music and lyrics for Clorindy, or the
Origin of the Cakewalk (1898). In 1900 Dunbar collaborated with black
composer Will Marion Cook in the production of Uncle Eph's Christmas.
The first three decades of the twentieth century did not see much
development in traditional dramas by black Americans, although the musical
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comedy tradition was popular until well into the 1920s. The year 1920 saw the
publication of Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel: A Play in Three Acts (produced
in 1916), but it would be well into the 1930s before a black writer completed a
drama that would have a successful run on Broadway. That distinction
belonged to Langston Hughes, whose Mulatto, a dramatic rewrite of his short
story, “Father and Son,” ran on Broadway from 1935 to 1936, as well as for an
additional two years on tour.
In the 1930s and 1940s, several black theatre companies were formed; most
of their productions, however, were reworkings of plays by continental and
white American playwrights. Alice Childress, whose Trouble in Mind (1955)
was optioned for Broadway in the mid-1950s, worked closely with one of these
companies, the American Negro Theatre (ANT). Other plays by African
Americans that were produced during this period include St. Louis Woman
(1946), a collaboration by Arna Bontemps and Countee Cullen in which
Bontemps's novel, God Sends Sunday (1931), was adapted for stage; Louis
Peterson's Take a Giant Step (1953); and Hughes's Simply Heavenly (1957).
Perhaps the most dramatic event in the history of the production of plays by
black Americans occurred in 1959, when Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the
Sun opened in Philadelphia. It was the first time, James Baldwin asserts, that
black people truly recognized themselves on the American stage. Blacks
flocked to see the play because they saw accurate reflections of themselves, and
they recognized Hansberry as a witness to their blackness and their aspirations
in American society. The play moved from Philadelphia to a successful run on
Broadway, where it opened in March of 1959. That event was followed in 1964
by LeRoi Jones's Dutchman, which, in its depiction of the sexual tempting of a
black man by a white woman and her eventual killing of him, had an equally
profound effect on the American theatre as well as on black viewing audiences.
Playwrights such as Ossie Davis (Purlie Victorius, 1961), James Baldwin (The
Amen Corner, 1965), Ed Bullins (In the Wine Time, 1968), and Charles
Gordone all had plays produced in the very successful decade of the 1960s.
Gordone became the first black playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama,
for his No Place to Be Somebody (1969).
The shocker for the next decade would be Ntozake Shange's For Colored
Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (1976), which
focused critical attention on the problematic relationships between black males
and black females. In 1981, Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play opened on
Broadway; the next year it followed the path of No Place to Be Somebody by
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winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The most publicized dramatic successes
of the 1980s belonged to August Wilson, whose Fences, the story of an
embittered player from the Negro Baseball League, won the Pulitzer Prize for
drama in 1987. That play moved from a very successful Broadway run starring
James Earl Jones to a 2017 movie starring Denzel Washington. Wilson's other
works include Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1986), The Piano Lesson (1987—
also a Pulitzer Prize winner), and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988). Before
his death in 2005, Wilson had succeeded in fulfilling his dream of writing a
play about black life in every decade of the twentieth century. Other plays in
the cycle include Jitney (1983), Two Trains Running (1993), Seven Guitars
(1995), King Hedley II (2001), Gem of the Ocean (2003), and Radio Golf
(2005).
Suzan-Lori Parks stormed the dramatic scene and took over as Pulitzer Prize
winner from Wilson. After small productions of several of her earlier plays, she
reached Broadway in 2002 with Topdog/Underdog, which won the Pulitzer
Prize. The play focuses on two African American brothers in a single room in
an urban area; one is a shoplifter and the other is a recovering “Three Card
Monte” hustler who now has a job in an arcade where he plays Abraham
Lincoln being shot in the Ford Theater. Conflict centers upon family
relationships, questions of identity, and the impact of the past/history upon the
present. Some of Parks's other plays include The America Play (1995), which
also features a Lincoln impersonator, Venus (1997), about the Venus Hottentot,
and 365 Days/365 Plays (2006), an experiment she conducted in composition
over the course of a year. More recently, she completed The Book of Grace
(2010), an adaption of Porgy and Bess (2011), and an off-Broadway production
in 2017 of Venus.
Other contemporary African American women playwrights producing plays
include Christina Anderson, Ifa Bayeza, Radha Blank, Lydia R. Diamond,
Sigrid Gilmer, Danai Gurira, Katori Hall, Sarah Jones, Lynn Nottage, Dael
Orlandersmith, Anna Deavere Smith, and Charlayne Woodard. Notable
accolades have come to Hall and Nottage. Hall ventured into previously taboo
territory with The Mountaintop (2011), a play in which she challenges the
traditionally sacred reputation of Martin Luther King Jr. Set in Memphis the
evening before King's assassination, the play features a King character who
encounters and flirts with a maid who delivers coffee to his room. In a
surrealistic presentation, the otherworldly nature of the maid becomes apparent,
as does her mission in relation to King's Civil Rights work. The play premiered
in London in 2009 and won the prestigious Oliver Award for Best Play. It
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opened on Broadway in 2011 with Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett in the
starring roles. Hall won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2011, a prize given
to “Outstanding Women Playwrights.” Nottage has had several plays produced,
including Ruined (2007), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in
2009. The play focuses on Congolese women during civil war and how rape is
used as a weapon against them. Other of Nottage's works include the well-
received Intimate Apparel (2003), Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine
(2004; for which she won an Obie Award), By the Way, Meet Vera Stark
(2011), and Sweat (2015). In addition to other awards, Nottage received a
MacArthur Genius Grant in 2007.
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Summary
In recent years, there has been a re-evaluation of what Southern territory
means in African American literature, and writers have set their works on that
soil and allowed their characters to define themselves and their world in that
previously restricting territory. Such writers and works include Toni Morrison's
Song of Solomon (1977), in which a spoiled middle-class black Michiganer
returns to Virginia to uncover the meaning of personal history and ancestry;
Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), in which a black woman who has
been abused physically and psychologically overcomes these debilitations to
become an entrepreneur in Memphis; and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988), in
which a descendant of slaves controls not only her family's destiny but the very
elements of the universe. For these writers, the South is no longer forbidden
territory, no longer a place of death, but a place where African Americans can
choose reasonably well under what circumstances they will live in the world.
The trend continues among younger writers with Tayari Jones, a native of
Atlanta, and Phyllis Alesia Perry, who sets her novels in Tuskegee, Alabama.
Perry, as mentioned, fits into the neo-slave narrative tradition. Jones took as the
subject matter of her first novel, Leaving Atlanta (2002), the Atlanta Child
Murders that occurred between 1979 and 1981. She joined Toni Cade Bambara
in fictionalizing the horror of that occurrence; Bambara's posthumous novel
about the murders, Those Bones Are Not My Child, was published in 1999.
Its roots in the oral tradition and in the African American slave/freedom
narrative enabled African American literature to come of age in the twentieth
century and to remain vibrant in the twenty-first century. From a literature that
made obeisances to white reading audiences, as was the case with Charles W.
Chesnutt, it has grown to insist, as Toni Morrison and Suzan-Lori Parks do, that
readers come to meet it wherever it starts and agree to go wherever it takes
them. Forms that were initially rooted in politics, such as Frances Harper's
lyrics, gave way to the mythologically sophisticated verses of poets such as Jay
Wright. And dramas that were initially intended for living room consumption
serve as the origins of works that have won several Pulitzer Prizes.
While much of African American literature follows a path from slavery to
freedom (South to North), locates characters in upward trajectories, deals with
questions of identity, engages issues of liberation (social justice, racism,
discrimination, Jim Crow, violence), and traces religious inclinations (appeal of
Christianity), sometimes there are deviations from or shatterings of these
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patterns. Occasionally, for example, as in Delores Phillip's The Darkest Child
(2004), an African American mother does not do what is expected of her.
Instead of putting the interests of her ten children ahead of her own, Rozelle
“Rosie” Quinn teaches her children to steal, prostitutes her adolescent
daughters, and kills her two-month-old daughter when the child's crying annoys
her. A novel that obviously moves beyond traditional patterns in African
American literature, The Darkest Child opens the door to other such
possibilities that may have a redefining effect on what we routinely assume to
be true of African American literary creativity. The same could be said of what
is currently called “Street Literature.” Writers in this sub-genre are as gritty in
their presentations as Donald Goines was earlier in such novels as Dopefiend
(1971) and as Iceberg Slim was in Pimp: The Story of My Life (1967). The
graphic nature of the language and actions presented might upset some
sensibilities, but it nonetheless pushes against traditional boundaries.
Subject matter that was strictly taboo in early manifestations of the literature
reached the forefront in the latter decades of the twentieth century. This is
especially true of gay and lesbian materials. In the 1960s, Ed Bullins obscured
—somewhat—his focus on lesbianism in Clara's Ole Man (1969). Ann Allen
Shockley shattered that taboo with Loving Her (1974) and Say Jesus and Come
to Me (1982). As mentioned, E. Lynn Harris's works went a long way in
institutionalizing focus on gay black men. And Randall Kenan's A Visitation of
Spirits (1989) did so as well in its focus on a brilliant African American high
school student who must reject generations of respectability politics as well as
Christianity in order to claim his identity as a gay man, though those rejections
and that claim have tragic consequences.
African American writers in recent years have also been more inclined to
move away from expected trends in genres. For example, the graphic novel
form has proven appealing not only for presentation of fictional material, but
also for presentation of biographical materials. A successful African American
male graphic novelist is Mat Johnson, whose first foray into the form was
Incognegro (2008). In response to Hurricane Katrina, he published Dark Rain:
A New Orleans Mystery (2010) in graphic form; it depicts the aftermath of the
hurricane's devastation and its levelling of social classes as well as its inspiring
of criminal and, at times, dehumanizing activities. Johnson has also published
traditional novels such as Hunting in Harlem (2003) and Pym (2011). In terms
of biography, there is Peter Bagge's recently published Fire!! The Zora Neale
Hurston Story (2017).
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The publishing industry has kept pace with audiences for African American
literature, and today novels, poems, and plays by black writers are available for
use in courses in American studies, African American studies, religious studies,
history, and sociology, as well as in the traditional English Department classes.
Several anthologies appeared in the 1990s and early in the twenty-first century,
including Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American
Literary Tradition (1997) and The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature (1997; revised twice since publication). These two standard
anthologies were but two of the many resources that appeared to aid in the
institutionalization of the study of African American literature. Encyclopedic
resources such as The Oxford Companion to African American Literature
(1997), in both expanded and concise versions, have made access to study of
the literature even easier. So have Internet resources such as those Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. has created on the study of African American life and culture in the
New World. Readership has transcended languages and national boundaries;
Morrison's works, for example, are available in more than 60 countries, she
won Italy's highest prize for a creative writer in 1990, and she won the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1993. Doctoral students in India, Spain, Germany, Japan,
the Netherlands, Korea, and China routinely come to the United States to study
with specialists in African American literature, and they regularly write
dissertations on African American writers. International organizations such as
The Collegium of African American Research (CAAR) and The British
Association of American Studies (BAAS) routinely focus on African American
literature, and scholars from Australia, Korea, and China, among many other
countries, frequent the United States to expand their knowledge of African
American literature. From a creative effort with a purpose, African American
literature has grown to be recognized internationally as a richly complex area of
study that will sustain many generations of students, teachers, and scholars.
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1. How has the portrayal of African American characters changed in literary
works from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries? How do these
characters reflect various social and political agendas of their creators?
2. What are some of the influences of the African American oral tradition upon
the literature? In what works and at which points in history are these
influences most apparent?
3. What would have been the consequences for an African American writer
who ignored the fact of his or her race during the nineteenth century?
4. In what ways was the New Black Aesthetic movement purely literary? In
what ways was it political?
5. What kinds of impacts have theoretical approaches to African American
literature had on how we read and interpret the literature?
6. How has the publication of commercially successful novels in African
American literature changed our perception of the literature and what is
appropriate for coverage in it?
7. Locate a couple of online resources that focus on African American
literature. How do these resources assist in your understanding of the
literature?
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References
William L. Andrews. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-
American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1986.
Houston A. Baker, Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A
Vernacular Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Bernard Bell. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots
and Modern Literary Branches. Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1987.
Hazel V. Carby. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-
American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Barbara Christian. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition,
1892–1976. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980.
Soyica Diggs Colbert. The African American Theatrical Body: Reception,
Performance, and the Stage. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2011.
Hazel Ervin. African American Literary Criticism, 1773–2000. New York:
Twayne, 1999.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American
Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Maryemma Graham and Jerry W. Ward Jr. The Cambridge History of
African American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2011.
Trudier Harris. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and
the South. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2009.
Stephen Henderson. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and
Black Music as Poetic References. New York: William Morrow &
Company, 1973.
James Weldon Johnson (ed.). The Book of American Negro Poetry. New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1922.
Lovalerie King and Shirley Moody Turner (eds.). Contemporary African
American Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Keith Leonard. Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from
Slavery to Civil Rights. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press,
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2006.
Lawrence Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American
Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977.
Angelyn Mitchell. Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American
Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
Loften Mitchell. Black Drama: The Story of the American Negro in the
Theatre. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967.
Winston Napier. African American Literary Theory: A Reader. New York:
New York University Press, 2000.
Howard Rambsy II. The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African
American Poetry. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press,
2011.
Adolpho L. Reed and Kenneth W. Warren. Renewing Black Intellectual
History: Foundation of African American Thought, ebook, 2010.
Leslie Sanders. The Development of Black Theater in America: From
Shadows to Selves. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 1988.
Sandra Shannon. The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Washington, D.C.:
Joan R. Sherman. Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century.
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1974.
Jean Wagner. Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar
to Langston Hughes. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1973.
Kenneth W. Warren. What Was African American Literature? New York,
NY: Barnes & Noble, 2011.
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19
Contributions in Science, Business,

Film, and Sports
Mario J. Azevedo1 &

Jeffrey Sammons
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Introduction
It is crucial that the work of black American scientists be given its proper
place in the history of the development of the United States of America, not
only because it is fair, but also because it provides role models for young
African Americans as well as young Africans on the continent. For example, on
the continent, what most African youngsters know is that African Americans
were enslaved and that they continue to be discriminated against. They have
only a superficial knowledge of famous personalities such as Jesse Jackson,
Michael Jackson, and Thurgood Marshall. The accomplishments of blacks in
this country, most notably in the sciences, are generally unknown in Africa. In
this country, both black and white students show an equally appalling ignorance
of the contributions of black Americans, particularly in the hard sciences.
Following is a brief summary of the contributions of black American
scientists who have had a significant impact in their fields and in American
society.2 For complete details, we refer the reader to the Negro Almanac (1989
edition), compiled and edited by Harry A. Ploski and James Williams, from
which most of the following information comes. The remainder of the chapter
is devoted to the role of African Americans in business, in the film industry,
and in sports.
Major terms and concepts: Business, competition, finance,
entrepreneurship, stocks, bonds, blaxploitation, “action” movies, “set-asides,”
sport, discrimination, patriotism, Americanism, class, race, gender, culture,
stereotypes, self-help, parallel institutions, social control, empowerment,
resistance, economics, politics, education, character, pseudo-science, social
Darwinism, and misplaced values.
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At present, patents by African Americans exceed 3,000 and are ever
increasing. Following the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1867,
African Americans were finally allowed to register their inventions with the
government. Earlier, as Ploski and Williams note, African Americans could not
have their inventions registered, because, “since slaves were not citizens they
could not enter into contracts with their owners or the government.” Thus,
several works by African Americans before emancipation and the Fourteenth
Amendment were either lost or were stolen by masters who claimed them as
theirs. In the case of free blacks, some of their inventions were patented.
For example, in 1832, a slave, Augustus Jackson of Philadelphia, was
credited with inventing the process of making ice cream but his invention was
not patented, while Henry Blair's seed planter was patented in 1834, because he
was a free man. Thereafter, patents by black Americans ballooned, as the
following individuals, presented alphabetically (and not chronologically),
illustrate. This method is also borrowed from Ploski and Williams, referred to
above.
George Alcorn, with eight patents, has distinguished himself with his work
on missiles, amino acids, planets, and molecular and atomic physics. Architect
Archie Alexander (d. 1958) is remembered for his construction of a major plant
for the University of Iowa, which required several tunnels under the Iowa
River. Benjamin Banneker (d. 1806) is famous for being the first American to
make a wood clock, for his astonishing knowledge of mathematics and the solar
system, and for publishing his own almanac. Banneker was also one of the six
surveyor-architects who laid the foundations for the nation's capital. Andrew
Beard (d. 1910) is credited with the invention of the Jenny Coupler, an
“automatic device which secured two [train] cars by merely bumping them
together.” Henry Blair (d. 1860), currently considered to be the first black
inventor to secure a patent (in 1834 and 1836), developed two corn- and cotton-
planting machines. Otis Boykin has invented electronic gadgets for computers,
radios, television sets; “a control unit for artificial heart stimulators”; resistors
for computers; a burglar-proof register; and a chemical air filter—just to
mention a few. John A. Burr (a lawyer) invented a lawnmower in 1899. And
the list goes on.
George Carruthers, a physicist, is well known for having made his own
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telescope at the age of ten and for coming up with an ultraviolet
camera/spectrograph for NASA. George Washington Carver (d. 1943) had
three patents on cosmetics and paint beyond his hundreds of purposely non-
patented inventions related to peanuts, corn, and sweet potatoes—all of which
revolutionized the economies of Alabama and other Southern states. Engineer
David N. Crosthwaith, Jr. (d. 1976) patented the automatic water feeder, the
automobile indicator, the thermostat-setting device, the vacuum-heating system,
and the vacuum pump. Dr. Charles Drew, who died in a car accident in 1950,
perfected the process of blood preservation, to the extent that the British
government asked him to organize the first blood bank in Great Britain. His
process saved thousands of lives in World War II.
Meredith Gourdine, a physicist, has contributed to the principles related to
the conversion of gas to electricity, while chemist Henry A. Hill (d. 1977) is
recognized for his research in polymer chemistry and “fabric flammability.”
Lloyd Augustus Hall has invented a method of “curing” salts for meat
preservation and processing and owns over 100 patents related to food and
baked goods. William A. Hinton developed the first reliable method of
detecting syphilis—the Hinton test. Mention must also be made of Frederick
McKinley Jones (d. 1961) who invented the first automatic refrigerator for
long-haul trucks. Percy Julian (d. 1975), a chemist, had 86 patents, some of
which are related to a drug used against arthritis pain.
Ernest E. Just (d. 1941) is known as the pioneer in the study of egg
fertilization, artificial parthenogenesis, and cell division. Samuel L. Kountz (d.
1981) remains one of the country's most famous surgeons since he performed
more than 500 kidney transplants, one of which was a transplant from a mother
to a daughter—“the first [kidney] transplant between humans who were not
identical twins.” Lewis Howard Latimer (d. 1928) worked for himself and for
Alexander Bell and patented a process to make carbon filaments for the Maxim
electric incandescent lamp. Jan Matzinger (d. 1889) invented the shoe-lasting
machine, while Walter McAfee is known for his work on radar detection and
range, antennas, the effects of nuclear weapons, and quantum optics.
Elijah McCoy (d. 1928) invented the automatic lubrication process for
moving machinery such as trains. Since the 1960s, W. Delano Meriwether has
experimented with a potential cure for young leukemia patients. Alexander
Miles is credited with the 1887 invention of elevator doors that automatically
opened and closed. Garrett A. Morgan (d. 1963) invented the gas inhalator,
which is widely used today by fire fighters and mine workers, and for the life-
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saving and indispensable traffic light. (He sold this last patent to General
Electric for $40,000!) Norbert Rillieux (d. 1894) invented a vacuum
evaporating pan used for sugar refinery, for condensing milk, and for soap
making. Daniel Hale Williams (d. 1931) is remembered as a pioneer in heart
surgery, who saved, almost miraculously, a patient who had a knife wound in
an artery, just an inch from the heart in 1893 (see Dunn, 2015).
Granville T. Woods (d. 1910) had accumulated fifty patents before his death,
one of which was for an incubator in which large quantities of eggs could
hatch. He also developed the induction telegraph system, which today allows
communication between moving trains as well as between trains and stations.
Last but not least (for our purposes), Louis T. Wright (d. 1952) is known for his
successful analysis of the intradermal method of smallpox vaccination.
Interestingly, when African American inventors are mentioned, most people
think about the patents of centuries ago, perhaps up to the 1950s, but forget that
African American geniuses are still part of our contemporary society. Among
the most recent and wellknown inventor is Lonnie Johnson, a favored engineer
at NASA during the 1980s, who invented the Super Soaker gun toy and had it
licensed to the Larami Corporation. Larami was later acquired by the Hasbro
Corporation. Hasbro had refused to pay royalties to Johnson but through
arbitration Hasbro had to pay $72.9 million from royalties. It has been
estimated that by 2013, the sales of the toy reached almost $1 billion.
Johnson also owns another patent called the Johnson Thermo-
Electrochemical Converter System, which he created from the arbitration funds
he received. His new invention was listed as one of the 10 top inventions of
2009. Patricia Bath has patented five inventions related to Laserphaco Probe,
used for treatment of cataracts. Mark Dean owns three of the nine original IBM
patents, for a total of 40 he has acquired. He also contributed to the invention of
the color computer monitor. He also led the team that designed the first
gigahertz computer processor chip, making him so famous that in 1997 he was
inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. James E. West is another
successful genius, who had worked for over 40 years at Bell Laboratories. He
managed to accumulate 47 US patents, while owning some 200 foreign patents
throughout the world. The reader may also check the names of Shirley Jackson,
who pioneered the technology that resulted in the portable fax invention, touch-
tone telephone, solar cells, and fiber optic cables, as well as the technology for
caller ID and call waiting, and many others. Of course, what prevented more
African Americans from being inventors is the fact that 35.5 percent of the
inventors in this country are foreign, with women accounting for 12 percent of
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the US inventors. African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and American
Indians represent only 8 percent of US patented inventions. However, a 2016
study by Adams Nager et al. found that 60 percent of private-sector innovations
come from businesses that employ at least 500 people and 16 percent from
those that have fewer than 25 employees, which definitely works to the
disadvantage of minorities.
It must be pointed out, in conclusion, that many of these scientists and
inventors had to struggle to obtain their patents simply because they were
black, and some were given credit only posthumously. In some cases, as with
Granville Woods, employed by Thomas Edison, company owners attempted to
steal inventions by blacks. Many other inventors, as is still the case in our own
time, fell by the sidelines, after deciding that fighting to just have their names in
the books and government registers was not worth the effort. African American
scientists have also left an indelible mark in the development of the NASA
program, and some have even served as astronauts, including Guion S. Bluford,
Ronald McNair (killed in space), Frederick D. Gregory, and Charles F. Bolden,
Jr.
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In any society, one crucial power base is the ability to influence the country's
economy through ownership and management of resources. Evidently, in most
cases, ownership and management presuppose capital already accumulated
either through inheritance (or sometimes gambling and lottery) or individual
initiative, knowledge of the workings of the business sector, necessary skills for
entrepreneurship, favorable economic climate and conditions, and a network of
acquaintances and associates. For several reasons, however—racism being the
most basic one—most of these prerequisites have been missing within the black
community, making it extremely difficult for African Americans to advance
economically.3
Although the situation seemed to improve during the 1960s and early 1970s,
the African American share of the national “pie” continues to be dismal and is
getting even smaller as other minorities—Hispanics and Asians settle in
America and enter the economic market. Since the issue of economic
conditions for African Americans has been referred to in the chapters on the
family and the diaspora, the following only briefly outlines the state of African
Americans in business, including the movie industry.
The disadvantage African Americans experience in business today cannot be
understood without examining their history in America. As we know, for some
three hundred years African Americans were held in bondage and, when finally
freed, they were not provided with the necessary intellectual and material tools
to become economically independent. While the federal government attempted,
through its Freedmen's Bureau, to provide land, jobs, and education, most states
(especially in the Deep South, where most of the black community found itself)
did nothing to make emancipation and Reconstruction meaningful. This neglect
forced many ex-slaves to remain on the plantations as workers, renters, or as
sharecroppers, without the advantage of ownership of the land they tilled or
lived on. Destitute, therefore, the greatest majority of them had nothing of value
to pass on to succeeding generations of freeborn men and women. Thus,
practically every African American who has succeeded in the business world
has had to start from scratch and rely on his or her own resourcefulness or
entrepreneurship and not on inherited family income and wealth.
Economic destitution has also been a result of continuing institutional racism
and the denial of opportunities for black Americans who, because of the past,
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are an already disadvantaged minority in a European-American (white)
majority. Yet, against all odds, a tiny percentage of African Americans have
been able to succeed, although the vast majority has lagged behind in poverty,
unable to own and control the means of production which, in a competitive
capitalist system, should lead to self-sufficiency.
To be sure, even during slavery, some free black men and women in the
North as well as in the South (when allowed) did own small, family or
individually run businesses. A classic example of a successful man was Paul
Cuffee (1759–1817), a shipper and a merchant in New England. At times, even
in the South, business ownership allowed some to buy their freedom. By and
large, however, until the end of Reconstruction (1865–1877), African
American-owned businesses were extremely small and invariably restricted to
inn management, tailoring, catering, furniture, shoe-repairing, farming,
shoeblacking, barbering, undertaking, hair-styling, and furniture distribution.
Only at the turn of the century did African American entrepreneurship begin
to encompass such businesses as insurance, banking, construction, publishing,
carpentry, masonry, and expanded janitorial services as well as the management
of large restaurants, food stores, and gas stations. During the eighteenth and
mid-nineteenth centuries, black entrepreneurship was spurred mainly by the
black Church through the Free African Society (founded by Richard Allen and
Absalom Jones in 1787), and several mutual aid societies (funeral associations
having been prominent). Following emancipation, during the 1890s and later,
the initiatives and efforts of Booker T. Washington became an inspiration for
many business-minded African American men and women. On several
occasions, representatives of mutual aid societies and those interested in
business and economic independence met to find the formula for success and
pull their resources together. Thus, a meeting of 2,000 fledgling insurance
representatives took place in Baltimore in 1884, which led to the creation of the
Southern Aid Society in 1893, and to others such as Liberty Life of Chicago
subsequently.
Moreover, under Booker T. Washington's initiative, the National Negro
Business League was created in 1900, which inspired the establishment of the
National Negro Bar Association, the Negro Bankers Association, and the
National Negro Insurance Association during the 1900–1925 period. The first
black millionaire, Madam C.J. Walker, who owned and operated a hair and
cosmetics business during the early 1900s, was definitely a product of this new
intellectual and business environment. The third factor which indirectly
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promoted black entrepreneurship, as W.A. Low and V.A. Clift point out in their
Encyclopedia of Black America (1981), was the offering of courses and degrees
in business at most of the six black colleges beginning in 1924. By 1940,
twenty colleges had courses and by the 1970s practically all schools offered
business courses. Education and inspiration led some African Americans to
venture even into the sectors of the economy which seemed to be barred from
them, including the banking industry.
Indeed, although there were “informal banks” owned and managed by free
blacks as far back as the 1830s in places such as Philadelphia, New Orleans,
Chicago, and New York, formal banks emerged only at the turn of the century
and thereafter. These were operated independently from the black Churches, as
was the case of the True Reformers Bank, founded in Virginia in 1889. (Prior to
this time, many black financial institutions were associated with the black
Church.)
During the past 75 years or so, however, any gains in business ownership and
management by blacks, have been offset by negative business cycles in the
country, such as the Panic and Depression of 1873, the 1929 Great Depression,
and the periodic recessions the American economy has experienced during the
past quarter-century. Securing capital has also remained a perennial problem
for aspiring business-minded men and women.
Strides were made in the 1960s and 1970s due to the Civil Rights movement,
the programs of the Great Society, and the Small Business Administration
introduced by the Nixon administration (which embraced the concept of “black
capitalism”). The gains were strengthened by executive affirmative action in
business-bidding and contracts (“set-asides”) for minorities during the Carter
administration. Such strides, however, have been skewed or eliminated by
negative economic changes such as inflation, high unemployment, and cutbacks
in social and economic programs during the Reagan administration, as well as
by the heightened racial polarization of the 1980s. What are the facts?
David Swinton notes in The State of Black America, 1989, that there is a
great “disparity” between black and white ownership in financial holdings
(stocks and bonds, US government savings bonds, IRAs, Keoghs, etc.). In
household ownership, for example, black people's household ownership
amounts to a mere 5 percent, compared to that of white household ownership of
22 percent for whites (the gap, Swinton adds, reflects an average of $3,077 for
the black household, contrasted with an average of $30,293 for white household
ownership). Ownership of and income from farms are also minimal within the
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black community. While at the turn of the century blacks owned some 240,000
farms, black-owned farms presently represent less than three percent of the
privately owned farms in the United States. In 1980, the number of blacks
living on farms was estimated at 242,000. By 1990 that number had plummeted
to a mere 69,000. To prevent further deterioration, African American farmers
have asked for more loans from the Farmers Home Administration and
elimination of discrimination in federal agriculture programs.
Overall, while blacks represent about 13 percent of the total American
population, African Americans own less than one percent of the businesses in
this country. (Tables I and II, presented by Swinton, underscore the magnitude
of ownership inequalities prevalent in the United States.) What is the solution?
Opinions differ. Swinton believes that, since Affirmative Action has failed, and
a separate state for African Americans is an impractical alternative, reparations
to the black community are the only way to address the inequality problem
fairly. He writes:
Thus the only viable option is a program of reparations. A constructive
and well-designed program of reparations will bring an end once and
for all to racial inequality. No other strategy can work unless it
eliminates the inherited disadvantages of ownership and power. Any
strategy that accomplishes this without creating a separate black nation
would have to be a form of reparations.
It is clear, however, that reparations also appear to be a nonviable solution
because the Euro-American majority will never find it acceptable. Education,
full employment, and the elimination of gross racist behavior and attitudes, as
advocated by others, may be the only long-range realistic solution to the
problem of black ownership and wealth accumulation. One should point out,
however, that African American entrepreneurial skills are needed and often
appreciated in the developing world, particularly Africa. There is no reason
why African Americans should not follow the example of Reverend Leon
Sullivan's successful and expanding Opportunities Industrialization Centers
(OIC) in West and East Africa.
Evidently, lack of meaningful ownership in business does not mean that
African Americans have been totally excluded from the executive boards of
white companies and corporations. In fact, trained blacks who show leadership
potential are constantly sought throughout the nation, and, once found, they are
immediately recruited and co-opted as top executives—not as tokens of
Affirmative Action goals but as acknowledged, talented individuals. It is
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interesting to note that African Americans who become frustrated by racism in
large corporations, those leaving the military, and those retiring from various
professions, especially from teaching, comprise a very large proportion of new
business owners. A 1987 study by Bennie Nunnally and Robert G. Hornaday
reveals that the rate of success of these entrepreneurs is quite high relative to
the “norm.” (Normally, approximately one in four new businesses, white or
black, survive the first three years.) Nunnally and Hornaday also found that
there was “a relationship between the educational level of the owners and the
size of both black-owned and white-owned small business” and that “black
owners recognize that their firms need to grow and choose growth as a main
goal,” because, in contrast to white owners, they see “lack of growth/expansion
capital and internal managerial problems as the most serious problems they
face, both related to their desire to grow.”
It is clear, therefore, that, in order for African Americans to succeed in
business ownership, as noted again by Nunnally and Hornaday, “the emphasis
placed by policy makers on providing new sources of capital to black-owned
firms must be combined with a recognition of sociological conditions in the
black community,” and that capital made available to non-college graduates to
open businesses will be unlikely to succeed in raising “the socio-economic
conditions of blacks in the ghettos” of America.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, African American business ownership
accounted for 1.2 million of the 23 million US businesses. By 2012, the number
had jumped to 1.9 million or by 9.4 percent, even though sales by African
American businesses accounted for 0.6 of sales of all businesses nationally,
they only represented 0.4 of all companies that had employees. However, the
most difficult time for black businesses was the period 2014–2015, even though
the country in general did not experience recession then. The racial gap in land
ownership and income continue to haunt the African American family, and
things seem to be getting worse than they were in 1910, the best year
throughout their history, when black farmers owned 16–19 acres of farm land
on the average, in contrast to only 1.5 million acres of farm land in 1997, most
lost from expropriation by white farmers, the states, and the federal
government. Currently, even though African Americans represent 13 percent of
the US population, they own only 1 percent of the rural land, whose value is
estimated at $14 billion, in contrast to whites who own almost 98 percent of the
land in the US, with an estimated value of $1 trillion. Antonio Moore notes, for
example, that Ted Turner, founder of CNN, owns 2 million acres of land which
is equivalent to nearly one-quarter of what blacks own in rural land in America.
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This inequity is dramatized by inequities in wealth ownership and income by
race. Whereas the average wealth for whites is $678,737, for blacks it is
$95,261 on average. While the median for whites is $134,230, for blacks it is
only $11,030. An article by Jamiles Lartey (2017) predicted that the median
wealth for black Americans will fall to zero by 2053, as things will continue to
be bad economically for them. Median health is also differentiated by
educational degree, which favors whites, who are likely to get one than blacks.
In fact, median wealth for whites who have a college degree is $180,500
compared to $23,400 for blacks. The inequality is amplified when black and
white median wealth differentials due to graduate or professional degrees were,
in 2013, $293,100 versus $84,000, respectively. Janelle Jones of the Economic
Policy Institute thus summarizes the existing gross inequalities: “The racial
wealth gap is much larger than the average wage or income by race. Average
wealth for white families is seven times higher than average wealth for black
families. Worse still, median white wealth (wealth for the family in exact
middle of the overall distribution—wealthier than half of all families and less
wealthy than half) is twelve times higher than median black wealth” (Lartey,
2017). We might say without hesitation, that the American dream of property
ownership, equal employment, and decent income, despite the progress made in
several areas, does not seem possible for African Americans now or in the
foreseeable future.
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The problems facing African Americans in the traditional business world are
also discernible in the entertainment world. The presence of African Americans
in the film or motion picture industry is now taken for granted. Many black
movie stars appear daily on the silver screen not only playing black roles in
society or depicting African American life themes but, increasingly, assuming
and portraying “crossover” roles and themes which were once reserved for
whites. Their participation in the industry has been enhanced by the fact that
blacks have finally become producers and directors, as is the case with such
current household names as Sidney Poitier, Eddie Murphy, Spike Lee, and
many others—some of whom have, in the process, become millionaires.
To get where they are in the movie industry, however, African Americans
have had to wage an uphill battle for decades and have struggled constantly to
gain recognition. The efforts of many groups have resulted in better and
increasingly diversified roles for black actors and a less stereotypical portrayal
of black life in America and elsewhere in the world. Changes in the film
industry have been brought about by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, the Civil Rights movement (which often
urged a boycott of the industry), the few black stars and producers themselves,
the black press, and the International Film and Radio Guild.
Until the end of World War II, the roles of blacks in the silent and sound
movies were played at first by whites with black-painted faces, and then by a
few blacks. African Americans, often dubbed “lackies,” were usually depicted
as loyal and obedient slaves, maids, servants, doorkeepers, singers of Gospel
music on the plantations (of the Yes, Master! type) or they acted as clowns,
imbeciles, and “Samboes” (as illustrated in the Birth of a Nation, 1915)—all
reinforced by Tarzan pictures denigrating the African continent and its people.
This trend continued during the 1930s, although singing and dancing
provided new roles for black actors, in tune with the stereotypical image of
blacks as people of innate “beat and rhythm.” Frustrated by Hollywood,
hesitation, and racism, many African American actors and aspiring producers
looked to Europe (Britain, France, and even Russia) as alternative outlets for
their creativity, as was the case of Paul Robeson in England and expatriate
Josephine Baker in France (with her Siren of the Tropics, for example). African
Americans' active involvement in World War II, however, the continuing
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decline of overt racism in the South, and the effort of African American
organizations contributed to the eventual acceptance of black Americans within
the industry. Melvin Van Peebles's production of The Night the Sun Came Out
in 1960 (which netted $10 million) has been heralded as signaling a new era for
blacks, one crowned with brilliant performances by stars like Sidney Poitier (in
Lilies of the Field, which won him an Oscar award in 1965) and by a score of
others. The independence of African nations beginning in the 1960s also had its
own positive impact, as Africans, in spite of the fact that they have never
controlled or managed the movie industry on the continent, began to combat
stereotypical Western portrayals of their lives and culture.
Unfortunately, this promising phase was followed, during the early 1970s, by
a proliferation of the so-called “action” films with scenes of black life replete
with violence, sex (pimps and prostitutes), and drug use and abuse, which later
were dubbed as “blaxploitation.” This trend elicited so much criticism from
moviegoers and reviewers that it was replaced by comedy, musicals, and
biographies played by black actors. These were followed, during the 1980s and
1990s, by a number of black stars, producers, and directors, including Spike
Lee, Sidney Poitier, Richard Pryor, Billy Dee Williams, Cicely Tyson, Lou
Gossett, Ossie Davis, James Earl Jones, Ben Vereen, Diahann Carroll, Arsenio
Hall, Gordon Parks, Raymond St. Jacques, Pam Grier, and others. Dozens of
films depicting black life or dealing with non-stereotypical African Americans
were also produced.
Barring unforeseen circumstances apart from recurrent economic downturns,
the place of African Americans in the motion picture industry seems to be
secure, and black actors and stars are poised to reach new heights, although
parity with their white counterparts, given the prevailing social climate, seems
to be out of the question. In fact, although figures are hard to come by, the
financial share of the most successful black producers and actors is like a drop
of water in the bucket, compared to the billions of dollars the white-dominated
film industry generates each month in Hollywood and elsewhere in the country.
Despite the rising contribution of African Americans to the movie industry, one
hurdle remains for them, and that is to be nominated for the Oscars, and
hopefully have a fair chance of winning, which has rarely happened. The
problem came to the fore in 2013, a year that some movie critics have called an
African American Renaissance in movies, when a half of dozen movies were
produced by black professionals in the industry. The 2016 Oscars were called
the “whitewash,” because again no black star or producer had been nominated
to win an award. In fact, of the more than 600 films released by Hollywood
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since 2007, fewer than 7 percent had a black director and around 10 percent of
speaking roles went to non-white actors, when in “films with a black director,
40 percent of characters with speaking roles were minorities,” notes the
Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of
Southern California.
The so loudly touted Renaissance of 2013 did not end up being so: Of 107
films produced in 2013 only seven were produced by African Americans. Thus,
in the internationally acclaimed movie 12 Years a Slave, the main character did
not win an Oscar. Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay, was also a major
disappointment for African Americans, because even though nominated, neither
DuVernay nor David Oyelowo, its star, was called to receive an Oscar. It was
the same story with Lee Spike's Do the Right Thing. The same thing had
happened to Don Cheadle, who was nominated for Best Actor in Hotel Rwanda
in 2004. The case of unfairness to black stars and producers is clear when one
realizes that throughout the twentieth century, 95 percent of Oscar nominations
went to white stars. The injustice is highlighted by the fact that, in 2013, 70
percent of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the American Union that nominates
film stars and producers, was white. Overall, 2015 and 2016 did not confirm
any Renaissance, the situation having been worse for African American women
and Hispanics, even though the latter represent 25 percent of the movie tickets
bought in the US. Criticism of the racist Hollywood practices was so loud from
2015 through 2018 that things definitely have to be better in the near future for
blacks and all minorities.
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Although few can overlook the economic dimensions of sport, many refuse
to see it as a political, cultural, and social institution, endowed with enormous
power to influence people's lives. Perhaps the first African American to record
such an understanding is Frederick Douglass, who viewed sport from the
perspective of a slave employed by slaveholders. In their hands, sport was an
oppressive instrument and a diversionary device to occupy the minds and
energies of slaves, thus preventing them from pursuing more useful activities
and of fully appreciating their horrible plight. Even more, Douglass believed
that the “sports and merriments” sanctioned by the slavemasters were among
the most effective ways of “keeping down the spirit of insurrection.” Although
one might disagree with Douglass's conclusions that the power of sport flowed
in one direction, he deserves praise for recognizing that sports were far more
than games people play.
Douglass's message of sobriety and industry seemed to resonate in the black
community, and Booker T. Washington's teachings echoed those of his
predecessor. Prayer, education, and work left little time for sport or leisure in
Washington's puritanical worldview. Yet, his chief rival for the attention and
allegiance of African Americans, W.E.B. DuBois, saw the need to address the
problems of amusements among blacks. If not ahead of his time, DuBois once
again proved himself ahead of Washington as a modern man. Writing on the
subject in 1897, DuBois did not pretend that amusement was “one of the more
pressing of the Negro problems, but it is destined as time goes on to become
more and more so.” What DuBois saw in blacks was a tendency to “depreciate
and belittle and sneer at means of recreation, to consider amusement [including
sport] as the peculiar property of the devil, and to look upon even its legitimate
pursuit as time wasted and energy misspent.” While DuBois understood that too
much of anything could be intoxicating, he not only urged moderate
participation but also analysis, for “proper amusement must always be a matter
of careful reasoning and ceaseless investigation, of nice adjustment between
repression and excess.” DuBois's prediction proved prophetic, as sport has
become a serious issue in the black community and, unfortunately, given little
of the “careful reasoning” and “ceaseless investigation” he urged.
Historians of the African American athletic experience once asserted that
there had been a slow but steady progress in the elimination of racial
discrimination in sport and that, since the late nineteenth century, athletic
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competition has been essentially democratic. More recent and careful studies
reveal that the history of race relations in American sport often imitated and
influenced the cultural patterns of the larger society. Moreover, sports
sometimes serve to affirm the cultural patterns residing in that society's
institutions, but they might also provide a forum for the expression of different
values and behaviors. In other words, sport can be an instrument of oppression
and conformity and one of liberation and resistance.
The African American experience in sport cannot be fully appreciated
without defining the meaning of sport in the larger, white, male-dominated
society. Once seen as repulsive and counterproductive, if not a threat to
survival, sport found little support among the so-called respectable elements of
American society until the mid-nineteenth century. Concern with morality and
health did much to change opinion. With popular amusements rising rapidly in
America's burgeoning cities, many saw the need to control and regulate the
activities of the masses. Moreover, with an eye to foreign developments, many
observers believed that Americans were becoming dissipated. Their reliance on
curative medicines and quack remedies (often one and the same) alarmed the
new proponents of physical fitness. In some ways, these concerns converged in
a movement known as “Muscular Christianity.” To it, the body was the temple
of the soul. Before long, a race for competitive athletics swept across the land,
finding sanction by high public officials such as Theodore Roosevelt. In his
“Strenuous Life” speech of 1899, Roosevelt, as the governor of New York and
with a national reputation, commanded his audience to “boldly face the life of
strife,” for strife was necessary to winning the goal of true national greatness.
Implicit in the new emphasis on athletics and physical development was the
alleged building of manhood, character, and leadership. It was a doctrine that
applied only to white males.
The nineteenth century was an age of endless measurement. Human beings
were ranked on the basis of anatomical, mental, and moral criteria; on all scales
blacks were founding lacking. These pseudo-scientific findings of difference
and inferiority justified segregation and discrimination and hindered blacks in
their attempts to disprove these tragic conclusions. These “findings” found
popular currency in social Darwinism, in which theories of survival of the
fittest came to apply to humans.
Despite the fact that blacks had demonstrated competence in boxing during
the early part of the nineteenth century (in the persons of Tom Molineaux and
Bill Richmond, among a host of others), whites, on the one hand, maintained
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that they were exceptions to the rule and, on the other, that success in sport did
not transfer outside of that context—at least not for blacks. In the face of white
defeats and black champions, the dominant discourse still maintained that white
physical and intellectual superiority would triumph always, while dismissing or
ignoring setbacks.
Race relations in sport around the turn of the century revealed the
shallowness of the myths that abounded in athletics and the larger society.
Contrary to the often-held view, evidence indicates that there has not been slow
and steady progress in the elimination of racial discrimination in sport, nor has
athletic competition since the late nineteenth century been egalitarian. From
1880 to 1900, blacks were at the nadir of their post-slavery experience.
Changing attitudes, laws, and treatment in the North and South, brought about
disfranchisement, segregation, and economic hardship while reversing black
gains in the athletic arena. Prior to this time, blacks participated freely in, and
excelled at, horse racing. The most outstanding jockey of his day was Isaac
Murphy, who rode three winners in the Kentucky Derby. African American
jockeys won twelve of the first fifteen “Derbies,” but were a rarity by the turn
of the century.
At the same time, whites tolerated some black participation in baseball.
Brothers Moses and Welday Walker both played for the Toledo Mudhens of the
American Association, a major league in the 1880s, but an incident occurred
which served as the pivotal event in determining black-white relations in
American sports for more than half a century. When the Chicago White
Stockings visited Toledo in 1887, Adrian “Cap” Anson refused to take the field
until the Walkers were removed. They did not play that game and, within a
week, they were banished from the sport. Anson's actions were accepted, even
preferred, in the harsh racial climate of the times. Worse, the Supreme Court of
the United States confirmed this hateful sentiment in a series of decisions
upholding segregation and discrimination from 1875 to 1898, culminating in
Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896, which nationally codified the doctrine of “separate
but equal” and ensured second-class citizenship for blacks.
No matter the sport, the “color line” became increasingly difficult to cross as
the African American athlete was called “a growing menace” and symbol of “a
black rise against white supremacy.” Thus, whites no longer wanted to watch
blacks dominate athletic encounters or even have them participate. Individuals
such as the pioneering speed cyclist Major Taylor, at the beginning of the
twentieth century, and Jack Johnson, heavyweight boxing champion of the
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world from 1908 to 1915, were exceptions. They were allowed to participate
and excel because their economic value to sports and related enterprises
outweighed racial considerations. Yet, both men still suffered extreme
persecution and hardship for their success in areas reserved for whites. All that
was left for most black athletes was the acceptable realm of comedy. Many
black athletes resorted to entertaining whites who gladly paid to watch the
“darkies” perform in the stereotypical role of clown. Others avoided such
humiliating displays by forming barnstorming teams for the benefit of
appreciative black audiences, yet another example of parallel institution
building.
The plan for one of the greatest of these enterprises was laid by Beauregard
F. Moseley, who had promoted a successful all-black baseball team in Chicago.
In 1910, Moseley called together a group of black baseball officials from
throughout the Midwest and South to organize a National Negro Baseball
League. Moseley's plans and goals reflected a more widespread concern among
blacks for self-help and racial pride to counter the exclusionary practices of
white America in and out of sport. Unfortunately, financial problems prevented
materialization of the plan until 1920, when Rube Foster, one of baseball's great
pitchers and a resourceful promoter, revived Moseley's blueprint for a black
baseball league. The new league, which lasted into the 1950s, produced such
legendary figures as Josh Gibson, James “Cool Papa” Bell, Leroy “Satchel”
Paige, and many other great stars.
Less known is the fact that blacks created successful golf and tennis circuits,
proving that they could both organize and master the more genteel forms of
sport and recreation. Virtually absent from the game's history and popular lore,
blacks long have been associated with golf as more than servants. One of the
game's first and best professionals was John Shippen, who played in the 1896
US Open and enjoyed a lifetime association with the game as a player and
teacher based at the black controlled and operated Shady Rest Country Club in
Scotch Plains, New Jersey. The inventor of the first golf tee was a black dentist,
Dr. George F. Grant of Boston, whose creation has received little credit.
Excluded from the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) and the United
States Golf Association (USGA), blacks formed the United Golf Association in
1928. The UGA had amateur and professional divisions and hosted local,
regional, and national tournaments for men and women.
Ted Rhodes, William Spiller, Pat Ball, and Howard Wheeler stand out
among the men. Although Ethel Funches and Anne Gregory were two great
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female champions, women were not altogether pleased with their standing or
treatment within the organization. In 1937, black women golfers in
Washington, D.C., and Chicago established their own clubs affiliated with the
UGA. Through these groups, they negotiated (with black men) gender roles in
and out of sport. Many of these women went on to become leading opponents
of racial discrimination in the sport and leaders of the UGA. Thus, black men
and women carried out legal assaults on segregated public golf facilities in the
1950s, aware that second-class status anywhere extended it everywhere.
Despite the breakthroughs of professionals such as Pete Brown, Charlie Sifford,
Lee Elder, and Calvin Peete, among males, and Renee Powell and Althea
Gibson among women, golf at its highest levels remains a white preserve, and
black participation has been (and continues to be) largely separate, unequal, and
invisible even though estimates of black golfers range from 400,000 to
2,000,000. The fact that so much attention was paid to Eldrick “Tiger” Woods
and basketball superstar Michael Jordan, underscores the sad state of affairs.
A similar story emerges in tennis. Denied membership in the United States
Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA), blacks formed the American Tennis
Association (ATA) in 1916. Its membership was composed mostly of
professional blacks and collegians. Early stars were Talley Holmes, Reginald
Weir, Gerald Norman, Jr., and James McDaniels, but none was allowed to
reach his full potential. The same held for Lucy Diggs Slowe, Ora Washington,
and Isadore Channels, who dominated the ATA. Only after persistent pressure
did the USLTA open its tournaments, played at prestigious private clubs, to
blacks. Largely responsible for the breakthrough was Althea Gibson, who
would emerge from the ATA to become a two-time Wimbledon and US Open
champion. For a long time, the late Arthur Ashe remained the only other
African American to win a “Grand Slam” event—the US Open and
Wimbledon. Unfortunately, all had retired by the mid-2000s. No other men
have come close to reaching this level. However, during the late 1990s and
2000s, several new stars and a few others came out of nowhere and won many
national and international competitions that are constantly in the news: the two
sisters Venus and Serena Williams, who have won the Wimbledon, the French
Open, and other international tournaments; Scoville Jenkins, 18 in 2004, when
he won the USTA National Open Hard Court title, was the first African
American to win that title; James Blake, who, after Arthur Ashe, Jr., became
the fourth most famous black player in 2006; Madison Keys, female player who
won her first WTA title in 2014; Sloane Stephens, also a female player, the first
African American to win the Citi Open since the women began to be featured in
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the tournament in 2011; and Katrina Adams, the first former professional player
and the youngest to be elected president of the United States Tennis
Association in 2015.
Notwithstanding the victories, and the increasing numbers of blacks in
sports, compared to the segregated periods in American history, until
fundamental socioeconomic changes occur in this country, blacks will not and
cannot represent the sports of golf and tennis in large numbers. Both are capital
intensive, requiring expensive equipment, expert instruction, quality facilities,
high-level competition, and parents with the time and resources to travel with
players to tournament sites. Adequate income is not the only obstacle. Racism
remains a serious impediment to participation in and mastery of these games.
Residential segregation hinders access to golf courses and tennis clubs, which
still might deny entry strictly on racial grounds. Inherent in the exclusion is a
desire to maintain social distance and to reinforce notions of difference. For
blacks to excel at sports supposedly requiring certain traits found among the
dominant group would help undermine racial myths. On the flip side, without
prominent and numerous rolemodels, exposure, and encouragement, neither
familiarity nor cultural acceptance is likely among members of the excluded
group.
Baseball, which had sought bright, educated, disciplined athletes, had similar
reasons for denying opportunities to blacks. Billed as the “national pastime,”
baseball had no room for blacks as it tried to project a cerebral and wholesome
image to the American people. Despite Jackie Robinson's historic breakthrough
in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, baseball has been slow to integrate the
front office and managerial ranks. Studies have also pointed to salary inequities
and segregation by position or stacking. The baseball establishment's true
feelings were revealed by Al Campanis of the Los Angeles Dodgers, in his
nationally well-publicized unguarded racist statement of 1987 that blacks
“lacked the necessities” to be managers (Aldridge, 1987). Blacks have,
however, been slowly breaking into the managerial ranks as evidenced by Cito
Gaston, the manager of the 1992 World Series winner, the Toronto Blue Jays.
Since then, the few black managers have included Michael Hill, Dave Stewart,
Dusty Baker, and Alvin Reid.
Perhaps no sport is more identified with black Americans than boxing. The
domination of boxing by blacks in the twentieth century is at once a measure of
black achievement and an index of the black plight. While African Americans
have taken pride and found encouragement in the triumphs of champions such
706
as Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Muhammad Ali, boxing
is a sport of the desperate. Sometimes glamorous, empowering, artful, and
lucrative, boxing is more often ugly, debasing, brutal, and costly. No modern
sport more closely approximates the gladiatorial spectacle, in which slaves
fought to the death at the pleasure and profit of others. Few white young men
see more than pain and suffering in such a sport, but African Americans, who
remain near or at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, will be attracted to
the illusory quick fame and wealth the game offers. Several other names can be
added to the list of famous black American boxers about whom interested
readers can read further: George Foreman, Evander Holyfield, Joe Frazier (d.
2011), Floyd Mayweather, Jr., Floyd Patterson (d. 2006), Shane Moseley,
Pernell Whitaker, Thomas Hearns, Ken Norton (d. 2013), Emile Griffith, Sandy
Saddler (d. 2001), Buster Douglas, Andre Ward, Leon Spinks, Meldrick Taylor,
Beau Jack (d. 2000), Jimmy Bivins (d. 2012), Sandy Saddler, Timothy Bradley,
Jermain Taylor, Aaron Pryor, Ray Mercer, and Shannon Briggs.
Today, basketball has also become a sport closely identified with blacks. The
college and professional games are dominated by blacks to the extent that white
players are often viewed as “tokens” and their presence often gives rise to cries
of reverse discrimination among black athletes and fans. In this societal mirror
image, white athletes are stereotyped for lack of jumping ability (called “the
white man's disease”). Yet, what white athletes are purported to lack in natural
talent is more than compensated for by media commentary about their
intelligence, grit, and discipline, positive traits rarely ascribed to blacks. Thus,
even in a sport with so many black stars and a relatively high number of black
coaches and executives, traditional images are perpetuated. It is probably no
accident that the Harlem Globetrotters, a comedic team, still draw fans and that
the Harlem Renaissance squads of the 1930s and 1940s, famed for their
discipline and teamwork, are hardly known.
Table III: African American Representation
Not to be overlooked in this discussion is the minority within a minority

group—black women. Not only has sport been racist, it is even more sexist.
707
Women who engage in athletic activities often do so at risk of reputations and,
in the minds of some, femininity. For black women, femininity has always been
at issue, having been forced to labor under degrading and harsh conditions
outside “the cult of true womanhood” promoted by white males and subscribed
to by many white females in the nineteenth century. Thus, whether they would
be condemned for participation in sport has been less of a concern for them.
Since so few professional sports opportunities exist, African American women
have been most prominent in track and field, even reaching celebrity status in
the persons of Wilma Rudolph, Florence Griffith Joyner, and Jackie Joyner-
Kersee.
The trend that has seen African Americans increase their numbers and
dominance in America's most popular recreational sports and related activities
has in general continued over the last 20 years. In basketball, for instance, even
as recently as 2017, African Americans, mostly males, continue to dominate the
NBA: their numbers represent 75 percent of the players. In the NFL, black
players are 64 percent of the professionals that play the games. In the baseball
professional sport or the MLB, the proportion of black American players is
only between 7.7 and 8 percent currently, a decline of 10 percent from 1986.
This is definitely a precipitous decline from what it was 50 years ago, as the
following figures demonstrate vividly for every 10 years since 1947, when the
game was desegregated through the admission of Jackie Robinson into the
majors.
The best years ran from 1967 to 1976, the plateau years as the experts in the
field say. The reasons for the decline thereafter have not been systematically or
comprehensively studied by the statisticians, even though the entry of Latino
and Asian minorities are presented as one reason.
In fact, during the 1960s, Latinos represented only 11 to 12 percent of the
players. However, since the early 2000s, the number has reached 20 percent.
Asians numbered 20 percent, mostly as pitchers, but now they play in almost all
positions of the game. The second factor might be the fact that the game has
always been seen as a white man's sport, and black youngsters tend to be
socialized as basketball and football players at home and in school. Last but not
least, is the expensive nature of baseball, which requires extra fees and
expensive outfits and other paraphernalia.
Despite the success of African Americans in sports, the American League
and the National League have a team of 32 all-star players, but only 4.6 percent
are African American, with Latinos becoming an increasingly growing
708
competitor. Among baseball all-star players, the number of African Americans
decreased from 22 percent in 1981 to 4.6 percent in 2018, perhaps the reason
why there have been no Willie Mays, Hank Aarons, Bob Gibsons, or Reggie
Jacksons recently. Yet, despite their decreasing numbers in some sports and
notwithstanding that African Americans males represent only 6.0 percent of the
US population, their representation is still quite impressive, particularly in such
sports as basketball and football, earning altogether about $12 billion in 2015.
Today, blacks who have believed that sport, like military service, is a way of
proving worth, ability, and even loyalty (as indicated by their stellar record in
the nationalistic, quasi-military Olympic Games), are still caught in a serious
dilemma over the place of sport. Although African American athletes dominate
the collegiate basketball ranks and represent other sports in large numbers, the
overall black college population is declining, especially among males. Many of
those athletes attending college are not graduating; some are hardly educated.
As African American sporting prominence grows, so does homelessness, crime,
drug abuse, and early death. Although not the cause of these social ills, sport is
not the solution to them. African Americans must remember the warnings of
Douglass and DuBois to place sport in perspective.
709
Summary
The role of African Americans in science has usually been neglected in the
European-American science literature, although African Americans have been
prominent in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, and mathematics. In spite
of institutional obstacles, for example, African Americans have been able to
patent numerous inventions, which have greatly improved the quality of life in
America. The contributions of African Americans will continue to be
significant, as long as they are given equal opportunities in the realm of
education.
A cursory analysis of black ownership and entrepreneurship in America
confirms the sad fact that African Americans, although 13 percent of the
population in the United States, owned only 2.6 million out of the estimated
19,000,000 businesses in the US in 2017. A combination of historical factors
and changing economic conditions (which always affect the black community
negatively) warrants several conclusions on African American ownership and
control of the means of production, namely: (1) that there is a disproportionate
and lopsided advantage given to European-American ownership and
management of business ownership in the country; (2) that most black-owned
businesses are of sole proprietorship, employing, on the average, three to four
persons; (3) that blacks are unable to compete in wholesale trade, finance,
manufacturing, and heavy industry (which requires considerable capital), and
therefore concentrate their business in the service sector and retail trade; and (4)
that 90 percent of the time black-owned businesses serve black communities
which are, in general, poor in resources; the businesses are rarely patronized by
the black middleclass. The implication of this situation is that African
Americans remain consumers rather than owners, which gives them very little
power in attempting to change the economic and political direction of the
country.
We might mention here that, given that the world is becoming much more
interdependent, the skills of African Americans can be put to good use in Africa
and other parts of the developing world. While their contribution should be
primarily to their communities here in the United States, African American
business men and women should also venture abroad to enhance the restricted
opportunities they have at home.
The athletic experience of African Americans has been one filled with both
710
tragedy and triumph, not unlike the historical plight of this long-scorned and
persecuted minority group. Like modern-day gladiators they have often
performed for the profit and pleasure of others and to the detriment of their own
selves and family. Some, such as Joe Louis, have risen to the very pinnacle of
success in their sport, becoming national heroes and symbols in the process,
only to be cast aside by the dominant majority when no longer needed. Yet,
blacks remain intensely loyal, finding in these individuals proof of black
capability and achievement.
Individually and collectively, blacks have proven that given the opportunity
to excel in the athletic arena their potential is unlimited. More than in most
other activities, sports have proven highly rewarding in terms of fame and
fortune. Yet, both can be fleeting and, for the majority, illusory. The publicity
afforded athletes far exceeds that given to blacks in any other field with the
possible exception of a few in entertainment. Unfortunately, educators,
scientists, lawyers, civil rights leaders, and other very successful professionals
are largely unknown and often unrecognized for their contributions. Moreover,
the chances for success in these fields greatly outnumber those in sport. While
some might be persuaded that the massive inclusion of blacks in some sports is
positive, one must also understand that the terms of this arrangement have their
costs. Only through a close examination of the historical record can sport and
the African American experience be understood for what it is and has been.
711
1. Explain why it has been so difficult for black people to own and run
businesses in the United States. What solutions do you propose to remove
the obstacles?
2. Why have African Americans been so successful as boxers and basketball
players? What have been the benefits and costs of that success?
3. Why have so few blacks reached the highest levels of success in golf and
tennis? What must happen before change occurs?
4. How has the plight of African Americans in sport reflected conditions in the
larger society for blacks, particularly females? How has it differed?
5. What would Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois think of African
Americans and sports today? Why?
6. What has been the role of African Americans in the film industry?
7. How do you explain the wealth and land ownership differentials between
blacks and whites in the US?
712
References
Arthur R. Ashe, Jr. Hard Road to Glory. New York: Warner Books, 1988.
William J. Baker. Jesse Owens: An American Life. New York: Free Press,
1986.
H.G. Bissinger. Friday Night Lights. New York: Harper, 1991.
Manthia Diwara. Black American Cinema. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2003.
Rob Dun. “How a Bar Fight Paved the Way for Heart Surgery.” In Rob
Dunn. From the Man who Touched his Heart: True Tales of Science,
Surgery, and Mystery. New York: Little Brown, 2015.
Maryann Erigha. “On the Margins: Black Directors and the Persistence of
Racial Inequality in Twenty-First Century Hollywood.” Journal of Ethnic
and Racial Studies, published online 14 February 2017,
(https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1281984), Retrieved 1/7/2018.
Allyson Nadia Field. Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American
Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke
Krin Gabbard. Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American
Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Michael Boyce Gillespie. Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of
Black Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
Darnell M. Hunt (ed.). Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and
Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005.
Janelle Jones. “The Racial Wealth Gap: How African-Americans Have Been
Shortchanged out of the Materials to Build Wealth.” Washington, D.C.:
Economic Policy Institute, February 13, 2017.
Onnie Kirk et al. Contemporary Black America. Nashville, TN: The
Southwestern Company, 1980.
David Aldridge, “Campanis Admits Error but Maintains Innocence.”
Washington Post, July 13, 1987.
Jamiles Lartey. “Median Wealth for Black Americans ‘Will Fall to Zero by
2053,’ Warns New Report.” The Guardian, Wednesday, September 13,
2017.
W. Augustus Low and Virgil A. Clift (eds.). Encyclopedia of Black America.
713
New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1981.
Antonio Moore. “Who Owns Almost All America's Land?” Research
Commentary, February 15, 2016 (http://inequality.org/reserarch/owns-
land/), Retrieved 1/9/2018.
Adams Nager, David M. Hart, Stephen Ezell, and Robert D. Atkinson. “The
Demographics of Innovation in the United States.” Washington, D.C.:
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), February 24,
2016, pp. 1–86.
National Urban League. The State of Black America, 1989, 1991. New York:
National Urban League, Inc. 1989, 1991.
Bennie Nunnally and Robert Hornaday. “Problems Facing Black-Owned
Businesses.” Business Forum, vol. 12, 4(Fall 1987): 34–37.
Nicole Pasulka. “Why There Aren't More Hollywood Films by Black
Directors.” TakePart, August 8, 2014.
“Film and Race: How Racially Skewed Are the Oscars?” The Economist,
Prospero, January 21, 2016
(https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2016/01/film-and-race),
Retrieved 01/10/2017.
Harry A. Ploski and James Williams (eds.). The Negro Almanac. New York:
Gale Research, 1989.
Donn Rogosin. Invisible Men: Life in Baseball's Negro Leagues. New York:
Atheneum, 1983.
Edna and Art Rust, Jr. Art Rust's Illustrated History of the Black Athlete.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985.
Jeffrey T. Sammons. Beyond the Ring. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1988.
Tim Sprinkle. “Bull's-Eyes! Super Soaker Inventor Scores Huge Payday.”
New York, NY: Associate Press, November 8, 2013.
David Swinton. “Economic Status of Black Americans.” The State of Black
America, 1991. New York: National Urban League, 1991.
US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Money Income and
Poverty Status, 1982, 1985, 1987, 1990. Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office.
Walter B. Weare. Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the
North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. Urbana, IL: University
of Illinois Press, 1973.
714
1. Chapter revised by Mario J. Azevedo in 2018.
2. The sections on science, business, and motion pictures were written by Mario J. Azevedo.
Jeffrey Sammons authored the section on sports.
3. The author wishes to thank Dr. Bennie Nunnally, Jr., former Chair of Finance and
Business Law at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, for his assistance on the final
draft of this section.
715
Part V
Society and Values in the Black

World
716
20
The African Family

Mario J. Azevedo
717
Introduction1
Just as elsewhere in the world, the traditional African family setting is under
assault from many factors, some of which are unique to the continent, while
others are brought about by external forces. These include children leaving
home at an early age and moving to the cities; a lessening of the gap between
men and women regarding roles and responsibilities in the household; the
practice of polygyny being challenged by educated women and enlightened
men; both men and women working away from home, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., in
order to feed family members and afford the necessities of modern life; the
diminishing influence of elders and traditional authorities from the village; the
impact of Westernization arriving through Western education, radio, television,
cell phone, the Internet, magazines, books, and social media which, in the eyes
of the elders, encourage lax morals; and increased poverty, particularly in the
inner city slums and the remote areas, all of which present immense obstacles
to the proper functioning of the family.
As a result, the question is often asked whether the family, as we know it
today in Africa, will survive and function normally, keeping the values it
cherishes at present. This essay attempts to portray the present structure of the
African family, its function in society, and the challenges it faces.
Major terms and concepts: family, marriage, matrilineage, patrilineage,
clan, lineage, bride-wealth, initiation or rites of passage, polygyny, bigamy,
inheritance.
718
Family Structure
It is universally acknowledged that, in every society, the family is of major
importance, though its forms and functions may vary. There are two functions
of the family that are widespread among African families. First, much as in
American society, the family is the social unit primarily responsible for the
early development and socialization of the child. Second, unlike most families
in American society, African families are the primary economic units of
production in their societies, and thus are organized according to the rules
surrounding corporate property and the behavioral requirements of producing a
livelihood.
In almost all cases, African families are also, in a very real sense, family
businesses, as the issue of marriage illustrates. There are several characteristics
of African marriage which differ significantly from what is commonly thought
to be typical of marriages in Western societies. In almost every African society,
marriage is universal; older bachelors and spinsters are practically non-existent
on the continent. One of the reasons for this situation is that the African
marriage is not a private matter or a relationship between two people alone.
Marriage focuses upon the individual, but each individual represents a larger
group. African marriages are alliances between families through the conjugal
union of a female from one family and a male from another. It follows that
marriage and divorce decisions involve many people and are usually not left to
the young people to make on their own.
Marriages are arrived at after a series of formal arrangements have been
made between the bride's and groom's parents and other relatives. In some
cases, the young people may have little personal knowledge of each other
before the marriage is arranged (if, however, parents will not accept their
children's choice, the young people may elope, just as happens, on occasion, in
American society).2
Another common characteristic of African marriage systems is polygyny, the
practice which permits a man to have more than one wife. Polygyny is an
accepted practice in practically every African society. For polygyny to be
possible, there must be more married women than married men, and this can
only happen if women marry at an earlier age than their brothers. Consequently,
first wives tend to be younger than their husbands, and second wives still
younger. Although, even at present, there are chiefdoms in which the ruler may
719
have as many as fifty wives, this is obviously exceptional. Even in societies that
promote polygyny extensively, it is not possible for more than a quarter or a
third of the men to take a second wife, and very few ever take a third.
Although polygyny is allowed, it does not mean that, whenever a man wants
another wife, he can simply go to the village and get himself one. Just as in
monogamy, courtship precedes consent of marriage, and a marriage ceremony
must be arranged in order for the union to be socially accepted. For centuries,
experts have tried to understand the reasons for polygyny (a practice which was
upheld by the Old Testament). Since the need for manpower is great in farming
societies, the desire to have many children in one household is understandably
strong: one more child means two more hands in the field. Polygyny allows this
to happen in a household or homestead in Africa. Likewise, because infant
mortality rates have been generally high on the continent, in spite of
colonialism, having many children born in one household does offset the losses,
which is indirectly guaranteed by the marriage of a man to more than one wife.
Finally, the practice of ceasing sexual activity as long as the baby is being
breast-fed, as is customary in many African societies (up to three years among
the Sara of Chad, for example), makes it extremely difficult for the male to
remain within the socially accepted mores, unless he can legitimately satisfy his
human needs through relations sanctioned by tradition. Polygyny is not,
therefore, the same as concubinage, which is morally frowned upon in African
societies, although, in the past, it was tolerated for chiefs and kings, particularly
in Muslim societies.
It must also be said that being polygynous requires not only wealth but also
interpersonal skills. The husband must be able to balance the needs of all his
co-wives and keep them in harmony. One thing he must constantly keep in
mind is never to show preference for the children of one of the wives at the
expense of those of the others. Such behavior would necessarily disrupt the
often-harmonious household relations. Usually, the first wife maintains some
authority over the wives, which often spares the husband the headaches brought
about by sometimes insignificant domestic quarrels. Anthropologists also
observe that polygyny guarantees steady companionship among the wives and
is a source of assistance when one of them falls sick, has a child, or is unable to
perform expected tasks.
A universal feature of traditional African marriage is the provision of bride-
wealth by the groom's parents to the bride's family. In some societies, bride-
wealth amounts to a little more than a token gift, while, in others, it involves a
720
very significant amount of property. (The implications of this variation will be
discussed in the following pages.) Whatever the amount, however, bride-wealth
has a number of functions beyond those we might consider economic. Most
generally, it constitutes a legal guarantee of good faith, a warranty for good
behavior, and insurance of the stability of the marriage.
In all African societies, whatever the bride-wealth arrangements, husbands
are directly responsible to their in-laws for the proper treatment of their wives,
and a woman's father or brother will not hesitate to reprimand her husband, if
he feels that she is being mistreated. In this sense and others, African marriages
are very much public, and not private, arrangements involving many people.
721
In Africa, as elsewhere on the planet, the family is the basis for social
relationships, but one's roots and kinship are of paramount importance. African
societies trace family membership through males (patrilineal descent), through
females (matrilineal descent), or through both equally (bilateral or cognatic
descent). The latter is common to Western tradition but extremely rare in
Africa, one example being the BaMbuti of the Ituri forest in Zaire. In a
patrilineal society, children (both sons and daughters) belong to their father's
kin group. Thus, among a man's various cousins, his father's brother's son and
daughter (technically his “patrilineal parallel cousins”) will be in his own kin
group, and are called brother and sister. This idea is easy for us to understand
since it corresponds to our system of passing on family names patrilineally.
American society differs from patrilineal African societies, however, in that it
reckons kinship equally through the father and mother. Consequently, although
only a few of our cousins share our last name, all are treated equally and
addressed by the same title in our system.
Examples of patrilineal societies in Africa include the Tiv and Yoruba of
Nigeria, the Tallensi of Ghana, the Kikuyu of Kenya, the Swazi of Swaziland,
the Mossi of Burkina Faso, the Malinke of Senegal, Mali, Guinea-Bisssau, and
Côte d'Ivoire, the Nuer of Sudan, the Zulu of South Africa, and the Gala of
Ethiopia. Authority can be systematized in a patrilineal system among highly
segmented or stateless societies with no central power just as satisfactorily as it
can in a patrilineal kingdom. In the latter, authority is centralized in the person
of the king who is recognized as a representative of divine power and is
elevated above the subjects by rituals and sacred regalia. African kings rarely
held dictatorial power, however. The day-to-day operation of the kingdoms
relied on the delegation of power principle, in a system of checks and balances,
between members of the royal family, representatives of other leading families,
and commoners who were appointed to high office because of personal talent.
In societies in which family property belongs to patrilineal kin groups, and
marriage involves the exchange of bride-wealth, it often happens that there is a
preference for arranging marriages between certain pairs of cousins,
specifically the children of a brother and sister. Anthropologists call this pair
cross-cousins because they belong to different kin groups. Such marriages lead
to strong bonds between different social segments. Since the children of such a
marriage will have only six great-grandparents rather than the usual eight, the
722
effect of cross-cousin marriage is to increase their inheritance and keep the
family property from being dispersed too widely among the younger
generations.
In a patrilineal society, there are generally three levels of relationships. First
comes the immediate family made up of a man and his wife (or wives) and their
children. If a man has two wives, each has her own household even if they live
on the same homestead. Next in size, and often of great importance, is the
lineage, made up of all those of a local area who can trace themselves through
men to a common forefather. In many societies, men live near their fathers and
grandfathers, and the lineage becomes focused around a shrine to their common
ancestor and held together by joint property and shared rituals.
Finally, on a more general level, there is the clan. This consists of all the
people in a community or the society that recognize that they belong to a
common kin group no matter where they live, even if they cannot trace their
exact relationships to one another. Kinsmen share moral responsibility. A man
may be held accountable for the crimes committed by his kinsmen. Similarly, if
one man sins, divine punishment may strike anyone in his kin group. It follows
that kinsmen are not only expected to help each other but also to govern each
other's behavior.
In patrilineal societies, women's duties are much the same as they are
elsewhere in Africa. Women are responsible for taking care of the household,
collecting firewood for cooking, and growing and preparing food. Other
children share much of the work of minding younger children as well as
helping with household chores. Pastoral people eat milk products along with
staple grains, supplemented with vegetables from women's gardens, and, when
an animal is slaughtered for an occasion, meat. A lightly fermented beer, which
is rich in vitamins and protein, is drunk by many Africans. In West Africa,
palm wine and kola nuts also play an important role in hospitality patterns and
family rituals.
Married and unmarried men eat together, separately from the wives and
children. The head of the household often eats alone or may share his meal with
a male visitor of equal rank. Children of both sexes eat in their mother's or
grandmother's house. The immediate patrilineal family lives in a compound or
joint homestead. In many patrilineal societies, an elder's married sons may live
with him as well. Large compounds are subdivided into several enclosed
courtyards, and each married woman lives in her own house. Another house is
set aside for the unmarried sons of the compound's head and his younger
723
brothers who choose to remain with him. Sometimes, older girls will sleep
together in a house where they are chaperoned by a grandmother. Associated
with each married woman's house are a few buildings used for storage, and a
granary. There is also an ancestral shrine or a sacred family symbol.
As noted earlier, Africans see marriage as a union between two families as
well as between two individuals. Before a family can give consent to a
marriage, long discussions must be held in which each family considers the
other's history and background. In some societies, the ancestors are also
consulted through oracles. In fact, when the issue of bride-wealth is settled, the
groom's parents assure the other family that their daughter not only has good
morals and manners but is also in good health and will be able to have children.
Proven future sterility and adultery are serious grounds for divorce and partial
or complete return of bride-wealth. The rituals have to be arranged, and
economic obligations of the groom to the parents of his future wife must be
settled in detail according to the local traditions of their group. In societies with
a great deal of moveable wealth, especially the pastoralists who herd large
numbers of cattle, as is the case among the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania,
bride-wealth can amount to a significant block of property, in some cases up to
twenty or thirty head of cattle.
The obvious economic importance of such large bride-wealth provisions led
some Europeans in the colonial era to think that the groom's family had
somehow purchased the wife. In fact, the bride is not his property in any case,
but his dependent and partner to whom he is responsible for providing the
material and social support to raise and feed a family. The critical problem for
pastoral families is to determine the link between father and son, which is so
necessary for the continuity of family herd, in a way that will never become
ambiguous. Yet, marriages can go astray, and people's personal lives can get as
complicated in Africa as they do in America. Among pastoralists, the marriage
contract designates the woman's husband as the legal father of all her children
come what may in their personal lives. Put another way, one can say that what
is purchased in a marriage contract involving a large amount of bride-wealth is
the right to paternity over all the children born of the woman.
Since a bride's family gives the cattle received from her marriage to still
other families when her brother marries, divorce (which requires total or partial
return of bride-wealth) is nearly impossible in such societies. In fact, a woman
remains married if her husband dies. His brother or kinsman assumes
responsibility for her and, if she is still young, she continues to bear children in
724
her dead husband's name. (Some call this a ghost marriage.) While this may
strike us as odd, the same pattern is found among the Old Testament Israelites
who were also pastoralists (Deuteronomy 25:5).
Although a husband is said to own all the cattle, a wife is permanently
assigned a share of his herd, which she controls until they are inherited by her
sons. A man with more cattle than are needed by one household naturally uses
the “extras” to support more dependents by taking a second wife. Although
there will always be some men with more cattle than others, polygyny ensures
that the key resources of milk and meat are distributed among the women and
children of a given society as evenly as possible.
What about matrilineal societies? When social anthropologists began
intensive study of African social organization in the 1930s, a great deal of
interest in different descent systems developed. These systems include: (1)
patrilineal, already discussed (tracing descent through only the father and his
kinsmen), (2) cognatic (tracing descent through both parents, as in America),
and (3) matrilineal (tracing descent through the mother and her female kin who
are descendants of a common ancestress).
Among the matrilineal societies stand the Yao of Malawi, Mozambique, and
Tanzania, and the Bemba of Zambia. Among the Wolof of Senegal, kinship is
also reckoned matrilineally, and the Baule of Côte d'Ivoire are predominantly
matrilineal. In some matrilineal societies, the bride continues to live with her
parents, and her husband takes up residence with them. It is rare, however, that
this is typical of most marriages throughout their duration. More often, men
seek to live near their sisters and their own kinsmen. As a result of the various,
at times contradictory, attractions which people feel in matrilineal societies, it is
not unusual for a person to live in three or more different places in a lifetime.
Yet, although descent is reckoned through women, it is men and not women
who dominate the public forums of power. In family affairs, it is not the
woman, but her brother who exercises ultimate authority in her house (instead
of the husband) and looks after his sister's affairs. It is a woman's brother who
belongs to the same kin group as her children, and not her husband.
Hence, in matrilineal societies, it is the uncle who disciplines the children
and arranges their marriages as the representative of the family. Within this
context, men find their attention divided between their wives and children, on
one hand, and their sisters and their children, on the other. While patrilineal
societies, particularly those that stress the local lineage, are marked by highly
stable local groups, matrilineal descent results in more flexibility, and the
725
membership of matrilineage in any local area is likely to change from year to
year.
Matrilineal descent is relatively rare in Africa, being found in only 14
percent of the societies. In all cases, these societies are associated with hoe
agriculture, and almost all of them are in the “matrilineal belt” of the southern
savanna. Throughout Africa, most people live on small family farms, and most
of the daily agricultural work is done by women. In the southern savanna,
however, a number of special circumstances combine to make matrilineal
descent adaptive. Goods cannot be stored for long, and the tse-tse fly makes it
impossible to accumulate wealth in cattle. Soil conditions are poor and the
population is relatively sparse. Thus, there is no shortage of land, but there is a
shortage of the one asset families do have, which is labor.
The most important function of a matrilineal grouping is to serve as a means
by which economic resources, especially men's and women's labor, can be
pooled and redistributed. Few people are willing to give up precious time
during cultivating season to work for others, even for pay, since they can easily
find land to work on their own. As a result, an ambitious cultivator can only
increase his agricultural income by marrying more wives or by controlling the
labor of his unmarried children, especially his daughters.
The forces at work make it difficult to keep extended families together.
Young men wish to exert their independence from their fathers and end their
economic dependence on their mothers by marrying; for, in Africa, a man is not
fully adult until he has his own household and children. Young women realize
that children are their major source of prestige, influence, and long-term
security. So, marriages are often arranged for a number of social and economic
purposes, as they are in patrilineal societies, but the interests of the young
people do not always match those of their elders.
Since there is a shortage of labor in matrilineal societies, heads of families
try to attract as many people as possible to their villages. While this presents
people with options about where to live, it also creates certain contradictions. A
big man will try to keep his sisters and the other females of his lineage with him
(whether or not their husbands are willing to join him instead of living with
their own people), while at the same time trying to keep his brothers and other
male kinsmen with him (although their wives are being pressured to return to
their own brothers). Obviously, everyone cannot have it both ways at once. The
bond between brother and sister is considered stronger than that between
husband and wife, and since there is little property to use as bride-wealth,
726
divorce is easy and occurs quite frequently. In such societies, it is not
uncommon for a woman whose children are approaching maturity to leave her
husband and return to the security of her brother's community.
Husbands also try to bargain for the best economic arrangements when they
marry. Sometimes they work for a number of years in the wife's matrilineage
(in what has been called bride service), and are then allowed to take their
family back to their own communities. Such arrangements, however, are highly
varied. On the one hand, elders of a young man's matrilineage may control his
labor by contributing heavily to his bride-wealth on the promise that he bring
his wife to live with them. On the other hand, elders of the bride's matrilineage
may keep control of her by accepting very little bride-wealth on the premise
that her husband move in with them.
Given that women's contributions to the economy are so important, there is
competition for marriages, and, in some cases, this reaches the point at which
options to marry elders' daughters are agreed ahead of time while the girls are
still very young, or even before their birth. This is not as odd as it sounds when
we reflect that, in that part of our society which is also based on highly
competitive recruitment such as professional sports, the “big men” also deal in
future options over potential team members.
Matrilineal societies arrange social life to facilitate production in a difficult
and uncertain environment. While the conflicting pulls of different groups may
sound chaotic when described one by one, people in these societies make
choices, and those choices are made according to their assessment of where
they can find the most socially satisfying and economically secure life. Since
the fortunes of any community are likely to fluctuate from year to year with the
uncertainties of farming in a marginal area, the various choices open in
matrilineal societies allow people to adjust by changing communities.
In patrilineal societies, men gain power and prestige by amassing wealth and
using it to support large numbers of dependents and heirs for whom they are
permanently responsible. In contrast, in matrilineal societies, a man gains
power and prestige through his leadership in keeping a number of people with
different interests working together as a team. To be successful, one must have
a great deal of interpersonal skill, wisdom, and political savvy. When it works,
people cooperate. Unfortunately, as in every society, people sometimes choose
not to follow the rules.
In both patrilineal and matrilineal societies, the primacy of the child is
incontrovertible. No family is a family until it has its first child. In fact, no one
727
is completely a man or a woman until a child is born, particularly a male child.
Thus, pregnancy is welcomed because it publicly declares that the union has
been consummated, confirms the fertility of the wife as claimed by her parents,
and affirms the husband's “virility” and procreativity. Names of children are
carefully chosen, and in many African societies, a special ceremony is held,
often eight days after birth, to name the child and present it to relatives and
friends. It is also at this time that the seclusion of the new mother, imposed
immediately after childbirth (which Eric Ayisi calls the period of separation)
ends. It is worth dispelling, at this juncture, the myth that all African names
have a meaning. Only a few ethnic groups have such a practice, as is the case
among the Yoruba of Nigeria, who may name a child after the day of the week
it was born or create a name that conveys a special message. In East Africa and
Southern Africa, children are usually named after important individuals,
deceased or living family members, or persons whose lives the parents would
like the child to emulate in his or her adult life.
728
Before closing this section, an important traditional educational process,
responsible for the transmission of culture and kinship bonds from one
generation to another, should be mentioned. Anthropologists have called it
initiation, initiation ceremonies, or rites of passage, common in some African
societies in the past as well as in the present, particularly in the countryside.
Initiation is a ritual and a period of formal training for young boys and girls
between the ages of nine and 16 and, depending on the society, occurs every
three to five years and lasts from two weeks to two months. Among the Sara of
Chad, for example, the yondo, from which no young person could escape, was
the most important event in the community. It was the rite of transition
(passage) from childhood to manhood or womanhood. The ritual was designed
to teach youngsters how to survive in the real world, it exposed them to the
secrets of life and to the traditions of their society, and told them what the
community expected of them. Among the Sara, the initiates were also trained in
a secret male language that bound them forever. (During the ceremonies, it was
not rare for entire villages to be completely empty of youngsters for 45 days or
more.) While boys were trained in seclusion by male elders, young girls were
entrusted to female elders. Among the Maasai of East Africa, circumcision is
still part of this formal educational process. In Sara society, clitoridectomy was
required of girls on that particular occasion, while circumcision was required of
boys.
Interestingly, among the Maasai warriors, a boy must undergo circumcision
and other rituals without complaint, before he is declared a Maasai warrior, a
man. In most societies, however, one should emphasize, initiation was a very
limited and temporary aspect of a youngster's life. In fact, many societies did
not or do not have one. Invariably, youngsters learned more from observing,
from listening to the elders in their daily counseling and pronouncements, and
by following the example of the adults—parents and older brothers and sisters.
This partly explains the absence of formal teachers and missionaries or
preachers in traditional African societies. The child grew naturally and, without
realizing it, he or she became the preserver and the transmitter of his or her
people's traditions. Societies without initiation might have other types of
organizations based on age set and gender. The secret societies of the Dan of
Côte d'Ivoire, for example, commonly known as poro, reinforce the bonds
between individuals and perform important social functions.
729
Any discussion of changes in Africa must encompass the recognition that
“traditional” African cultures were associated with a vast array of different
social organizations and ways of life, including many bands of hunter-
gatherers, hundreds of different societies based on self-sufficient farming
villages, and several multi-ethnic empires using special currencies and trading
over vast areas. Africans living below the Sahara, particularly in the Western
Sudan, have been in contact with the Mediterranean world since time
immemorial. While societies along the West African coast have been involved
with direct European contacts for 500 years, those on the east coast similarly
had a long history of contact with Arab, Indian, and even Chinese trade. Much
of the interior of Africa, however, was not directly contacted by colonial
powers until the start of the 20th century.
The most important force in the modernization of last century has been the
involvement of almost all of rural Africa in the worldwide economy. This has
come about in two main ways: (1) wage labor, almost always outside people's
home areas, and (2) the expansion of traditional agricultural production or,
more often, the adoption of new plants, to be grown for outside markets. While
some areas are heavily involved in migratory wage labor and others have
specialized in cash crops, most African families find themselves trying to strike
a balance between both methods of raising cash for the many expenses that
have become necessities: taxation (which was often introduced with the
intention of forcing people to seek employment with outsiders), imported goods
(the earliest ones, such as cloth, salt, sugar, and metal, are now enhanced by
thousands of others including bicycles, motorcycles, trucks, radios, computers,
and televisions), educational costs, and many more.
At first, wage labor took place on colonial plantations growing such crops as
coffee, tea, rubber, sisal, and cotton; in the mining industries of Central and
Southern Africa; and on the European-owned farms in East and Southern
Africa. Now, of course, millions of Africans work in cities in jobs ranging from
bus boys to corporate executives and presidents, from skilled traders to office
professionals.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of African migrant labor is that people
involved did not cut themselves off from their rural homes, but sought, through
wages, to supplement their families' economic position in the countryside. Once
730
cash became a necessity, the number of men seeking work has always exceeded
the available jobs. This has led to a number of negative results: since wages
were sought as a supplement to what the family produced outside the cash
economy, wages for most Africans have fallen to far less than the amount
needed to support families adequately, especially in the cities where life is
expensive. As a result, most men leave their families at home, causing much
separation, and resulting in large numbers of single men living in substandard
conditions at such workplace cities as Lagos, Nairobi, Abidjan, and
Johannesburg.
Meanwhile, the development of the rural areas has meant that women, who
did much of the traditional agricultural work and provided much of the day-to-
day support for their children, now find their work expanded to include
responsibility for growing even more crops for sale. In areas where population
pressure is greatest because of improvements in public health, land is scarce, a
large population of the younger men is away at work, and many children are in
school. In order to cope with these problems, Africans have adopted traditional
ideas of communal support to form migrant associations (sometimes voluntary
associations) in the new cities or networks of friends and relatives who help
each other find housing and employment and assist one another in maintaining
contact with their families back home. While these responses have been very
effective, it is still true that involvement in wage labor has caused many strains
for the cohesiveness of the African family and community patterns. Rapid
change also alienated younger people from elders, particularly when the young
adopted a Western, individualist, capitalist economic philosophy of life, which
is in sharp contrast to the spirit of communal responsibility that characterizes
traditional African thought.
Cash cropping, or commercial agriculture, has also become a mixed blessing.
In many areas, agricultural land has been converted from growing local foods
to growing export crops—a particularly serious problem given the rapid
increase in population throughout most of the continent. People who farm to
supply foreign markets also find that they are at the mercy of price changes
caused by forces beyond their control. While many Africans have risen to the
top of their national governments and business corporations, and some
independent African nations are major producers of oil, such as Nigeria,
Angola, Gabon, Chad, and South Africa, and minerals, including copper, the
vast majority of families in Africa find themselves caught up in an economic
squeeze which threatens to overwhelm the resources of the traditional family
life.
731
However, what seems to give hope to the continuity of the African family is
the fact that the sense of communalism is still strong, as is the primacy of the
child, and respect for human life and age. Other positive factors include the
relative absence (at least for the present) of substance abuse by the young,
homelessness, serious violent crime, and forced teenage pregnancy. Yet, the
issues of population explosion and the spread of AIDS and poverty (the latter
sometimes induced by nature and other times by unwise government policies),
present a challenge which the continent cannot ignore, if generations to come
are to maintain a viable family and national life.
There is no doubt that, as elsewhere, the African family faces tremendous
challenges. One challenge has been the perennial presence of domestic violence
against women and spouses in many households in Africa, despite the fact that
virtually every African country has passed a law prohibiting it. Yet, the practice
has not subsided, and many cases are never reported for fear of retaliation from
the accused and his family. It is like a plague even among educated households.
The other has been the issue of circumcision, which has often had such severe
consequences to the health of women and girls that it has been called by its
opponents “female genital mutilation” (FGM). Zimbabwe and Zambia are also
said to practice what is called “dry sex,” which, allegedly, increases man's
sexual pleasure.
According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF), as of 2017, FGM
is prohibited by law in the following 24 countries: Benin (2003); Burkina Faso
(1996); Central African Republic (1996, 2006); Chad (2003); Côte d'Ivoire
(1998); Djibouti (1994, 2009); Egypt (2008); Eritrea (2007); Ethiopia (2004);
The Gambia (2015); Ghana (1994); Guinea (1965, 2000); Guinea-Bissau
(2011); Kenya (2001, 2011); Mauritania (2005); Niger (2003); Nigeria (2015);
Senegal (1999); South Africa (2000); Sudan (State of South Kordofan, 2008,
State of Gedaref, 2009); Tanzania (1998); Togo (1998); Uganda (2010); and
Zambia (2005, 2011). This means that over half of the 54 African countries
(i.e., 30) have not passed laws related to women's circumcision. Conspicuously
absent from the list are countries such as Somalia, Angola, Gabon, Rwanda,
Burundi, Malawi, Mozambique, Mali, and Mauritania.
Health professionals likewise state that polygyny exposes women to STDs,
HIV/AIDS in particular, as a result of the promiscuity of some men who, if they
get the virus in the process, may transmit it to their wives. The 20 million cases
of HIV/AIDS in Africa have destroyed innumerable families and created
hundreds of thousands of orphans all over Sub-Saharan Africa in particular,
732
which has also increased the number of school-age children who have had to
drop out of school, in a society where girls are often considered less important
than boys. Today's USAID estimate is that AIDS has orphaned 16,830,000
children in Sub-Saharan Africa since the 1980s, out of 17 million worldwide,
that is, 99 percent of all cases globally.
Social media, in the form of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Imo, YouTube,
Snapchat, Google, Pinterest, smartphone, and WhatsApp, has also hit African
families hard, just as it has globally, by exposing children and adolescents to all
kinds of potentially harmful habits and relationships. These cherished devices
have contributed to the disintegration of families and a disregard for accepted
human values, while shattering the quality of family life, as addiction to the
new technological communication tools forces the younger, and even the older
family members, no matter where they might be, to spend over half of their
time away from face-to-face interaction and not bothering to listen to one
another and thus learn from the more experienced members of the household.
Facebook Messenger and Twitter, for example, can have a serious destructive
impact, unless one acts maturely: The two can be a conduit of the most
untruthful “stories” that are taken by many youngsters and uninformed adults as
true.
One other important aspect of the African family is the desire to have many
children. The economic reason for the shrinking of the African family has
already been discussed. Indeed, one would assume that the irresistible
economic changes imposed on Africa by globalization and its cultural
consumerism, as well as the resulting increase in absolute poverty, would
dictate the acceptance and adoption of some type of family planning through
proven contraceptives. The so-called “rhythm-method” (Natural Family
Planning) advocated by the Catholic Church is simply considered unreliable.
Opposition by African men and the elderly is often the major reason why
women cannot protect themselves from unplanned or unwanted pregnancies.
It is also worth noting that Africa is the fastest growing continent,
compelling some experts to note that Africa's fertility is the highest among all
the regions of the world. Currently, fertility in Africa is said to be 4.5 children
per woman on average, while in Asia, it is 2.1; in North America, 2.0; in
Europe, 1.6; and globally, 2.5. This is the reason why 50 percent of Africa's
inhabitants are 15 years old and younger. In fact, in a period of 20 years,
Africa's population has risen from 800 million during the mid-1980s to 1.256
billion in 2017. The pressure exerted by rapid economic growth on available
733
resources that are not expected to grow at the same pace is retrogressive,
especially in a continent where communalism or community needs take
precedence over the individual. Some social scientists have argued that
communal responsibilities and social expectations in Africa have forced
families and communities to share scarce resources that could be used more
effectively among smaller households whose extended family ties are not as
strong. This can be illustrated by the expectation in most of Africa when a
family member succeeds and has a salary: He or she must take care of the
siblings, impoverishing him or her in the process.
However, the most threatening factor of change for the traditional Sub-
Saharan African is the continued rapid spread of Christianity, which has been in
process since the nineteenth century. Today, the prohibition of such practices as
polygyny, certain dances and music performances, and veneration of the
ancestors, all of which are still labeled as “pagan” or un-Christian, are
accompanied by a gamut of competitive and strange religious teachings
conceived and propagated by Evangelical zealots, many of whom are
foreigners, as is the case in Uganda, where false apostles are disguised in
sheep's clothes, and preach doom and a catastrophic Armageddon unless their
warnings are heeded. Until a few decades ago, Islam had co-existed peacefully
with African traditional practices, including polygyny. Unfortunately, today,
there is tension between the two, as a stream of violent extremists who
misinterpret the Koran have caused division and deaths, as with the case of Al-
Shabab in Somalia and Kenya and Boko Haram in Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and
Cameroon.
However, the preceding remarks are not designed to deny that some of the
African family values must change and adapt themselves, as the world is
different from what it was two centuries ago, because, notwithstanding the
challenges Africa has experienced, most experts today hold the view that, in
general, African families are stronger and more stable than families in the West
—poverty being the number one enemy. The relative absence of serious and
violent crime, of substance abuse, of teenage pregnancy, or of out-of-wedlock
motherhood (although these are increasing in the urban areas), assures that
African families will survive. It is comforting to know that, even in the midst of
extreme poverty, an elderly person, a widow, a divorcee, a child born out of
wedlock, and a handicapped person, are all taken care of by family members. In
the words of Paul Bohannan and Philip Curtin, “loneliness is not an indigenous
African problem.”
734
Summary
As is true in every society, the African family is the most basic human
institution. In Africa, in spite of changes brought about by colonialism and the
pressures of contemporary life, the family has remained relatively strong and
still tends to be extended (rather than nuclear), encompassing all kin members
who live in proximity, such as brothers, cousins, grandparents and great-
grandparents, uncles, nephews, and other known, close or remote, relatives.
African societies are still polygynous in theory (a man has the right to marry as
many wives as he wishes), although most men do not choose or cannot afford
more than one wife. In fact, the ratio between polygynous and monogamous
married males was estimated at 33 to 60 percent, respectively, decades ago, the
remainder being non-married individuals due to various reasons.
Since marriage is an obligation in Africa, one does not find many bachelors
within the marriage age, although modern changes, especially in the cities, have
forced many men and women to delay marriage or a few not to marry at all. It
is still true that, in most African societies, marriages are seen as alliances
strengthening the bonds between families, friends, or even clans, which explain
why young men and women are not at liberty to plan their wedding without
considerable family input. Families also discuss the type and amount of bride-
wealth to be given by the groom's family to the bride's parents. (Some
governments have unsuccessfully attempted to pass laws against the practice.)
This physical token represents compensation to the parents for the “loss” of
their daughter, while serving, at the same time, as a guarantee that the husband
has the right to paternity over every child born of his wife-to-be. As a result of
the deep involvement of several families and the practice of bride-wealth,
which, in most cases, must be returned when things go wrong, divorces are not
as common in Africa, particularly in patrilineal societies, as they are in the
Western world. But divorces do occur, especially in cases of proven adultery,
impotence, and sterility. Sometimes, serious disagreements with the husband or
among wives in a polygynous household may also lead to divorce.
Major differences in family members' relationships occur between patrilineal
and matrilineal societies. In patrilineal societies, for example, descent is
reckoned on the father's (male) side, and usually the bride must join the
husband's kinsfolk, whereas, in matrilineal societies, the tendency is to compel
the man to join his wife's people, although there are many intervening variables
that may prevent this from occurring. In matrilineal societies, however, the man
735
is more at the mercy of the wife's brothers or uncles than in patrilineal societies,
as the latter not only make sure that they continue to have control over their kin,
but even assume responsibility in disciplining the children and in arranging for
their marriages.
The primacy of the child in the African family milieu is acknowledged by
anthropologists and by careful observers alike. In fact, there is no family if
there is no child, and men and women are not considered adults, even if they
have undergone the rites of passage, until they have had a child. Parents, on the
other hand, are not content until they become grandparents. In some African
societies, children go through a formal period of training for life, called
initiation, while in others simple observation, direct experience, and daily
admonitions from parents, elders, and others through various means
(conversation, stories, legends, songs, and assignment of certain
responsibilities) prepare the youngsters to become productive individuals and to
transmit social traditions. Thus, the adage “it takes a village to raise a child”
takes true meaning in an African social setting. The child is, in most cases, a
type of social “insurance” for old age, a guarantee of manpower in farming
communities (as is the case in most of Africa), and the assurance, particularly
in non-literate societies, that the name of the family will be perpetuated
indefinitely.
736
1. How is the family in Africa different from that in the Western world?
2. Discuss the role of marriage, bride-wealth, and divorce in Africa.
3. Compare and contrast polygyny with monogamy. Can you see the reasons
why societies in Africa have preferred polygyny in the past?
4. What roles do patrilineage and matrilineage play in African societies?
5. Compare and contrast the problems of the African family and those of the
African diaspora in America.
6. Where do you stand on domestic violence and women and men's
circumcision?
737
References
J. F. Ade Ajayi and Toyin Falola (ed.). Tradition and Change in Africa: The
Essays of J. F. Ade Ajayi. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000.
Eric O. Ayisi. An Introduction to the Study of African Culture. London:
Heinemann, 1988.
Mario J. Azevedo. Historical Perspectives on Health and Health Care in
Africa, Vol. I and II. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Mario J. Azevedo and Gwendolyn Prater (eds.). Africa and Its People.
Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1982.
Martha Bailey. Polygamy: Selected Full-Text Books and Articles. New York:
Praeger, 2011William Bascom and Melville Herskovits. Continuity and
Change in African Cultures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
Edna Bay and Nancy Hafkin (eds.). Women in Africa: Studies in Social and
Economic Change. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976.
Paul Bohannan and Philip Curtin. Africa and Africans. Prospect Heights, IL:
Waveland Press, 1988.
Vigdis Broch-Due (ed.). Violence and Belonging: The Quest for Identity in
Post-Colonial Africa. New York: Routledge, 2005.
P.H. Gulliever. Tradition and Transition in East Africa. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1969.
Philip Kilbride. Life in East Africa: Women and Children. London:
Longman, 1990.
Paulo Kyalo. “A Reflection on the African Traditional Values of Marriage
and Sexuality.” International Journal of Academic Research in
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Ron Lesthaeghe. Reproduction and Social Organization in Sub-Saharan
Africa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989.
Joseph Lijembe (ed.). East African Childhood. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967.
Michael Meeker. The Pastoral Son and the Spirit of Patriarchy: Religion,
Society, and Person among East African Stock Keepers. Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
Denis Odinga Okiya. “The Centrality of Marriage in African Religio-Culture
with Reference to the Maasai of Kadjiado County, Kenya.” Nairobi,
738
Kenya: Kenyatta University (Dissertation).
Christian Oppong (ed.). Female and Male in West Africa. Boston: Allen and
Unwin, 1983.
David Parkin and David Nyamwaya (eds.). Transformations of African
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Gilles Pison. “Why African Families Are Larger than Those of Other
Continents” (https://theconversation.com/why-african-families-are-larger-
than-those-of-other-continents-84611), Retrieved 12/30/2017.
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Promoting Development in Africa Today. New York: Zed Books, 2003.
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Thomas S. Weisner, Candice Bradley, and Philip L. Kilbride. (eds.). African
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1. On the role of women in Africa, the reader should read Dr. Agnes Leslie's chapter in this
volume.
2. Portions of this essay have been adapted, expanded, and reprinted by permission by
Kendall-Hunt Publisher from Mario J. Azevedo and Gwendolyn S. Prater's (eds.) Africa and
Its People (Dubuque, IA: Kendall-Hunt, 1982), authored by Robert Daniels et al., pp. 9–19.
739
21
The African American Family

Gwendolyn Spencer Prater
740
Introduction
Since the mid-1960s, the African American family has attracted considerable
attention from scholars as well as from politicians. Tragically, during this same
period, black community members have continued to be victims of increased
crime, of substance abuse, of unemployment, and ultimately, of untold poverty.
The size of the black community's male population continues to dwindle. The
impact of the provocative works by E. Franklin Frazier and Melville Herskovits
during the 1940s seems to have opened the debate on the black family.
Franklin, after a careful study of the impact of the slavery era and the
conditions of the black family in the periods thereafter, concluded that slavery
contributed to a loss of traditional African family values within the black
community, forcing African Americans to assimilate the values of the white
family structure, a trend that was accelerated by continued racism and the
deplorable conditions of the inner city (the destination of most urban
migration). Alternatively, Herskovits stressed the strength of the black family
even in slavery and pointed to the survival factor that Frazier had overlooked.
Unfortunately, Frazier's conclusions were subsequently misinterpreted and
misused by Daniel Moynihan who, as a member of the Nixon Administration,
argued that the detrimental matriarchal nature of the black family was
responsible for the disintegration of the black community. The debate has
resulted in a serious questioning and criticism of the methodology used by the
students of the African American family and therefore of the validity of their
conclusions. Many black sociologists argue against sweeping generalizations
based either on the black middle-class family or the premise that the white
middle class model—monogamous, nuclear, and self-sufficient—is the model
family against which black families should be measured to determine success
or failure.
The continuing debate has generated two major schools of thought: one
which sees the black family as sick (the pathological theory, advanced by
Moynihan and others) and therefore negatively affecting the soundness of the
whole black community; and the other stressing the strengths of the black
family as an adaptive institution (the adaptability theory, advanced by scholars
such as Robert Hill and John Blassingame). Most other scholars can be placed
between the two extremes, as they are able to find both positives and
threatening negatives in the institution of the black family.
741
An important often-asked question is: Will the black family be able to
survive the onslaught on its stability coming from so many directions? Because
the issue has become so prominent and troubling among African American
researchers and professionals, particularly social scientists, social workers,
public policy makers, and community leaders, the following chapter will be
devoted entirely to the black family—its history, its nature, its strength and
weakness, and its ability to survive and thrive, as America continues its path
throughout the twenty-first century. The author hopes that this introductory
treatment of the black family will lead students to pursue more advanced
studies on the topic.
Major terms and concepts: slavery, emancipation, family, nuclear vs.
extended family, monogamy, African survivals, pathology, adaptability,
teenage pregnancy, single-headed household, racism, unemployment, child
welfare system, adoption, foster care, guardianship, empowerment, family-
preservation services, family-centered services.
742
Much of the study that followed Frazier's work and Moynihan's rejoinder has
attempted to rehabilitate the black family by exposing the fallacies upon which
the pathology and instability claims about the African American families were
based. In his several studies, Billingsley, for example, has denied the premise
that the black family, even during slavery, was unstable and matriarchal,
pushing the argument to the point of almost denying the cultural and
psychological destructive nature of slavery in the United States. He has argued
that black families, in spite of slavery, kept kinship ties, maintained solidarity,
respected their traditional mores, and never abandoned the mutual assistance
tradition, much of which, he added, were African survivals. Atwood and
Genovese advanced a similar argument when they concluded that commitment
to marriage was always present in the majority of black families and that, rather
than a matriarchy, there was partnership, flexibility, and equalitarianism in
marriage, as a complementarity in household roles, out of which came families
that were as stable as white families as America entered the post-World War II
era.
Other scholars, including Herbert Gutman, painstakingly made efforts to
demonstrate that, contrary to what we have been led to believe, black families,
from the Civil War to Civil Rights, even though the large majority were lower
class, remained overwhelmingly, both in the urban North and the rural South,
two-parent headed households kept together by extended, “multigenerational”
kinship networks, just as continental African families have been over the
centuries. Allen (1978) and Harriet Pipes McAdoo have also derided the
generalizations of the first studies because these were based on the lower-class
black family and used the white family or the upper middle class black family
as a median model. While Allen stressed variance or the adoption of a “variant
perspective,” which underscores the diversity but also the normalcy of all types
of families, including the African American family, McAdoo has noted that
“there are several distinct groups within the African American community, yet
when we are able to relate only to mean or median statistics, the wide diversity
of family experiences becomes buried.” She finds, however, a major common
thread in the fabric of black communities, reflected in the crucial role of such
African survivals as the importance of “oral traditions, reliance on extended
families (consanguineal relationships), spirituality, rhythmic-movements
expression, and communalism.”
743
McAdoo further stresses the fact that earlier studies contributed to unproven
stereotypes about black families when they failed to differentiate between
family stability and marriage stability. She and many other scholars have
emphasized the important point that, in the black community, kinship
relationships have often kept family relationships stable in the face of rising
divorce and separation rates. The most important requisites for stability and
proper functioning of the family, scholars add, are love and adequate resources
to raise the children.
Historians John Hope Franklin and John Blassingame and the late sociologist
E. Franklin Frazier provide a comprehensive view of the black family in
antebellum America. Their studies demonstrate and underscore both the
obstacles to the continuation of the family traditions brought from Africa and
the slaves' resilience in their attempt to maintain a modicum of kinship ties
despite the brutal system under which they lived. The picture that comes out of
the slavery experience, studied by so many others, has shaped many of the
treatises advanced by contemporary social scientists.
When slaves arrived on the shores of America, they were, in most cases, not
kept as a family but were split up and sold or auctioned to eager slave masters.
Although keeping families together should have been simply a matter of
common sense if the plantation productivity through stability of manpower
were to be facilitated, masters feared that a stable and close family could
become a nucleus for conspiracy based on kinship, culture, and common
language. Separating individuals who might have come from the same African
region, who spoke the same language, or who were members of the same
family was thought to be the safest way to ensure the survival of the “peculiar
institution.” It was believed that a slave, placed in a totally new social and
physical environment without the solidarity brought about by family bonds,
would not be as likely to muster the inspiration and strength to escape or rebel.
John Hope Franklin writes that, among most slave owners who specialized in
slave-breeding in such states as Virginia and South Carolina, the tendency was
to sell slaves as individuals rather than families, some of which had emerged on
the plantations, because retailing individual slaves was more profitable.
Although some states had laws prohibiting the sale of children under the age of
10, in most, the laws were “almost wholly disregarded.” In most cases, except
among some extremely religious masters' households, slave families were never
taken seriously. In those cases where slave unions were somewhat respected,
economic rather than moral considerations were the basis. Marriage, the most
744
important aspect of family formation, was not taken seriously by slave masters,
even when they allowed a special ceremony to mark the event. Marriage was
simply viewed as a search for companionship to make plantation life more
bearable. In fact, slave accounts confirm that most of the marriage ceremonies
that were allowed turned out to be an entertainment for the master's household.
Slaves wishing to marry always had to have permission from their masters.
Because most masters preferred marriages of slaves living on the same
plantations, it became extremely difficult for most male slaves to find suitable
mates, since the master himself quite often maintained his most attractive
female slaves as concubines. The high incidence of concubinage is confirmed
by the numbers of mulatto children in the antebellum period: out of 3.2 million
slaves in 1850, 246,000 were registered mulattoes, according to John Hope
Franklin. By 1860, the figure had risen to 411,000 (or 588,352 according to Du
Bois) out of a slave population estimated at 3.9 million. Adding to the
difficulties surrounding marriages between enslaved African Americans was
the fact that, when marriages were allowed by the slave masters, necessary
courtships were often missing. Furthermore, children were not properly cared
for because of the work the mother had to perform for her master in the
household or in the fields. Slave children, except perhaps among certain
mulatto households, were given tasks (errands, fetching water, taking care of
the master's other children, traveling with his wife) as soon as they reached the
age of seven or eight, spending very little time with their own parents. Lack of
prenatal and postnatal care for the mother and care for the newborns resulted in
high infant mortality rates, which further destabilized many slave families.
One other factor contributing to the erosion of family ties prior to
emancipation was the separation of slaves during settlement even if the slaves
were from the same household. In addition, because many slave masters
maintained a sexual relationship with their female slaves, particularly those
assigned to domestic chores, women became heads of families. They assumed
authority over the children while the father, feared and relegated to the fields,
was reduced to the role of a breeder. The presumed predominance of a
matriarchal system in the slave family prompted Frazier to declare the
weakness of the institution within the black community and to posit that
mulatto families, favored by slave-owners, were stronger because they were
predominantly patriarchal.
Franklin, Frazier, Blassingame, and Gutman are quick to add, however, that
even during slavery—in the midst of oppression and repression—the black
745
family remained relatively strong in the North and where it was allowed in the
South. Mothers loved their children (the primacy of children has remained one
of the major characteristics of the black family); under adverse circumstances,
fathers did what they could to protect their households; brothers and sisters took
care of each other; and when they were separated, siblings quite often
attempted to find one another. Using the Underground Railroad, siblings looked
for each other in such large northern cities as Philadelphia and New York.
Thus, the family, as an institution, continued to be cherished within the slave
community, notwithstanding the legal system that did not recognize it as valid
and legal. This reality prompted Blassingame to write:
Although it was weak, although it was frequently broken, the slave
family provided an important buffer, a refuge from the rigors of slavery.
While the slave father could rarely protect the members of his family
from abuse, he could often gain their love and respect in many ways. In
his family, the slave not only learned how to avoid the blows of the
master, but also drew on the love and sympathy of its members to raise
his spirits. The family was, in short, an important survival mechanism.
With emancipation, the situation of the African American family was
radically altered, and the union of the emancipated could now evolve from an
“invisible” and oppressed family to a full-blown, self-sustaining, free family.
Several factors assisted the newly freed slaves in starting a new family or
reinforcing the one maintained during the slave years. It must be noted that,
although a period of theoretical freedom for the slaves, emancipation proved
very trying for many former slaves. Many remained on the plantation against
their will; others decided to stay with their masters because they had nowhere
else to go or owned nothing; and many others, some of whom had families,
remained literally hopeless. The federal government and some states stepped in
to protect the freed families and instill in others the sense of building a
monogamous household, because many polygynous and polyandrous practices
had existed among both the white and black plantation dwellers. Thus,
deserting a wife or the children became a criminal offense in many states, and
bigamy and polygyny were punishable by law.
In order to allow a smooth transition, beginning in 1866 several states
compelled the male ex-slaves to select only one spouse in cases where they
may have had several wives. In South Carolina, for example, polygamous
slaves had until April 1, 1866, to select a spouse, otherwise their children would
be declared illegitimate. Marriage registration was made easier at state, county,
746
and municipal offices. In this effort, the churches (the various independent
African American churches) and the missionary schools (especially those run
by missionaries from New England) contributed greatly to the stabilization of
old and new marriages. As Jessie Bernard (in Marriage and Family Among
Negroes) notes on the role of the Church, “in many cases the idea of marriage
dignified by a minister appealed to the newly freed Negroes, for it implied
equality with whites. Official marriage became a status symbol, and weddings
became occasions of great gaiety.” The Church was empowered by states to
dissolve polygamous or abusive marriages whenever it made sense to church
officials.
The military establishment also had a positive role in this endeavor, as it
insisted on marriage registration and family responsibility toward wife and
children, and often returned any fees charged to the soldiers who attempted to
obtain marriage certificates. This was reinforced by the establishment in 1866
of the Freedmen's Bureau. The bureau was an early, significant, government-
sponsored child welfare service that had a positive impact on African American
families. Not only did it clarify and facilitate rules governing marriage for the
newly freed slaves, it often secured land, work, and direct relief to poor
children within their families. Within the context of the time, the creation of the
bureau was a revolutionary development in child welfare services since it was
financed by the federal government and provided in-home service to African
American children and their families. Its demise in 1871 came too soon and
was a result of inadequate financial support and the belief that, Andrew
Billingsley and Jeanne Giovannoni state, the bureau's work encouraged “the
natural slothfulness of the Black race.”
Other early community efforts in the late 1800s were led by African
American organizations such as lodges (e.g., the Masons, the Odd Fellows, and
the Knights of Pythias); women's clubs (e.g., the National Association of
Colored Women); and educational institutions which were instrumental in
meeting the needs of freed or newly established African American families.
These measures certainly strengthened the post-emancipation African
American family. Thus, although Billingsley calls emancipation “a catastrophic
social crisis for the ex-slave,” and the Reconstruction period “a colossal
failure,” he is compelled to add that “at the same time, there were some
‘screens of opportunity’ which did enable large numbers of families to survive,
some to achieve amazingly stable and viable forms of family life, and a few to
achieve a high degree of social distinction.”
747
A discussion of the African American community following Reconstruction,
particularly in the South, must take into account the devastating psychological
and social impact of racism and violence on the family unit. In its worst form,
violence against blacks and the black family manifested itself in lynching,
which became an all-too-common occurrence. Available records suggest that
between 1882 and 1968 some 4,700 cases of lynching of African American
men, women, and children took place in the United States, including 581 cases
in Mississippi, 531 in Georgia, 493 in Texas, and 347 in Alabama, as the
following table illustrates.
Added to the terror of lynching, was the fact that little was done by the
government to protect by law and through enhancing programs the African
American community and its family units.
During the early and mid-1900s, authorities continued to exclude African
American families from the formalized child welfare service systems. As a
result, national black community organizations, such as the National Urban
League, founded in 1911, and the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, created in 1909, struggled for the provision of economic
opportunity and civil rights for African American families. Since that time,
African American families have become more visible in the child welfare
system. However, adequately meeting African American families' and
children's service needs in the current system of service delivery remains
inadequate.
Table 1: Incidence of Lynching in the United States (1882–1968)
748
749
The past four to five decades have also witnessed broad societal changes that
influenced the status of the African American family—the Civil Rights
movement, urban unrest, political discontent, the War on Poverty programs of
the 1960s, school busing to achieve integration, the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
affirmative action and the affront to its existence, and an employment-focused
child and family welfare system. The United States has also experienced the
numerical predominance of African Americans in major cities, the expansion of
the black middle class and a stable working class, and the achievement of a
nearly one million-plus enrollment of African American youth in higher
education, in addition to the exponential increase in the number of African
Americans holding elected office. The Joint Center for Political and Economic
Studies released its 2000 figures, showing a six-fold increase since 1970 to
9,040 of black elected officials. Perhaps surprisingly, the top five states with
the largest number of black elected officials are Mississippi, Alabama,
Louisiana, Illinois, and Georgia. Furthermore, Black Issues in Higher
Education has reported the striking progress of African Americans in degree
attainments. Specifically, the number of blacks earning bachelor's degrees has
doubled over the past two decades and includes more than 100,000, while the
number of blacks earning master's degrees is up 141 percent since 1985.
The most frequent degrees awarded to blacks were business management and
social sciences, such as psychology, education, and health sciences. In 2002,
according to census information, 17 percent of young blacks received
bachelor's degrees. Although black women are earning almost double the
baccalaureate degrees as black men, black men earning degrees are also
increasing in number. Other striking news is that, during the same period, black
doctoral degrees were up 110 percent. Yet, the African American community
itself continues to face significant problems. For example, although the African
American teen birth rate is reportedly the lowest in the 40 years for which data
have been available for African American women, the percentage of births to
unmarried teens remains high. In 2000, the birth rate for African American
adolescents 15–17 was 50.4 per 1,000 compared to 23.6 per 1,000 for white
teens, according to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the
United States. This phenomenon accounts, in part, for the rate of out-of-
wedlock pregnancies and subsequently for an increase in single parents.
Further, the number of children in need of child protective services has
750
soared. Maltreatment categories typically include neglect, medical neglect,
physical abuse, sexual abuse, and psychological maltreatment. The National
Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information revealed that, in 2001,
3 million referrals concerning the welfare of approximately 5 million children
were made to child protective services agencies throughout the United States,
with two-thirds being screened in and one-third screened out for service.
Additionally, more than 2 million children and families were provided services
to prevent abuse and neglect. According to the National Child Abuse and
Neglect Data System (NCANDS), investigations confirmed over 903,000
children were found to be victims of child maltreatment in 2001. The highest
percentage of victims was white (half), African American (one-quarter), and
Hispanic (15 percent). Child fatalities are the most tragic consequences of
maltreatment. Approximately 1,300 children died of abuse or neglect during
2001, a rate of 1.81 children per 100,000 children in the population. Neglect,
difficult to clearly define, usually refers to deleterious acts of omission
(inadequate care) rather than commission, and was the largest single discrete
category of children noted to be in need of protective services, comprising 57
percent of the total number of abused and neglected children.
As Robert L. Hampton has noted, it is risky to draw conclusions solely from
official reports about the rates of child maltreatment among African American
families because the poor and racial minorities are typically over-represented in
official reports of deviant behavior. Reflecting the high rates of poverty in the
black community, African American children do, unfortunately, enter the child
protection system in disproportionately large numbers. As the National Center
of Child Abuse and Neglect has previously indicated, parental abuse of alcohol
and use of other drugs during and after pregnancy and later has been identified
as a major factor contributing to child abuse, neglect, and death. Child
maltreatment has negative short- and long-term effects on children's mental
health and development, including drops in intelligence quotient (IQ) and
increases in learning disabilities, depression, suicides, delinquency, and drug
and alcohol abuse.
During the 1980s, African Americans experienced a growing “underclass,”
high rates of unemployment and underemployment, and a high rate of school
drop-outs. Clearly, the African American community is in transition. Yet,
African American families are retaining their strength to “make it against all
odds.” In 2002, there were 8.8 million black families and 53.6 million white
families in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, also in
2002, the Hispanic population became the largest population of color in the
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U.S., with about 13.5 percent of the population. This was up from about 4.5
percent in 1970. Simultaneously, the black population comprised about 13
percent of the total population, comparable to the 1990 percentage, although the
black population increased faster than the population as a whole, at 21.5 percent
for African Americans versus 13 percent for the entire population. Yet, black
families faced odds that have been difficult to overcome, as the following
statistics underscore.
The income for African American households increased 4.3 percent between
1996 and 1997 and has not drastically changed since. The real median income
rose from $24,021 to $25,050, making the income surpass 1989 levels.
However, in 2016, the median household income for a black family still
remained around $20,000. While the median white household income was
$60,000 that of a black household family rose only to $40,000, according to the
Brookings Institution.
On ownership, receipts for all African American businesses represented 10
percent of the more or less firms of the 27 million existing in the US in 2018.
For interested readers, following are the richest African Americans in the US
(see https://www.ranker.com/list/the-20-richest-african-americans/worlds-
richest-people-lists): In 2013, the top 10 African-American-owned businesses
netted more than $185 billion in total gross receipts, distributed as follows:
World Wide Technology: +$6 billion; ACT-1 Group, Inc: $2.2 billion;
Bridgewater Interiors, LCC: $1.5 billion; Modular Assembly Innovations, LLC:
$1.2 billion; Manna Inc: $630 million; Anderson-Dubose Company: $545
million; Detroit-Based Global Automotive Alliance: $520 million; Thompson
Hospitality: $485 million; Radio One, Inc: $450 million; SET Enterprises, Inc:
$400 million; and Patti LaBelle: $1 million (Thangavelu, 2015). The richest
black individuals in the United States include: Aliko Dangote $14.4 billion;
Mike Adenuga $9.9 billion; Robert Smith $4.4 billion; Oprah Winfrey $3.1
billion; Byaruhanga Kimberly Junior $2.1 billion; Femi Otedola $1.85 billion;
and Strive Masiyiwa $1.8 billion (from Zimbabwe); Michael Jordan $650
million; Sean Combs $620 million; Tiger Woods $590 million; Robert Johnson
$580 million; Mariah Carey $510 million; Magic Johnson $500 million; Jay-Z
$475 million; Sheila Johnson $400 million; Tyler Perry $400 million; Bill
Cosby $380 million; Shaquille O'Neil $350 million; Dr. Dre $350 million;
Master P $350 million; Donahue Peebles $350 million; Berry Gordy $345
million; Russell Simmons $340 million; Quintin Primo III $300 million;
Beyonce Knowles $300 million; Prince (d. 2016) $300 million; Janice Bryant
Howroyd $250 million; Diana Ross $250 million; Herman Russell $200
752
million; Ulysses L. Bridgeman, Jr: $200 million; Kobe Bryant $200 million;
Will Smith $200 million; Lionel Richie: $200 million; and Tina Turner $200
million.
Poverty has declined over the years but continues to be high among African
Americans compared to white Americans and to other races, except American
Indians. Between 1996 and 1997, for example, the number of poor African
Americans dropped to 9.1 million and poverty rates among them dropped from
28.4 percent to 26.5 percent. In 2001, census statistics indicated that an
estimated 32.9 million people in the US lived below the poverty level,
including 8.1 million blacks, and 15.3 million non-Hispanic whites.
Unfortunately, while poverty among black people was 22 percent in 2017 from
an overall US poverty level of 12.7 percent, among African American women
the level of poverty was higher, namely, 34.2 percent. Poverty and hunger
among African Americans was 22.5 percent, according to the US census.
Thus, the attainment of economic parity with white American families in the
2000s continued to elude African American families. As the Census Bureau
indicates, over one-half (52 percent) of all black married-couple families had
incomes of $50,000 or more and 27 percent of them had incomes of $75,000 or
more; conversely, 64 percent of non-Hispanic white families had incomes of
$50,000 or more, while 40 percent of white families had incomes greater than
$75,000. Clearly, black married couples fare better economically than all
variations of black family structures combined, as indicated by the lower
percentages of all black families with incomes reaching $50,000 (only 33
percent) annually and those attaining a $75,000 (only 27 percent) yearly
income.
Indeed, notwithstanding the above, still a larger proportion of black married-
couples (8 percent) than their white counterparts (3 percent) were poor in 2001.
There were 6.8 million families in the United States with incomes below the
poverty level, and 1.8 million of these families were black. Twenty-one percent
of families in poverty were black. In 1997, the nation's African American
population consisted of 12.109 million households of whom 3.85 million were
married couples, 3.94 million were headed by women, and 757,000 were led by
men. Furthermore, also in 1997, African American families with children under
18 were comprised of 1.97 million married couple families, 2.59 million
female-headed families, and 1.70 million were headed by males. Among
African American families, which consisted of families with children less than
18 years of age, 58 percent were headed by females who had no spouse present
753
and had never been married, as compared to 41 percent of mother-child family
groups in the total population.
The number of families headed by African American women and women in
the general population has increased dramatically over the past several decades.
For example, Family Services America reported that the number of families
headed by African American women significantly increased, from 30 percent in
1970 to 42 percent in 1987. In 1997, all married couples with children less than
18 years of age had declined to 25 percent, down from 40 percent in 1970. With
the growing unemployment, single female heads of families in the black
community were likely to increase. Robert Hill notes that the poverty rates
among female-headed African American families edged upward by 1 percent,
from 51 percent to 52 percent, between 1978 and 1987, while recent census
reports (2001) indicate that 35 percent of black families maintained by women
were in poverty and 19 percent of black families maintained by men with no
spouse present lived in poverty. The comparable rates for white families were
19 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
Statistics also prove that both African American males and females are likely
to be employed in lower paying occupations and to receive lower wages within
many occupations. According to Jesse McKinnon, in 2002, the unemployment
rate for blacks was twice that for non-Hispanic whites, 11 percent and 5
percent, respectively. Recent history shows that the African American
community lost about $15.2 billion in income due to high rates of
unemployment (from 6 percent in 1969 to 12 percent in 1988). This increase
from 570,000 unemployed to a record high of 1.7 million resulted in zero
earnings for a significant number of black American individuals and families.
African American males and teenagers were the hardest hit by unemployment.
Overall, the most recent census figures reveal that the number of black families
under the poverty level was 20 percent in 1969 and 21 percent in 2001, thus
emphasizing that the economic racial divide for a significant minority of the
black population continues. These adverse circumstances have also been
detrimental to the life expectancy of the black population, particularly for
males, whom death prematurely takes from the family. Life expectancy for
black males has declined over the years, from 69.7 years in 1984 to 69.5 in
1985 and to 69.4 in 1986 and, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) in 2000, to 68.2 versus 74.8 for white males. However, have
changed slowly over the years. In 2017, blacks had slightly gained in life
expectancy, having moved up to 75.6 years compared to 79 among their white
counterparts. The CDC notes, in fact, that a black boy born in 2013 had a life
754
expectancy of 72.3 years in contrast to his white counterpart, who showed a life
expectancy of 76.6 years.
As though these misfortunes were not enough, the African American male
has been hardest hit by drug abuse, crime, unemployment, lack of educational
opportunities, prison, and diseases, conditions that have created severe shortage
of prospective spouses within the black community. In 1983, it was estimated
that, although the black male population accounted for only 6 percent of the
U.S. population, about 50 percent of the U.S. prison population was black—
about 80,671 black male prison inmates (contrasted to 6,836 black females).
Delgado, in 2001, reported that, although blacks were 13 percent of the U.S.
population, they represented 45 percent of those arrested for violent felonies
and roughly half of those held in state and federal prisons. Ergo, no decrease in
the percentage of blacks in the prison population over the past two or more
decades is discernible. African American overrepresentation in prisons and jails
is nothing less than startling. Even worse, historically, men of color have been
overrepresented on death row, comprising 50 percent of the total of 5,416
persons sentenced to death from 1877 to 1997. This period also witnessed an
overwhelming number of those who were executed—181 of the 432 men and
women, or 44.2 percent.
The impact of these conditions on the number of males has been well
documented. Thus, for example, in 1989, there were 95 white men to every 100
white females but only 90 black men to 100 black females. This shortage was
most acute within the 24–45-year-old range, where the ratio was 85 for every
100 females. Interracial marriages have also had their impact on the black
family and the availability of male partners. According to Lee, in 1990, black
males were 2.5 times more likely to be married to a white female than black
females married to a white male. The author reports from the official 2000
census count that black men are 2.82 times more likely to marry outside of their
race, predominantly to white women, than black women are to marry outside of
their race. According to the Bureau of the Census, in 1985, among black-white
interracial married couples in the United States, the number of black
male-“white female unions was more than double the number of black female-
white male unions.” From 1970 to 1985, the number of black husband-white
wife marriages rose from 41,000 to 122,000 respectively, while that of black
wife-white husband grew from 24,000 to 47,000 respectively during the same
period. The interracial marriage trend continues, while drug use erodes the
community and the black family. At the height of the war on drugs, from 1986
to 1991, the number of white drug offenders in state prisons increased by 110
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percent. The number of black drug offenders grew by 465 percent. African
Americans account for 14 percent of the nation's drug users, yet they make up
35 percent of those arrested for drug possession, 55 percent of those convicted
for drug possession, and 74 percent of those sentenced to serve time, according
to Charles Shaw. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (2003), males
represent 71.8 percent of those sentenced to serve time. In his study of the ratio
between black males and females, Michael Williams warns of ominous
consequences for the future of the black family and concludes by noting:
When the numbers of black men who are homosexual, already married,
uninterested in marriage, and for other reasons, unacceptable as mates,
are excluded from the official Census Bureau statistics, the male-to-
female ratio in the African-American community, in real terms, declines
even more. In fact, Robert Staples has suggested that, in practical terms,
there may be no more than one black man for every five single women
in the United States.
The impact of disease on the black community, particularly HIV, has become
clearer as more studies are completed. According to the CDC, in 2001 African
Americans accounted for more than 833,000 estimated AIDS cases diagnosed
since the beginning of the epidemic. As a result, by the end of December 2001,
more than 168,000 African Americans had died from AIDS. That year, African
Americans accounted for about 21,000 or 50 percent of the more than 41,000
estimated new AIDS cases diagnosed among adults. In this area, the rates have
changed but African Americans are still not doing as expected compared to
other groups in the US. In 2014, for example, some 471,500 African Americans
were diagnosed with HIV, representing 43 percent of “everyone living with
HIV in the United States,” but 16 percent of them did not realize they had an
infection. In 2015, 3,379 African Americans died from HIV, which represented
“52 percent of the total deaths attributed to the disease that year.” By 2016, the
new rate, according to CDC, was estimated at 44 percent of the United States
total cases but the proportion was still higher compared to that of the white
population. This means that greater collaborative intervention efforts on the
part of stakeholders in the African American community, including spiritual
and religious leaders and organizations, educational systems, family systems of
diverse structures, professional practitioners, and those directly impacted by
HIV or AIDS must become involved in preventive efforts to reverse the
situation. Recently, HIV/AIDS has not become a death sentence, as several
treatments have proven to be effective in prolonging life.
756
The preceding figures were provided not only to underscore the dire needs of
the black family to survive and strive but also to highlight how far it has come
since the end of slavery in 1865. As demonstrated in the table below, with
figures provided by the Pew Research Center for the period 2014–2017, the
dogged persistence of problems related to poor college education,
unemployment, and poverty are emblematic of the work that still needs to be
done to rescue the African American family. There has been, in fact, a
precipitous drop in the number of African American married couples (35
percent as opposed to 60 among whites, respectively, and 68 percent among
Asian Americans), and the percentage of children living in a single-parent
household (54 percent as opposed to 19 percent among white families) is
alarming.
Other experts note that, while in 1962 only 12 percent of black children were
raised in single-parent homes, in 2015 the number has climbed as high as to 70
percent rather than the 54 percent noted above. As if to add insult to injury, the
rate of poverty among blacks in female singled-headed households is 37
percent. While in households where both parents raise a child, only 8 percent
live in poverty, in households where both parents have full-time employment,
the level of poverty is even less, namely, 5 percent. This prompts George
Mason University Professor Walter E. Williams (a conservative) to assert that
“the bottom line is that the black family was stronger the first 100 years after
slavery than during what will be the second 100 years.” The following selected
data published by the Children's Defense Fund in 2014 is a stark indication of
the precarious state of black families' children in the United States.
Table 2: Comparative Percentages of Racial Inequality among Four

Major Ethnic Groups in the U.S. (2015)
757
758
Many of the problems within the black community have economic and racial
bases. Thus, to understand and appreciate the economic difficulty of African
American families, four social and economic disadvantages that have plagued
African Americans must be understood.
First, African Americans own or control few businesses or other wealth-
enhancing or job-creating institutions. Second, African Americans have had
little accumulated wealth. Third, they have historically experienced racial
discrimination in their attempts to gain equal access to education and
employment opportunities controlled by whites. Finally, African Americans
have traditionally had lower levels of formal training and education than their
white counterparts. The impact of these economic circumstances on family
functioning is negative. The primary functions of the family are: (1) to provide
for the basic physical needs of its members and (2) to nurture them. Adequate
income is required to fulfill the provider role which, if accomplished, raises the
self-esteem of parents and consequently increases their ability to nurture their
children. As job opportunities decline and unemployment gains momentum, a
simultaneous decrease in two-parent families, increases in out-of-wedlock
births, and the growth of an underclass of families in poverty can be seen.
Table 3: State of African American Children in America in 2014

(Unless Otherwise Specified)
759
The federal government has, over the years, provided some assistance to
poor white and poor black families. As noted by Prater, the three primary forms
of services historically offered by child and family welfare agencies are
supportive services, supplemental services, and substitute services. These
services are generally mandated at the micro level (individual and family) while
using an ameliorative or restorative approach to service delivery for the purpose
of improving family functioning. Supportive services, such as child care and
760
counseling, provide help to families that are carrying out the basic caretaking
role and providing for the principle needs of their members. Supplemental
services are made available to families by the child welfare system to aid them
in meeting the basic family functions of feeding, clothing, housing, and
ensuring that adequate healthcare services are provided for their members.
These services are offered through programs such as Medicaid, the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) created by the Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. The latter replaces the
former Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the Job Opportunities and
Basic Skills Training (JOBS), and the Emergency Assistance Programs. Both
supportive and supplemental services are usually provided to families in their
own homes. Moreover, there is increased overlap of supportive and
supplemental services as the federal guidelines for states link supportive and
supplemental services such as child care with economic assistance such as
TANF.
The final primary service category is substitute services. These are generally
out-of-home services provided to children and families, when, for a myriad of
reasons, families are unable to provide for the basic needs of their members.
Examples of these services are foster care, group homes, and other institutional
care, adoption, and other permanency planning options such as guardianship. A
significant number of African American families interface with the child and
family welfare system in the supportive, supplemental, and substitute service
areas. Of importance is the fact that African American children are
disproportionately represented in the foster and group home and other
institutional care arenas. It should be further noted that extensive culturally
competent service delivery and policy formulation and implementation are
required to reverse this occurrence.
Child care provisions are especially important to support the goal of
promoting self-sufficiency through work. The law (PRWORA: P.L. 14-193) is
designed to streamline the federal government's role in child care services and
increase flexibility to states. Historically, “states' rights” over federal
government leadership have often not served the best interests of African
Americans. Implementation issues that disproportionately affect black families
include the extent to which child-care resources will be adequate to meet the
needs of eligible low-income families including those who receive welfare and
those who do not. Important factors for analysis and assessment are the specific
work requirements developed by the states for welfare recipients, whether
761
states comply with the federal work requirements, the amount of non-federal
resources committed to child care, and whether states will use all child-care
funds available from the federal government. Child care, including Head Start
and Early Start, is especially important for African American low-income and
poverty-stricken families, since the key to an economically self-sufficient and
stable family in the African American community is usually comprised of both
parents working in two-parent families. Further, it is necessary for a low-
income female-headed family to maintain a job or participate in education and
training for meaningful employment in order to approach sustainable economic
self-sufficiency. Therefore, available, affordable, quality child care is necessary
if this quest for self-sufficiency and family stability is to be achieved.
There is no doubt that, although the black family will survive, it will
continue to face tremendous obstacles, both from within and from without, and
solutions must be found to make its path more certain. In his article, “Critical
Issues for Black Families by the Year 2000,” Robert Hill outlines the problems
the institution will face: (1) recessions and inflation which, in the past, have
been extremely detrimental to the black community; (2) industrial shifts,
particularly of industrial jobs from the inner city to the suburb, a shift that has
always benefited the white middle class; (3) job mismatches, due to lack of
adequate training; (4) new immigration patterns, which will see an increase in
other minorities such as Hispanics and Asians fiercely competing with African
Americans in education, employment, and housing; (5) federal budget cuts and
tax reforms which could have an adverse impact on blacks; and (6) uncertain
welfare reforms and non-cash benefits, for which the black community must be
prepared.
Hill lists several important issues to be addressed by both the public and
private sectors in order to strengthen and stabilize the African American family
for the twenty-first century. These include: single parenthood, adolescent
pregnancy, sensitive child support policies, available quality child-care
services, formal foster care and adoption policies that build upon the informal
adoption practices of the black community (permanency planning for African
American children), family violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and the shortage
of marriageable men.
Minimizing the impact of the serious problems that plague the African
American family requires resources that build on the strengths of African
American cultural experiences. These include strengthening the delivery of
services to children and their families (which enhances family integrity and
762
decreases the risk of inappropriate placement) and promoting prevention and
early intervention services. Viewing the family as a system that deserves and
should receive services based on need is an important philosophical stance to
embrace if the goal is to improve the functioning of the African American
family. Family preservation services or family-centered services embrace this
philosophy and are designed with the intent of keeping families together and
preventing out-of-home placement in child welfare protective services, juvenile
justice, and mental health systems. The service providers (usually
professionally trained social workers) offer intensive, time-limited, family-
focused, and home-based services, including concrete and psycho-educational
services, and often achieve positive outcomes for troubled African American
families.
Empowering families is a common theme used in the family preservation or
family-centered therapeutic model. As Carol Williams indicates, the lack of
supports for families necessitates reshaping an impoverished policy
environment by creating a policy context that is supportive of families and that
minimally guarantees access to adequate income through training and
employment, prenatal and postnatal health care, adequate housing, early
intervention services of improved family functioning, and mental health and
drug-treatment services based on need. This form of public policy agenda
requires restructuring the delivery of services to abusive and neglectful families
so that families are preserved and reunified whenever feasible, while ensuring
protection of the children. It calls for the expansion of the permanency options
for children, which would include the following: (1) preservation of the family
of origin; (2) adoption, if the former is not feasible; and (3) legal guardianship
(a legal guardian is a person who has control over a minor's person or estate or
both by decree of the court for purposes of protecting the minor).
Hill sees the “attainment of economic self-sufficiency, strengthening and
stabilizing families, and developing viable and healthy communities” as the
most important broad tasks of the black community for it to survive during the
twenty-first century. Most scholars tend to agree that education, elimination of
racism (the problem of twentieth-century America, in Du Bois's view), and the
provision of job and wealth creation opportunities (including economic
development within the African American community) will go a long way in
solving the problems facing the black family today. However, of all culprits
that might explain the present conditions of the black family, besides racism
and discrimination, lack of adequate education and employment seem to be the
two major factors, as both behave like twin sisters that cause poverty and
763
instability.
Racism and discrimination have always been here and will continue to be
with us, but the courts and people of good will can minimize their intensity. In
this context, however, unemployment is like a cancer, and worsened recently
due to the flight of blue-collar jobs to the suburbs, a fixture of the big cities
where black families tend to live. Walter E. Williams, quoted earlier, stresses
the important negative role unemployment plays as opposed to the impact of
racism and discrimination. Williams notes that, in 1900, unemployment for
blacks was 15 percent; but, in 2016, it was 30 percent. Indeed, as another
expert, Steven Chapman, editorial writer and commentator of The Chicago
Tribune, emphasizes, “Without decent jobs these men [African American
males] are not likely to find wives or support families. They are not likely to get
married or stay married. If family breakdown causes poverty, poverty also
causes family breakdown.” One might also add, and rightly so, that without
good education and training, no one can have a secure future, especially in
times of rapid technological changes in employment patterns and
communication.
Caught in a catch-22 in a society where education plays a preponderant role,
the black American family finds itself squeezed in by the few relevant
opportunities it has to find a job and still afford going to school. It is a fact that
many black youngsters are not ready to face the job market because their skills
are not on par with those they need to have when, for example, going for an
interview. However, Walter Williams may have been exaggerating when he
said that “many black twelfth-graders [for example] deal with scientific
problems at the level of whites in the sixth-grade,” and therefore do not qualify
for well-paying jobs. Obviously, it is not just the fault of some parents who
cannot do better due to lack of adequate education, but also the poor quality and
often underfunded schools their children attend. However, by 2018, the level of
high school completion for black students had risen as high as 88 percent and
unemployment for a few black Americans declined to its lowest in decades, for
example, to 4.9 percent in cities like Omaha-Council Bluffs and to 4.5 percent
in San Antonio, Texas. Overall, life expectancy for African Americans leveled
at 73, with Connecticut registering 77.8 in 2017 (National Urban League, 2017:
13). If the country's economic conditions continue to create more jobs and
black family members are able to get the job training and education necessary
for self- and family-sustaining employment, then double-digit unemployment
for blacks will likely decline, forecasting a better future for black families
during the coming decades.
764
There are also good signs in the educational arena. For example,
undergraduate and graduate degree numbers (MAs, PhDs, JDs, and MDs) have
been steadily increasing over the years, even though they would most likely be
higher if inequalities were not as high. Indeed, though the figures tend to be
contradictory, indications are that the number of bachelor's degrees for students
25 years of age or older rose from 8 million in 1960 to 11 million in 1970, to 28
million in 2008, and to 29 million in 2011. Additionally, in 2004, 1,869
doctorates were conferred on African American candidates, of which 43.3
percent were in education, a 9 percent increase over the 2003 doctorates. In
2014, of the 54,070 new doctorates in the US, 6.4 percent (or 3,460) were
conferred on African Americans, which represented an increase of 4.1 percent
over those conferred on black Americans in 1994. Therefore, if education is the
door to success, much more needs to be done by the leaders and policy-makers,
both black and white, to increase the number of graduate and undergraduate
black students attending and completing their education in the United States of
America. Unfortunately, on policy matters, African American representation in
Congress has grown at a snail pace over the years. In the 113th Congress, for
example, the number was 43 in the House and one in the Senate. In the 115th
Congress (2017), however, the number grew to 46 in the House and three in the
Senate. This, of course, does not portend a bright future for the education of
African Americans, who represent about 14 percent of the American
population. This simply means that the struggle must continue.
765
Summary
The nature and the viability of the black family has been a focus of a heated
debate among scholars and community leaders. While a few see it as
pathological and decaying, the majority of the experts view the institution of
the black family as vibrant, but facing strong challenges resulting from racism,
inner city neglect, low income, and unemployment. Years of indifference on the
part of the federal government and state agencies as far as correcting the
shortcomings that have resulted from centuries of oppression have also
contributed to the difficult plight of the black community.
Among the weaknesses often pointed out are the high rates of unemployment
and illiteracy among blacks, drug use and prison occupancy, the shortage of
black men, high teenage pregnancy rates, and the increasing number of female-
headed households. However, those who believe that the black family is viable
emphasize that most black families are resilient and demonstrate considerable
strengths; that caring is certainly visible—particularly the love for children
(perhaps an African carry-over which puts primacy on children); and that the
sharing of responsibilities among the family members ensures its survival.
Some even point to major differences between the nature of the black family
and that of the white family: that the black family tends to be an egalitarian unit
in the decision-making process and, in the tradition of African families, it is
extended and cherishes kinship bonds (no matter how distant they might be),
and a sense of community. They further remind us that the successful struggles
the black family has endured to survive and provide shelter, food, clothing, and
emotional nurturing for each member of the family prove that it is here to stay.
The debate is not over yet, and more research is currently being conducted on
this critical issue. The methodology used and the assumptions of the researchers
have added to the debate, with some arguing that there is no typical African
American family, and others rejecting the tendency to view the white middle
class or, for that matter, the black middle class, as the ideal family—
monogamous, small, and able to provide all the necessities of life, including
leisure opportunities for the members of the household. Moynihan, who
initiated the controversial discussion that followed on the plight of the black
family in America, was criticized for pointing to some of the cultural practices
he saw as negative in it, such as what he called “matriarchy,” and the impact of
the extended family. However, it appears now that he was a very perceptive
politician and sociologist who had a point when he made one statement that has
766
been usually ignored by his critics. He ended his treatise on the problems of the
black family by noting that “Three centuries of injustice have brought about
deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American.... The cycle
can be broken only if these dislocations are set right.” The question is: How
does one solve the problem of unequal land ownership, for instance, when
African Americans, who constituted 13.3 percent or 40–43 million of the
population in the US in 2017, owned less than 1 percent of the rural land,
including farm land worth only $14 billion? White Americans, then, owned 98
percent of it, which translated into 856 million acres valued at $1 trillion. Thus,
the cause of the deep-seated problems of the black family in the US cannot be
attributed to the impact of racism and discrimination alone; it is the result of
many other factors, as pointed out in this chapter, meaning that single-causal
explanations of the conditions of the African Americans tend to miss the point.
767
1. Compare and contrast the conditions of the black family during slavery and
emancipation.
2. What are the factors that account for the high rate of poverty within the
black community, and what are some of the solutions proposed by the
experts and community leaders?
3. Read the writings of E. Franklin Frazier and those of Melville Herskovits
and assess the weight of their positions on African survivals in the black
community in America.
4. Why do you think the welfare of children is crucial to the survival of the
black community?
5. Would you agree with the view that the African American family is “sick”
and in danger of extinction or do you believe that it is alive and will continue
to survive and thrive as it adapts itself to new circumstances? Why?
6. What do you think are the areas in which the black family in America is
showing its strength?
768
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22
Religion in Africa
Mario J. Azevedo
773
Introduction
Throughout the centuries, religion has played a crucial role in the destiny of
humanity. It has shaped our outlook on the universe, provided an explanation of
our existence, and impacted our political, social, and economic behavior.
While, on the one hand, religion has brought harmony, strengthened the bonds
of brotherhood among peoples of the world, and fought racism and oppression,
it has, on the other hand, fostered injustices (as was the case with slavery,
colonialism, and apartheid), and reinforced global polarizations. On occasion, it
has likewise caused untold suffering, as illustrated by the impact of the
Inquisition in medieval Europe, the Crusades and the jihads (Islamic holy
wars), the wars and the unending conflicts between Catholics and Protestants,
and the vicious splits between moderates, fundamentalists, and the orthodox
within the Christian denominations themselves, as well as within Islam. More
recently, religion has exacerbated the violent political cleavages among
continental Africans, with Nigeria, Chad, and Sudan being the prime examples.
The following chapter takes a broad look at the state and role of three major
religions in Africa: Islam, Christianity, and Traditionalism.
Major terms and concepts: Islam, Christianity, Traditionalism, ancestor,
sasa, zamani, jihad, Muslim brotherhood, Qur'an, colonialism, monotheism,
polytheism, slavery, civil rights, the five pillars of Islam, pantheism, ontology,
cosmology, eschatology.
774
In contrast to both Islam and Christianity, it is much more difficult to discuss
Africa's traditional religion. First of all, what has been called Traditionalism
does not have a sacred book as does Islam or Christianity, no known religious
founders, no proselytizers or missionaries coming from foreign lands and
roving in the countryside to secure coverts, and no marabouts (hermits, saints),
or priests on the Western model. Furthermore, to the outsider, it looks as if
African religion has no temples of worship, no representations of God, no
reformers or prophets, and no complex dogmas. African religion prescribes no
specific days of worship consistently held during the week, month, or year, as
in the West. To add to the confusion of looking for uniform, organized religious
practices, the first missionaries realized that virtually no traditional African
society subjects children to formal and consistent “catechetical” training and
drilling about religious beliefs and dogmas as is the standard practice in
Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. To the outside world, especially Euro-
Christians, Africans either had no religion or theirs was an “invisible” one.
This seeming void frustrated Christian missionaries as they began their work
on the African continent, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, and searched for
authentic African religious beliefs they could contrast to their own. The
problem was and still is compounded by the fact that little is written about
Traditionalism (formerly labeled as paganism, heathenism, or even animism)
because most literate Africans tend to be either Christians or Muslims, or,
occasionally, atheists, and therefore are rarely interested in preserving or
clarifying the African supernatural belief system.
Experts such as John Mbiti, Fr. Placide Tempel, Geoffrey Parrinder,
Benjamin Ray, and others, however, tell us that African religion is as complex
as other religions of the world, in its attempt to explain humankind's existence
on the planet and the issues of life and death. Unfortunately, a discussion of the
African religious system must always carry the following caveat: one is entitled
to talk of African religion only if one stresses the common elements of religious
beliefs in Africa. If the emphasis, however, is on the differences (specific
beliefs, rituals, and responsibilities, for example) from region to region and
from ethnic group to ethnic group, then the expression “African religions” is
more appropriate, although it renders matters more complicated. Thus, while
Mbiti writes of African Religion, Benjamin Ray titles his book African
Religions. Therefore, only the common elements of traditional religion are
775
discussed in this essay. Interestingly, as David Westerbund has uncovered in
his study, continental African scholars tend to see similarities rather than
differences in African religious practices. He attributes that to the fact that
African scholars are more interested in creating or preserving the sense of
nationhood and in fostering social solidarity in Africa than in pointing to
differences, which can only perpetuate the strength of the ethnic group's
affiliation.
The term Traditionalism in the present context refers to those supernatural
beliefs and rituals that have existed on the continent since time immemorial
without being intrinsically tampered with by foreign influences. Consequently,
the word “indigenous” describes the concept better. An analysis of
Traditionalism in Africa, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, reveals the
following common features. First, African religion postulates the existence of
one Supreme Being, God in Western terminology, for which every African
language has its own term. This God is creator of the universe, omniscient,
omnipotent, omnipresent, and caring. Perceived in anthropomorphic (human-
like) form, he lives way up in the skies, and therefore stands remote from his
creatures. Accordingly, on special occasions only, man appeals or prays to Him
directly (e.g., when a community is threatened by such calamities as epidemics,
continued drought, and unexplained deaths that befall members of a family), as
is the case among the Kikuyu and Maasai of Kenya. Otherwise, man must avail
himself of intermediaries: the spirits (sometimes inappropriately labeled by
Western experts as deities, gods or lesser gods, making African societies
polytheistic). In this context, therefore, the overwhelming majority of African
societies are essentially monotheistic in the sense that they worship only one
Supreme God.
In the traditional setting, true worship is only reserved to the Great God
because everything else is subordinate to Him. The spirits are designed to
protect humankind or to punish evil-doers and serve as intermediaries or
mediators between God and man, playing a role similar to that of Christ or the
saints in Christianity. Ancestors, who are venerated rather than worshiped, are
those important people who lived in a community, left offspring, led an
exemplary life, and have joined the everlasting world of spirits. They are the
protectors of the community and guarantors of morals. As such, they are the
living-dead, who can also reward and punish. Evil-doers are quickly forgotten
by the community, since the eschatological (related to the end of time) concepts
of final judgment, purgatory, eternity, hell, and heaven are not part of African
religious traditions. Thus, while going to hell in Africa can be equated to being
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forgotten by one's community because of the evil deeds one committed on
earth, being in heaven is remaining in the memory of the living as the “living-
dead.” In this context, God is not a capricious and an imperfect being that
constantly changes his mood by getting mad or happy, and spending His time
determining how to punish or reward humans. This function is essentially
reserved for the ancestors.
Mbiti makes an interesting point about the African concept of time. He
claims that Africans are mainly concerned with the recent past, the present, and
the immediate future (two years at maximum), which he calls the micro-time or
sasa (a Swahili word). The remote past, the macro-time, or zamani (another
Swahili concept), equivalent, at maximum, to five generations, is meaningless
or incomprehensible to them. Thus, the relevant immortality of the soul applies
only to sasa, which Mbiti calls personal immortality. Once the last living
member who might remember the deceased dies, the living-dead (ancestor)
falls into zamani, achieving collective immortality as a spirit, and becomes
irrelevant to his or her community. If Mbiti is correct, therefore, the limited
number of eschatological concepts (those that refer to the future) in African
Traditional religion may be well explained. In fact, Mbiti attempts to prove his
point by noting that the future tense in most African languages applies only to
up to two years. It is within the context of sasa and zamani that deceased
individuals, no matter how virtuous they might have been during their lifetime
on earth, never share of the divinity of the creator or the place (heaven) where
God is thought to live. We might say, therefore, that, if there are irreconcilable
differences between Christianity or Islam and Traditionalism, they lie mainly in
the nature of the after-life (if Mbiti's study is accepted).
On the other hand, however, African Traditionalists, just as the Christians do,
make sacrifices, involving (1) the shedding of the blood and the viscera of an
animal or bird, usually a lamb, a goat, or a chicken and (2) consumption of
meat by those officiating the ritual, who may be priests, elders, or selected
others. Offerings to the spirits consist of foodstuffs, during harvest, e.g., water,
milk, honey, drinks (as a libation) or even money. Prayers for good health, rain,
success, and protection against the elements are usually accompanied by
offerings and sacrifice and by singing and dancing. Africans may worship at
specific places (such as a forest, a tree, a shrine, a cemetery, a simple altar, or
the back of the household dwelling), as is the case among the Yoruba of
Nigeria. In the past, many societies built elaborate temples, as was the case in
Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. As a result of Western
intrusion, says Mbiti, very few of these are left or built these days. Shrines, both
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private and communal, are the most common religious places, and are found all
over Africa. Africans also perform rituals that are specifically related to birth or
death, adulthood or marriage, and the seasons, and thus may be related to
agriculture (planting and first fruits), stock-keeping, milking, bloodletting,
health, and other occasions that follow the rhythm of life. African
Traditionalists may use images as well to represent the spirit or the spiritual
world (e.g., sculpture, masks, and statuettes) and symbols that carry spiritual
content and message. On such occasions, “priests” (rarer now with the fading of
the temples, especially in East and Central Africa), elders, chiefs, or heads of
the family may be officiating. These may be called “specialists,” to use Mbiti's
terminology.
Contrary to Western or Middle Eastern tradition, in traditional Africa,
children are exposed to religion in their daily lives and not necessarily through
special sermons, daily chanting or memorization (as with Islam), or through
years of schooling. The constant indirect or direct, brief admonitions from the
parents and the clan, the songs, the proverbs, the riddles, and the rituals, all
reinforce the religious message about God, the spirits, or the ancestors. In this
sense, therefore, children grow up in a religion which permeates their entire life
cycle. As some experts put it, “African religion is life and African life is
religion.” Among societies that practice initiation ceremonies or rites of
passage that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood, religious
instruction simply becomes not a lesson apart from but a part of the process of
learning about one's responsibilities and rights as a member of society.
Africanist theologians tell us that African cosmology (view of the universe or
cosmos) evolves around the idea of a God who is (or transmits) a vital force,
which in turn informs everything living or non-living. This is not, however,
conceived in a pantheistic sense (or that everything is God and can therefore be
worshiped). It is this ontological (relative to being) view that has led Western
theologians and philosophers to use the word animism for African religion(s).
Actually, animism is an inaccurate concept that does not express the true
meaning of African belief systems. Indeed, African traditionalists do not
believe that a man, a lamb, a bird, a stone, the wind and water, the sun and the
moon all have souls or that they are gods (which must be worshiped), as the
word animism, derived from the Latin word anima, implies.
It must also be acknowledged here that, because African traditional religion
is not compartmentalized, scholars find it hard to classify certain traditions
(sorcery, for example) as religious or simply as aspects of culture which would
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have endured even if Africans were atheists. For example, the Western beliefs
that a black cat crossing the street or the number 13 are omens of bad luck are
characterized as superstition in Western tradition because they have no
provable basis. However, to the extent that sorcery, witchcraft, divination, and
magic contain elements of the supernatural (as naturally inexplicable) and are
sometimes a part of the religious ritual in Africa, they may be discussed in the
context of traditional religion.
To be sure, sorcery is a willfully acquired power to cause evil in others. A
sorcerer, usually thought to be a female, is believed to travel even long
distances at night, causing death, illness, injuries, or bad luck to enemies,
animals, and even crops through secret spells and poisoning. Witchcraft, on the
other hand, is an inborn (innate), uncontrollable power to cause evil in other
people through words, rituals, incantations, and magical objects such as nails,
hair, cloth, and other people's possessions, according to Mbiti. Both powers are,
of course, socially unacceptable and are viewed as evil states of mind and
immoral behavior which must be eradicated or whose potential harm must be
prevented by securing (in most cases) the help of medicine-men (often
pejoratively labeled as witchdoctors), oracles, mediums (those who can
establish contact with the spirit world), diviners or fortune-tellers and seers
(those able to see things others cannot see), both of whom can also be
medicine-men. The triad of sorcerer, witch, and medicine-man or traditional
healer (TRH) exists in every Sub-Saharan African society. While sorcery and
witchcraft are symptoms of a sick society, medicine men or medicine-women
exist to mend society both physically and spiritually. Some studies have shown,
for example, that the frequency of sorcery and witchcraft cases increased with
the advent of colonialism due to the unique suffering it caused and that, in time
of crisis, the cases tend to intensify. This seems to have been the case during
the German occupation of Tanganyika, which led to the 1905–1907 Maji Maji
Rebellion against the Germans, and during World War I, with the so-called War
Effort. Thus, sorcerers and witches, once discovered, are brought to public trial,
ostracized, and sometimes killed through poisoning or deadly rituals. They may
also be forced to pay compensation proportional to the evil or misfortune
“inflicted” on the victim, the family, or the clan.
Magic, on the other hand, is the ability to manipulate the powers of nature or
the “vital force,” to use Father Temple's expression. As such, magic can be
good, as is the case when a chief is believed to bring rain after a period of
severe drought, or bad, as when a medicine-man might “inflict” pain in a
patient who refuses to pay promised consultation or treatment fees. Beliefs in
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the supernatural powers of the witch, the sorcerer, the medicine-man, or the
healer, the diviner, and the fortune teller are widespread and strong in Sub-
Saharan Africa and are therefore hardly abandoned totally even by devout
Christians or Muslims. This reality has caused great frustration and
discouragement among Western missionaries, some of whom have concluded
that an African, even after generations, can never be a true Christian. In fact,
one may find Catholics who receive Communion at Mass at 10:00 a.m. on
Sunday or speak in tongues during an Apostolic Church service and then go
home and pour libations to the spirits or the ancestors. Interestingly, TRH's,
who incurred the wrath of the missionaries, are now being officially
rehabilitated all over Africa because of their knowledge of human nature and
familiarity with the curative power of certain trees, roots, and leaves. It is
acknowledged now that they can successfully diagnose and treat several blood
diseases. As a result, they remain very popular even among the educated
Africans, who go to them when Western medicine is unavailable or ineffective.
This explains why so many African religious beliefs remained among
transplanted Africans in the Americas—in the Voodoo rituals of Haiti, for
example, in the Santeria of Brazil, and in the highly emotional Baptist and
Pentecostal Churches of black Americans in the United States, in which the
state of “possession” by the spirit among the worshippers, as in Africa, is
common.
Finally, it should be said that, because religious beliefs are absorbed
naturally and become an intrinsic part of the self of the African child as he or
she grows to become a man or a woman, traditional religion, contrary to what
we are told by partisan Muslim and Christian statistics alike, presently marshals
more followers on the continent than the other two faiths. However, the future
of Traditionalism in Africa is at risk stemming from several forces, including:
(1) absence of a proselytizing zeal; (2) lack of an effort to religiously organize
across clans; (3) eternal tolerance for other religions on the part of
Traditionalists (who, for example, have never gone to war to stop foreign
crusaders or to impose their beliefs on others); (4) and the fact that education
has meant Westernization, which has implied abandonment of essential
traditional teachings. Indeed, while Africa faces growing atheism on the part of
its young men and women who live in the large urban centers, the roots of
Traditionalism are constantly weakened by aggressive attempts by both
Christianity and Islam, in particular, to find new followers. To its credit,
however, it must be said that Traditionalism has never been a religion of
divisiveness on the continent. By contrast, even though Christians are supposed
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to be united by their belief in Christ's incarnation, death, resurrection, and
second coming, they are nevertheless desperately disunited, making the current
ecumenical efforts virtually non-inconsequential. The controversial ordination
of a gay bishop in the US Episcopal Church in October 2003 proves the point
beyond a doubt. Likewise, the rivalry between Christianity and Islam in Africa
has contributed to wars in Nigeria, Sudan, and Chad, and to riots and military
coups in other parts of the continent. What did Christ say about loving one's
neighbor?
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Christianity has become one of the oldest major religions in Africa. This has
prompted renowned Kenyan theologian and philosopher John Mbiti to note in
his African Philosophies and Religion (1969) that “Christianity in Africa is so
old that it can rightly be described as indigenous, traditional and African
religion.” Three major phases characterized the spread of this religion on the
African continent. First was the arrival of Christianity in North and Northeast
Africa, as early as the first century A.D. The Coptic Church in Egypt and the
Orthodox Church in Ethiopia claim that St. Mark, the Gospel writer,
evangelized the area and converted many Africans. It is also known that, during
the fourth century, Ezanas, Emperor of Ethiopia (or Abyssinia), made
Christianity the religion of the state, as depicted in the Ethiopian flag and the
symbols of the era. Likewise, Nubia and parts of present Chad had become
Christian enclaves up until the coming of Islam during the seventh century.
Northern Sudan did not succumb to Islam until the sixteenth century, while, in
Ethiopia, Islam made limited inroads (except in parts of Eritrea, where both
Islam and Christianity have maintained a strong foothold).
Interestingly enough, the earlier African Church was much more creative and
vibrant than the present, taking part in the most important activities of the
Church of Rome. Thus, the contributions to theology, asceticism, and
monasticism by famous African clerics such as Saint Augustine (a Berber who
became Bishop of Hippo and turned out to be a renowned theologian who
wrestled with the mystery of the Trinity), Tertullian (150–258), Cyprian (200–
258), Origen (182–251), Clement of Alexandria (d. 215), and others have not
gone unnoticed among informed and interested scholars. Their writings, their
influence in Church synods and councils, their defense of the Christian doctrine
as they interpreted it, and their sometimes independent thinking,
notwithstanding the position of Rome, attest to the extraordinary role the early
African Christian Church played in Christendom. While Augustine attempted to
explain the Trinity, for example, Clement and Origen synthesized Platonism
and Christianity. As a result of the theological and philosophical activity of the
early Church Fathers in North Africa, for a long time it was not clear whether
Rome would continue to be the seat of Christianity. However, the invasion of
North Africa by the Vandals in 429 and the subsequent fall of the city of Hippo
in 431 (St. Augustine died during the siege of the city), the seventh-century
Islamic onslaught, and theological differences with Rome, contributed to the
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decline of the primordial Christian Church and to the ultimate independence of
the Coptic Church (centered in Alexandria, Egypt). Leaders of the new Coptic
Church eventually refused to recognize the authority of the bishop of Rome, the
pope, as the successor to Peter.
The second phase was spurred by the arrival of the Portuguese on the coast
of Africa after 1415. Officially, the Portuguese voyages were intended
primarily to reach India by sea and to fight the so-called Moors or African
Muslims who threatened Western Europe and the Holy Land. Increasingly,
however, the voyages became religious crusades, designed also to spread
Christendom and allow the forging of an alliance between the Portuguese and
the legendary Christian king Prester John, identified as the emperor of Ethiopia
only in 1505. As a result, not only was the Church of Ethiopia revitalized with
the coming of the Portuguese, but the newcomers established missions in
Angola, Congo, Mozambique, Benin, Mwenemutapa, Mombasa, and other
parts of Africa. In the Congo, for example, they converted the royal family and
one of the kings, Afonso (baptized a Catholic with this Portuguese name), had
one of his sons ordained a priest. In Mwenemutapa, Father Gonçalo da Silveira
converted the king, his family, and his court in 1560. (In 1561, however, the
Jesuit priest was murdered, and the Portuguese implicated the king in the plot,
even though some accounts blame the murder on the jealousies and intrigues of
Arab merchants.) During this phase, the Portuguese did most of the missionary
activity. The Spanish, the French, the Dutch, and the British focused mainly on
legitimate trade. The decline of the Portuguese in Europe, the intensity of the
Atlantic slave trade, which replaced earlier trading activities, the anti-
clericalism of the Marquis of Pombal, once Prime Minister of Portugal (1750–
1777), and subsequent anti-religious actions undertaken by the Portuguese
government contributed to the rapid deterioration of the Church in Africa.
Dominicans, Jesuits, Franciscans, and other religious orders, for example, were
expelled from the Portuguese colonies during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, leaving hundreds of churches totally abandoned.
One of the root problems encountered by these Euro-Christian Churches in
Africa was the failure to train and ordain an indigenous clergy. Unfortunately,
the same problem was to plague the next phase, particularly within the Catholic
Church. There was a minor revival of Christianity at the end of the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, when Sierra Leone and Liberia were created,
ushering in a good number of African Americans and West Indians, such as
Bishop Edward Wylmott Blyden (1832–1912), whose mission, as they stated it,
was to “civilize and Christianize Africa.” However, the era of real revival of
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Christianity in Africa coincided with the advent of colonialism, following the
Berlin Conference (1884–1885). The Berlin Act forbade discrimination of
religious activity on account of denomination both on the coast and in the
interior of Africa.
In this effort, Protestant missionaries outdid the Catholic Church in most of
Africa. The Anglicans (in West and Central Africa) and the Baptists, the
Seventh-Day Adventists, the Methodists, and the Presbyterians (in South-
Central Africa) outpaced the work of the Catholic missionaries who became
active mostly in the Portuguese, Belgian, and some French colonies, and in
Uganda. (In South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church had been taking root
since 1652, but Anglicans and Catholics also established missions and parishes
there during the nineteenth century.) As a result of colonial occupation,
missionaries found it easier to gain access to Africa's remote areas to the extent
that, prior to independence, Africans were being converted to Christianity in
unprecedented numbers. Yet, it was feared that, after independence, Africans
would abandon the old Euro-Christian tradition along with its various
denominations and sects. However, the prophets of doom saw the numbers of
conversions soar after 1960 as the Church continued to Africanize itself in
ritual and personnel, while simultaneously attempting to meet the social needs
of the faithful. Consequently, during the early 1990s, the number of Christians
on the continent was estimated at more than 200 million out of a total
population of 750 million Africans (26 percent) and, according to the
Encyclopædia Britannica Almanac, as of 2003 there were 394 million out of a
total population of 851 million (46 percent), and perhaps 690 million out of a
population of some 1.256 billion in 2017 (or 55 percent).
Notwithstanding the controversy over the methods, the role played by the
Church in Africa's development, particularly in health and education, has been
heralded even by critics as pivotal. Indeed, it is acknowledged that Christian
missions educated more Africans than the colonial governments. Missionaries
established the first schools in most areas, including the remote hinterland; built
the first health care centers; and promoted several indigenous languages
through the collection of folklore and translation of the Bible. Many religious
orders, such as Cardinal Lavigerie's Missionaries of Africa (also known as
White Fathers), urged their clergy to learn and speak African languages so they
could better communicate with the faithful. In spite of the emphasis
missionaries laid on religion to the neglect of the political and social well being
of the Africans, it is a known fact that, in most of Africa, the first African
nationalists and leaders were products of mission schools. Skillfully using the
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arguments of equality preached but rarely observed by the missionaries
themselves or the colonial government, the new nationalists successfully
challenged the imposed European presence on the continent. Even the late
Walter Rodney, who, in general, argued against the colonial Christian Church
in almost every respect, admitted that the Church contributed to the end of the
killing of twins and trials by ordeal among certain African societies.
Unfortunately, however, missionary work was also plagued with many
shortcomings. As noted earlier, most mission schools and parishes made little
attempt to train a local clergy and adapt the Church to African cultures and
realities. The continued use of the Latin in Catholic liturgy, even when Vatican
II had lifted a ban on the use of vernacular languages, the wholesale adoption of
European hymns in Church celebrations and services, the use of white images
and symbols in churches and in teaching, and proscription of African musical
instruments in worship proved that the Church was insensitive to Africa's
valued traditions. There were other problems: the proliferation of
denominations, which desperately confused the uninformed faithful; the
emphasis on elementary education to the neglect of secondary or university
education for Africans; the constant chastisement of African values and
customs, particularly the practice of polygamy; and the deliberate restraint
imposed on the expression of spontaneous emotions in church services,
particularly among the Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Methodists—all
constituted insurmountable contradictions for the institution. More importantly,
the racist attitude of many of the missionaries, ministers, pastors, and priests
became a major issue for Christians Africans.
The most severe problem facing the Church on the continent, however, was
the (often correct) African perception that the Church was in collusion and in
alliance with the colonial authorities—hence the experts' fear that the end of
colonialism in Africa also meant the eventual demise of Christianity on the
continent. As Professor Nyang in his Islam, Christianity, and African Identity
(1984) puts it, “When Africa finally came under colonial rule, the European
missionary found himself in a very difficult position. Though protected by the
colonial regime from the attacks and harassments of an unruly population
somewhere within the newly established colony, his national and racial
association with those manning the colonial apparatus soon exposed him to
African suspicion and hostility.” These contradictions and shortcomings
account for the rise of African independent (Ethiopian or Zionist) churches on
the continent, especially during the 1920s and 1930s. For example, the racist
attitudes of the American Zulu Mission founded in Natal, South Africa, in
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1844, which refused to ordain black ministers, lost many of its members who
joined other churches or founded their own. In 1888, the Lagos Baptist Church,
led by Rev. D. B. David, a segregationist American missionary, saw 200 of its
204 members leave and follow Moses Stone and D. B. Vincent, who
established their own Native Baptist Church. The Methodist Episcopal Church
founded in Inhambane, Mozambique, in 1895 and supervised by an American
racist missionary by the name of Erwin H. Richard, lost in 1917 many of its
members, who went on to found the Mozambique Independent Methodist
Episcopal Church under the leadership of Muti M. Sikbele. Richard is said to
have been such a racist that he once wrote that the African “is stark naked for
the most part and full of lecherous sores and his spiritual nature is so very low
that his breath would pollute the waters of the Stygian Lake—of which it is said
that it stunk so bad the birds were unable to fly over it” (Gershoni, 1997: 19).
One recalls also the outcome of the 1920s and 1930s fight between Christian
missionaries and African converts over the issue of circumcision and
clitoridectomy in Kenya, which led to the creation of several independent
African churches and schools. The African Inland Mission, the Gospel Mission,
and the Church of Scotland Mission (CSM) in Kikuyu country, the latter led by
zealot crusader Rev. John Arthur of the CSM in 1929, lost 90 percent of their
members and almost 80 percent of their African school children, whose parents
and teachers refused to sign a pledge to abandon the rites of passage to
adulthood. Some independent churches, as was the case of Simon Kimbangu's
in the former Belgian Congo during the 1920s, became veiled nationalist
stages, prompting the colonial administration to incarcerate the leaders.
(Kimbangu died in jail after being incarcerated for 30 years.) Other independent
churches and sects that sprang up in Central and East Africa were genuine
attempts at creating indigenous African Christian institutions, just as the
Europeans had created theirs, which they subsequently propagated with racial
overtones in Africa. Independent churches were established as an attempt to
explain African suffering under colonialism and its organized religious
institutions. In the process, the leaders of Kimbanguism, Khakism, Tonsism,
Mpandism, and several others weaved together selected Christian teachings and
African traditional beliefs.
Interestingly, many of the churches were also millenarian and messianic in
character, extracted from the cheaply available American Watch Tower
writings (in African languages) and the preaching of the Seventh-Day
Adventists, predicting that the impending thousand years were at hand and that
the Messiah would come to end the rule of the white church and liberate
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Africans from the shackles of colonialism. Watch Tower followers, some of
whom had familiarized themselves with the Marcus Garvey's radical racial
philosophy embedded in his Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA), rejected the church hierarchical structure and embraced the “more
fundamentalist, egalitarian interpretations of the Scriptures,” considering all
governments as Satanic and the organized churches as “Satan's emissaries.”
Basing their teachings on the Old Testament, they predicted an Apocalyptic
(God-revealed) Armageddon (i.e., the last battle between evil and good) that
would pit Goliath (the white world) against David (the suffering African
people) and end in David's victory! In fact, in the process, some leaders
proclaimed themselves the anointed Messiahs and incited their congregations to
take up arms against colonial rule only to be incarcerated and at times killed by
the colonial administration. For example, Tomo Nyiremba of Nyasaland,
educated at the Scottish Livingstonia Mission, formed a very popular
millenarian sect in the then Northern Rhodesia during the mid-1920s, where
people considered him to be “the resurrection of their traditional god [sic]”
(Gershoni, 44). His Nyasaland Tonga friend, Elliot Kamwana, also educated at
the same mission, had founded his own messianic church as a local branch of
the Watch Tower in October 1908. Nyiremba changed his name to Mwana
Lesa, meaning the Sun of God in the Lala language. Some of the leaders were
so zealous that they went after those who were accused of witchcraft, which
they considered to be anti-social and anti-Christian. Thus, while Tomo
Nyiremba, mentioned above, led a crusade against it and executed 174
“witches” in Northern Rhodesia and former Belgian Congo before the
authorities stopped him, William Wade Harris, calling himself a “prophet” in
Côte d'Ivoire (1913–1915), “destroyed fetishes and offered baptism as
protection from evil spirits” (Gershoni, 1997). For obvious reasons, the
independent church movement has continued to spread in Africa even today,
and it is reported that, during the 1990s, a total of some 4,000 independent
churches and sects flourished on the continent.
In an effort to learn from its past mistakes, Christianity in Africa today is
becoming an action-orientated institution. In order to be relevant, it is making
strides to preserve those cultural elements that are not specifically condemned
by the Gospels; allows the laity to take an active part in matters and decisions
that affect their various dioceses, parishes, and congregations; and stresses the
importance of achieving happiness in this life, if at all possible. In fact, as
David Thebehali asks (in A New Look at Christianity, 1972):
Why should not a black man be called to church by a big drum, as he
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was generally called to any public meeting? Why in the name of reason
and common sense should not a black man bear his name, and wear his
own garments? Why, indeed, other than that the simple missionaries
had from the beginning ruled that all these things were against the spirit
of the Gospel which they saw as inalienably wedded to their Western
culture?
As a result, today's Church in Africa is increasingly being staffed totally by
Africans, whose leaders are finally becoming bishops, cardinals, deacons, and
pastors in their own countries, positions which had been reserved for the white
clergy in years past. The Anglicans, for example, demonstrated their
commitment and pragmatism even in apartheid South Africa with the
consecration of now retired Desmond Tutu as their first African Archbishop. To
the extent that Christianity attempts to adapt itself to the African reality, as is
now the trend, and continues to provide educational opportunities and health
care for the needy, as it did prior to independence, it has a bright future on the
continent. In this context, is it not amazing that in 2005, within the Catholic
Church, before the election of Benedict XVI, there was speculation that the
next pope would have to be an African cardinal. This did not happen due to
internal politics. Instead, the compromise was the election of Jorge Mario
Bergoglio, who chose to be called Francis I.
As we close the discussion of Christianity in the chapter, we need to spend a
few moments outlining what ultimately bothers many Christians, educated and
non-educated, in Africa. There are scholars who convincingly argue that
Christianity in the world, especially in Europe and America, is in a deep crisis
in this period called post-modern. A known book, titled Christianity in Crisis:
The 21st Century, written by Hank Hanegraaff 20 years ago, makes the point
that Christians were experiencing a major crisis over their “non-Biblical
identity” brought about by preachers who are not agents or initiators of change
but imposters who are followers of “a bizarre cultural array of fads and
formulas.” Hanegraaff contends that the Christian Church is no longer able to
answer life's fundamental questions about who one is, why one is here, and
where one will go. He places the blame on the false prophets that claim to
speak in the name of Jesus as many Evangelicals do, particularly the so-called
charismatic Pentecostals, and the Christian cults that are nothing more than
“neo-pagan movements, leading many Europeans to Buddhism, Hinduism,
Shamanism, and witchcraft.” He also makes the point that some use
Christianity as a means of expressing their traditional racist views.
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Although much can be said today about the decay of Christianity, there
seems to be no evidence to indicate that the situation has, as a result, become a
bonanza for the other religions, such as Hinduism, as they still have to work
hard to get converts. The current evidence seems to show that there are no mass
conversions to the oriental religions either, although people may admire certain
of their practices such as the routine meditation and the teachings about respect
for other human beings. Other onlookers contrast European and North
American Christianity, which they see as experiencing a religious implosion or
shrinking from within, contrasted to Africa, said to be undergoing a massive
conversion to Christianity. In Africa, the current annual rate of conversion is
estimated by some at 2.78 percent, making the African continent 55 percent
Christian, contrasted to that of Europe, where the annual rate of conversion is
around only .16 percent. In fact, some had predicted years ago that, by the year
2015, African Christianity would have surpassed that of Europe in number.
This is, of course, a far cry from 1910, when Africa was only 10 percent
Christian.
If these forecasts are accurate, they mean that Christianity in Africa is
growing even faster than Islam, contrary to what one hears in the news and
reads in most of the general literature. Writing on Nigeria and Christianity, for
example, the not-so-well-known Rev. Danny McCain claims that, in more ways
than not, Christianity in Africa has become more “Africanized, bigger, younger,
livelier, and brighter,” yet, more “enthusiastic” but less “rationalist,” more
“conceptualist but less synchronistic,” which he figuratively describes as “one
mile wide” [in numbers] but only “an inch deep [in understanding and
practice].” He adds that the African Church is imbued with no intellectualism
but is extremely emotional in nature, often forgetting its mission of fighting for
social justice and providing assistance to the needy. The scandals that have
plagued the Western Church, especially in America, at the hands of such
televangelists as Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and several
others, and the well-publicized cases of pedophilia among the Catholic clergy,
perpetrated, however, by a very tiny minority, have all certainly made
Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, less convincing and therefore less attractive
to many onlookers, even though many Church goers tend to quickly forgive
their pastors' transgressions. Of course, the scandals of the Church in Africa
itself should not be swept under the rug.
Islam, on the other hand, has been heralded as the faith that is growing faster
than Christianity in Africa, a claim considered suspicious by some in view of
counter-claims over the past few decades. Yet, notwithstanding the known
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cultural advantages that Islam seems to have in Africa, it has recently hurt itself
through the activities of sects that claim to derive their actions from their
interpretations of the Koran, just as Al-Shabab of Somalia, that has carried out
deadly attacks in that country and in neighboring Kenya, Boko Haram of
Nigeria, now causing deaths in Nigeria itself, Chad, Cameroon, and Niger, and
other violent movements, including followers of ISIS, have done in parts of
Africa over the past 10 years.
Christianity is, indeed, growing in Africa but the question remains whether
Africans do actually abandon all the cultural and religious practices that were
considered “pagan” by Christendom. Indeed, it is not unusual, a point made in
this chapter, that many Christians in Africa, including the highly educated,
might go to a service or Mass on Sunday and receive the sacraments but still
not hesitate to offer sacrifices to the dead and the ancestors and consult the
traditional healers, often called witches by the Christian West. The problem is
that the West has equated Christianity with its own cultural values and has used
conversion to Christianity as a way of spreading its way of life, its exclusivist
perspectives on the universe, and its own speculations or rationalizations about
what happens after life on earth. Furthermore, Christianity has been used not
just to exclude others, but also, as Hanegraaff has said, to explain racism by
distorting the teachings of the Bible.
The other problem the Church has encountered in Africa has come from its
conversion method: There is often intimidation of potential followers and those
already converted by a consistent focus on hell for the “evil” doers, such as all
“pagans” and unbelievers, as opposed to an emphasis on Christ's teachings,
succinctly captured in the sentence “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
Are our churches in Africa and elsewhere, seen almost on every corner, really
spiritual sanctuaries of unconditional love and peace, and not institutions and
facilities engaged primarily in financial profiteering as disguised businesses
intent on making the leaders rich, allowing them to lead a life of opulence when
their “flock” is poor and destitute but still asked, over and over again, to give
and give more, from their meager monetary resources? Is this what Christ
meant when he told his listeners to get rid of their possessions if they wished to
be his disciples? Wasn't Christ calling his followers to be poor in spirit and not
be consumed by a love of material, finite trappings of this world, to feed the
hungry and not be fed by the hungry, and serve the flock and not be served by
the flock?
Finally, in the matter of love your neighbor, which is understood as
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unconditional, regardless of color, origin, nationality, and, these days, sexual
orientation, as the Apostle Paul taught and lived, the Church does exactly the
opposite. When Africans, for example, come to the United States, the first thing
they notice on Sundays are church services completely segregated by race or
skin color and religious differences! When missionaries arrive in Africa, they
and their families always live apart, enjoying the best things in life, but still
constantly asking the people for their monetary contributions and time! What
type of example is that to their critical Christian thinkers and potential
followers? To this must be added the silent question Africans have for
Christianity: How come there are no concerted efforts to convert the Jews, as
Paul and the Apostles did, the Muslims, the Chinese, and other peoples of the
world? Is it because Africans are perceived to be inherently weak and more
accepting of others, or because they are powerless or led by benign autocrats
that do not dare to hurt a citizen of another nation? If the reason is the latter,
then Africans seem to be more humane than many people that never hesitate to
use force or imprison indefinitely anyone against whom they often trump up
charges designed to intimidate the rest of the world. Born and raised a Catholic
in Africa, this author, who also spent 14 years to become a member of the
ministry one day, is always appalled to see people simply follow without
raising existential, fundamental questions whose clear answers could make their
lives more meaningful!
791
In an article on Islam published in The Cambridge History of Africa (1986),
C. C. Stewart echoes what many experts on Islam have observed, namely, that
“the most remarkable feature of Islam in twentieth century Africa has been the
rapidity with which diverse communities embraced the faith.” Unfortunately,
most estimates of the Muslim population in Africa are results of guess-work
and are often contradictory. While Ali Mazrui, himself a Muslim, quotes the
figure of 80 million in 1951 (from 40 million in 1931), and notes that, at that
time, out of 130 million Africans in Sub-Saharan Africa, 28 million were
Muslim, 17 million Christian, and 85 million Traditionalist, Geoffrey Parrinder
estimates that there were more than 83 million Muslims in Africa in 1966, 68
million Christians, and 130 million Traditionalists, out of a total population of
280 million Africans. John Mbiti, on the one hand, believes that, in 1969, the
number of Muslims and Christians in Africa approached the 100 million and
the 70 million mark respectively, while M. Ali Kettany, on the other hand,
provides the following figures: 202 million Muslims in 1971 to 276,190,000 in
1982, out of a total African population of 508,700,000 that year. Kettany adds
in his Muslim Minorities in the World Today (1986) that “Africa is the Muslim
continent of the world.” It would seem, however, that the true Muslim
population of Africa stood at less than 250 million during the late 1980s.1 The
World Almanac cites the figure of 264,132,000 Muslims for the year 1992, but
this number is still unreliable because it is based on an estimated total
population of 647,518,000 for Africa, when the UN figure was around 750
million for the continent in early 1991. As of mid-2003, the Encyclopædia
Britannica Almanac counts 344 million Muslims out of a total population of
851 million.
In spite of its foreign origins and the uncertainty over the numbers of its
adherents, there is no doubt that Islam has become one of the most widespread
religions on the African continent. The North, comprising Egypt, Tunisia,
Algeria, Libya, and Morocco, is practically all Muslim, while Nigeria, Senegal,
Sudan, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Niger, Somalia, Tanzania, Djibouti, Mali, and
Chad have large Muslim populations. At present, some studies predict that
Islam will continue to gain grounds over Christianity and Traditionalism. How
did Islam spread over Africa and why has it been so successful on the
continent?
792
Islam, meaning “submission” (to Allah), originated in what is now Saudi
Arabia, in the city of Mecca. Islam is based on the teachings of Muhammad
(570–632), who proclaimed himself the last of the prophets in the line of Moses
and Jesus, entrusted with a message from God by Archangel Gabriel. The
message purportedly entrusted to him is contained in the Islamic holy book
known as the Qur'an. Following his marriage at the age of twenty-five to a
wealthy forty-year-old widow, Muhammad began preaching his new religion in
Mecca. Persecuted there, he was forced to seek refuge in Medina in 622. There,
his new religion was well received, which allowed him to return to Mecca and
succeed in his previously failed religious crusade.
As a result of its successful religious and political sweep over most of the
Arab Middle East, Islam, after sanctioning the use of the “holy war” (jihad) to
convert “pagans,” penetrated North Africa around 640 and reached the shores
of the Atlantic Ocean within the next 50 years. Through force and persuasion,
traveling often on camels, the adherents of the new religion prevailed over the
indigenous inhabitants of North Africa, who were mostly Berbers rather than
Arabs, converting the whole Maghrib (Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco)
to Islam. Thus, by the end of the eighth century, Islamic Arabs had taken over
the Maghrib religiously and politically, and from there succeeded in converting
the Berbers. Islam then pushed southward to Sub-Saharan Africa through the
Sahara Desert—not only to find new converts but also to subjugate new peoples
and lands in the name of Allah.
Two major sects developed among the Berbers: the Almoravids, who,
following the teachings of Abu Bakr (d. 1087) and Imam Al Hadrami (d. 1096),
preached a strict interpretation and practice of Islam; and the Almohads, who
instead espoused a more liberal theology, stressing the importance of a personal
and individual relationship with Allah as opposed to the external observance of
rituals and ancient teachings. It was the Almoravids who took the initiative to
penetrate West Africa. After successes in Mauritania, Mali, and Niger, they
invaded Ghana, which fell to their armies in 1076. Although evicted from
Ghana in 1087, the Almoravids had laid the foundations for Islam to
subsequently spread to Mali and Songhay. There, such Muslim rulers as Mansa
Mussa of Mali (1312–1337) and Askia Muhammad of Songhay (1493–1538)—
both of whom made celebrated pilgrimages to Mecca—attempted to impose the
new religion on Traditionalist Africans. From there, Islam penetrated—through
the work of Muslim merchants, marabouts (saints or hermits), learned men, and
proselytizers—to other areas of West Africa, including Senegal, Sierra Leone,
Liberia, and parts of Côte d'Ivoire.
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The jihad, as an arm of Islam, was extensively used in the Senegambia area,
where the converted pastoral Fulani of Futa Jallon (1725) and of Futa Toro
(1775) defeated their Traditionalist rulers and imposed on them their new
religion. In parts of Nigeria, where such Hausa states as Kano, Katsina, Gobir,
and Zaria had nuclei of Islamic communities, in Northern Cameroon, and in
Northern Chad, the nineteenth century jihads (initiated or authorized by the
now famous Usuman dan Fodio) assured the total victory of Islam over the
Traditionalist rulers and institutions. Dan Fodio, a Fulani learned man, a
teacher, and a protege of the king of Gobir, did not hesitate to revolt against his
master to restore pristine Islam as he saw it. Toward that end, he called on his
fellow Fulani to join him in a crusade against the Hausa rulers in 1804, an
appeal that attracted even non-Muslims who were overburdened by taxes and
tired of tyrannical rule. Having won the war, dan Fodio established himself as
the Caliph (head of a Muslim state) of Sokoto, in what is now Northern
Nigeria, making his son Mohammad Bello his emir (viceroy, governor, prince)
at Sokoto and his brother Abdallah emir at Gwandu. His followers continued
the “crusade” into Northern Cameroon (particularly in Adamawa) and in
Northern Chad, where they established strong centralized systems based on the
law of Islam (shari'a).
Along with the jihads, several Muslim orders or brotherhoods (known as
tariqa, meaning path)—including the Qadiriyya (founded in Baghdad during
the twelfth century), the Tijaniyya, and the Ahmadiyya—became powerful and
fervent weapons in the spread of Islam in West Africa, particularly in Senegal
and Nigeria. Ira Lapidus (in his History of Islamic Societies, 1988) notes that
Islam experienced three major phases before it became a part of African life,
namely: (1) the acceptance of its “material culture” (food, ornaments, and
concepts); (2) formal conversion, including the worship of Allah and the
acceptance of the ulama (Muslim scholars); and (3) adoption of Islamic law and
the five “pillars” of Islam, as well as the introduction of Islamic customs in
“rituals of circumcision, marriage, and death.” The five pillars of Islam are: (1)
belief in Allah as God and Muhammad as his Prophet; (2) prayer held five
times a day; (3) observance of Ramadan, a month-long fasting; (4) pilgrimage
to Mecca at least once in one's lifetime; (5) and giving alms to the poor.
In Sudan, Islam encountered serious difficulties in its attempt to dislodge the
Christians in Nubia, where Christianity had taken root as early at the fourth
century. Constant intercourse between Egypt and Northern Sudan, however,
assured by the sixteenth century the ultimate victory of Islam in what is now
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Northern Sudan. When the Turks, in 1820, followed by the Egyptians and the
British in 1898, imposed their rule over Sudan, Islam had already prevailed in
the north, while the south continued to be mostly Traditionalist and Christian.
This religious and cultural dichotomy later exacerbated the country's political
problems, as the Muslim rulers insisted on imposing the shari'a on all regions.
In Ethiopia, Islamic crusaders also met the resistance of the Amharic emperors
and kinglets who had converted to Christianity and had formed the Orthodox
Church (until 1959 hierarchically subordinate to the Coptic Church of
Alexandria).
The east coast and, to a certain degree, the hinterland, had established and
maintained trade relations with India, China, and the Arabian Peninsula well
before the beginning of the Christian era. The now famous Chronicle of Kilwa
indicates that, during the eighth century, Arabs had already settled on the
Somali coast, joined a century later by Shirazi traders and immigrants. The
Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, a Greek merchant's maritime guide, and the
writings of Arab trader Ibn Battuta, confirm these early movements and
settlements of Arabians and Persians on the east coast of Africa. Given the
success of the trading activities on the coast, more immigrants, particularly
Muslim Arabs from Hadramaut in Southern Arabia, Aden, and Yemen arrived
on dhows propelled by the monsoons on the East African coast as traders and
seamen, some of whom settled on the islands, married African women, and
helped establish permanent trading posts (Lamu, Pate, Shango, Zanzibar,
Manda, Mafia, Mombasa) and create a unique language and culture known now
as Swahili. A surge in trading activity resumed after 1698, when Omani Arab
soldiers and mercenaries chased the Portuguese out of Mombasa and settled
there permanently. In 1840, Sultan Sayyd Said moved his Omani capital from
Muscat to promising and secure Zanzibar.
A unique feature of the newcomers, however, was the fact that, contrary to
what happened in North and West Africa, most came as individuals, without
their families. East Africa's universally precious and exotic trade items attracted
the attention of a large number of seafaring Muslim entrepreneurs, searching
for incense and ambergris (ninth century); leopard skins and gold, particularly
from Zimbabwe down to Sofala in Mozambique (tenth century); iron (twelfth
century); gum and myrrh (thirteenth century); cotton cloth, grain, corn, rice,
millet, sorghum, sugar cane, coconut palm, orange, sesame, timber, dyes,
perfumes (fourteenth century); and tortoise shell, slaves, ivory, and cloves
(fifteenth century). Imports included swords, food stuffs, cloth, wine, guns, and
gunpowder, from Europe and the Middle East; lances, glass, and porcelain from
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China; and from Arabia, copper, hatchets, and cannons. However, the Bantu-
speaking, non-Muslim populations remained the major link and middlemen
between the hinterland and the coast and (at times) coastal sheikhs (Muslim
officials, heads of family or clan) made specific agreements with the chiefs of
the interior to preserve this status quo. Thus, only during the nineteenth century
(1870s) did caravans of Islamic Arabs such as Tippu Tib go inland as far as
Tabora, Nyangwe, Buganda, Lake Nyasa, and even Katanga, in pursuit of
slaves and ivory.
Among the factors that slowed the spread of Islam stood out the absence of
strong state societies in the hinterland. This fact, in contrast to the situation in
West Africa, made it almost impossible for any chiefs who might have
converted to Islam to force their new religion upon their scattered and few
subjects. In East Africa, conversions seemed to have been individual.
Generally, as in West Africa, analysts have emphasized that the adaptability
and tolerance of African traditional religion to either Christianity or Islam
(though Islam seemed the greater beneficiary) was one factor in the spread of
Islam. Mazrui calls this tolerance the “ecumenic element” of African religion.
Edward Alpers, in his study of the phenomenal conversion of the Yao of
Mozambique to Islam during the nineteenth century, cites cultural affinity,
reinforced by commercial links with the Muslim east coast, as one of the most
important factors predisposing Africa's positive response to the new faith. Other
experts point to the attractive character of Islam as a modernizing force, a
vehicle allowing Africans to belong to a more international community—the
learned pan-Islamic world—with its pilgrimages to Mecca, while Sulayman
Nyang speaks of African exposure to “a brotherhood of Islam whose borders
were beyond what he [the African] could be and see.”
A major debate arises when the colonial factor is brought into play to explain
the rapid expansion of Islam in Africa, particularly East Africa. One theory
claims that colonial penetration assisted the expansion of Islam through its
pacification process. The other posits that the social and economic dislocation
brought about by the oppressive colonial system forced many Africans to join
the religion of their Muslim neighbors, some of whom had successfully halted
the tide of colonial penetration in their areas. Upholding the first view,
Trimingham argues that the pax colonica (colonial peace), which enabled the
rapid improvements in communication and transportation and the founding of
new towns and commercial centers, created an atmosphere that assisted Islam
in its sweep over the coastal areas and the interior of East Africa during the
1880–1930 period. In the same vein, Humphrey Fisher gives credit to the quasi-
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political autonomy given to Muslim areas by the colonial policy of indirect
rule, and the direct employment of Muslims in government positions as clerks,
policemen, soldiers, teachers, prison wardens, and interpreters, as the Germans
and the British did in Tanganyika and the latter in Kenya and Zanzibar, by-
passing the Africans. In general, where Europeans found a well-organized
Muslim society, they feared changing the status quo. In Northern Cameroon,
for example, the Germans (1884–1916) declared the Muslim areas off limits to
Christian missions, while in Northern Chad, the French were powerless when
the Muslim hierarchy refused to send their children to Western schools (seen as
culturally poisonous) and began sending, instead, the sons of their slaves.
At the other end of the spectrum, however, G. E. Grunebaum credits
indirectly the European system for the spread of Islam—not for its pax colonica
but for the odium colonicum (colonial hatred, author's expression) it provoked
in the colonial subjects. He argues that African social and political systems,
unable to cope with the threats posed by colonialism, opened the door to
“transformation or even displacement” by Islam. More recently, Ira Lapidus,
embracing the same thesis, noted that “it seems likely that the spread of Islam
was facilitated by political instability, by the need for a common identity for
heterogeneous peoples, and by the need for new bases of social and political
organization.” August Nimtz takes issue with the pax colonica advocates and
posits instead that “the evidence ... [particularly, for the 1916–1924 period]
indicates that Islam's vigorous expansion occurred not during tranquil times
but, on the contrary, during periods of upheavals and crisis.” Edward Alpers,
although unwilling to generalize on the crisis theory, concludes that the massive
conversion of the Yao occurred after the conversion of their chiefs, who faced a
challenge from their village headmen over the issue of “ancestors' veneration.”
The most likely hypothesis to explain Islamic expansion, however, seems to lie
elsewhere, for colonialism impeded as well as facilitated the popularity of Islam
in Africa. For example, the employment of Muslim agents was counterbalanced
by the admission of Traditionalist Africans into Western colonial and European
schools. On the other hand, as Mbiti observes, the fragile colonial peace, which
supposedly created a favorable atmosphere for Islamic expansion, found a
fierce competitor in Christianity, which was often protected by the colonial
state, as was the case in the Portuguese colonies, and in former Belgian Zaire,
Rwanda, and Burundi.
In view of the inadequacy of the hypotheses presented above, one must look
elsewhere for the most important factor (beyond Islam's natural appeal to
Africans) to explain its unprecedented rise during the 19th and 20th centuries. It
797
would appear that, unlike in West and Central Africa, where Muslim traders,
sheikhs, and the jihad played a major role, on the east coast, the answer lies in
the activity of the Muslim brotherhoods (turuq; singular, tariqa). The
Qadiryyia, for example, the most popular brotherhood in East Africa, did not
reach Zanzibar until the nineteenth century, but by 1950 it had become
extremely popular in the Tanzanian hinterland, with major strongholds in Dar-
es-Salaam, Bagamoyo, Kilwa, Lindi, Northern Mozambique, and Nyasaland.
The Shadhilyyia, which also admitted women, presumably spread from
Comoros during the First World War and became the second most popular
tariqa in East Africa, with major chapters in Kilwa, Zanzibar, and northern
Mozambique. The brotherhood leaders, although often only half-educated, were
egalitarian, mystically oriented, and self-made missionaries, who were well
versed in the Qur'an. They were also healers, charmers, and eloquent talismans,
attributes that intrigued the Traditionalist African. As a result, tariqa leaders in
the hinterland eventually became local Africans. Had it not been for these
newly arrived missionaries of the faith, notwithstanding the so-called pax
colonica or the social crisis (odium colonicum) it caused, Islam might have
been still confined to the islands of the Indian Ocean.
Elsewhere, it is generally acknowledged by scholars that in several areas of
Southern Africa the Portuguese succeeded in slowing down the spread of Islam.
In South Africa, where there were some 300,000 vocal Muslims in 2003, the
repressive apartheid regime also prevented Muslims from worshiping freely
and gaining converts easily, while in Central Africa the strong alliance between
the colonial state and Christianity (as was the case in the Belgian Congo) made
it extremely difficult for Islam to expand. Mazrui says that Islamic expansion in
North and West Africa was facilitated by the camel, which was able to criss-
cross the Sahara Desert but not the forest: Where the camel stopped, Islam
stopped!
The impact of Islam in Africa cannot be overestimated, as being a devout
Muslim is not just believing in and practicing the “five pillars” of the faith but
embracing a whole new way of life. In fact, Islam has increased the
international dimension of the continent through links with the pan-Islamic
world, has contributed to literacy, and has dictated new codes on health
(emphasis on cleanliness, for example), dressing, and eating habits (prohibition
of the consumption of pork, for example). It has, at the same time, strengthened
the patrilineal societies through emphasis on man's undisputed authority in the
family and reinforced inheritance traditions, which favor the male, while
weakening the traditional role of women in matrilineal societies. It has also
798
given stronger sanction to certain long-standing African traditions such as
polygamy, circumcision (where practiced), and the use of charms, amulets, and
certain types of symbols and signs which “guarantee” success and good luck.
While, politically, Islam provided a strong basis for resistance against
colonialism and, therefore, became inspiration to all African state as well as
stateless societies, it also ushered in severe obstacles to the nationalist
movement during the 1950s and 1960s and to the nation-building effort
following the achievement of independence. In Nigeria, Ghana, and Tanzania,
for example, Islam militated against the nationalist movement and, quite often,
as was the case in Northern Nigeria, Northern Mozambique, and Chad, Muslim
leaders either opposed independence or attempted to postpone its arrival. This
created much internal discord and recrimination.
The reasons for such behavior on the part of Islamic leaders are easy to find.
First, Muslims feared that their privileged positions, protected in most cases by
the colonial government, would disappear as the new leaders took over the
reins of power. Furthermore, the emerging nationalists, most of whom were
Christian, insisted that all future citizens would have to come under one
government with no political or cultural privileges reserved for any community,
religion, or region. Second, many of the new nationalist leaders embraced the
concept of a secular state, in which all religions would be treated equally. This
emphasis threatened the position of many Islamic elites who, in the tradition of
Islam, maintained both political and religious power, making the distinction
between church (religion) and state almost meaningless. Third, the long-
standing tension between Arabs and Sub-Saharan Africans was aggravated by
Islam's close association with the Arab Middle East, culturally and religiously,
thus heightening African nationalists' suspicion, both prior to and after
independence, of the loyalty of Muslim citizens, particularly if they were of
Arab descent, as was the case in Northern Chad and parts of East Africa.
Finally, the philosophical dispute over the role of race and color in nationalist
pronouncements heightened the political differences between African Muslim
and non-Muslim believers. Islam sees the world as primarily divided on the
basis of religion and not color, whereas some radical nationalists have used race
and color to advance their objectives, making Muslim nationalists too
uncomfortable to join the mass parties which led the colonies to independence.
At present, in Sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam has remained the religion of
a minority (as is the case in Mozambique, Kenya, Cameroon, Chad, South
Africa, and even Nigeria), the political and social tensions of old have surfaced
from time to time, and have either contributed to war (Sudan, if one locates in
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Sub-Saharan Africa, being a classical case) or heightened tensions which have
led to violence (exemplified by incidents in Nigeria in 1992 and Kenya in
2002). Overall, however, orthodox Islam has not been a disruptive but a
positive force in Africa, and, usually, Christians, Muslims, and Traditionalists
have been able to live in a semblance of harmony. Senegal (predominantly
Muslim but long led by a devout Catholic president and then by a Muslim head
of state) and Côte d'Ivoire (until the death of Christian President Felix
Houphouet-Boigny in 1993), have been perfect examples of harmonious
religious co-existence. The deadly bombings of the American embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania in 1994 and the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on
September 11, 2001, by Islamic fundamentalists and the retaliatory measures
undertaken by the United States against Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003,
in the name of the war against terrorism, represented a new challenge to
African Muslims, to Christian and Muslim leaders in Africa, and to the
ecumenical movement on the continent. For the foreseeable future, and as long
as the fight against terrorism is linked to religious fundamentalism, the dilemma
will be quite obvious for Africa. For a leader with a large Muslim population,
the fear may stem from the actions of a small radical Islamic group that
espouses the religious fundamentalism associated with Osama bin Laden's and
his follower's ideology. This fear will be heightened if the population is entirely
Arab, since understandably, Arabs tend to associate some of the latest global
terrorist acts with the explosive unresolved Palestinian issue. Palestine has
worried the Africans since the beginning of the Arab-Israeli wars in 1948 to the
point of breaking relations with Israel after the June 1967 Israeli War. The
stakes of anxiety and non-action rise if the leader is a non-Muslim governing a
Christian and a large Muslim population. As a result, the Christian West cannot
expect much cooperation from Africa, even if a fundamentalist group threatens
the established internal order. The issues of religion and the fate of Palestine
have always been a double sword to many African leaders.
By contrast, in a state where the Muslim population is a minority, as in
Mozambique and Cote d'Ivoire, whoever is the leader straddles a fine line
between close cooperation with the West, which is Christian and mistrusted
because of its past conduct in Africa, and the outright fight against possible
Islamic terrorism. Indeed, the African Arabs and Muslims see the current
avowed assault on terrorism as an indiscriminate, deliberate affront, designed to
cleanse all the continents, including Africa, from the Muslim presence. Either
way, for the presidents of Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, Senegal, Uganda, and even
South Africa, the issue is how to pursue a strong anti-terrorist policy without
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offending their Muslim populations or giving their Christian and religiously
traditionalist citizens the impression that they are placating their Muslim
constituency. How does one react to Ugandans and Kenyans who are making
Osama bin Laden a hero by naming their children little Osamas? Because the
recent terrorist events have strained intra-Islamic relations, mainstream Islam
has made a concerted effort to distance itself from the extremist positions taken
by its marginal or “outlawed” elements that are intent on making their point
heard at all cost. Within the ulamma (community of scholars) and the umma
(Islamic community) rages the debate as to the true meaning of the jihad: is it,
asks Walter Laqueur (1999), a “jihad bi al saif” (holy war by means of the
sword) or “jihad al nafs” (struggle of one's soul against one's own base
instincts)? In sum, for the African masses, the two imported religions,
Christianity and Islam, are at a crossroads, and the future of peaceful co-
existence seems to be bleak, as demonstrated by the continued failure of the
ecumenical movement trying to bring Christians and Muslims in Kenya,
Uganda, and Nigeria closer together. It is also clear that universal Islam is now
at the crossroads, as some of its so-called adherents, such as ISIS and Al-
Shabab, claim to represent its teaching while they continue to murder anyone
who might disagree with them, innocent or not, child or woman, Christian or
Muslim around the globe, including Africa.
801
Summary
This chapter outlined the major tenets and current (and historical) state of
three major religions in Africa: Traditionalism, Christianity, and Islam.
Traditionalism is indigenous to the continent of Africa and, contrary to myths
and stereotypes perpetuated by European traders, explorers, missionaries, and
early ethnographers, it enshrines the essential elements of any religion in the
world, namely, the belief in a creator and in a world of spirits (often wrongly
labeled by Western scholars and their early African disciples as gods or
deities), and the use of sacrifice, prayer, and ritual. Africa's ancestral veneration
and invocation could be compared to the prayers addressed to saints among
some Christian denominations. The strength of Traditionalism on the continent
is illustrated by the fact that, notwithstanding the cultural and political
onslaught of colonial Christianism and Arab Islam over the centuries, much of
Sub-Saharan Africa remains Traditionalist. Furthermore, the resilience and
strength of African religion can still be detected among diaspora Africans in the
United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, especially Brazil. Yet, the
lure of Western culture and technology and the continued appeal of both Islam
and Christianity threaten the future of Traditionalism.
The issues of witchcraft, sorcery, divination, magic, and fortune telling, often
labeled by the West as superstition, must be understood in their proper context
to make sense. The concept of the vital force in the universe, emanating from
the all mighty Creator, seems to be crucial to the understanding of African
traditional religion into which children are born and in which they live, grow,
and die. Because religion is not compartmentalized but still permeates the
individual inner self and is, in a sense, the soul of the traditional community in
Africa, outsiders find it difficult to differentiate religious from secular cultural
practices. This was, in fact, the major reason why missionaries and colonial
administrators showed such contempt for what has come to be known as
Traditionalism. On Islamic and Christian expansion in Africa, the chapter
pointed out that, even though North Africa and Ethiopia experienced
Christianity perhaps as early as the first century, Islam enjoyed a more rapid
and sustained expansion after its founding in Mecca during the seventh century.
It spread first throughout North Africa, then to West and Central Africa, and
finally to coastal East Africa. Whereas in North, West, and Central Africa,
Islam was assisted primarily by the jihad (holy war), particularly during the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the trans-Saharan trade, in East
802
Africa the holy war was less important than the work of Muslim brotherhoods
and the impact of the caravan trade, which, by the twelfth century, had created
an African-Arab Islamic culture and language called Swahili. Here, proximity
to the Middle East, the birthplace of the faith, was another important factor.
Colonialism, on the one hand, indirectly assisted the spread of Islam through
improved communication networks, the creation of new urban centers, and the
special role it entrusted to Muslims, most of whom were literate in the Western
sense. Islam also skillfully exploited the misery caused by the colonial situation
and often convinced mainly its destitute urban listeners that Christianity was
nothing more than the other face of colonialism. European occupation, on the
other hand, brought an influx of mission churches, schools, and health care
centers which, protected by the colonial state, became a fierce rival to Islam,
clearly demonstrated by the sparsity of Muslim communities in Southern
Africa.
It would appear more plausible, therefore, to hold the view that, apart from
the Muslim orders or brotherhoods, the most important factor in the spread of
Islam where it succeeded was its very nature, which seems to elicit a positive
response from Africans—the simplicity of its dogma; its success in portraying
itself as a non-racialist, a non-colonial, and an egalitarian religion; its affinity
with long-standing African cultural practices and symbols such as circumcision,
polygamy, and amulets as was, according to Alpers, the case among the Yao of
northern Mozambique; and the lure of its learning and cosmopolitanism. In
both colonial and post-colonial Africa, the political, social, and cultural impact
of Islam has been greatest in all of North Africa and in such countries as
Senegal, where the population is predominantly Muslim, and in Nigeria, Chad,
Cameroon, and Tanzania, to cite a few examples, where there are large Muslim
communities.
Christianity in Africa is almost 2,000 years old, having made its inroads, as
noted above, in North Africa and Ethiopia perhaps as early as the first century
of the Christian era. However, the destructive nature of the Vandals during the
fourth century and the pressure from Islam after the seventh century dealt a
severe blow to its presence. It was only after the fifteenth century, with the
arrival and the activities of the Portuguese, that Christianity flourished, but only
temporarily and only along the coastal areas. By the end of the seventeenth
century, a combination of factors, including the rivalry between the Christian
religious orders, anticlerical metropolitan tendencies, lax morals among the
European clerics in Africa (some of whom were even involved in the slave
803
trade), and the absence of trained indigenous personnel, contributed to a total
decline of Christendom on the continent. However, the implantation of
colonialism in Africa during the nineteenth century contributed to an
unprecedented revival of the Christian Church with all its antagonistic major
denominations.
Notwithstanding their shortcomings in Africa, missionaries not only
concerned themselves with converting the Africans, but they also built schools
and contributed to the education of Africans, created dispensaries for the
treatment of the sick, and initiated the use of African languages in texts such as
the Bible, while often collecting the rich folklore of the people they
encountered. Unfortunately, missionaries often allied themselves with the
colonial state, did not forcefully combat racism among themselves and the
colonialists, and never took seriously the indigenization of the African Church.
Instead, they constantly fought against African cultural manifestations and
rarely listened to the warnings of their faithful, even after the proliferation of
independent Christian Churches on the continent. (Their fate is well dramatized
and depicted, for example, in such African novels as Mongo Beti's The Poor
Christ of Bomba and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.) Thus, when
independence came, it was feared that the Church might one day disappear
altogether. However, this fear did not materialize, even though in the
Portuguese colonies, where the alliance between Catholicism and the colonial
regime was tighter than anywhere else in Africa, the Church suffered severely
following independence. The new revolutionary Marxist regimes declared war
against organized religion, while attempting to deprive the few African priests
of any power, freedom of worship, or role in the new society they were forging.
In spite of obvious problems, however, Christianity continues to be popular
in many parts of the continent, and therefore still poses a “threat” to both Islam
and Traditionalism. A major challenge to the ecumenical effort put forth during
the past four decades by leaders of Christianity and Islam both in the Western
world and in Africa has been made tenuous by the resurgence of fundamentalist
Islam. Islamic fundamentalists have declared war on the West, using terrorist
acts, and they demand, among other things, the establishment of religious rather
than secular states in the Muslim world, the imposition of the law of Islam or
shari'a, the elimination of Christianity, the abandonment of some modern
technological innovations that corrupt the youth, and an end to the education of
women, and would like to see a strict enforcement of the medieval dress code,
especially for women. In Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa, and many
other countries in Africa where there is a vocal Muslim population, the recent
804
terrorist acts and American retaliation have strained the relations among
Muslims, Christians, and Traditionalists, even if feelings are not always
expressed in public. It is clear that the period following the 1994 embassy
bombings in Africa and the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon in the US have created more divisiveness than harmony in Africa.
The future of religious relations on the continent is therefore gloomy, as the
constant acts of violence by Al-Shabab, ISIS, and Boko Haram in East and
West-Central Africa continue to harm innocent Africans and others in countries
such as Somalia, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon.
805
1. Do further research on African traditional religion and compare it with
Christianity in the following aspects: the concept of God and the role of the
spirits, the dead, sacrifice, and prayer.
2. Compare and contrast the spread of Christianity and Islam in Africa. What
were the elements that made both religions attractive to the Africans?
3. What were the major shortcomings of Christianity in Africa during the
colonial period? Have these disappeared on the continent?
4. Do research on the following African theologians: St. Augustine, Origen,
and Tertullian.
5. How do you explain current terrorism that claims to have its roots in Islam?
806
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T. O. Ranger and I. Kimambo (eds.). The Historical Study of African
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C. G. Baeta. Christianity in Tropical Africa. Oxford: Oxford University
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Kwesi A. Dickson and Paul Ellingworth (eds.). Biblical Revelation and
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Allan Fisher and Humphrey Fisher. Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa.
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810
23
Religion in the Diaspora

Kevin D. Butler
811
Introduction
A large and disparate topic among people of African descent since the early
days of slavery, religion in black America was related primarily to the basic
right of racial and social justice. Notwithstanding the fact that religious
traditions took many forms, they have remained an integral part of life among
diasporic Africans in the United States (US). This chapter will present a brief
historical synopsis of some of the major facets of diasporic religious
manifestations and a sampling of the major religious movements among black
people in this country. Even though space does not permit an in-depth
discussion of the various religious faiths herein, the author tries to provide an
introduction for the interested readers to prepare them to begin investigation
elsewhere into related topics that might interest them.
Major terms and concepts: the “invisible” Church, Baptist, Methodist,
Episcopalian, Catholic, Universal Negro Improvement Association, Civil
Rights Movement, storefront church, Pentecostal, Nation of Islam, slavery,
Caribbean, Liberation Theology, Ahmadiyya, Sunni, Vodou (Hoodoo), Orisha,
Regla de Ocha, Santeria, Obeah, Myalism, conjure.
812
In the English colonies of North America, Christianity, in general, made few
inroads among enslaved Africans. Africans showed little interest in the religion,
and colonists in the South, where slavery was most prominent, ranged from the
irreligious themselves to those disinterested in converting Africans to
Christianity out of fear that conversion might lead to freedom for those who
converted. So, with little interest from either Africans or European colonizers in
spreading Christianity among the enslaved population, African-based religious
traditions prevailed among them for close to two hundred years.
The African-based religious traditions in the African American slave
community consisted of the beliefs of the various groups entrapped in the
Middle Passage that brought Africans to the New World. The forced
newcomers adapted their African beliefs and traditions to the conditions and
environment that they faced in North America. As Africans became African
Americans, religious customs were similar throughout a large portion of
England's North American colonies and the subsequent United States of
America. Their religious beliefs came to be known by various names; some of
the most commonly used included conjure, hoodoo, and root work. The Kongo
cosmogram, for instance, as documented by Robert Farris Thompson, Sterling
Stuckey, and other scholars, was part of the religious life of enslaved people
throughout British North America and the antebellum US. Contemporaries
described the cosmogram engraved in religious sites, and modern scholars have
found it at plantation sites and nineteenth century churches. Indeed, some
churches still in use in parts of the South, still contain engravings of the
cosmogram.
The “ring shout,” the most important ritual in the slave community's religious
life, was centered on the cosmogram, and even those who became Christian
included the ritual in their version of Christianity, which survived in the black
church even after emancipation. It was a counter clockwise dance performed as
participants moved in a circle through the four “moments of the sun.” Scholars
have argued for the Kongo origin of the ring shout but various peoples
throughout western Africa used similar ring rituals which could also be a source
for the symbolism involved as well as the Kongo people themselves.
Conjure was known for its ability to help, to heal, or to harm. People with the
requisite knowledge could make sacred objects, such as charms and amulets
813
that had the properties needed to bring about the desired effect for the user. For
example, the fugitive slave and abolitionist Henry Bibb wrote of a love charm
sold to him by a conjure doctor. Similarly, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass
recalled that he had been given a charm said to have the power to save one from
getting whipped. Believers could use other such charms or amulets to cause
harm to their enemies. Such amulets could render one's enemies ill or cause
them to have bad luck. The charms and amulets of hoodoo contained
ingredients such as dirt from a cemetery, or personal items of the targeted
individual, such as hair or fingernails. For that reason, people were cautioned to
ensure that their hair or other personal effects did not fall into the hands of
others.
Because religious beliefs were holistic, one can consider their medical
practices as part of conjure. Hoodoo practitioners knowledgeable about
medicine were called “root doctors” because they knew which plants and roots
could be used to treat particular illnesses or injuries. Conversely, such
individuals also knew which plants and roots were dangerous. Because that
kind of knowledge existed among enslaved people, they were often suspected
of poisoning whenever unexplained illness or unexpected deaths happened.
Nevertheless, conjure was a belief system that was a part of enslaved African
Americans' identity, that recognized Africa as a place of knowledge and power,
which white people did not possess. Through its rituals and artifacts, it provided
enslaved Africans in the US a sense of control over their environment.
814
A significant portion of the South's enslaved population first converted to
Christianity and began joining churches during the Great Awakening of the
mid-eighteenth century. Those converts became the foundation for African
American Christianity. Most African Americans who converted to the new faith
during that period joined evangelical churches, especially Methodist and
Baptist churches, although some also became Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and
members of other denominations. A significant portion of African Americans,
especially in Southern Louisiana, Maryland, and in urban areas, became Roman
Catholic.
It is difficult to say why African Americans were drawn to evangelical
Christianity. Scholars have speculated that the more participatory worship style
of evangelicals, their emotive manner of preaching, and the similarity of
baptism to African water rituals were among the elements that appealed to the
African American population. Doubtless, evangelical talk of spiritual freedom
and liberty which enslaved people believed was applicable to their earthly lives,
also drew the interest of African American listeners. Additionally, evangelical
churches during the Revolutionary era tended toward antislavery sentiment,
which appealed to African Americans. It was also important that evangelical
churches licensed black men to preach. Black preachers played the key role in
taking the Christian gospel to the slave community, because they had more
credibility in that environment than white preachers and were better able to
communicate with the enslaved Africans.
After a period of openness toward abolition during the Revolutionary War
era, Southern evangelicals started to accommodate to the institution of slavery.
The impact of such incidents and revolts as those associated with the Denmark
Vesey conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, and Nat Turner's
rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1832, displayed clearly the
revolutionary potential of African American religion. Thereafter, a proslavery
theology that urged African Americans in the South to be “good slaves” came
to dominate the evangelical church in the South.
Despite the admonition of white preachers urging them to accept slavery,
African Americans developed their own version of Christianity that modern
scholars call the “invisible Church” or the “invisible institution.” Through the
invisible Church, slaves met, often in secret and at night, in brush arbors away
815
from the watchful eyes and listening ears of white preachers and slaveholders.
There they preached sermons and sang songs of a more uplifting nature than
what they heard in white churches where white preachers told them that they
should be subservient to white people. The invisible Church emphasized
freedom narratives such as the Exodus story of Moses leading enslaved people
out of bondage. However, while members of this invisible Church, African
Americans did not abandon their traditional beliefs, but appropriated
Christianity to their worldview by using African elements, which some scholars
have labeled “African residuals” or “Africanisms.” Thus, practices such as the
ring shout remained as part of their Christianity.
816
Separate, independent African American churches arose in the US because of
the mistreatment and discrimination accorded to African Americans who were
members of white churches and the inability of white churches to provide a
sense of spirituality or an environment that African Americans believed could
meet their needs as the equals of white people. White churches continuously
failed or refused to uphold the idea that black people were the equals of white
people except in the vague concept of “spiritual equality.” Spiritual equality
acknowledged that black people had souls that needed salvation but, at best,
relegated equality to the afterlife while justifying the subjugation of black
people on earth.
Consequently, freedom and equality became central ideas in the growing
independent African American church movement. African American churches
in the North were abolitionist in nature, serving as community centers, meeting
places for abolitionists and political activists, and refuges for escaped slaves.
Whereas these were often stations on the Underground Railroad, African
American churches in the South had to be more cautious than their Northern
counterparts because they faced the scrutiny of the slaveholding class and
proslavery state legislatures and local governments. Despite the suspicion and
scrutiny that black churches faced in the South, they did provide opportunities
for education, for organizing, for aid to escaped slaves, when possible, and to
those who were suspected of plotting resistance to slavery.
Following the American War for Independence, Methodist and Baptist
churches, whether it was due to their style of worship, emphasis on baptism, or
talk of freedom and equality, were the ones that drew the most interest from
African Americans. So, it is not surprising that a Christian-based movement for
black autonomy would emerge among those who were Methodists. Richard
Allen, a former slave from Delaware, had become a Christian at a Methodist
camp meeting and bought his freedom. He became one of the leading African
American residents of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he and his associate,
Absalom Jones, were members of St. George's, a white Methodist Church. In
1787, Allen and Jones led a walk out by St. George's black members when the
church sought to force them into segregated seating in the balcony.
Afterwards, Allen, Jones, and the black members who walked out started the
Free African Society, and Allen subsequently organized a black Methodist
817
church named Bethel, which became the mother church of the African
Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) organized in 1816. As the first black-
owned and -controlled denomination in the US, it spread across the North and
the West, wherever the African American population was large enough to
support one. The AME Church was perhaps the single most influential black
institution in antebellum America. It was also an abolitionist church that
advocated equality for black people and prohibited its members from owning
slaves.
Although the AME Church spread across the North, it was restricted in the
South. Morris Brown was the pastor of an AME Church in Charleston, South
Carolina, that was one of the largest churches in the state. However, the
authorities shut down Brown's church after it was implicated in the Denmark
Vesey conspiracy, a plotted slave insurrection. Brown himself had to leave the
South for his own safety and moved to the North, where he later became AME
bishop. After the Vesey conspiracy, except for a few churches in the Upper
South, the AME Church did not have a presence in the South until the Civil
War, when AME missionaries arrived and helped the newly emancipated
freedpeople organize black churches. Other African American Methodists in
the North had a similar experience to that of Allen and Jones in Philadelphia.
James Varick and other black members of St. John Methodist Church in New
York City left that predominantly white church to worship in a way more
culturally relevant to them. They founded the African Methodist Episcopal
Zion Church (AME Zion), which was separate from the AME Church, in New
York City, in 1821. This organization, too, spread among the freedpeople of the
South after emancipation.
During the slavery era, many enslaved people in the South joined or attended
Baptist churches, to the extent that they were the majority in some Baptist
churches. Scholars cite the Bluestone Church, a church started on the William
Byrd plantation in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, in 1758, as the first black
Baptist church in British North America. Although the membership was mostly
black, white missionaries founded the Bluestone Church and it had several
white members.
In the Lower South, three enslaved men, Andrew Bryan, George Liele, and
David George were key figures in the growth of the Baptist faith among black
people in that region. Bryan preached to black people outside Savanah,
Georgia, and consequently was twice arrested and whipped for holding illegal
assemblies. Liele, the first black man ordained in Georgia, worked with Bryan,
818
and their efforts led to the creation of the Silver Bluff Church, the first black
Baptist church in the Lower South, in 1773. It relocated to Savannah in 1794
where its name was changed to the First African Baptist Church. Liele trained
David George in the ministry, who in turn established other black churches in
Georgia. These African American leaders led the spread of the Baptist Church
in the black Atlantic world. At the end of the United States' Revolutionary War
George Liele left the US with the British and started the Baptist movement in
Jamaica. David George also left America and started churches in Nova Scotia,
Canada, and Sierra Leone, West Africa. Another prominent African American
leader, Lott Carey, started Baptist churches in Liberia.
819
During and after the American Civil War, numerous northern missionaries,
both black and white, went to the South to preach to the freedpeople and
organize churches among them. Indeed, the rapid spread of the black church
across the South was one of the most significant cultural and institutional
developments there after the abolition of slavery. One of the first actions of
formerly enslaved Christians was to leave the white churches they had attended
in the antebellum years and form their own separate and independent black
churches.
Black Baptist churches were among those in the forefront of the growth of
the black church at that time as the Baptist denomination grew to contain more
black members than any other denomination in the South. The growth of black
Baptist Churches led them to organize the National Baptist Convention, the
largest African American denomination, in 1895. Representatives of the AME
Church also organized congregations across the South. Another black
Methodist organization from the North, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion
Church successfully organized African American congregations in the South as
well. The AME Zion Church became most prominent in the Carolinas and
Georgia. The success black Methodists from the North achieved in organizing
their Southern brethren alarmed white Southerners to such an extent that they
lent their support to organizing black churches themselves. Southern
Methodists, however, supported the formation of the more conservative
Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (CME) to stem the flow of black
Methodists into the AME and AME Zion Churches. Later, as its connections to
the white Southern Methodists carried a tint of servility to the Southern racial
status quo, the CME Church changed its name to Christian Methodist
Episcopal.
By the turn of the last century, one of the most dynamic developments in
American Christendom was the rise of the Holiness and Pentecostal
movements. Pentecostalism, with its roots in Southern black Christianity, grew
quickly in the African American community. Northern missionaries and church
leaders in the South often tried to remove elements of African tradition from
the black church, which led to disagreements between Northern and Southern
blacks. The cultural difference between the Northerners and Southerners
factored in the growth of Pentecostalism in the black church in the South.
Northern missionaries and leaders often looked disdainfully on the worship
820
style in Southern churches and considered some of the practices that were
consistent with slave religion as overly emotional, superstitious, and
uneducated. Consequently, they tried to end them. Those practices included the
continued use of the ring shout in the church, an emphasis on spirit possession,
and belief in healing. Pentecostalism, on the other hand, was more
accommodating to the continued practice of slave religion as part of African
American Christianity, hence its success with African Americans in the South
and among migrants who moved to urban areas in the North.
William J. Seymour, an African American preacher and early adherent of
Pentecostalism, conducted revival meetings in Los Angeles that started in 1906.
Seymour preached the Pentecostal doctrine and, as news of his Los Angeles
revival spread, it became the platform that launched Pentecostalism as a global
movement. Charles Harrison Mason, formerly a Baptist preacher, was among
those who went to observe Seymour's meetings. Mason and Charles P. Jones
had started the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), based in Memphis,
Tennessee, in 1897 as a Holiness church. After returning from Los Angeles, he
led the organization into the Pentecostal movement, which soon became the
largest black Pentecostal denomination. Some scholars of African American
religion consider the success of COGIC and other black Pentecostal
organizations as an example of African American Christianity's roots in slave
religion.
The black church in both the North and South included support for education
and civil rights as an integral part of their service to their communities. The
idea that the church had a role in education continued a tradition that pre-dated
the Civil War. In 1854, a white Presbyterian minister had founded Ashmun
Institute in Pennsylvania, the first college in the United States established to
educate black people. The AME Church had started Wilberforce College, the
first black-owned and -operated college in the US in Ohio in 1856. In the South
during the decades after the Civil War, African American churches often
housed schools for the freedpeople and their children. Recognizing the need for
higher education, black churches also started such colleges as Shaw University
(Baptist) in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Morehouse College (Baptist) in
Atlanta, Livingstone College (AMEZ) in North Carolina, and many others.
Ministers were among the most educated and ambitious people in the African
American community and thus became among the most significant and
influential black leaders. The church had a political role to play as indicated by
the fact that many prominent African American political figures were also
821
ministers. They included Henry McNeal Turner, Hiram R. Revels, and many
others through the decades of the twenty-first century from Clayton Powell,
William Gray, and Benjamin Hooks to Jesse Jackson. The church's political
involvement also extended a tradition of activism by the church that had started
before the Civil War and included its support of the abolitionist movement and
aid to fugitive slaves.
During the Great Migration, which spanned the period from the outbreak of
World War I (1914–1918) to the early 1970s, millions of African Americans
left the South for new homes and opportunities in the North and the West. The
church saw one of its missions as helping rural Southern African Americans
transition into their new lives in the urban North. Black churches provided
migrants to the North a sense of community and gave them a mooring to help
with the transition to a new life. Often the core membership of a church were
migrants from the same part of the South, and the church served at the center of
building a new community for them. Other transplants joined storefront
Pentecostal churches that sprouted in African American neighborhoods of cities
throughout the North. Pentecostalism flourished as it helped many migrants
navigate the transition from the more traditional South to the modernity they
found in the post-World War I North. Another impact of the Great Migration
was the increased religious choices available to migrants. In the northern cities,
they encountered a greater variety of denominations than were typically
available in the Southern communities they had left. As African Americans
came in contact with migrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, they had
more interactions with Roman Catholicism and Caribbean religions, as well as
new African American religious groups that emerged during the early phase of
the Great Migration.
In both North and South, the church called for civil rights for African
Americans, and laity and clergy were involved with organizations such as
Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The
UNIA, with its message of black pride, addressed the religious needs of
diasporic Africans as well as their economic, social, and political needs. To
instill its ideology of racial pride, the Garvey's association used such religious
imagery as a black Jesus and a black Virgin Mary. UNIA chapters held Sunday
morning religious services and Sunday schools and published a Universal
Negro Catechism. African American ministers were also prominent in the
Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People and allowed civil rights organizations and even labor unions to utilize
their facilities.
822
At the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, the
church and African American clergy were at the forefront of the movement.
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist pastor, became the symbol of the
movement and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
had a leadership primarily of clergy. African American churchmen and women
across the South and in the North and West demonstrated in support of civil
rights, coordinated voter registration drives, and encouraged African Americans
to demand equality. A generation of African American theologians supported
the civil rights or the black power movements by embracing black liberation
theology. Among the most significant proponents of this new black theology,
one that argued that God was on the side of the oppressed, were James Cone,
who pioneered the concept of black liberation theology in his books, Black
Theology and Black Power and A Black Theology of Liberation, and African
American minister Albert Cleage. Cone and Cleage argued not only that God
was on the side of the oppressed, but also that the black church had the mission
of helping African Americans “take total control of their destiny and to struggle
against social, political, and economic oppression and cultural subjugation.”
Although the majority of African American Christians were Protestants, with
Baptist and Methodist denominations as the largest, since the closing decades
of the twentieth century, Pentecostal, charismatic or nondenominational
churches have experienced significant growth. This is seen most visibly in the
rise of megachurches and the prominence of ministers with television or radio
ministries such as those of well-known figures Frederick Price, T. D. Jakes, and
Creflo Dollar. Charismatic churches are sometimes called “neo-Pentecostal”
because they adopt elements of Pentecostal theology, such as speaking in
tongues, but are not part of a traditional Pentecostal denominational structure.
The Church of God in Christ continues to be the leading Pentecostal
denomination and is among the largest of African American denominations.
However, due to the popularity of charismatic and nondenominational
churches, denominational lines have become less important. Megachurches,
especially those with ties to tele-evangelical ministries, are often
nondenominational, and even in denominational churches, it is common for
people to change churches and move from denomination to denomination.
Lines blur even further by the acceptance in many Baptist, Methodist, and
mainline Christian churches of neo-Pentecostal practices in non-Pentecostal
settings. A significant aspect of neo-Pentecostal churches and megachurches is
that many of them are proponents of what has been called the “prosperity
gospel,” the belief that material prosperity and health are a sign of God's
823
blessings on the “saved.”
Despite the importance of Protestant movements, however, one should not
overlook the presence and significance of the large number of Roman Catholics
among African American Christians, especially since the mid-twentieth
century. The Roman Catholic Church has included African Americans since
colonial times and black Catholics were most often in places with significant
French or Spanish influence, such as Southern Louisiana or parts of Maryland,
where the Catholic presence was an important part of its history. Black
Catholics could also be found in major American cities such as St. Louis. By
the end of the twentieth century, there were two million black Catholics in the
US.
In the antebellum decades, many white Catholics in the United States
supported slavery and the position of the Church in the United States was
hardly different than that of other American denominations, with African
Americans treated as second-class members. Especially in the South, Church
publications and leaders defended slavery. Indeed, Catholic churches and
institutions such as Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., owned slaves
themselves. Yet, African Americans in the Catholic Church have not been
passive. They have participated in black Catholic congresses, published
newspapers aimed at African Americans, like the American Catholic Tribune,
and advocated for representation at all levels of Church activity. For example,
African Americans formed two communities of nuns, the Oblate Sisters of
Providence in Baltimore in 1829 and the Sisters of the Holy Family in New
Orleans in 1842, the cities where black Catholics were most visible.
The Roman Catholic Church started accepting African Americans in the
ministry much later than had Protestant churches, which doubtless hindered the
growth of its African American membership. The first African American
Catholic priests were the Healy brothers, James, Patrick, and Sherwood. James
became bishop of Portland, Maine, and Patrick served as president of
Georgetown University. Although the Healys were born in slavery to an
enslaved mother, their white father financed their education in Catholic schools
and they did not publicly acknowledge their African American ancestry. The
first openly black Catholic priest in the US was Augustus Tolton, a former
slave from Missouri, who was ordained in Rome in 1886. Even after Tolton's
ordination, the Catholic Church was still slow to ordain more black priests in
America. The church still had fewer than 35 African American priests as late as
1950, and black Catholics still primarily attended segregated churches led by
824
white priests. Many Catholic colleges and universities remained segregated
until the 1950s and 1960s.
During the era of Jim Crow, African American Catholics, like those of
Protestant persuasion, strived to obtain equality in the United States. They
started the Knights of Peter Claver, which remains the largest African
American Catholic organization, in Mobile, Alabama, in 1909. Members of the
organization sought to serve the black Catholic community, worked with civil
rights organizations during the Civil Rights Movement, and promoted social
justice. It was also in the segregated environment of the Jim Crow era when the
Josephite Society of the Sacred Heart, which had been formed to serve the
freedpeople in the South after the Civil War, started Xavier University of New
Orleans in 1925. Xavier is the only historically black Catholic University in this
country. St. Augustine's seminary in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, was started in
1920 specifically to prepare African Americans for the priesthood. The
activism of African American Catholics, including priests and the Knights of
Peter Claver, has pushed the Church to become more responsive to their needs.
It has increased the number of African Americans attending seminaries, and
there are currently six African American bishops in the US. But in 2012, only
250 of 40,000 Catholic priests were African American. In sum, since the mid-
twentieth century the Roman Catholic Church has experienced significant
growth in its African American membership. While immigration from Latin
America and the Caribbean has contributed to the growth, it is due primarily to
conversions. By the end of the twentieth century, the proportion of African
Americans who profess Catholicism had nearly doubled, increasing from 2.3
percent to 4 percent.
825
People of African descent in the West Indies and Latin America carried on
traditions of African origin through such religions as Regla de Ocha in Cuba,
Candomble in Brazil, and Vodou in Haiti. In those lands, where a
predominantly Roman Catholic nation was the colonizer, the state did have an
interest in converting Africans to Roman Catholicism. Thus, such diasporic
religions were often outlawed and practiced in secret. In response to
suppression or because of their exposure to Catholicism, these religious forms
came to syncretize Catholicism and African traditional religions. In Catholic
colonies, worshipers often had devotion to specific saints. This facilitated the
tendency of Africans in the Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies to
identify an African deity with a specific Catholic saint and continue to worship
them. For example, they identified Ogun, an African deity associated with iron
and metal working, with the Christian apostle, St. Peter. As a result of the
syncretic nature of these beliefs, Roman Catholic priests sometimes tolerated
them and individuals often practiced both Catholicism and their New World
African-based faiths. These New World faiths draw on traditions from various
West African peoples, especially Yoruba and Fon, as well as from other
ethnicities.
In these traditions and in Yoruba traditional religion, practitioners believe in
a high god, Oludumare, and lesser deities, called orishas. Adherents view
Oludumare as a distant creator, so regular devotions are to the orishas who play
a more direct role in everyday life, hence, New World traditions that worship
deities from the Yoruba pantheon are also called Orisha “worship,” though they
are known by a variety of names. In Haiti, they are Vodou or some variation
thereof. Scholars have popularized the term “Santeria,” which means “Way of
the Saints,” as a name for orisha religion in Cuba, though practitioners prefer
other terms such as Regla de Ocha or Lucumi to refer to their beliefs. In Brazil,
Candomble is a well-known term for these traditions.
The aforementioned traditions are practical, and rather than engaging in
speculation on esoteric questions about the nature of salvation and such, they
focus on practical matters such as helping practitioners navigate through the
matters in life that affect them, including healing, divination, or accessing
spiritual power to achieve their goals or resolve problems. Unlike in some
religious traditions where spiritual power is either good or evil, in these New
World African traditions, power is neutral and can be used according to the
826
intent of the user who harnesses it. Whether it is for their own self-interest or
for the good of the community, these religions hold the prevalence of Yoruba
and Fon traditions and an African view of the universe in common, but each is
also distinct.
Haitian Vodou had a large influence on slave revolts in that colony. Francois
Makandal, said to be a Vodou houngan, or priest, organized enslaved people
around the colony for a revolt in 1758. Later, the Haitian Revolution of 1791
that culminated in the destruction of slavery in Haiti and the establishment of a
black republic started with a Vodou ritual when Dutty Boukman, a maroon
leader and Vodou priest, performed a ritual aimed at cementing the loyalty of
the rebels and prophesied that they would gain their freedom. In the British
Caribbean Obeah, another form of orisha worship, was widespread in Jamaica,
Barbados, and Antigua, while in Trinidad it was called Shango. Besides
influence from Yoruba and Fon traditions, scholars attribute much of the
emergence of Obeah to the presence on those islands of many Akan people
from West Africa's Gold Coast (Ghana today). Colonial authorities sometimes
outlawed Obeah because they feared its revolutionary potential, which was
realized with Tacky's Rebellion of 1760 in Jamaica. Tacky, who was born in
the Gold Coast, led the revolt, and Obeahmen distributed a type of powder
amongst the rebels that was supposed to protect them from harm.
Obeah does not center on group or community worship and rituals aimed at a
pantheon of deities as in Vodou or Regla de Ocha, but rather on individual
practitioners who are herbalists or root doctors. Myalism is also common in
Jamaica. While some scholars treat Obeah and Myalism as parts of the same
tradition, other scholars consider them distinctly different traditions that were
already separate in West Africa before their New World adherents endured the
Middle Passage. In contrast to the individualism of Obeah, Myalism involved a
community of believers who performed group rituals. Due to the differences
between the two, observers have portrayed Obeah negatively as “witchcraft”
for hire, as Obeahmen sold their services to whomever needed them and could
do harm to others or help according to the needs or wants of the client.
Myalism, by contrast, due to its communal services and rituals, was seen as a
system whose aim was to serve for the benefit of the community.
These New World African traditions still have adherents around the
Caribbean and in Latin America and have experienced growth in the number of
adherents, especially among people seeking a connection to their African roots.
But they have also attracted devotees who are not of African ancestry. Due to
827
increased immigration, they have also taken root in the United States. Cuban
immigrants introduced Regla de Ocha to the United States and immigration
from Haiti has spread Vodun. African Americans not of Caribbean background
who seek an African experience have also embraced these traditions. Since
these religions do not have sacred texts or centralized and hierarchical
organization, practice varies widely and there is no authoritative version that
claims to be the “right” or orthodox form of belief. Rather, specialists and
believers learn from the practitioners who introduced them to the community
and practice the specific ideas of their community of believers. As these
traditions have grown in recent years, some believers, especially those who
embraced them in search of a more African experience, have looked to West
Africa for leadership, searching for what they believe would be a more
“authentic” African experience, and they attempt to weed out elements that they
consider to be of Caribbean origin.
828
The Church in the Caribbean: Missionary Work on the
Islands Prior to Emancipation
The Church in much of the Caribbean mirrored the actions and attitudes of
Protestant churches on the North American mainland. Church leaders decided
that their interest most closely aligned with that of the slaveholding class with
whom they had close ties. So, like in the Southern United States, Christian
organizations accommodated themselves to slavery. The attitude of
slaveholders in the British Caribbean during the early colonial period was much
like that of their counterparts on the Mainland. The Church of England was not
able to adequately staff the islands with priests, and slaveholders often refused
to grant them access to slaves because they feared that conversion to
Christianity might lead to emancipation. Consequently, for most of the colonial
era, few enslaved people became Christians. In the mid-1700s, as a wave of
evangelization swept over the English-speaking world, nonconformists,
meaning those groups other than the Church of England, attempted to
evangelize in the Caribbean, but they were met with opposition from plantation
owners and therefore had relatively little success in evangelizing the enslaved
Africans.
Those early Christian groups like the Moravians, who were among the most
active in the Caribbean, did not oppose slavery. The Moravians in Jamaica
during the 1700s owned slaves themselves, as did the Baptist, Presbyterian, and
other groups as well. Even Quakers, known for their early opposition to slavery
in England and North America, not only did not speak against slave ownership
in the Caribbean, but were slaveholders themselves. When Christianity did start
to gain supporters among enslaved people in the Caribbean, it was black people
that played the leading role in its growth. Early white Methodist missionaries
had achieved only modest success on a few Caribbean islands during the
eighteenth century, but the Baptists started to gain many converts because their
movement in the islands was led by people of African descent. George Liele, an
African American preacher who left the mainland after the US Revolutionary
War, introduced the Baptist church to the Caribbean. Liele, who had a hand in
starting the first black churches in South Carolina and Georgia, left the
mainland with the British and relocated to Jamaica, where he started the first
Baptist church on the island. Liele and his assistants gained thousands of
converts, started Baptist churches and spread that faith to other islands. As the
829
Baptist church grew, the London Missionary Society took control of it in the
West Indies.
While plantation owners still often objected to missionaries preaching to
their slaves, missionaries persisted, and Protestant denominations continued to
spread until the so-called Baptist War of 1831. Sam Sharpe, an enslaved man in
Jamaica who was also an officer in the Baptist Church, led this rebellion that
involved over 50,000 slaves. Prior to joining the Baptist church, Sharpe also
had a background in Myalism. In addition to the prominence of Baptists in the
rebellion and the Myalist influence on it, Obeahmen participated in the revolt
too. In the aftermath of the Baptist War, Sharpe and other principle participants
were executed, but plantation owners blamed white missionaries for sparking
the uprising. While Protestant missionaries called for more humane treatment
of slaves, they did not oppose slavery. They decried the rebellion and argued
that if plantation owners gave them more access to the slaves that the
missionaries' teachings would help make the slaves more docile. But the actions
by enslaved people to oppose slavery, such as in the Baptist War, helped
influence Parliament to pass an emancipation law in 1833.
830
Following emancipation, Caribbean churches focused on educating the
masses, land ownership, and improving the living conditions of the free people.
Within a short time, Baptists had helped enable free people to occupy land,
establish a school system, and start colleges, and black church membership
grew greatly. After the period of rapid growth that occurred after emancipation,
churches soon lost much of that membership as they experienced a temporary
decline. This could be attributable in part to the fact that Africans in the
Caribbean had not abandoned African religious beliefs as shown by the
continuance of Myalism, Vodou, Regla de Ocha, and Shango.
Black Christians in the West Indies continued to include some of their
African based traditional beliefs in their religious activities as well. This was
especially true for Baptists, as the Baptist church in the Caribbean had started
with Africans. Because they had Africanized their Christianity, other
denominations accused the Baptists of compromising Christianity with
“heathenism.” They especially faulted black immigrants from North America
for spreading supposedly un-Christian practices in Baptist churches throughout
the English-speaking Caribbean. African Americans also introduced
Protestantism to predominantly Catholic countries, including the Dominican
Republic and Haiti. Haiti, which ruled the Dominican Republic, allowed
missionaries there in 1824 when African Americans from the Mainland
migrated there. Thomas Paul, an African American abolitionist and preacher,
spread the Baptist faith in Haiti, and African American migrants also brought
the Episcopal Church to Haiti in 1861.
Despite criticism from white-controlled organizations from Europe, or
perhaps because of it, the independent black church movement spread in the
Caribbean islands. The independent churches grew alongside such religious
movements as Vodun, Shango, and Regla de Ocha. Thus, the most important
features of religion in the current Caribbean, including in Christianity, have
been the rise of the independent church movement and the continued popularity
and influence of Africa-based traditions. West Indians' African heritage has
exerted its influence in the Christian churches and even practitioners of more
overtly African based traditions still profess to be Christians.
831
Rastafarianism
Rastafarianism is a diasporic religion that originated in Jamaica in the 1930s.
It has influenced popular culture and the arts and gained worldwide recognition
far greater than its number of adherents might suggest. It started with certain
followers of Marcus Garvey, including Leonard Howell, who were convinced
that Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie I, was the messiah. Rastafarianism
combined Christianity with West Indian customs and ideas that came from its
founding fathers.
Besides affirming the deity of Haile Selassie, adherents of Rastafarianism
believe in living life in accordance with nature, such as eating organic foods,
abstaining from alcohol, and avoiding chemicals and additives in their diets.
Some Rastafarians are, indeed, vegetarians. Although some preach
reincarnation, Rastafarians generally do not believe in an afterlife because they
hold that one's salvation happens on earth. In popular culture, Rastafarians' use
of marijuana and their dreadlock hairstyle have gained widespread attention.
For Rastafarians, however, marijuana has ritual purposes, and they believe it
serves to heighten spiritual awareness. The dreadlock hairstyle is related to their
emphasis on living a natural life and to admonitions in the Old Testament
against trimming the corners of the beard and cutting the hair, as when one
takes the vows of a Nazarite as described in Numbers 6:1–21.
832
Islam came to North America in three chronological groupings. First there
were the enslaved people that arrived via the Middle Passage, next there was a
wave of converts beginning in the early twentieth century, and finally, large
numbers of Muslim immigrants have started to come to the United States since
the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 reformed the US's immigration
policy. Most Muslims in early America were of African descent. Since the
slave trade affected parts of West Africa where Islam was common, Muslims
were among those taken on the Middle Passage. Some of them were literate and
could write in Arabic. Though it would be very difficult to calculate how many
of the enslaved Africans brought to America were Muslims, scholarly estimates
range from 10 percent to 30 percent. Therefore, a similar proportion of those
brought to British North America and the US would have been Muslims.
Those Muslims in the New World continued to practice their religious beliefs
as much as they were able to under the circumstances. For example, they
maintained Islamic prayer traditions and passed on aspects of their culture to
their children, such as giving them Muslim names. Despite the devotion of
Muslim victims of the Middle Passage, in the context of North America, their
faith did not maintain generational cohesion. Hence, according to scholars of
African American religion, there is not a direct connection between African
American Islam of the antebellum period and the Islam that emerged in
America in the twentieth century. Rather, the Muslim community that emerged
in the twentieth century owes its rise to the unique conditions of African
American life and to the work of immigrant Muslims and missionaries of the
early 1900s. From the combination of the social, political, and cultural context
of African American life in the early 1900s, along with influence of Muslim
missionaries, emerged a distinct African American Islam.
By the early 1900s, Muslim immigrants from countries with large Islamic
populations were arriving in the US. During this period, thousands of African
Americans joined various Islamic movements. The Ahmadiyya movement was
especially significant in the development of Islam in this country. Muhammad
Sadiq, an Ahmadiyya missionary from what is now Pakistan, started to recruit
African Americans into his movement and thousands of African Americans
joined him. In fact, the work of the Ahmadiyya missionaries and of Sunni
Muslims significantly impacted the growth of Islam among African Americans.
During the Great Migration, when Southern migrants in the North sought
833
meaning, stability, and community in their lives, many turned to Islam,
including those who turned to distinct African American Islamic movements. In
the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans created their own Islamic-influenced
religious movements. Most notable were the Moorish Science Temple (MST)
and the Nation of Islam (NOI). Noble Drew started the Moorish Science
Temple of America in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913 and changed his name to
Noble Drew Ali. Ali preached that African Americans were not Negroes but
Asiatics. He moved his organization's headquarters to Chicago in 1925 and died
in 1929, but the MST continued.
The Nation of Islam became the best known and most publicized Islamic
movement in the United States. Started by Wali Fard, a teacher of uncertain
origin, and spread by his pupil, Elijah Muhammad, the NOI's influence and
renown exceeded its size. After Fard's departure, Muhammad was able to
spread the NOI faith beyond what Fard accomplished in his lifetime. Then,
during the 1950s and 1960s, Malcolm X emerged as the most prominent
spokesperson for the NOI, and one of the most popular and charismatic figures
of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet, despite the continued existence of groups
like the MST and the notoriety of the Nation of Islam, thousands of African
Americans were practitioners of orthodox Sunni Islam.
Although the population of American Muslims has surged since passage of
the Immigration Act of 1965, and Muslims from around the world came to
America, African Americans still constitute a disproportionate number of the
Muslims in the US, most of them being Orthodox Sunni. After the death of
Elijah Muhammad in 1975, his son, Wallace D. Muhammad, became the head
of the NOI. Wallace D. Muhammad rejected his father's unique doctrines, such
as the separate creation of white people, and moved the NOI into Orthodox
Sunni Islam. Through a series of name changes, the NOI became the American
Society of Muslims.
However, not all NOI members were happy with the organization's direction
under the younger Muhammad. As a result, Louis Farrakhan led a splinter
group that retained the name of Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad's
theological teachings. Though the NOI represents only a small portion of
African American Muslims, through Farrakhan's leadership and his status as
one of the most prominent black leaders in the United States, the reconstituted
Nation of Islam remains influential, as demonstrated by Farrakhan's success in
organizing the Million Man March in 1995. The Moorish Science Temple
continues to exist as well. As immigration has increased, the percentage of
834
African Americans among US Muslims has declined, but American Muslims
are still disproportionately African American. And despite the importance of
leaders such as Louis Farrakhan, most African American Muslims are Sunnis.
835
Summary
The history of religion in the African diaspora in the Americas has been
diverse and complex, though united by an African view of the universe. Though
Christianity has been widespread among diasporic Africans since slavery was
abolished, to the extent that commentators commonly describe the black church
as the most significant institution in the black community, the creation of
African American Christianity proceeded slowly, and today, the future of the
black church is sometimes questioned. During the colonial era, Protestant
churches often did not have enough clergy to Christianize the population
amongst whom they worked. Slaveholders in predominantly Protestant colonies
also often objected to letting ministers have access to enslaved people. In that
atmosphere, African traditions prevailed in religious practice and that led to the
emergence of Hoodoo, or conjure, an African American system of religious
practices that drew on African traditions and the African worldview.
After many African Americans became Christians during the Great
Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, it led to the creation of independent
black churches after the Revolutionary War. These churches were the
foundation of the emergence of the black church as the leading black institution
in the United States. But the version of Christianity that emerged after the
abolition of slavery was one that had been Africanized to some extent and was
quite different from that practiced by most white Americans of that time.
Perhaps the primary difference was that African American Christianity focused
on liberation and rejected the racial hierarchy that eighteenth-century white
churches accommodated and helped to create.
Since the abolition of slavery, Islam and other religions have also spread
among African Americans in the US, and today diverse options are available in
the religious sphere. However, Christianity remains the largest religion among
African Americans by far, but the population also includes several million
Muslims who are mostly Sunni. Growth in Islam is primarily from conversion,
but immigration has also contributed to the increase in African diaspora
Muslims. Many African Americans have also turned to New World African
religious traditions from the Caribbean, especially Regla de Ocha or Santeria,
and Vodun.
In the West Indies, the islands of the Caribbean, the religious trajectory for
the African diaspora was similar to that in the United States. Migrants from the
836
US also played an important role in the emergence of the Protestant churches in
the Caribbean. The predominantly Roman Catholic colonies differed from the
colonies that the Protestants settled, as in Catholic colonies the church had
more political influence and made extensive an effort, even using force, to
convert enslaved people. But even in those colonies, which included Haiti and
Cuba, the continuous importation of Africans and the concentration of African
people allowed African religious traditions to flourish. Those in Haiti, Cuba,
and Brazil syncretized African traditional religion into their Catholicism and
practiced such faiths of African origin as those named above. Today, the
Catholic Church and Protestantism flourish in the Caribbean alongside
Caribbean African traditions, which have also spread to the mainland.
837
1. How did the Civil Rights Movement and the black Church impact each
other?
2. Discuss the origins, success, and problems of black Muslims in the United
States.
3. Compare and contrast the features of the Church in North America and the
Caribbean and its treatment of black people.
4. What impact did the Great Migration have on African American religion?
5. What impact has immigration had on African American religion?
838
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__________. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum
South. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Walter C. Rucker. The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and
Identity Formation in Early America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
Sterling Stuckey. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of
839
Black America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Robert Farris Thompson. Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art &
Philosophy. New York, NY: Random House, 1983.
Richard Brent Turner. Islam in the African-American Experience.
Robert A. Voeks. Sacred Leaves of Candomble: African Magic, Medicine,
and Religion in Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997.
Calvin White Jr. The Rise to Respectability: Race, Religion, and the Church
of God in Christ. Fayetteville, AK: University of Arkansas Press, 2012.
840
24
The Evolving Roles of African

Women
Agnes Ngoma Leslie
841
Introduction
There are many similarities in women's roles across the continent. While
there were many societies in which women's status was and still remains bound
to the domestic realm, there are many others in which women also operated
outside that sphere. Clarke (1988) notes that “In Africa the woman's ‘place’
was not only with her family: she often ruled nations with unquestionable
authority. Many African women were great militarists and on occasion led their
armies in battle.”
This article provides a survey of the changing status of African women from
pre-colonial to postcolonial societies and provides examples of the roles they
have played and their impact in the political, economic, religious and military
domains. It is difficult to fully grasp the roles and status of African women in
traditional and modern societies given their diversity across the continent.
Although there is great diversity in the women's status and roles, there are also
some commonalities. Apart from the biological and social roles of raising and
nurturing families, women throughout the continent have been seen as the
protectors of their traditions. The status of African women was greatly
impacted by the slave trade beginning in the 1500s and later, by colonialism.
European ethnocentrism has tended to depict African women negatively as
dominated and lacking authority. This view, however, has been challenged by
many including Ifi Amadiume (1987), van Sertima (1984, 1989), Diop (1974)
and Parpart (1986).
Major terms and concepts: matriarchy, patriarchy, matrilineal, patrilineal,
kinship, dual-sex, intermediary, enstool, golden stool, women's movements,
post conflict.
842
Traditional African societies were either matrilineal or patrilineal. In
matrilineal societies, children trace their descent through the mother. They
carry their mother's name and they inherit possessions and positions through
their mother. Patrilineal societies trace their inheritance through the father. In
matrilineal societies, it is the husband who moves to live in the woman's side of
the family. Examples of matrilineal societies include the Bemba of Zambia, the
Asante of Ghana, who make up about fifty percent of the Ghanaian population,
and the Bamenda of Cameroon. Some matrilineal societies also have
matriarchies, which are family groups headed by women.
When studying women in African societies, it is useful to examine
matriarchal traditions and dual-sex modes of political organization. Matriarchy
is a political system in which women are the dominant political actors, as
opposed to patriarchy, in which men are the exclusive or primary heads of
families, social groups, or political states. A matriarchal social system is
organized around the principle of female-rule, in which women are at the top of
the power structure. It is opposed to a patriarchal system which places emphasis
on a male-centered political system. This is how many traditional African
societies differed from Western societies which were and are still largely
patriarchal.
Matriarchy is a fundamental social and ideological base on which African
kinship and wider social and moral systems are based. In addition, women's
age-set organizations and councils also played a role in government.
Matriarchy, as is constructed by African women, has a very clear message
about social and economic justice. Matriarchal patterns vary, with some women
gaining prominence due to their positions as wives, such as the Egyptian
queens married to pharaohs, and many who were independent, such as the
Ethiopian queens. According to Ifi Amadiume (1997), writing about African
women transforming their culture for 500 years, there are two major
contributions that African women have made to world history and civilization:
matriarchy and the dual-sex character of African political systems.
843
The uniqueness of traditional African societies is the “dual-sex” political
system they practiced. Most African societies utilized the principle of a dual-
sex political system in which the sexes pursued their parallel political and
religious interests. This provided for individual female leadership, and it also
differs from the European patriarchal system where women were largely
confined to the home and did not have public roles. There are many societies in
which females operated on parallel level with male leaders. These include the
Bemba people of Zambia, the Asante of Ghana, and the Ganda people of
Uganda. A dual monarchy existed in some parts of Africa, and it still exists in
Swaziland, where there is the king symbolized by the lion (Ingwenyama), and
the queen mother, symbolized by the she-elephant (Ndlovukazi). Although
today, the king rules Swaziland, traditionally the role of the queen mother was
to balance the king's power and to check on the excesses of power. The king
was the administrative head while the queen mother was the spiritual and
national head of state with real power counter balancing that of the king. She
also acted as regent and ruled the country while training the next leader. Queen
Mother Labotsibeni Mduli is remembered for her effective rule of Swaziland
first as the Queen Mother from 1890 to 1899 and then as Queen Regent for the
young King Sobhuza II from 1899 to 1921. She was also known for her fight
against Boer and British occupation of Swaziland.
Another way women in traditional African societies held leadership roles, in
many cases on a parallel basis, was through their own female societies in which
they performed parallel tasks to the general societal responsibilities. Having
children was celebrated and seen as a symbol of maturity and respect but was
also an economic asset since labor was required for agricultural and many other
tasks. Throughout the continent, motherhood was held in high esteem and a
determinant for one holding high position. Many traditional societies had queen
mothers. The role of queen mothers varied in different societies, with some
holding the position as a regent until the king took over while others continued
on a parallel status. Among the Ashanti, the king and the queen mother have
stools like thrones, to symbolize their power and authority. They are
matrilineal, so the descent is through the mother. However, the king and queen
mother ascends to the stool separately but they function as a duality in the
leadership roles. One does not exist without the other. Each political unit has a
chief and a queen mother but they access the throne individually on their own
844
merits. Although they may be related since they both belong to the royal
lineage, they are chosen independently based on their qualifications. They can
sometimes be the biological mother and son but not husband and wife.
845
Women's nurturing responsibilities extended to food provision and
production. The centrality of women's role is tied to food provision. Ali Mazrui
(1992) described women's responsibilities as being linked to earth, fire, and
water, three of the four elements in traditional culture. In reality, they are
responsible for agricultural production, elements for preparing food, and
ensuring the availability of water. In other words, women are responsible for
providing most of the basic human needs. The fourth element is the
omnipresent air, which is in God's custody. Mazrui refers to “the doctrine of
dual fertility” that women ensure the survival of the current generation by
cultivating and nurturing and ensures the arrival of the next generation in their
roles as mothers. In essence, this means that women safeguard the lives and
ensure the continuity of the society.
In African societies, however, the roles and responsibilities are not rigid but
are carried out in complementary ways. African women were and continue to
be agriculturists. In some cases, men were hunters while the women tended the
land. Agriculture was also the basis of a woman's economic power. Since food
production was determined by land control, it meant that women were
recognized for their vital economic roles as food producers. In some cultures,
like the Bemba of Zambia, or the Kikuyu of Kenya, women had control over
the land and determined how it was to be cultivated. They divided the land and
apportioned it among the other family members. In this manner, women
controlled the economy. This has continued to the present in many African
societies where women cultivate the land and perform agricultural related
responsibilities. Since agriculture and other economic responsibilities were tied
to the land, women's roles and status were upgraded.
Women's authority was manifested in the cultivating and controlling of the
land. There are many traditional societies in Africa where women are still
subsistence farmers; indeed, they make up more than 80 percent of the
subsistence farmers. Among the Tonga of the southern province in Zambia, for
example, many women have their own fields and granaries. They control their
grain production and the security of land tenure. Control of the land extended
the women's influence to their sons and in-laws and others who worked the
land. In matrilineal societies, like the Bemba of the northern province of
Zambia, husbands would move to their wives' residence, thus extending the
women's economic influence.
846
In sum, throughout much of the continent, women hold major economic roles
with wide-ranging impact. Women have recognized the vital roles they play in
the economic well-being of their communities. Among the Kikuyu of Kenya,
women were the major food producers and thus not only did they have ready
access to land but also had authority of how the land was to be used and
cultivated, which gave them both economic and political authority. The value
of women's labor in producing and processing food established and maintained
their rights in the domestic and other spheres. Although women lost much of
their status under colonialism, they still account for much of the 80 percent of
the agricultural production which comes from small rural farmers. African
women comprise the largest percentage of the workforce in the agricultural
sector, but unfortunately in many cases today, they lack control over the land
and other productive resources. In the last 10 years, however, many African
countries have adopted new laws in order to strengthen women's land
ownership rights. This has helped improve the situation of rural women.
847
Religion and Status
Traditional African religions transcended all aspects of people's lives.
African religions are based on the belief in one supreme God. There are various
ways in which people express their belief in God's attributes, one of which
relates to the status of women in religion in their cultures. Women used to play
prominent and sometimes leading roles in many African religions. John Mbiti
sees the link of human life to God directly through the woman. He explains that
God created the woman and she herself becomes an instrument of human life.
Various African cultures hold different interpretations of God's attributes. The
Ashanti people of Ghana view God, the Supreme Being they call Nyame, as
being male and female. The female aspect is symbolized by the moon which
created human beings with water, while the male is symbolized by the sun
which put life giving fire into the human veins and made human beings live.
They view women as the mother of all humankind.
Women played and continue to play various roles, which in some cases are
very high and authoritative. In many societies, they held superior roles as
deities, diviners and spirit mediums who interceded between the people and
their gods. In these societies, women were also believed to have mystical
powers. The abilities they were endowed with, including the biological roles of
carrying and nurturing children, were seen as sacred. Although the Igbo of
Nigeria are patriarchal, they viewed women as the superior deities, and they
were able to translate uncommon things from the gods to ordinary human
beings. Women exerted power through their religious involvement. Chinua
Achebe illustrates this in Things Fall Apart:
The oracle was called Agbala, and the people came from far and near to
consult it. They came when misfortune dogged their steps or when they
had a dispute with their neighbors. They came to discover what the
future held for them or consult the spirits for the departed fathers.
Worshippers and those who came to seek knowledge from the god
crawled on their belly through the hole and found themselves in a dark,
endless space in the presence of Agbala. No one had ever beheld
Agbala, except his priestess.... The priestess in those days was a woman
called Chika. She was full of the power of her god, and she was greatly
feared.
In this Igbo illustration, Chika, the woman, was a real person who was known
848
in the society but believed to hold special powers and was able to intercede
between the people and the higher power. She was highly respected and was
never questioned for her actions, which were at times authoritative. Although
the Igbo are patriarchal, they nonetheless view women as being supreme. When
Okonkwo, the main character in Things Fall Apart, is banished from his land,
he returns to his mother's land. Okonkwo is depressed but his uncle chides him
and educates him on the important status his mother represents:
Can you tell me, Okonkwo, why it is that one of the commonest names
we give our children is Nneka, or “Mother is Supreme?” A man belongs
to his fatherland and not to his motherland. And yet we say Nneka—
Mother is Supreme. Why is that?... Why is it that when a woman dies
she is taken to be buried with her own kinsmen? She is not buried with
her husband's kinsmen. It is true that a child belongs to its father. But
when a father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother's hut. A
man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet.
But when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in his
motherland. Your mother is there to protect you. She is buried there.
And that is why we say that mother is supreme.
Thus, although in some cases the status of women is not overtly shown to be
high, it is understood through symbolism. African women also belonged to
their own traditional associations in which they played roles to safeguard their
traditions. Some of these societies were secret, as in the case of the Sande in
Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). This may
explain the leadership roles that African women have been able to attain in
post-colonial Africa compared to other regions. Women also played the role of
traditional doctors with the ability to diagnose disease and provide treatment. In
some cases, they worked with men, with the women being able to diagnose the
disease and the men being able to locate the treatment. In parts of Africa,
including South Africa, women traditional healers still serve significant roles in
their societies.
849
In Swaziland, the king and the queen mother, as noted above, are
traditionally co-rulers and believed to have supernatural powers extending to
the ability to make rain. They are both believed to be rain makers. However,
even in this regard, the duality of their supernatural power is gendered. They
make different types of rain, which are “male” and “female.” The male rain is
aggressive, accompanied by thunder and lightning, while the queen mother's
rain is gentle and steady, reflecting the symbolic attributes of the lion and
elephant. The lion symbolizes the aggressive quality and propensity to fight its
enemies, while the elephant is strong, protective and nurturing. In the Swazi
history, Queen Mother Labotsibeni Mduli, who ruled from 1890 to 1921, is
remembered for her strength, including her rain making powers, which even
shocked the white administrators who had doubted her. Mduli led Swaziland
before the country came under colonial rule and fought against the British
occupation. Thoko Ginindza, who has studied the Swazi royal history, captures
this:
Some informants also told me the story that, once the white
administration disputed Labotsibeni's powers of rain-making. She said
she would prove that she could cause rain. A heavy downpour ensued
which flooded rivers, including the Mbabane River flowing in the white
administration's capital. Mining equipment was swept away along the
river banks where mining was being carried on, especially alluvial tin
mining. The whites were astounded.
Swaziland (now called eSwatini) is still a monarchy, ruled by the king, and still
has a queen mother. It maintains the symbols of the lion and the elephant on its
official coat of arms.
850
In African societies, the wide-ranging positions of women in politics make
the continent incomparable to other parts of the world. The range includes
women in high status positions, such as those in Egypt and Ethiopia, to include
warrior queens such as Angola's Queen Nzinga and queen mothers such as Yaa
Asantewaa of Ghana, chiefs and priestesses. This section will provide examples
of women who played significant political roles in their societies.
The Egyptian Pharaoh, Hatshepsut, has been referred to as the “first queen in
the history of humanity.” She reigned from 1505 to 1485 BC and is known as
the warrior queen who was aggressive and a born dynast. She successfully
established trade routes and numerous construction projects and is now
considered one of the most accomplished leaders of ancient Egypt. She created
a new way of rulership by using male attributes to install female authority. She
wore male attire, sported a beard, and even referred to herself, and insisted on
being referred to, as “he.”
Basing his opinion on the Ethiopian legend Kebra Nagast, Adolfo
Makuntima writes in How to Thank your Father that The Ethiopian Queen
Sheba is known in the Bible as “the great black beauty who melted King
Solomon's heart.” She started the Solomonid line of Ethiopian kings which can
be traced to Emperor Haile Selassie, their leader. Her accomplishments are not
often recognized, but they include ruling a large empire and developing an
extensive trade network. In Angola, the warrior Queen Nzinga took over
leadership from her brother and fought the Portuguese occupation of her
country. Born around 1581, Queen Nzinga was a strategist and a fierce fighter
when her attempts for peaceful resolution did not succeed. Among the other
things she is remembered for is her strategy to ensure equal status with the
Portuguese governor who had been installed in Angola. According to
Sweetman, this historic meeting is captured in the following:
Nzinga organized her arrival at the governor's residence in such a way
that no one could be in any doubt that this was a “royal” occasion and
not the humble arrival of a conquered messenger. Musicians heralded
her approach as she entered the audience chamber escorted by her
serving women. Now occurred the event that was to make her so
famous, an event happily recorded by a Dutch artist a little while later.
There was only one chair, the governor's throne. Nzinga was
851
determined not to be placed at a disadvantage. Summoning one of her
women, who came forward and fell to her hands and knees, the haughty
princess sat down on this human seat. When Governor de Souza
entered, he found himself already outmaneuvered. During the following
interview he was not allowed to regain the upper hand.
Nzinga fiercely fought the Portuguese and developed fighting tactics which
were admired and resembled those utilized 300 years later by the Angolan
guerrilla movements fighting against Portuguese rule. Although the Portuguese
were better armed, they still fought a long, tough battle against her resistance
movement before taking over the country. Nzinga fought actively before
retiring at age 75!
While these women were located in patriarchal societies, there are many
located in matriarchal traditions with dual-sex political systems. The following
section will provide two examples from West and Eastern Africa to portray
some of that diversity. In Ghana, the Asante people, who belong to the Akan
group, constitute 50 percent of the country's population. They are matrilineal
and provide examples of dual-sex political organization. In Uganda, the Ganda
people of the Buganda kingdom also portray a gendered practice of their
political system.
852
Two Queen Mothers
The most important symbol of the Asante is the golden stool, which
symbolizes authority and unity. Legend has it that the stool appeared from the
sky and descended down onto the people. Since the Asante have a dual-sex
political system, they have two stools, one for the male and one for the female
chief. The stool is like a throne except they do not sit on it. The queen mothers
“occupy” their own stools. The chief and the queen mother are selected
separately based on their qualifications and are “enstooled” separately. They,
however, have to belong to the royal family and, since they are matrilineal, they
may be related through a mother, sister, or aunt but never a husband, since they
are from the same lineage. Every individual belongs to the mother's clan, and
all successions to the stool are matrilineal. Every Asante community practices
dual leadership, through the chief and the queen mother, which is reflected in
having the two stools. It is important to note that the emphasis is on the parallel
nature of the relationship rather than equality.
The queen mother is considered the mother of the clan and the mother of the
chief. She represents both symbolic and political power. Since the status and
prestige depends on her, the queen mother is an authority on the history of her
lineage. Power also rests on the chief and queen mother for the distribution of
land, which may translate that all the land belongs to the chief. She is seen as
the locus of authority in the clan and passes on her wisdom to the chief and the
people. She is also the protector of the nation. This is portrayed in Queen Yaa
Asantewaa, who led the Asante against the British in what has been called the
“Yaa Asantewaa War” of 1900–1901.
When the British went to occupy the Gold Coast, now Ghana, they
encountered the formidable queen mother, Yaa Asantewaa of the Asante. She is
remembered as the queen that the Asante people asked to lead them in the fight
against the British. The British, not understanding her role, remarked: “When
all seemed lost, their power broken and their king exiled, the Asante put
themselves under the command of a woman, Queen Yaa Asantewaa, who led
them in their last desperate attempt to keep the foreigners at bay” (David
Sweetman, 1984). The British had established the Gold Coast colony on the
coast and their governor, Sir Frederick Hodgson, demanded the Golden Stool
so that he could sit on it as the British queen's representative. This sacrilegious
provocation led to fierce fighting. The British were fighting to colonize the
Asante and the rest of Ghana.
853
Queen Yaa Asantewaa was appointed by the regional chiefs to take over the
command of the Asante forces, a role which exceeded the normal political and
military roles of Asante women. As Arhin Brempong puts it, “The men
recognized in her a potential leader and elected her as the first female war-
leader, Sahene; it was an appointive, not an ascribed, position.” The men at one
point decided to give up to the armed British, but Queen Asantewaa
reprimanded them: “Now I have seen that some of you fear to go forward to
fight for our King. If it were in the brave days of Osei Tutu, Okomfo Anokye,
and Opoku Ware, leaders would not sit down to see their King taken away
without firing a shot. No white man could have dared to speak to a leader of the
Ashanti in the way the Governor spoke to you this morning. Is it true that the
bravery of the Ashanti is no more? I cannot believe it. It cannot be! I must say
this, if you the men of Ashanti will not go forward, then we will. We the
women will. I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight the white men.
We will fight till the last of us falls in the battlefields.”
At one time, her forces trapped and surrounded the British in a fort for
months. The British, however, had superior weapons and brought in more
troops from other countries. It took a force of over 2,000 to capture Yaa
Asantewaa, which they finally did; they subsequently exiled her to the
Seychelles, where she died around 1920. Yaa Asantewaa is remembered as the
woman who carried a gun and is often depicted in pictures wearing an army
uniform and holding a rifle.
Like the Asante, the Ganda people in the East African kingdom of Buganda,
now part of Uganda, also had a gendered system of power in which the queen
mother had autonomous authority which she used to check the chief's excesses
of power. She had the power to enthrone or depose a king and watched over the
kingdom by restraining the king's power. She held parallel authority to the king.
The queen mother received the same kinds of tribute as the king. Like the king,
she controlled a large tract of land, which served as her material base. The
queen mother's authority was similar to that of the king. Her duties were like
the king's, appointing her own ministers of various kinds, allocating land to
them, and collecting taxes. The queen mother received a portion of all taxes
collected and was financially independent, which emphasized her autonomous
power. She also provided political, economic and spiritual counsel to the king.
The queen mother was the only one in the Ganda political order who could
counterweigh the king's power and constrain his excessive power.
854
The status of women, including those in authority, diminished with the
advent of colonialism. The colonial administration introduced their own system
of government which excluded many of the African traditional leaders. Women
were in most cases completely ignored. The dual-sex nature of their authority
meant that, since the men were excluded, the women too were rendered
irrelevant. There was no place for women of authority and even less so for
women in general. At the beginning the women tried to fight the foreign
intervention at various levels. For example, at the arrival of the foreigners in the
1870s, Queen Mother Muganzirwaza of the Ganda exercised her authority to
reduce foreign influence on the king. She was against foreign goods and
refused to wear imported cloth.
The changes to Ganda traditional authority started gradually, beginning with
the long-distance trade. Hanson (2002) states that long distance trade in
imported goods undermined the authority of the king in the center as people
were able to conduct trade and get goods which were previously only gifts for
the king. As the king lost his authority so did the queen mother, since her status
depended on the central authority of the king. “Ganda institutions still existed,
but their meaning shifted radically. The king became a figurehead, carrying out
the will of coalitions of chiefs with military power.” As recounted by Hanson,
“the queen mother ceased to have a meaningful role in politics, because a queen
mother had always exercised authority in relation to a powerful king, the queen
mother's ability to influence affairs of state was severely diminished.”
855
In general, colonialism brought down the status of men and women in Africa.
Women and their traditional organizations were ignored. However, the colonial
administration engaged men because they needed them to work for them. They
worked in the new administrative offices and the new economies. Men's status
changed since they needed jobs to pay taxes. However, women stayed home
and were not actively engaged in the new administration. There were a few who
were educated as teachers and nurses and some worked as maids. Many women
were engaged and continue to be engaged in subsistence farming and small
businesses. The colonial administration also set up some welfare centers where
women were taught domestic work including sewing and cooking. Both men
and women, however, faced discrimination, which led many to be involved in
liberation movements. Although not much has been written about women, they
also played major roles in fighting against colonialism.
Throughout the continent, women participated in fighting against colonialism
and apartheid in South Africa. In East and West Africa, market women's
demonstrations originated in their protest against taxes. Since they did not have
weapons, they resorted to using various strategies to make their impact,
including demonstrations, shopping boycotts and even writing petitions, as
demonstrated in South Africa. In southeastern Nigeria, thousands of Igbo
women protested against taxes and launched a women's war in 1929. Their
demonstration included burning buildings, looting, breaking jails and attacking
European stores. Women also combined forces with men to fight against
oppression. In Zambia, a group of women demonstrators led by the fearless
Julia Chikamoneka stripped and bared their breasts to show their anger. In
March 1960, they surrounded the British foreign secretary, Ian Mcleod, when
he arrived at the airport from Britain. Traditionally, the act of older people
stripping signified a curse. Mcleod was brought to tears and, soon after the
incident, he was recalled to Britain. Mama Chikamoneka used her home to care
for freedom fighters. She earned the name “Chikamoneka” (victory will be
seen), when she stood out in a crowd when confronted by police and claimed
she was the leader. When she was asked her name, she said “Chikamoneka” to
show her anger against the system and the people's determination to win. Mama
Chikamoneka is referred to as the “Mother of the Zambian nation.”
In South Africa, women participated in the fight against the apartheid
regime. Black African women fought against triple oppression since they were
856
discriminated against due to their race, class and gender. In 1956, women from
different races and classes joined together to protest the pass laws that the
South African government introduced to restrict women's movements.
Women's groups and leaders, including Lilayi Ngoyi, the first president of the
Federation of South African Women, and Helen Joseph, led more than 20,000
women in a historic protest match against pass laws to Pretoria. All women's
groups later formed the South African Women's Coalition. Women's groups
worked with the main liberation groups to liberate their countries. Indeed, many
African countries have acknowledged that their liberation would have come
much later without women's participation.
857
African independence from colonial rule did not automatically elevate
women's status. Many women, including those who had participated in the
struggle against European rule, did not take part in their countries'
governments. Whereas the new governments attempted to elevate women's
issues, women in those countries found that a lot more needed to be done to
uplift their status. For instance, in Botswana, which was democratic and
economically better off than most countries, women found that the constitution
had 25 laws that discriminated against them (Leslie, 2006). They formed a
group called Emang Basadi (Stand up Women), which led the fight for
women's rights. Emang Basadi played a big role in educating the people what it
means to be a democracy and fighting for women's rights.
In South Africa, the Women Coalition was instrumental in ensuring that the
South African constitution guaranteed their rights and participation in decision
making positions. For the African National Congress (ANC), the leading and
ruling party, they ensured a minimum 30 percent representation of women in
parliament and the rest by general vote, leading to an average of 45 percent of
women in parliament. South Africa and Botswana have had among the
strongest women's movements on the continent. Women's organizations
continue to fight for their rights, representation in decision making positions
and other sectors. Most of the countries that have succeeded in establishing
quota systems for women's representation are post-conflict countries including
Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa and Mozambique, which have ensured at least
30 percent women's representation in their national legislative bodies. This is
partly due to the pressure emanating from local and international organizations,
the role women played during and in ending the conflict, and women's pressure
in writing the new constitution and establishing new governments.
858
The current situation shows that there are higher numbers of women in
political representation in African countries both at the presidential level and
for parliamentarian representation as of 2017 than in many other parts of the
world. As the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) notes, three African countries
were among the top 10 globally with more than 40 percent of women
parliamentarians in 2017: Rwanda, South Africa and Senegal. This may be
related to the early female roles and participation in their traditional political
systems. By 2017, Africa had had four female presidents: Liberian President,
Ellen Sirleaf Johnson; President of Malawi, Joyce Banda; Central African
President, Catherine Samba-Panza; and Mauritius President, Ameenah Gurib.
Except for Mauritius, which has been a long-standing democratic and
economically strong country, the other three have been either poor, as in the
case of Malawi, and conflict states, as in the case of Liberia and the Central
African Republic. As in the traditional times, the female leaders were elected to
lead their countries through challenging times. Sirleaf Johnson was the first
African woman to be elected president. She was first elected as president of
Liberia in 2006 and stepped down in 2017.
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Case Study: Rwanda
Although the numbers show comparable high levels of women's
representation, African countries still have to grapple with discriminatory
policies and developmental issues including a lack of basic amenities. Many
believe that having more women in decision making policies may lead to more
effective and inclusive development, as Rwanda has shown. With the senate
being comprised of 64 percent women, Rwanda leads the world (as of 2017) for
its having the highest number of women legislators. The impact of having more
women in the senate has been the passing of more women-friendly laws.
Women are able to own land, and marital property is equally shared. The senate
has passed laws which make issues such as rape a serious crime. As a result in
part of having more women in the senate, Rwanda is doing economically much
better than most other African countries.
The genocide which occurred in Rwanda in 1994 resulted in 500,000 to
800,000 deaths, many of these being men. This created a vacuum which women
were compelled to fill. Women took over many responsibilities in the society
and, as the country drew up a new constitution after the genocide, women
insisted on being included in large numbers in policy and decision making
positions. As a result, the Rwandan constitution mandates that at least 30
percent of seats in the senate and other decision making positions should be left
for women. This means that there are reserved seats for women but also women
run in regular elections. Thus, in the last election women got the 30 percent
reserved seats and 34 percent in the general election, making it 64 percent,
which is the highest percentage of seats for women in the world in 2017.
860
Summary
Colonialism greatly diminished women's status and responsibilities. While
men lost their rights, new opportunities opened up for them, while women
suffered as they were ignored under the colonial administrations. Women's
indigenous associations that were their sources of authority and status were
replaced or subsumed with Westernized systems which emphasized unequal
gender roles. Colonial officials propagated stereotypic Western ideals of
women and relegated them to the domestic realm.
Today, women's roles in Africa have evolved according to the changing
political situation across the continent. In many African societies, women
played leadership and other important roles, contrary to their stereotypic
portrayal as docile and lacking importance. In order to fully grasp their
positions, it is important to study their traditional status and how that has been
impacted by external forces. Colonialism also affected the status of women in
Africa. Women's activism can be traced to fighting against the colonial forces.
After independence, women were also engaged in movements to ensure their
rights and active participation in their governments. Many African countries
realize the importance of having more women in decision making positions.
They have instituted some forms of quota systems in order to ensure the
participation of more women. This is especially the case in post-conflict
countries including Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda. At least four African
countries have had female presidents. Still, much more remains to be done to
empower women and ensure their active participation in their societies and
governments.
861
1. Think about your personal history. Identify a woman that has greatly
impacted your family. What role has she played? Why do you think women's
achievements are not highlighted as much as men's?
2. Define matriarchy. Why is this important for explaining the status of African
women?
3. Choose one of the women mentioned in the article and research and write
about her role in her society.
4. What country has the highest percentage of women in the senate? How did
they achieve this? What has been the impact of having more women in
legislative positions?
5. What measures do you think countries should adopt to increase the number
of women in decision making positions?
862
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25
Women of the Caribbean

A. Lynn Bolles &
Barbara Shaw
866
Introduction
Since the 1970s, researchers have brought women's histories and experiences
to the forefront of the academic forum in efforts to construct an accurate picture
of the Caribbean. Before then, Caribbean women did not receive the kind of
attention they deserved in the historical and socio-cultural scholarship. This
centuries-old omission had to do with who was documenting the events of the
day and the importance placed on what was considered valuable knowledge—
usually that coming from a masculinist perspective. Basically, the experiences,
the lives, and the worldviews of women were not seen as equal to those of men.
And, in a colonial context (the historical memory of the region), subjugated
women, especially those of dark skin color, were even more dishonored than
their Caucasian or mestizo/light skin-colored counterparts. In combination, all
of these factors limited the range and scope of the scholarship concerning
women of the Caribbean. This essay discusses some of the historical, social
scientific, and literary cultural work designed to redress this imbalance.
When writing and reading about women's lives, as eminent anthropologist
Johnnetta Cole notes, no one model or theory is adequate because of the
intersection of class, race, color, ethnicity, religion, geographical location, and
sexual preference. This means that we must analyze women from the standpoint
of the multiple positions that they occupy in society. Moreover, when
Caribbean women are the subjects of comparative analysis, social factors,
nationality, and geopolitical influences must be examined. For example, one
must consider whether the area is on the mainland or is a big or small island
and whether it is a Department of France, a Commonwealth of the United
States, a member of the British Commonwealth, a colony of the Netherlands, or
an independent country. And if it is one of the oldest black independent
republics, like Haiti, it is critical to understand why it is one of the poorest
countries in the Western Hemisphere. For our purposes here, we will give a
cross-cultural overview of Caribbean women's lives and experiences through
the following subject areas: (1) the legacies of Caribbean history, (2) the
European “ideal” versus the Caribbean “reality” in the social structure, (3)
family and kinship, (4) tourism and work, (5) health, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS,
and (6) a brief overview of Caribbean women's literature. In the remainder of
this essay, these topics will be discussed through examples taken primarily
from the English-speaking areas, and to a lesser extent from the Spanish,
French, and Dutch Caribbean. Before going further, however, let us take time to
867
locate Caribbean women in the broadest sense of that socio-cultural term.
Major concepts and terms: Caribbean, caste, maroon, creolization,
commonwealth, visiting union, Trinidad, Guyana, Dominican Republic, Puerto
Rico, Jamaica, Kumina, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Haiti, mestizo, Helen Safa.
868
The Caribbean region, named after one of its indigenous groups, the Caribs,
includes 27 island and mainland territories, four major European language
groups, countless vernaculars, and a myriad of races and cultures. Despite these
differences, the people of the region have a shared identity—a West Indian or
Antillean, or a Caribbean one—that results from a shared history. There is no
denying that the Caribbean region experienced two of the most extreme forms
of exploitation known in human societies—slavery and colonialism. Contact
between Europeans and the indigenous populations almost eradicated the latter
through warfare, forced labor, diseases, and genocide. Slavery and colonial
oppression introduced two additional cultural systems—West African and
European—which, through the process of creolization, gave rise to particular
geographically and historically complex social formations. Consequently,
because of the legacy of slavery, which marked free and non-free on the basis
of phenotype (skin color), Caribbean societies are highly stratified by race,
color, class, ethnicity, and gender inequality.
In the Caribbean, women descend from various ethnic backgrounds,
including Africa, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, China, and the Middle East.
In fact, the majority of contemporary Caribbean women can trace their cultural
heritage to the largest forced migration in modern history (arising from the
enslavement of the African peoples) and of the coerced relocation of
nineteenth-century indentured East Indians. They are the victims and survivors
of European expansionism and its annihilation of Amerindians.
For most Caribbean societies, the Amerindian (namely, the Taino, [the
Arawak] and the Carib) contribution to culture is reduced to a faint memory
inscribed in archeological sites and is evident in some cultural traits such as
language, geographical names, home furnishings, and some food customs.
However, the recognition and pride of Taino heritage is resurfacing in certain
quarters in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. For contemporary Carib
women from St. Vincent, Dominica, and their relatives, the Garifuna from
coastal Guatemala and Belize, Amerindian culture is alive and well. There is no
doubt that these indigenous groups paid and continue to pay a high price for
their survival. Caribs who survived battles against the French and the English
were forcibly removed and relocated. Britain moved Carib peoples beyond the
tropics and even resettled a group to their northern colony of Nova Scotia
(Canada). However, the Caribs did not go quietly. In 1650, the Caribs of
869
Grenada allowed a French expedition from Martinique to buy extensive land
holdings. A year later, however, hostilities resumed between the indigenous
people and the French. Seeing their efforts had become futile, the last 40 Caribs
jumped to their deaths from a precipice on the extreme north of Grenada. The
cliff is now known as le Morne des Sauteurs, or Leaper's Hill. Caribs suffered
this extreme sacrifice rather than submit to French rule.
In Guyana and Trinidad, the East Indian population is the numerical majority
in the former and is the largest ethnic group in the latter. Clearly, those societies
exhibit critical cultural contributions from the subcontinent, including both
Hindu and Muslim influences. The vicissitudes of British colonial rule, the
political economy, and immigration flows impacted the indentured populations.
Many more men than women were conscripted, thereby skewing the
demographics and altering cultural expectations for both men and women. Only
when the male-female ratio evened out did the Hindu and Muslim prescribed
roles of women and men become possible in the Caribbean. Gender constructs
of the sending society weigh heavily on how Indo-Guyanese and Indo-
Trinidadian women are viewed historically and how they are understood at
present.
Caribbean women of European descent are predominant in the Spanish-
speaking countries of the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Cuba,
although these societies are primarily mestizo. Mestizo means that the majority
of these societies reflect the sociocultural and racial context of creolization—in
this case the outcome miscegenation among African, European, or Amerindian
peoples. Here, as in the rest of the region, class and color are fundamental
indicators of a woman's social position. There are also Caribbean women of
Chinese and Middle Eastern descent, among others, who have different ethnic
and religious affiliations. Ironically, notwithstanding the creole nature of these
societies, in the official census there are categories of people designated as
“mixed.”
When all is said and done, however, the majority of the women who live in
the Caribbean are of African descent. The sociocultural contributions of
different African (e.g., Akan, Yoruba, Ibo, and Twi) ethnic groups in the early
days were quite significant. Subsequently, language, music, religion, and other
aspects of social organization contributed to the creolization process in all
island and mainland territories. In addition, the intensity of particular African
ethnic cultural contributions is often most pronounced. For example, there are
Trinidadian Yoruba songs, and religious practices of Kumina in Jamaica,
870
Vodun in Haiti, and Santeria in Puerto Rico and Cuba.
Regardless of racial or ethnic background, the brutal force of slavery and the
aftermath of uneven social and economic development propagated by colonial
administrations and the landed elite influenced the shape of livelihoods and
options available to peoples in Caribbean societies. However, the social
divisions of society (race and color, class and gender) assign black women to
the low end of the socioeconomic ladder.
The pioneer work of Jamaican feminist historian, Lucille Mathurin Mair
(1974), brought the “invisible” black women into Caribbean history. The
images of women found in conventional historical texts convey the idea that
either the experiences of slavery and post-emancipation life were homogeneous
(essentially those of men) or that black women and men had different
aspirations, needs, and functions in West Indian societies. It becomes evident
that, by reducing women's experiences to a generic one, the texts denied the
role of female participation in resistance, in the development of culture and
society, and advanced male-centered interpretations of history.
The focus of our attention here, however, is the positive nature of the cultural
patterns of Afro-Caribbean people, specifically, how West African heritage
influenced women's position in culture and society during Caribbean culture
building. How did these new cultural forms provide the basis for future
generations of black Caribbean women? Men and women labored side by side
in the sugar cane fields. Some occupations were gender-specific to women,
such as midwifery. On the other hand, production-related jobs on sugar estates
were exclusively the domain of men. This was particularly the case of artisans,
such as coopers, blacksmiths, and carpenters. In the French Antilles, men were
also given tasks as drivers of the first gang, coach drivers, and messengers.
However, for the majority who labored in gangs, only age and health
differentiated one slave from another. As the time period of slavery extended
into the later part of the nineteenth century, often this unidentified,
undifferentiated slave was female.
In most areas of the Caribbean, especially in the early days, as Mair notes,
men outnumbered women. In 1789 in Jamaica, for example, the ratio was 2:1.
Slave mortality was high throughout the region, and some slaveholders took
extreme measures to increase their slave populations. Historian Bernard Moitt
tells us that in 1775 in Guadeloupe, the slave master paid 15 livres to the
midwife for a live birth and gave the mother cloth. If the baby died, both
women were whipped and “the one who lost the child placed in iron collars
871
until she became pregnant again.”
After the abolition of the British-controlled slave trade in 1807, women
became important as breeders to maintain the number of slaves needed for
labor. Thus, the enslaved woman who bore six children became “privileged” by
law. Such a clear recognition of the black woman's vital role as mother
indirectly helped to keep alive her awareness of herself as a woman. As Mair
comments, “it is essentially such awareness of oneself as a human being which
makes the individual refuse to be reduced to the level of a non-human being, in
the way that slavery attempted.” West African traditions of production, kinship,
and family also supported the positive valuation of motherhood and the
“equality” fostered by the estate labor force.
The following two examples taken from Caribbean history illustrate how an
alternative view can bring people, especially women, and events into their
proper light, and, at the same time, provide a more inclusive vision of society.
While the first illustration comes from the slavery period and focuses on
women and resistance, the second example is an account of the experiences of
women leaders in the trade union movement in the post-World War II era.
Conventional histories of slavery assert that women in slave society were
“more readily and firmly” attached to white society; in other words, that black
women accommodated more readily to slavery than their male counterparts.
Presumably, a domestic slave woman's physical proximity to white men placed
her in a contradictory position of devotion and betrayal. However, as the
records of slave revolts in the British and French West Indies swell with
accounts, there is no doubt that there was an outright rejection of slavery by
peoples of African descent in the region. Furthermore, both men and women
found many ways in their everyday lives to frustrate their masters. Planters
needed the psychological and physical security of believing behavioral
stereotypes of blacks to retain their own honor and power in slave society.
Daily resistance on the part of enslaved women was the response to this
denigration. In fact, resistance to enslavement began from the moment of their
capture and continued through the middle passage and onto emancipation,
which began with the Haitian Revolution in 1801 and lasted until 1886, when
Cuba finally freed its slaves.
Female insubordination took on various forms, including shamming illness,
refusing to go to work, using abusive language (“tongue lashings”), leaving the
estate without permission, losing articles of clothing from the master's laundry,
withholding or using their sexuality for their own benefit, and using the slave
872
codes in their own favor, especially concerning maternity rights. One of the
most powerful weapons in the hands of women cooks was their skillful use of
poisons.
Around 1769, in Saint Domingue (Haiti) a group of women, who pounded
grain and did other domestic chores, was persuaded by another group of women
to become maroons. Maroons were groups of people who escaped slavery and
set up their own communities, usually in inaccessible areas such as swamps,
forests, and mountains. Although women refrained from running away in large
numbers because of their kinship ties and children, it is now clear that they
engaged in daily resistance and were often severely punished for these offenses
against the planter class.
As the documents show, including the work by Barbara Bush, women on a
daily basis caused more trouble than the men. According to contemporary
histories written by men, few women seem to have taken part in the uprisings
that plagued the Caribbean during the days of slavery. Yet, as Bush adds, the
absence of the names of female slaves from official records and contemporary
accounts of slave uprisings and conspiracies does not constitute proof that they
played no active part. Nanny, the legendary Jamaican Windward Maroon,
provides an example of the role women played in their battle for freedom from
slavery in the region.
Nanny was known by her own people and the British as an outstanding
political and military leader. As cited by Bush, a junior British officer described
her in the following way: “(She) had a girdle round her waist, with nine or ten
different knives hanging in sheaths to it, many of which I doubt not had been
plunged into human flesh and blood.” Legend also has it that Nanny slew
captured English soldiers with impunity and that she had supernatural powers.
Yet, in 1739, when the British were finally defeated, they refused to recognize
Nanny as the Maroon leader during the signing of the treaty. Nonetheless,
stresses Caribbean scholar Rhoda Reddock, Nanny figures prominently in
Caribbean women's history because she led her people with courage and
religious conviction, and inspired them to maintain their spirit of independence
that was their rightful inheritance.
It was only after the tremendous social, economic and cultural change took
place in the nineteenth century (e.g., the Haitian revolution, the independence
of the Dominican Republic, the emancipation in the English, Danish, Dutch,
and French colonies, the rise of the peasantry, indenture, and the wars of
independence with Spain at the end of the century), that the region would be in
873
a position to look for a female figure who could reclaim the spirit invoked by
Nanny. One such figure is Doña Mariana Grajales de Maceo of Santiago de
Cuba. Born a free woman of color in the early nineteenth century, Doña
Mariana was the mother of thirteen children, nine of whom lost their lives in
Cuba's independence wars (1868–1878), including the most famous, Antonio
and Jose Maceo. Antonio Maceo (the Bronze Titan) has military standing that
is likened to that of Toussaint L'Ouverture of Haiti's revolution. Caribbean
historian Jean Stubbs remarks that Mariana, “the mother of Cuba,” has acquired
legendary proportions akin to Nanny, “but the focus is on her status as a self-
sacrificing mother, and not as a political or military leader.”
Both Nanny and Mariana Grajales de Maceo each represent an aspect of
womanhood that is fostered in the region. Each worked exceptionally hard to
reach her own goals. Mariana nursed her sons, as well as other wounded
soldiers, in the fight for independence. She lived in exile and her own life was
in jeopardy for decades. Nanny's status as a warrior mother rekindles the
heritage of the Akan of peoples of Ghana who were prominent in the early
enslaved populations of Jamaica. Nanny fought the battles but was denied
recognition by the British because of her gender. They're now valued by their
respective countries: one of the highest accolades bestowed to a Cuban mother
is in the name of Mariana Grajales de Maceo, while Nanny is Jamaica's only
National Heroine and her visage is on the Jamaican $500 bill.
During the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s, Anglophone Caribbean
women became ready to reclaim the political spirit invoked by Nanny of the
Maroons. It is in the labor unions that the public role of women is quite evident.
The general strikes and worker insurrections, which blazed across the English-
speaking Caribbean in the late 1930s, gave rise to two things: a more self-
confident working class demanding its rights, and trade union workers calling
for the right to strike for labor representation, adequate pay, and decent working
conditions. Work situations had not improved since the days of slavery, which
had ended 100 years earlier in the British territories. The trade unions,
following British organizational structures, considered men as the primary
workers, although they did recognize the fact that women constituted a major
segment of the British West Indian labor force. During the strikes, there were
women on the picket lines engaged in their own anti-colonial struggle and
exerting their right to self-determination.
Feminist anthropologist Lynn Bolles's study underscores the view that early
women trade union leaders were fiscally responsible for those fledgling labor
874
organizations. Yet, these women are absent from Caribbean history. Like the
men in the labor movement, trade union women leaders continue to have a
sense of collective consciousness; they recognize the benefits of collective
action on behalf of the common good of working people. Once they were
members of a trade union and their talents became apparent to those in
leadership positions and their peers, these women took on responsibilities
beyond mere membership. To this day, however, only a handful of women
trade union leaders are included in the highest levels of decision-making in
their organizations. Again, it is not a question of women's capabilities but the
nature of the deterrents that impede their progress.
875
Much of the social literature from the 1930s to the early 1970s stresses the
differences that appear between aspects of culture that are perceived as
ascriptive, “European” features (white or light-skinned, upper- or middle-class),
and as the social “norm,” on the one hand, and the African-based creole cultural
systems of the majority, on the other. Over four centuries of European
colonization resulted in the socio-political hegemony of the upper classes and
accompanying derision of the cultures of the masses. Light skin color and
middle-class status approximated the socially approved “norm,” while the
African cultural patterns and dark skins of the black majority were causes of
disparagement. In the case of Trinidad and Guyana, the Indo-West Indians were
allotted a rank below that of Afro-Caribbeans, while Chinese, Lebanese, Jews,
and Portuguese were below that of “whites.”
Family forms were couched in “ideal” topologies. For example, decades of
social science research categorized West Indian family forms and household
organizations into three patterns, listed here in descending order: nuclear family
(wife, husband, children); common-law (nuclear without legal sanctions); and
visiting unions (woman and children with a nonresident boyfriend, or
nonresident children's father). Research in the French and Dutch Antilles
followed the British model, while studies in Cuba, the Dominican Republic,
and Puerto Rico utilized the Spanish class/color specificities of mestizo culture
and denigration of the African-based cultural practices.
Often, marriage is neither economically feasible (due to the cost of a
wedding, setting up a household, etc.) nor a given in the Caribbean reality of
gender relations. Indeed, having a child does not connote or necessitate the
forming of a nuclear family and therefore counters the normalization of what
“family” means following a model standardized by colonial domination. Within
domestic organizations, there is the prevalence of female-headed households
and other variations in household structures, the double standard in mating
relations, the normative experience of extra-marital mating, and the
commonplace acceptance of birth outside of wedlock.
The West Indian Family, the topic and title of a book set in Martinique,
reminds us that the very notion of West Indian-ness refers primarily to peoples
of African descent, and to a lesser degree of mulatto or mestizo origins. To a
large extent, the terms exclude the Indian experience. This is particularly true in
876
the discussion of family organization. The East Indian family structure was able
to draw on its South Asian foundations when the ratio of men and women was
less skewed. When there were twice as many men as women, there were a
variety of relationships, none of which even came close to approximating
traditional ones. Hindu and Muslim marriages were not legally sanctioned in
Trinidad and Guyana until the mid-twentieth century. For those living primarily
on sugar plantations, the estate manager following Eurocentric family norms
and values settled the marital disputes and other domestic conflicts that
appeared before him. In contrast to subcontinent practices, couples resided with
their paternal parents for only a few years, the father was no longer the sole
“trustee” of family resources, and wives were given more say in family events.
In the caste system, caste endogamy (marrying within your own group by
Hindus) was undermined and arranged marriages became impossible to attain.
When the balance between males and females was finally established, it
became a catalyst for the revival of Indian culture in the West Indies. Pride over
India's independence in 1947, and the arrival of Muslim and Hindu religious
preachers and artists, made family and religious ceremonies once again the
center of Indian life. However, Indo-West Indian culture had evolved its own
creolization due to influences of the wider society. Marriage was one of the first
traditions to be compromised. While parents' criteria for selection of marriage
partners emphasized security, wealth, and family status, the younger generation
looked for new and modern ways, similar to creole styles. The legally
sanctioned nuclear family is still the most popular marital union, although
common-law and visiting unions are becoming more prevalent than before.
Young Indo-West Indians are also experiencing greater equality between
spouses.
The domination of European constructs of gender-appropriate role, status,
and proper place in society can be seen in the laws and policies enacted
throughout the region at the turn of the century. For example, mass-marriage
campaigns of the post-World War II period attempted to convince Jamaicans to
transform common-law relationships into patriarchal legal marriages, and
enlisted churches, schools, the press, the radio, and welfare agencies in the
effort. This effort also legitimized offspring who were deemed bastards under
the law. Despite the media “blitz,” the mass-marriage campaign was a failure
because of the popular economic requirements necessary for legal marriage,
and the social acceptance of all children, regardless of the circumstances of
their birth. As a matter of fact, since the late 1970s, starting with Jamaica, most
Commonwealth Caribbean governments have enacted a “Status of the Child”
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law, which states that a person cannot be held responsible for the consequences
of his/her birth. In effect, “illegitimacy” is now a moot point and all children
are legitimate under the eyes of the law. Mindie Lazarus-Black studied how in
Antigua, poor women, legally married or not, are taking their “baby fathers” to
court and demanding childcare payments because the children are legal heirs to
the man's property.
However, it was not the question of children that was viewed as a “problem,”
but the prevalence of female-headed households that concerned first colonial
and subsequently, duly elected governments. Furthermore, this situation, most
prominent for poor and working-class women, dovetailed with the increasing
levels of social inequality.
Detailed investigations by anthropologists and sociologists eventually
challenged the notion that Afro-Caribbean families represented disorganized or
pathological adaptations to the conditions of slavery. Such a view resulted from
looking at female-headed households in the Caribbean through Eurocentric
eyes. For example, the model household of a family as two adults of the same
generation, but different sexes, who are the biological parents of children with
whom they live, rests in part on a gendered division of labor requiring a male
breadwinner and a female homemaker, as well as on the belief that conjugal
relations are more important than consanguineous ones. Across the region,
Caribbean families differ from this not only in reality, but also in beliefs about
what a family is and what is appropriate for its members to do. Anthropologists
have learned that, in attempting to understand both the economic support of
households and children, and the performance of domestic responsibilities such
as laundry, meal preparation, and childcare, they could not assume that the
boundaries of a dwelling define a family and what it does. Often, eating,
sleeping, financial support, and child rearing were shared among a network of
male and female relatives and neighbors.
The complexities of Caribbean plantation life, particularly in the English-
speaking areas, distorted the African heritage division of labor, while ironically
reinforcing it. For example, many mothers felt the deep cruelty of bringing
children into slavery and resisted the master's encouragement to do so. The use
of women as laborers in the fields beside men also revealed biases of color and
gender: the majority of field slaves were black women. Although men and
women labored equally in the field gangs, the chances of females doing any
other task were slim. Further, today there is a sharp division in the organization
of household labor. One of the early 1970s women-centered sociological
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studies was conducted by Dorian Powell and stressed the point that women
perform a disproportionate amount of work and usually carry the enormous
responsibility of ensuring the survival of family members, a set of activities that
Victoria Durant-Gonzalez calls “the realm of female responsibility.” She states
that a large proportion of women in the English-speaking Caribbean are “in
charge of economics of producing, providing, controlling, or managing the
resources essential to meeting daily needs.”
Helen Safa did a comparative study of contemporary women, family, and
factory work in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico in the mid
1980s. She notes that women assume more authority in the household than was
culturally prescriptive in the past when they were employed in jobs outside of
the home. The additional authority does not necessarily come from their
economic contribution, but more from the fact that now there was more than
one source of family income. It is not only the erosion of the man's role as the
economic provider that is at issue, but his ability and willingness to share this
role with his wife. It makes for more equitable marital relationships. According
to Safa's study, in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, where male
marginalization was most severe due to unemployment, the percentage of
female-headed households was on the rise; as a matter of fact, women headed
25 percent of all households in all three countries. According to UN data, by
2013, women headed 39 percent of households in the Dominican Republic. The
trend that began two decades earlier became a pattern of family organization
that relates to unemployment and the instability of the economy. Still, this is in
contrast to the prevailing preferred cultural patterns of male dominance within
families. The question is: will these trends start to approximate marital patterns
found in other areas of the Caribbean, or will new forms appear?
With the predominance of women heading households, we see the reality of
the “price” of the inclusive concept of motherhood that pertains to the West
Indies. Since most Caribbean women are either employed in low-paying, low-
skilled, and menial jobs or unemployed, how can they fulfill all that is expected
of them? The ideological support mechanisms found in the African-based
traditional role of women in Caribbean societies prove to be invaluable cultural
assets. Work, regardless of what tasks it is tied to, has meaning in terms of how
a woman attempts to meet her familial responsibilities, and is an essential part
of her self-image and conception of womanhood. As a result, “independent” is
a word often used to describe West Indian women and how they carry out their
responsibilities. As used by Christine Barrow, independence is a quality based
on having one's own source of economic support—from employment, other
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income-generating activities, and, where possible, savings—while at the same
time organizing and utilizing support from others. Autonomy, on the other
hand, implies exercising options while making decisions for oneself and having
control over one's own destiny with no strings attached.
Independence, then, is not coterminous with female autonomy. Economic
self-sufficiency is far beyond the grasp of most to whom the term independent
has been applied in the Caribbean context. Rather than acting on behalf of a
single person, autonomy implies interdependence among a number of
individuals. Autonomy is highly valued, and lifetimes are spent fulfilling
obligations to others so as to reinforce that reciprocal support in time of need.
Barrow says: “one is considered foolish to refuse support from those who give,
especially if they have a culturally prescribed obligation to do so.”
One mechanism used to preserve autonomy in the Caribbean is the
maintenance of reciprocal relationships with the networks. Again, to borrow
from Barrow, there is an element of etiquette in network exchanges such that
“independence,” or at least the public image of it, is maintained. The most
critical characteristic of successful network management is avoiding total
dependence on one source of support, particularly a male partner. If a
relationship endures over the years, the mate support tends to become secure.
However, it can never be fully relied upon, since at any stage of marital union-
visiting (where the man visits his girlfriend and perhaps their children),
common-law (where a couple lives together), or points in between—the
relationship can be temporarily or completely terminated. Therefore, Caribbean
women's control over their lives is a function of their degree of economic
autonomy, which includes the nature of their earning, spending, saving,
property ownership, and the sexual division of “money matters.” According to
Barrow, female autonomy in the English-speaking Caribbean is encouraged
from an early age, and education is emphasized as the means to get a good job.
Although the notions of independence and autonomy are essential aspects of
women's survival in the region, they should not be romanticized.
The Caribbean has among the highest rates of sexual assault in world. In
1995, CARICOM issued a report that ranked violence against women as the
number one issue facing women of the region. Twenty years later United
Nations statistics state that one in three women have experienced sexual or
physical violence at least once in their lives. Further, it is estimated that 14–38
percent of women have experienced intimate partner violence at least once.
According to UNICEF, in the eastern Caribbean, between 20 and 45 percent of
880
children have been abused. The location and reasons for gender-based violence
showed that socialization practices, acquisition of violent behaviors, and drug
trafficking were regarded as some of the elements producing and reproducing
this culture. Violence occurs in both private and public life. The significance of
domestic violence, now broadly understood as gender-based violence, cuts
across the domestic as well as public spheres. The term “domestic” should
imply a space where women and girls are the safest, but it is in fact the location
where they face terror and violence from someone who they should trust. Non-
government organizations and women's groups, like the Tambourine Army in
Jamaica, have set up programs for victims and to advocate for them as well as
to develop strategies to inform and educate the public to end the silence about
this crisis.
UNICEF states that women and children have the right to state protection
even in the confines of the home. Violence against women is perpetrated when
legislation, law enforcement, and judicial systems condone domestic violence
or do not follow through on the prosecution of those crimes. Trinidad and
Tobago passed the Domestic Violence Act of 1991, making that Caribbean
country just one of just forty in the world that has enacted this kind of
legislation. Lazarus-Black's study examines how the Trinidad and Tobago
legislation was viewed and enacted by the citizens, law enforcement agencies,
and the courts. In 1997, however, CARICOM developed model legislation for
member states to implement in their own countries. Laws against sexual
offenses were passed in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Jamaica, just to
name a few of the Caribbean states, to protect the vulnerable, women, girls,
boys, and men. Organizations such a J-Flag in Jamaica focus on advocating for
the rights of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
communities who are also included among the vulnerable in society.
Women of the region, whether poor or from the working or the upper classes,
are subject to iniquities based on their gender. They are denied access to
resources (relative to their class position), and their potential is minimized
because they are not full participants in the development of their countries. The
UN Human Development Index (HDI) is a configuration of life expectancy,
education, and income per capita that is used as an accounting for inequality
and viewed as a potential index for improvement. What clouds these indices are
then the constraints of free market policies and structural economic programs
that exacerbate income inequality, which is all keenly felt by the poorest and
least educated women in a society. For example, according to 2016
International Labor Organization (ILO) data the female unemployment rate in
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the Dominican Republic is 22 percent, for Jamaica 18 percent, and in Barbados
10.9 percent. These data do not show the improvements and the success stories
that have taken place over the last two decades. Complicating the situation, for
example, is that Barbados is pegged among the very high-HDI countries in the
world with Jamaica designated as high HDI, suggesting that there were signs of
improvement in levels of economic and social development. Economic
opportunities for women also do not necessarily mean the reduction of their
domestic duties at home. As we learn more about the past, and the contributions
women made to Caribbean life and culture, we will be better equipped to
answer the questions for contemporary problems and those that may rise in the
future.
882
Tourism, that broadly defined, service-producing sector, has emerged as the
primary industry of the region. A record year for the Caribbean tourist industry
was 2016, when 29.3 million visited the region. The United States remained the
Caribbean's primary market, with Europe also recording very high growth in
market share. Clouding this success was the downturn in business coming from
Canada, demonstrating the fluctuating nature of this business. The tourism
sector has for the past 23 years been the largest earner of foreign exchange for
Jamaica (e.g., US $1.46 billion in first six months of 2017). Tourism represents
30.3 percent of Jamaica's GDP, while for Antigua and Barbados it produces 60
percent of that country's income. Recent 2016 data show the leading
destinations in the region were Dominican Republic, Cuba (thanks to the lifting
of US travel restrictions), and Jamaica. As one of the “mature” Caribbean
destinations, Jamaica's tourist sector is known to be the country's biggest
employer. For the most part, the majority of workers in Jamaica's tourist sector
are women, yet rarely are the dynamics of gender, class, and race analyzed in
most of the tourist academic literature, or that of the promotional literature
coming from the industry itself. Certain questions need to be asked: what do
these women think about their relationship with tourists? How do they equate
their hard work with someone else's pleasure and adventure? How will US
diplomatic relations impact Cuba's tourist industry?
Tourism, like the other sectors of the economy, features sex-segregated
occupations (housekeeping, bar maids, craft vendors) as well as those that are
considered non-traditional (hotel managers, dive shop owners, and head cooks).
All of these jobs are subject to the variances of hurricanes, seasonal business
cycles, and overall international economic conditions that allow or discourage
individuals from taking a vacation far away from home. In addition, tourism is
embedded in the society in which it is located. Places like Jamaica are highly
stratified on the basis of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and other marked and
unmarked differences. The culture, with its legacy of slavery, indenture, 350
years of colonialism, and neo-colonialism frames a society that is also secured
by a social system that allows upward mobility to be a real possibility. As a
service sector, tourism work fits neatly into Jamaica's gender-segmented labor
market. Low-skill jobs are the backbone of the business, and according to
Government of Jamaica data, one out of four jobs in the country is now related
in some fashion to the tourist industry. Women have numerous roles to play in
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tourism. Not only do they represent the “natural” service worker (based on
being women), but because they are also non-white, they represent “the exotic
islander” to tourists—another set of criterion for “consuming the Caribbean.”
Tourism requires not only being an expert in one's own job, but also being an
accomplished actress so that the tourists, no matter where they are from in the
world, will return to the Caribbean again and again to seek the “pleasures” of
the islands.
Tangentially related to women and tourism is sex tourism. It is a thriving
business in the Caribbean, and, as a result, contributes substantially to the
annual income of the islands. While prostitution is illegal in Jamaica, it is
decriminalized in the Dominican Republic, Belize, Aruba, and Curacao, and
widely practiced in Cuba and Puerto Rico (Caribbean Vulnerable Communities
Coalition, 2016: 2–16). Such industries make a profit from women's labor and
their exploitation, and, as detailed in the following section, compromise
women's physical and mental health. Sex tourism and prostitution depends on
the ready supply of women's bodies, and it comes as no surprise that countries
that see high sex trafficking (that is, the sending of women to Western Europe,
Israel, Puerto Rico, Panama, and Venezuela) also support the growing sex
tourism industry.
884
The primary indicators of women's health according to world organizations
—maternal mortality and HIV/AIDS—are connected directly to issues of
sexuality, world economics, and the global structures of poverty. According to
geographer and women's studies scholar Joni Seager, “[o]f all the health
measures monitored by the World Health Organization, the largest discrepancy
between rich and poor countries occurs in maternal mortality” (38). Since Haiti
is one of the poorest countries in the Caribbean, it should come as no surprise
that it has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the Caribbean.
According to 2015 data, Haitians experience 625 deaths of mothers per 100,000
live births, whereas Guyana is 171/100,000, Jamaica is 89/100,000, and the
Dominican Republic is 110/100,000. According to researchers, most of these
deaths could be prevented if basic prenatal health care, nutrition, education, and
support were provided. However, for the government, non-government
organizations (NGOs), and/or the private industry to implement such
programming, it must have financial backing and the countries themselves are
not in an economic position to support such endeavors.
Due to the very same social structures that contribute to maternal mortality
(women's social status, economic disempowerment, and sexual status), women
are also at high risk for contracting HIV/AIDS. As Seager suggests, “sexual
relations between men and women are often framed by violence, coercion, and
the presumption of men's ‘right’ of sexual access to women. Many women are
not able to negotiate safe sexual behavior with male partners. Higher illiteracy
rates for women and certain social arrangements (such as multiple partnering)
add to their burden of risk” (48). For 2014 in the Caribbean, there are 280,000
persons living with HIV, half of whom are women, and 13,300 are children. Of
that overall figure, 29,000 are aged 15–24 years and young women represent 53
percent of that group. Even with the decline in the number of cases in 2016 in
Haiti, there were still 130,000 people living with HIV and 8,000 deaths from
AIDS. However, the increasing number of health programs as well as the
variations in the construction of gender and sexuality across the region will
impact how the public understands and deals with this epidemic. On 2016
World Awareness Day in Barbados, British royal Prince Harry and Barbadian
singer Rhianna took the test together as advocates for this public health
campaign.
Given the processes of globalization described above, combined with
885
complex social factors and personal choices, women have been and continue to
make difficult decisions to leave their homes in the Caribbean in order to better
support their families and take care of themselves. For example, according to
the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, 400,879 migrants
from the Americas and Caribbean were admitted to the US alone in 2000.
However, when looking at statistics, it is important to keep in mind, as women's
creative expression shows us, that migration does not mean that the Caribbean
is left behind. Rather, their connections, memories, and travel back and forth
become a part of women's diasporic experiences and constitute an increasingly
important part of the scholarship on the Caribbean.
886
Overview of Caribbean Women's Literature in the
Diaspora
As Joan Anim-Addo writes in the introduction to her edited text, Framing
the Word, women's literature as a body of work is becoming more
representative of women's diverse experiences in the Caribbean. Moreover, she
asserts that the “range and vitality” of women's creativity are attracting new
readers and more scholarly interest globally (Anim-Addo, ix). Central themes
of this body of literature include domination and resistance to colonial power;
back and forth migration in the diaspora; female sexuality and relationships; the
significance of land and space in understanding social interaction and power;
the centrality of storytelling and spirituality in understanding the Caribbean;
nationalism and transnational connections; neocolonial relationships; and
Caribbean peoples' subjectivities in the construction of home and identity.
Some of the notable authors and their creative work that have received quite a
bit of scholarly attention include but are not limited to Michelle Cliff's Abeng
and No Telephone to Heaven (Jamaica); Merle Collins' poetry Rotten Pomerack
and novel Angel (Grenada); Maryse Condé's I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem,
Segu, and Windward Heights; Edwidge Danticat's Breath Eyes Memory and
Krik? Krak! (Haiti); Beryl Gilroy's Frangipani House and Boy Sandwich
(Guyana); Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (Cuba); Lorna Goodson's I Am
Becoming My Mother (Jamaica); Merle Hodge's Crick Crack, Monkey
(Trinidad); Jamaica Kincaid's body of work, particularly Annie John, Lucy, and
A Small Place (Antigua); Andrea Levy's Fruit of the Lemon (Jamaica); Audre
Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Carriacou); Paule Marshall's Brown
Girl, Brownstones, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, and Daughters
(Barbados); Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale (Guyana); Grace
Nichols' Whole of a Morning Sky (Guyana); Elizabeth Nunez's Bruised
Hibiscus (Trinidad); Joan Riley's The Unbelonging (Jamaica); Jean Rhys'
Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea (Dominica); Esmeralda Santiago's
When I Was Puerto Rican and America's Dream (Puerto Rico); and Jan
Shinebourne's Timepiece and The Last English Plantation (Guyana). It is worth
noting that many of the above titles were written in Spanish or French before
being published in English.
Writer and literary scholar Merle Collins states in “Framing the Word:
Caribbean Women's Writing” that Caribbean women writers today, much like
887
in the past, are engaged in framing that “which is distinctively Caribbean,
shaped by the Caribbean experience” (Anim-Addo, 4). As Collins details,
Caribbean women's writing emerges from its patriarchal and white-centered
history and creates a vibrant and differently told history of the region.
Connected to expanding notions of education for girls and women, as well as
international women's movements and the expansion of publishing house titles,
women today have some outlets (though still not enough) to weave their stories
of family and kinship, connection to the land and Caribbean space, colonization
and racial power, and subjectivity and independence.
888
1. Given the history of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean, discuss two
examples of how Caribbean women actively resist(ed) Western domination.
2. Discuss the variations in family type across the Caribbean and how they
differ from patriarchal, Western marital arrangements.
3. What is the relationship between women and tourism? What does Esmeralda
Santiago's novel, America's Dream, add to the scholarly literature on
tourism?
4. In what ways have Caribbean women overcome social and economic
obstacles in their societies?
889
Glossary
Caribbean: a complex term that can refer to (1) the Caribbean Sea, its
islands, or its Central or South American coasts or to the peoples or
cultures of this region; (2) indigenous Carib peoples, their language, and
their culture.
Caste: (1) a social class separated from others by distinctions of hereditary
rank, profession, or wealth; (2) a social system or the principle of grading
society based on castes; (3) the social position or status conferred by a
system based on castes.
Common-law family: a family in which a man and woman are not legally
married by state and/or religious codes but bound together by choice and
years of living in the same household.
Commonwealth: the people of a nation or state; the body politic. In the case
of the English-speaking Caribbean, the commonwealth refers to those
lands that were and are, in principle, self-governing but under the rule of
the English monarchy. Commonwealth can also describe the relationship
between the Spanish-speaking island of Puerto Rico and the United States.
Creolization: the blending together of two or more cultures to create a new
one.
Female-headed households: a sociological term that describes the economic
and social arrangements of families where the woman/mother is the
primary economic provider and caretaker.
Male breadwinner: a sociological term that describes the economic and
social arrangements of families where the man/father provides the sole or
majority income for the household.
Maroon: (1) a fugitive black slave in the West Indies in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries and (2) a descendant of such a slave.
Mestizo: a person of mixed racial ancestry, especially of mixed European
and Native American ancestry.
Nuclear family: a family in which a man and woman (1) are legally married
and thus bound together by state and/or religious codes, and (2) have
children.
Resistance: the act or instance of resisting or opposing a given force. In this
case, resistance refers to collective and individual acts. For example,
890
Caribbean peoples fought back or resisted oppressive institutions such as
slavery (e.g., through slave revolts) and an individual might resist slavery
by poisoning the master's food.
Sexuality: a complex term that has social, political, and biological
connotations. On the surface, it might appear that sexuality refers to how
one is characterized by sex (female or male) and engages in sexual
activity. However, sexuality is broader than this and must consider
relationships and identification beyond heterosexuality to include lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transsexual, and transgender persons. Sexuality and its
perceptions are deeply connected to power within any given society.
Social divisions of society: the social system in which societies are built
upon hierarchies connected to race, class, gender, sexuality, religion,
ability, and education.
Visiting union: a family structure whereby the mother/female guardian and
children live together in a domestic dwelling while the woman's
mate/children's father is a non-resident in the home.
891
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26
Lifting as We Rise: Women in

America
895
Introduction
Black American women and girls share a common heritage with Black
American men and boys. Together, as people still striving to attain equality and
freedom from persecution and white domination, exercise human and civil
rights, and manifest personal and collective advancement, Black American
women and men have endured and resisted centuries of captivity and
enslavement, denial of human rights, exploitation, disfranchisement, and de
facto and de jure segregation. Collectively, Black women and men have also
worked to develop their own institutions, organizations, businesses, and
intergenerationally transmitted values arising from the empowerment they have
created in transforming their social status and engaging and evolving
participatory democracy in the United States. In addition, Black peoples'
commitment to racial uplift and self-determination has never wavered, as
successive generations of Black women and men have prodded the nation to
acknowledge and treat Black people as full citizens of the United States.
For a very long time, though, it was the practice to speak of Black people
with one voice, as though they have had one set of goals and one identity. In
this regard, Black peoples' efforts to promote racial uplift, nation-building, and
an emphasis on the similarities and differences in male leadership in Black
American communities has preoccupied most “progressive” historical accounts
of Black peoples' history. Consequently, until fairly recently, Black American
women have been rendered invisible in Black American and American
historiography.
This chapter seeks to address the challenge of presenting Black American
women as more than relatively invisible appendages of men in history. It must
be said that the experiences of Black American females have differed from
those of Black American males. In other words, as unaccustomed as some
people are to asking how the experiences of the gendered constructions of
female and male sex have created and sustained more socially marginalized
lived experiences for Black American women and girls, it is clear from the
significant corpus of scholarship on the unique burdens Black women and girls
have confronted, that the social construction of female gender subordination
derived from beliefs about female inferiority has not been inconsequential.
Intersectional Analysis (or Intersectionality) is the theoretical framework that is
the centerpiece of much of the cutting edge scholarship on Black women's
lives.
896
Consequently, this work uses Intersectional Analysis (Intersectionality) to
assess the challenges and burdens created by the social construction, meaning,
consequence, and impact of multiple and intersecting identities and
discriminations in Black women's lives. The central point here is that the use of
Intersectionality provides a view of Black women's lives that captures the
complexity of the lived experiences of Black women and girls. Where Black
men and boys in the United States live identities derived from being among the
people of color in a country where white males are dominant and even white
females possess and most often exercise privilege based on skin color and
economic status, Black men and boys very often experience discrimination and
marginalization based on their skin color and working-class status. Black
women and girls are, along with Black men and boys, among the people of
African descent who live identities marked by race- and class-based
discrimination in a white society that confers economic advantages on whites.
However, where Black men and boys are males in a male dominant society,
Black women and girls live under the discrimination imposed on females in a
male dominant society. Hence, Black women and girls bear the extraordinary
burdens created by the combination of race, gender, and socio-economic class
discrimination and marginalization in America's patriarchal society.
Intersectionality provides us as students of history with a clearer lens through
which to see and understand that Black women's burdens of multiple and
intersecting identities and discriminations (race-, gender-, and class-based)
account for why it has taken so long for Black women to attain the exercise of
civil rights, especially economic and reproductive justice. Women, including
Black women, still earn less than men for the same work, and as women of
color in a racist society, most Black women earn less than white men, white
women, and Black men.
This chapter seeks to address important questions regarding Black American
women, chiefly: How has the experience of being female, coupled with the
experience of being a woman of African descent, shaped the historical
experiences of Black American women? What unique and different issues arise
when we consider Black American females as subjects in the historical
narrative? What unique burdens have shaped Black American female
consciousness and action? Why? In what ways have the capture and captivity of
Black women influenced both responses and initiatives in the actions of Black
American females over the past several centuries?
Major terms and concepts: invisibility of Black American females in Black
897
history; Black American females as historical subjects with a “herstory” of their
own; cultural roots of gender identity; multiple intersecting identities and triple
jeopardy—racial, sexual and class exploitation in the United States; Black
American women's resistance to slavery; the Black family on plantations;
matrilineal descent; incest taboo; Black naming patterns; Black American
women as abolitionists and women's rights advocates; Black American female
mutual aid, benevolent, and educational societies; Black women in the Black
Church; Black Women's Club Movement; Black women in the Civil Rights
Movement and beyond.
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Until recently, many scholars of American history began their discussions of
people of African descent in the North Atlantic British colonies in the year
1620, and for a very long time, scholars wrote textbooks that celebrated
European military conquests over the indigenous peoples of North and South
America and the Caribbean. In the same way that American Indian history was
distorted to conform to the white image of Amerindians as “noble savages,”
people of African descent were represented as unorganized “savages” living in
primitive barbarity. White supremacists argued that the conquest and
domination of Amerindians was a cultural imperative, and that the enslavement
of African peoples was not only benign, but, quite possibly, a service to
humanity and an aid to African and Negro progress. Against such a distorted
backdrop, many white scholars and leaders have portrayed Africa as a “dark
continent” and Africa's sons and daughters (whether remaining in Africa or
abroad in the African diaspora) as having come from nothing worthy of note,
much less of cultural respect. In essence, Black “history” was purported to have
begun with the European trade in African flesh—the Atlantic slave trade,
hence, identifying 1620 as the starting point for Black history.
What does it mean to “start” Black American history in the year 1620? To
begin Black history in 1620 is to begin to understand Black peoples' history
with no initial point of reference other than captivity, enslavement, and the
objectification of African people into a European white settler's concept of
property. For example, one notices how often publishers, editors, and scholars
refer to Black people who lived during America's antebellum slavery period as
either “free Blacks” or “slaves.” In this context, the use of the word “slave(s)”
to denote a person who was reduced to their role as laborer in a unit of
production system under capitalism, denies the enslaved the status of human
being. Indeed, the word “slave” masks the explicit political, social, cultural,
economic, and ideological process of “enslavement.” The word “slave” is
impersonal and non-sentient. Conversely, if we insist on recognizing the
humanity of captured Africans and the generations of children they created we
need to reach beyond the impersonality of the designation of the “slave.”
Importantly, to have been a person ensnared in the Atlantic trade of human
flesh is to have been captured and held in captivity and enslavement against
one's will—to have been enslaved. The question is, do we see Africans, or real
people caught up in a painful, debilitating, and grotesque situation? Do we see
899
Africans as they saw themselves, as persons against whose humanity slavery
occurred? Or do we see Africans through a European lens that strips them of
their humanity and refers to them in connection with the only thing that defined
their value, namely, the work they were required to perform? The fact that we
are still debating this point speaks volumes about the creation and tenacity of
the racism that European settlers in the British North Atlantic colonies, and
later the United States, created and transmitted intergenerationally to justify and
maintain a slave society on the backs of people of African descent.
The larger problem is that enslaved Africans are often reduced to passive
objects or units of history, while white settlers are described and analyzed as
active subjects who grapple with difficult choices on the stage of “history.”
Certainly, the effect of an historiography that has presented images of white
settlers as paternalistic should be noted, if only because it has influenced
scholars to see what might be called “becoming benevolence” where they might
note a bizarre, yet conscious attempt by many white settlers to relegate humans
to the level of animals or chattel. In addition, dwelling on white settler
paternalism does more to ameliorate contemporary guilt amongst whites than it
does to explain the emergence of an institution predicated on white denial of
African personhood.
The enslavement of Africans occurred against a background of racial and
gender-defined entitlements. Persons and subjects under British and later
American law were first white and Christian, then male, and then white and
female. Chattel and objects under the law were brown and ebony, and male and
female. In essence, white settlers undertook to establish freedom in an unfree
society, equality in the slave society of their creation (with denial of African
humanity at its center), and participatory democracy (based on white skin
privilege in a multi-racial social setting).
Contrary to the representation of Africans as “savages,” many African
females and males who were transported to the Americas against their will had
a frame of reference that was distinctly African. Since 1620 marks the
beginning of a point in Black history where racial betrayal and the persecution
and humiliation of ever-increasing numbers of Africans commenced, beginning
Black peoples' history in 1620 deprives Black people of a past not pillaged by
European greed for profit and white nationalism. Denying that Africans forced
into the enslavement diaspora came from the often vibrant and economically
stable Old World societies in Africa (which formed the basis of their identities)
fosters “victim studies,” namely, historical accounts in which Black people
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have no past, no history, no cultural antecedents, and no ancestors worthy of
note.
Therefore, no matter how brief an overview of the most significant values
and belief systems that formed the cultural basis for an African Old World
connection might be here, our discussion begins neither with European
domination and exploitation nor with the betrayal of African against African
(that accounts for some of the captives Europeans transported to the Americas
and the Caribbean). It begins, instead, with an exploration of the major themes
and issues in the “herstory” of African women living in African social systems,
prior to being involuntarily and forcibly carried to the West. Most enslaved
African women in the diaspora would subsequently give birth to generations of
children in the Atlantic World economy. Other captive African women died a
wretched death during the Middle Passage or at the hands of white settlers
intent upon stripping African women of their human dignity.
901
Women of African descent did not come from a nameless void—from
cultures without values, belief systems, customary laws and practices,
institutions, obligations, or commitments—even though for nearly three
centuries, millions were confined to live out pitiful and degrading experiences
of captivity and work—productive and reproductive—in an enslavement
thought to be in perpetuity. Nor did women of African descent, either in the
British North Atlantic colonies or later the United States, simply evolve as an
extension of males of African descent, invisible and spoken for at all times by
the voices, interests, beliefs, and aspirations of Black men.
As a result of a shared exploitation and subordination based on race,
enslaved Black females and males shared a common experience of racial
oppression. Yet, enslaved Black women and girls were not males in a world
where race and sex were and still are at the center of nearly all levels of
personal and group definition and interaction. Indeed, throughout the last 500
years, many Black women and girls have been victimized and traumatized by
rape and sexual violence. No man, of whatever race or class, can speak
definitively for the experience of Black women's pain and struggle, for in the
British North Atlantic colonies and later the United States, under chattel
enslavement of their bodies and wombs, only Black women have borne the
children of their beloved and the children of their oppressors.
The following are very brief comments on the importance of beginning
Black history by assessing West African philosophy and providing some
general sense of the social systems that preceded the horrifying experience of
enslavement and involuntary transmigration to the West. It is important to
reference the values and beliefs that formed the social boundaries that held
society in place for African females and males, for their benefit and the benefit
of their children, their elders, and their ancestors. According to John Mbiti's
classic work on African philosophy, African Philosophies and Religions, in
West African belief, the needs, the values, and the respectful place accorded to
each member of society—incarnate and discarnate—defined the philosophical
boundaries that shaped values and generated the expectation that
obligation/reciprocity between members of society would help sustain the well-
being of African communities.
Moral boundaries that respect and protect the vulnerable—children, women,
902
the aged, and those with different abilities—served as the foundation of the
traditional West African societies from which came millions of captured
Africans. Many West African social systems provided institutional structures
(chiefs, priests and priestesses, healers, diviners, Griots), which allowed
actualization of the concept of a “common good,” mechanisms for sharing
resources, provisions for shared family maintenance responsibilities, and other
equitable norms. The point is that these were the villages from which many of
the millions of mostly adult West Africans came.
A second important aspect of some communities in West Africa was the
greater equality between women and men. Many West African women and girls
lived for centuries without the same yolk of oppression experienced by women
and girls in, for instance, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Confucian societies.
The issue is that patriarchal societies that represented female sexuality and
women as evil, unworthy, and undeserving—the opposite of the image of men
as good and deserving—were and are societies in which women's inequality is
very pronounced (ironic when one considers that all men and women come
through and by the presence of a woman). Also at issue are male-controlled
religions that have curtailed or denied women unconditional “worthiness,”
limiting women's worth to their biological role as mothers.
Curiously, there were older religions (some of which influenced the
development of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) in which goddesses were
revered (Nut, Isis, Ashtar, Diana, Hathor, and Maat). That is not to say,
however, that West African societies were without ascribed male privileges, but
there is no question that the pernicious persecution of women and the denial of
their equality before the sacred speak to the differences in status and in
conditions of worthiness and value accorded to females in European, Asian,
and African societies during the 1500s. Many West African women living
outside of Islamic influence lived in social systems where their sex and
sexuality, their bodies, the unity of body and mind, and the expression of
emotions and feelings were believed to be positive and, hence, accepted, not
repressed or denied manifestations of the natural world. There were many
societies that embraced male and female priests.
In the patriarchal societies, which are prevalent in West African regions
where most enslaved Africans lived, variations and distinctions in the evolution
of male entitlements were and are still important. Essentially, traditional non-
Muslim West African societies were significantly more egalitarian in the range
of rights and levels of respect accorded to women. In many places, patriarchy
903
existed alongside matrilineal descent. It must be remembered that, while most
of the world values women for their reproductive capacity, women's productive
capacities, at the material level, have made significant contributions to the
development of traditional subsistence societies. Studies have shown, for
example, that 80 percent of Africa's subsistence-scale agricultural productivity
has, for centuries, come from the work done by women in crop cultivation.
West African women were and are instrumental in growing, storing,
bartering, and marketing food, and in selling grains, cloth, and other items at
stalls in markets. Because their work in the cultivation of grains and cereals and
their knowledge of food, herb, and root nutrients sustained the daily needs of
most villages, women earned respect in their communities. It was in their
capacity as workers, not just as mothers, that they derived their status, for,
while men's work of hunting (in hunting societies) was indeed important to the
nutritional needs of the village, it was a task that took them away from the
village for days or even weeks. Were it not for the daily gathering and
subsistence agriculture that women undertook, starvation would have been
widespread. Furthermore, in traditional Africa, women were the midwives, and,
in many villages, trusted mediums, diviners, and priestesses.
The phenomenon of African market women, particularly in West Africa, who
have undertaken increasingly sophisticated roles in providing some of the
material-level needs of families, is time-honored. Essentially, West African
women have been instrumental and significant in the entire food chain, and,
along with men, have served their families as “providers.” Needless to say, with
such essential roles as workers, particularly in West African societies, women
have earned levels of respect and deference that often established their
mentoring of younger females and males as an important and far greater
balance in the distribution of power and authority.
Hence, because scholars sometimes hold patriarchy constant (and assume
that the distribution of power between the sexes has been the same in African,
European, Asian, and Amerindian societies), important distinctions that
bespeak structural differences in the social status and personal recognition of
women in different parts of the world prior to the 1500s have not really been
explored. The penchant for some scholars toward immersion in European
culture is in part the issue, alongside the presumption that African societies
were about at the same (or much lesser) degree of state formation as the
European nation-states when they sought out Africans in the fifteenth century.
The tendency to “universalize” the austere treatment of women under European
904
male patriarchy is also embodied in European assumptions, and it is the idea
that women's status under a male-defined nation-state apparatus must also have
been, or should have been, the same in Africa as in Europe.
Yet, many West African ethnic groups had partnership structures prior to the
arrival of the Europeans and the Arabs, in which the legal status of children was
derived from matrilineal descent. In a world now preoccupied with images and
validation for patriarchy, matrilineal descent is inaccurately compared and
assessed in the context of patriarchal control and subordination of women. As a
matter of historical record, it would also be inaccurate to assume that non-
Islamic traditional rural West Africans practiced any sex-specific subordination
of women common to Western Europe and Islamic societies. The fact of
matrilineal descent evolved not only from women's real and symbolic
relationship with the survival of the lineage, but also from women's direct link
with fertility. Matrilineal descent ensures that the social group will always be
more certain of the identity of a child's mother than of the child's father. In
addition, since children were the primary responsibility of their mothers,
guaranteeing them linkage to the mother's family usually facilitated their access
to people and resources not arranged for by marriage vows, but by direct blood
lineage.
Hence, many West African women functioned in a far more egalitarian social
and political environment than women in Europe or in Asia. In Africa, some
women served as co-regents, queens, and heads of state from the earliest times
through the recent centuries. At issue, quite simply, is the fact that women's
status in the Middle Ages deteriorated everywhere when a belief system
evolved that elevated the value of property over the value of persons. Property
relations were applied to women and girls—through, for example, slavery,
female concubines, and prostitution. This development was contrary to the
traditional worship of a Supreme Creator with a female and male sacred aspect
(like the Yoruba Orisha and the Akan Obasom in areas of West Africa).
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have generated a belief in female
subordination and undermined the significance accorded women's work and
their religious identification with the sacred.
905
Slavers did not carry off old, sick, or disabled people. Neither did the slave
trade begin and then taper off after twenty years. Much to the detriment of
Africa's development, the enslavement and forced transportation of Africans in
the Atlantic slave trade lasted anywhere between 245 and 300 continuous years.
In essence, millions of Africa's youths were carried away for three centuries.
Africa's development was partially arrested as the continent lost the productive
capacity of many young minds and hands. In conquering the Amerindians and
forcibly transporting millions of Africans into the New World, European
settlers expropriated the reproductive, earning, and inventive capacity of the
enslaved African women who survived the horrible Middle Passage.
Enslaved African women were victimized culturally and sexually. Slavery
meant the loss of personal and familial control over African female
reproduction, and the significantly diminished capacity to influence key events
in a child's passage into young adulthood. For instance, an incest taboo was
meant to protect children from sexual abuse and to teach them the
inappropriateness of sexual involvement with a close blood relative. However,
enslaved African women were forced to engage in sexual relations with men
not of their own choosing, and hence to conceive and bear children at the whim
of white settlers who themselves often arranged their own first-cousin
marriages and often insisted on having affairs with their mulatto female
children.
Captive African women transported to the New World were treated as sexual
prey and defined as beasts of burden, even when they resisted such degradation.
Black women and girls were targets of the full force of a virulent white male
patriarchy that has been institutionalized into much of the American culture and
gradually absorbed by many Black men in their quest to be acceptable as
“males” on terms set down and defined both explicitly and implicitly by white
male misogyny towards women. The idea that all women are property lies at
the root of white male misogyny, which since 1620 has defined and represented
Black women as “common property”—as promiscuous, ugly, and undesirable.
The idea that white women, on the one hand, are the mothers of white children
is the basis for white female “worthiness” and redeems some of the “lost” value
white male patriarchy has imposed on women. The idea that white women, on
the other hand, are beautiful derives from their skin color privilege, and extends
to the possession of a sexuality that white males value for their sexual
906
enjoyment. These value-laden criteria lift white women, particularly those with
blonde hair and blue eyes, to “cult” level.
It is the European creation of “fallen” womanhood that is responsible for the
transmission of misogynist beliefs brought over to the Americas and instilled in
the social ordering of colonial society. Enslaved African women's vulnerability
as females, as legally enslaved foreigners, and their subjugation as objects of
white male lust or sexual prey that could be violated without moral censure that
would follow such violation of even poor white women, affixed a racial and
sexual oppression. Thereafter, successive generations of enslaved Black women
were persecuted by racist and misogynist actions. Deliberate violations of
Black female personhood conveyed the idea that Black women were
unacceptable to look at, and fit only (to put it frankly) to serve a white man in
his fields or in his bed.
The rape and physical violations of enslaved African women were intended
to ensure that their sexuality and reproductive capacity belonged to white
males. One tires, therefore, of hearing some white scholars strain both the
historical realities of what Black women endured under slavery and of white
male domination of their sexual and reproductive experiences, in order to assert
a comparable female oppression among white women settlers who lived as
wives. Alongside a cadre of white women who committed themselves to
abolitionism as they saw and reported on the degradation of enslaved African
women were many white men and women who purported their own greater
moral and physical “worthiness” and value precisely because of Black women's
degradation. Such an attitude is consistent with the evolution of some white
settlers' attitudes that someone must be degraded and made into scapegoats for
them to feel worthier. Indeed, a pivotal question in examining America's past is
how persistent white men and women were in both attempting to instill in
Black women racist and misogynist projections (to fear their sexual organs and
hate their hair, noses, skin, buttocks, and hips) and encouraging white women
to belittle the value of other females, especially Black women. Thus, regardless
of the skill, intelligence, and moral fiber captive Black women might have
possessed, most white settlers displayed their most negative emotions towards
the slave trade's most vulnerable people.
The decision to exploit the sex and color of enslaved African women marked
the beginning of an African nation in the diaspora—Africa was picked up and
forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean, forcing its daughters to
experience dramatic changes in their personal, legal, social, economic, political,
907
and spiritual status, as well as in the treatment accorded to their persons.
Liberal historians have often made a distinction between the status of Africans
in 1620 and the decades that followed. While such a distinction has some merit,
particularly when one considers the unchecked movement toward enslaving
Africans in perpetuity by the mid-1600s, it is important to ask what and whose
perspective is being used to consider the issue of the declining status of
enslaved Africans. Simply put, from an African woman's point of view, forcible
removal from Africa under the barbaric and cruel conditions of capture,
separation from significant others, white male sexual violence, branding, and
other forms of personal degradation and humiliation remained traumatic and
debilitating throughout captivity.
There is little question that African women were outraged, terrified, and
brutalized, even with the first boat's arrival in Jamestown in 1619. Already
without a country, without a village, without elders (both female and male
served as mentors), and without warriors to protect their persons and children,
captive African women were vulnerable, misunderstood, despised, and
mistreated. What was yet to follow was the gross exploitation and forcing of
Black women into legal and social postures for the economic profit and lust of
white men. Consistently raped and labeled as “wenches,” African women were
regarded as sub-human and became the property of white men. White men, ever
accustomed to holding white women to a monogamous standard of sexuality,
availed themselves of a captive and powerless group of women. As a result,
Black women gave birth to mulatto children, clear evidence that white males,
though professing cultural supremacy and hence disdain for “African wenches,”
nonetheless maintained sexual relations with them. These actions prompted
colonial courts and legislatures to write into law statutes that defined the status
of mulatto children, as well as those whose color resembled that of their
mothers.
A significant number of the newborn children of African women consistently
looked like the white men who had sired them. White men, who controlled the
Virginia House of Burgesses (where much of colonial law regarding race and
sex was first written), provided any white male settler with a legal and
economic cover for illicit sexual relations with African women. In 1662, as
notes A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. (in The Matter of Color, 1978) the Virginia
House of Burgesses ruled that all children born to African women would follow
the legal status of their mother: “1662. Act. XII. Children got by an Englishman
upon a Negro woman shall be bond or free according to the condition of the
mother.” Master-class white males (in opposition to the doctrine embodied in
908
English Law whereby the status of children followed that of their father) wrote
colonial law to specify the subjugation of African women. Hence, all children
born to enslaved African women followed the status of their mothers, while the
color, religion, or legal status of the children's fathers was inconsequential in
the sight of the law. Thus by 1662, a new body of “slave law” relegated captive
African women to the status of “breeder.” With such a law, Virginia and all of
the colonies that followed its lead tacitly sanctioned the sexual exploitation of
captive African women. At the same time, colonial laws insured that white
settler males who sexually used enslaved African women could reproduce the
slave population without bearing the expense of “purchasing” abducted
Africans at slave markets.
White settler males established a system of Black women's concubinage
without any moral imperative to take responsibility for the consequence of their
sexual control over African females. As a matter of fact, countless numbers of
their mulatto children grew to adulthood looking at their fathers, only to have
their fathers deny that English fatherhood meant anything but the ability to
exploit women and children of African descent. Unlike some other places in the
Americas where mulattoes were enumerated as a separate segment of the
population—thereby acknowledging the incidence of interracial sexual liaisons
—white males in the British Atlantic colonies insisted on defining even their
own children by African women as Black. Hence, instead of the status, race,
and religion of males imparting a definitive patrilineal status to children,
children born to enslaved African women on colonial soil had no father as far
as the law was concerned.
Essentially, since law follows social custom, the act of sexually exploiting
captive African women well preceded the perceived need to legislate the matter
on behalf of the sexual and material interests and passions of white settler
males. The denial of white male paternity was one of the early influences that
molded the boundaries of American slavery. Sexually exploiting African
women while holding constant the value of the white, male head of household
and the monogamous, Christian family exposed the contradiction laid down as
a part of the founding of the Republic. The reality was that, at any given
moment, enslaved and free children—brothers and sisters who looked alike,
except for skin pigmentation—existed in a colonial world where the
promiscuous sexual conduct of white men went largely unnamed as the rape of
captive African women.
Enslaved African women were already desperately exploited and sexually
909
oppressed long before most American historians mark the point of legislation
that set down in writing what was already crystallizing in social practice—that
Africans would be debased, subject to cruelty, and enslaved in perpetuity.
Indeed, as Higginbotham notes, the sexuality and reproductive behavior of
African women was dominated by white males long before the Virginia statute
of 1691 that stated, “A great inconvenience may happen to this country by the
setting of Negroes and mulattoes free.”
Assessment of the codification of racism and sexism into American social
practice and law must acknowledge the incipient racism and sexism of the
colonial era. In her groundbreaking book on enslaved Black women, Arn'n't I a
Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985), Professor Deborah
Gray White argues that “color was the absolute determinant of class in
antebellum America. To be of African descent was mark of degradation, so
much so that in most Southern states one's dark complexion was prima facie
evidence that one was a slave. Black in white society, slave in a free society,
woman (and sexual prey) in a society ruled by men, enslaved women and girls
had the least formal power and were perhaps the most vulnerable groups of
antebellum Americans.”
At the same time that enslaved African women's reproductive sexuality was
controlled by white men, the work that Black women performed was similar to
that of enslaved African males. Commenting on Black women's work under
American slavery in her book, We Are Your Sisters (1984), Professor Dorothy
Sterling asserts that “by the time she was ten years old, a slave girl was
classified as a half-hand. At puberty she was doing the work of a woman, and a
woman's work was scarcely distinguishable from a man's.” Indeed, enslaved
African females were worked as hard and steadily as men. Narratives are
replete with explicit accounts of enslaved African women performing labor-
intensive agricultural work in the fields, while being responsible
(simultaneously) for sewing, cooking, cleaning, and caring for children.
The “double-duty day” meant that Black women toiled under the grueling
demands of the white settlers all day, and then usually in the evenings set about
doing what was needed to help keep themselves, men, children, and elders. In
Sterling's book, Black women speak for themselves on this matter: “This race
coming up don't know nothing ‘bout hard work. Over there, see a road all
turned up and you would see men and women both throwing dirt and rocks; the
men would haul it off and the women would take picks and things and get it up.
You could, any day see a woman, a whole lot of ‘em making on a road. Could
910
look up and see ten women up over dar on the hill plowing and look over the
other way and see ten more. I have done ever thing on a farm what a man done
‘cept cut wheat. I split rails like a man. I used a iron wedge and drove into the
wood with a maul. I drive the gin, what was run by two mules ... I fired de
furnace for three years. Standin’ front wid hot fire on my face. Hard work, but
God was with me.” The toll exacted on enslaved African women must have
been enormous because labor-intensive work is exhausting. We will probably
never really know the extent of miscarriages and health problems borne by
Black women being worked as mules. Indeed, it is a testament to the Black
women's resolve and resistance to enslavement—and not to white settler
paternalism—that the institution of the Black family was sustained at all.
Enslaved African women were instrumental in fashioning an experience of
family that resembled the value structure not of white settler communities, but
of traditions long cherished, learned, and internalized from African first
principles. As captives, Black women, like Black men and Black children, lived
in two worlds: the highly restrictive and exploitative world that white settlers
made, and the close-by world of Black people who lived together in the
plantation “slave quarters.” Professor Herbert Gutman's pioneering book on
Black families in slavery and freedom underscores the fact that much of the
previous scholarship on enslaved Africans understated the significance of
cultural values, structures, and forms that Black women had some direct hand
in helping to shape. Indeed, because Black women and men were each someone
else's personal chattel property, labored similarly, and worked collectively to
survive enslavement, a form of egalitarianism between the sexes often
prevailed.
Documentary evidence cited in Professor Gutman's copious book, The Black
Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925, notes that several important
characteristics of African social systems were valued by enslaved Africans,
and, when possible, replicated by the sampling of Black families that his
research uncovered. In researching several plantations located in different areas
of the South, Professor Gutman found evidence of enslaved African women and
men tracing their descent by organizing their naming patterns in a manner
similar to West African matrilineal descent. They used the naming patterns to
keep and transmit to the young the knowledge of kinship boundaries sufficient
to enforce an incest taboo amongst kinfolk. Not only does Professor Gutman's
research provides clear evidence of “organized” attempts to create and sustain
meaningful beliefs, values, and “responsible” behaviors, but, very significantly,
the enslaved Africans he reported on were not emulating white settler values
911
and beliefs. Hence, Black people in some communities in the “slave quarters”
created and sustained African-derived beliefs and values sufficient to create and
sustain the basis for a Black culture.
Clearly, maternal bonds established during pregnancy and in a child's infancy
were often disrupted by slave owners. Knowing that white settlers greedily took
possession of the fruits of enslaved African women's labor in the fields and the
children born from their wombs, most Black women set about to define the
nature of their emotional relationship with their children from as early in
childhood as a child's understanding would permit. Essentially, Black children
had to learn early on in their youth that they lived in two worlds; living in a
white world of oppression, often brutal and physically controlling at a personal
level, and a Black world of personal survival and collective group
empowerment through self-determination and resistance to exploitation
required dual consciousness. While the responsibility to convey a folklore of
resistance to their young rested with all members of enslaved Black
communities, the mother-child dyad lent itself particularly well to Black
women introducing and affirming important lessons about identity to their
young children.
The received historical tradition has most often presented enslaved and free
Africans of both genders as victims. Much of this history rests on an
oversimplified assessment and aggrandizement of white settler authority and on
a gross misunderstanding and underestimation of African women's and men's
capability and willingness to resist and challenge the imposition of domination.
This legacy of racism has produced a scholarship that presents African women
as Black “Blackboards” without a sense of separateness, significance, or
importance in the presence of white settlers. It is the folly of seeing
omnipotence as a cultural characteristic of whites that has prompted the legacy
of depicting African women and men without any redeeming cultural
endowments of their own. Much of the scholarship written within this view of
African inferiority assumes (1) that white culture erased whatever little of
Africa remained in the minds of enslaved Africans, and (2) that white authority,
institutions, and values became as important to enslaved Africans as they were
to white settlers. Therefore, it is against such a backdrop of values that we pose
the question: What was the nature of Black American female resistance to
enslavement?
White settlers often represented and treated enslaved African women as
chattel. While pigs and chickens might reasonably be thought of as animals that
912
without rational thought allow themselves to be penned up, enslaved Africans
acted in ways that subverted slavery. Africans organized overt and covert
resistance to being held in bondage against their wills. Contrary to the
mythology of slavery, the reality was that from the start of the institution, white
settlers maintained their system of forced servitude with violence, cunning, and,
where possible, cooptation of Black self-help. While many scholars have
accurately described the many contrived boundaries—some very inhumane—
that the white men, often with the complicity of white women, imposed on
enslaved African women, some scholars have presented white constraints and
physical domination as though Blacks obediently obliged because whites willed
it so. Again, one might argue that the tendency to see whites as omnipotent
many times blurred the separate and often uncontrolled Black identity and will
that characterized the anger and distance between the races almost everywhere
that there was plantation slavery. Simply put, Africans understood that slavery
was wrong, and captive Africans knew that White people practiced physical
and sexual violence against them.
Enslaved African women knew that white settlers acted to betray and rob
them of their productive lives; it was clear that many settlers constantly
compromised their humanity for greed, lust, and domination over a captive
people. African women and men created oral narratives and a folklore tradition
that conveyed the moral and ethical issues involved in their struggles against
captivity and exploitation. The most fundamental act of struggle is survival, and
enslaved Africans in America constantly sought to protect their own humanity
from exploitation and cruelty, while also insisting on creating structures for
shared communities defined by self-help and philanthropy towards others.
Indeed, enslaved African women occupied and utilized a unique place in the
enslaved Black community. Professor Angela Davis observes in her article
“Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves,” that
“even as [the enslaved African woman] was suffering under her unique
oppression as female, she was thrust into the center of the slave community.
She was, therefore, essential to the survival of the community. Not all people
have survived enslavement; hence her survival-oriented activities were
themselves a form of resistance. Survival, moreover, was the prerequisite for all
higher levels of struggle.”
As such, even when enslaved African women were legally prohibited from
learning to read or write, owning or conveying property, testifying against a
white person, serving on juries, defending themselves from white violence, or
obtaining patents for their numerous inventions, unknown numbers of enslaved
913
African women somehow taught themselves to read. They usually read the
Bible, and then they taught other adults and children. On a spiritual level,
enslaved Black women struggled to see themselves as “worthy” human beings
because violence hurt, injured, and belittled their lives. Most enslaved Africans
knew that white people lied to themselves when they denied what orally
transmitted African traditions—the oldest on the planet—had for centuries
taught African peoples about the soul and one's eternal relationship with one's
ancestors and the deities. Even as white settlers initially insisted that enslaved
Africans were ineligible for baptism, and decades later insisted that, even with
baptism, their status would remain unchanged, Black people had to sustain a
spiritual awareness, inextricably connected to the spirit and the discarnate
world to which we all return.
Since it was clear that many white settlers adjust religious principles to allow
their greed and penchant for violence, Black people perceived an awareness of
the difference and distance between being white and being Black. Accordingly,
spiritual, moral, and ethical worldviews became crystallized as racial groups
identified their values and actions, and over many decades the enslaved became
the champions and guardians of the concepts of justice, freedom, equality,
equity, human civil rights, disobedience and nonviolent direct action protest,
and violent struggle against any form of oppression.
Black people readily understood the dual nature of providing for themselves
so as to empower their own self-determination whenever possible (given the
very real limitations and constraints that pushed in on their consciousness and
persons everyday) and insisting on resisting white control and enslavement by
acting to weaken and destroy slavery. Out of the many decades of enslavement,
there emerged a deeply ingrained and passionately pursued commitment to
resistance, protest, and individual and collective empowerment. This active
tradition of protesting subjugation and exploitation and resisting injustice and
inequality has factored significantly in the participation of Black American
women in the evolution of the Black Church, and in the many spiritual rituals
and practices that draw on the traditional religions of West African peoples,
particularly the Yoruba and the Akan. Essentially, worshiping the sacred realm
and pursuing freedom and equality on the earthly realm have always been
inextricably linked and an unmistakably Black aspiration.
Clearly, enslaved African women had to conspire against oppression in order
to do something good for themselves and others. Ultimately, one conspired to
escape enslavement and to somehow bring (or await) loved ones to (or in) a
914
place of safety. Many did. However, sometimes enslaved African women,
exhausted and desperate from being forced to use their bodies as “baby
breeders” on plantations, chose to abort fetuses or kill infants and themselves
rather than continue in a seemingly unending nightmare. On plantations where
enslaved African women were forced to undergo one pregnancy after another, it
was not uncommon for them to birth twenty or more babies. It was the kind of
experience that devoured a woman's body, mind, and soul.
Alongside many forgotten women whose struggles for dignity and self-
direction in their own lives prompted their covert and even overt resistance to
enslavement appear strong Black women whose escape from slavery informed
their insistence on aiding in the liberation of others. Harriet Tubman (1820?–
1913) was one of many enslaved Black women whose insistence on being free
of slavery's cruel domination prompted her attempted escape to freedom. In a
daring, willful, and persistent manner, Harriet Tubman succeeded in escaping
captivity, and returned repeatedly to liberate both her family members and
others, despite serious and dangerous obstacles. She was one of the driving
forces in the effectiveness of the Underground Railroad.
Black women who displayed courage and took risks in challenging slavery
and escaping enslavement and captivity were most certainly mentors for others,
as were previously enslaved Black women who spoke publicly or wrote articles
and books about the struggle against slavery. Sojourner Truth (1797–1883),
born Isabella Baumfree, a committed and effective abolitionist and women's
suffrage advocate was freed by the 1827 New York Emancipation Act. Once
the shackles of slavery were removed, Sojourner Truth began to renounce
slavery and the absence of women's rights. Truth lectured publicly, often
appearing before white audiences who were silenced by her moral conviction,
candor, accuracy, and intense commitment to see all forms of slavery, including
the subjugation and sexual domination of women, abolished. She is here quoted
(in Marilyn Richardson's book, Maria W. Stewart: America's First Black
Woman Political Writer, 1987) from two public addresses, the first recorded by
Francis D. Gage, at the Akron Women's Rights Convention on May 29, 1851,
and the second recorded in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1856, by Thomas
Chandler, recording secretary for the Michigan Friends of Human Progress:
“Dat little man dar, he say women can't have as much rights as men cause
Christ wasn't a woman! Whar did Christ come from? From God and a woman!
If de fust woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside
down all alone, dese women togedder ought to be able to turn it back, and get it
right sid up again ... I have had children and yet never owned one ... I did have
915
love for them, but what was become of it?... I have had five children and never
could take one of them up and say, ‘My child’ or ‘My children,’ unless it was
when no one could see me.”
In a book edited by Maria Child, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Linda
Brent (1818–1896), an enslaved Black woman who escaped enslavement in
South Carolina, presented a scathing indictment of the brutality and misogyny
directed against Black females. Her autobiography was a call to anti-slavery
activism in its poignant and sincere personal account and description of the
physical and sexual exploitation directed against enslaved Black females by
white males. Brent's contribution to the Abolitionist Movement was important,
for her words countered the denial of Southern whites and the mythology of
Black female promiscuity deliberately fostered by white supremacy
misogynists.
It is important to bear in mind that the struggles of many other enslaved
women were much more difficult than the challenges of either free Black
American women, or the numbers of progressive white women who also
worked to abolish slavery. The obstacles that confronted enslaved Black
women who took their freedom, or were granted liberty, were often numerous:
overcoming or working despite illiteracy, delivering speeches or lecturing often
to literate audiences that valued book learning, working as activists with little if
any material or financial support, and traveling around to meet and talk with
other anti-slavery advocates, often alone and at risk of physical violence.
916
From a demographic standpoint, free Black Americans were always a
minority of the Black population in the United States. In the decades following
the Revolution, Black American advocacy on behalf of emancipation in many
northern states prompted the abolition of slavery, thereby freeing the Black
populations in those states. By 1800, there were approximately 47,000 free
Blacks in the North, living mostly in cities. Contrary to popular belief, the free
Black American population of the South was substantial. Professor Ira Berlin,
author of Slaves without Masters, cites the figure of 250,000 free Black
Americans in the South by the middle of the nineteenth century.
Life was hard, perhaps nowhere as difficult as under slavery, but free
African- Americans lived in a tenuous existence in the United States throughout
the years of slavery. Many places forbade free Black Americans to settle, and,
after 1830, cities like Richmond, Virginia, required that free Blacks post a
monetary bond in order to remain in the cities. Many whites made their
animosity toward free Black Americans very clear. Free Black women were
discriminated against at all levels of society except in their own communities.
Even in some free Black communities, status distinctions based on skin color,
literacy, and class emerged. Black American women lived in a society
committed to “racially defined” slavery, which meant that, at any given
moment, the freedom so preciously appreciated by free Blacks could be
compromised or even withdrawn. And so, free Black American women took
very seriously the task of promoting the development of services and
community facilities. It bears remembering that since there was an absence of
any system of state or local financial intervention, Black women and men
understood the imperative of working to sustain their own self-help.
In fact, much of the work to support, nurture, and sustain Black families was
done by Black American women, as many free Black families in the antebellum
period included female and male working adults in the household. Most Black
families would not have survived without both adult members working and
without Black American women engaging in a double-duty day once at home.
With their numbers increasing naturally, free Black communities engaged in
self-help development and created their own organizations and institutions.
Free Black women worked; participated in mutual aid societies; paid dues to
benevolent associations; initiated their own women's educational and benefit
organizations; wrote and published articles, speeches, and books; supported
917
philanthropic efforts to assist those in need; and helped to institutionalize free
Black churches. In some instances, free Black women started and operated their
own businesses, schools, health facilities, and burial associations.
Most free Black American women worked in the only jobs available to them:
washing, sewing, cooking, cleaning, nursing, and caring for other people's
children. Even into the twentieth century, Black women were relegated to
service jobs such as those. More prosperous free Black American women were
able to acquire an education, often at colleges like Oberlin that opened their
doors to Blacks in the nineteenth century. For the most part, they worked as
teachers, or started businesses or organizations, or both. The businesses
operated by free Black American women included catering, bakeries, hair
salons, boarding houses, milliners, and dressmaking. The women used their
earnings to start institutions such as schools, burial insurance companies,
societies for the educational improvement of girls and women, churches, and
board and lodging houses (modern precursors to inns and motels). A partial list
of organizations that Black American women supported in the antebellum era
includes:
1790—Brown Fellowship Society, Charleston, SC
1815—Burial Ground Society of the Free People of Color, Richmond,
VA
1828—African Educational and Benevolent Society, Providence, RI
1832—Afric-American Female Intelligence Society, Salem, MA
1838—Female Benevolent Society of Troy, NY
1843—New York Benevolent Branch of Bethel
1843—Ladies Union Benevolent Society, Charleston, SC
1843—Union Band Society of New Orleans (secret society)
1847—Madame Bernard Couvent Institute for Colored Youth
Professor George F. Jackson (in his Black Women Makers of History, 1975)
has cited the research of Benjamin Quarles to identify the significant efforts of
numerous self-help and philanthropic organizations, many involving Black
American women's efforts and support: “Philadelphia ... outstripped all other
cities, nearly one-half of its adult Negro population holding membership in
mutual aid societies in the 1840s. In 1838 the city could count 80 such
organizations, with an average membership of 93. Ten years later the roster of
mutual benefit societies had risen to 106, comparing favorably with the total of
918
119 such groups in the entire state of New York in 1844. Most of the groups
were related Dorcas groups comprised of women.”
After attending the everyday survival needs of their community, many
African-American women were preoccupied with destroying slavery, not only
because free Blacks would not ultimately be safe until slavery was gone, but
also because all Black people comprehended the horror that enslavement
imposed on the majority of Black Americans living in the United States. The
published speeches of Maria Stewart (1803–1879) provide a poignant and
forceful narrative reflecting the views that a number of free African American
women held. According to Professor Marilyn Richardson's published volume of
Maria Stewart's speeches, Stewart, the first American woman to lecture in
public on political themes and leave extant copies of her texts, was a woman of
profound religious faith, a pioneer Black abolitionist, and a defiant champion of
women's rights. Likely the first Black American to lecture in defense of
women's rights, Stewart constructed a series of arguments citing feminist
precedents from biblical, classical, and historical sources.
Maria Stewart and other Black American women committed themselves to
actions that positively influenced the Black community and challenged the
continued existence of slavery. Stewart delivered public speeches, some of
which were later published in the Liberator, the anti-slavery publication edited
by William Lloyd Garrison. Historians have been slow to report that, so far as
we can ascertain at this time, the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society,
founded in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1832, was the first female anti-slavery
organization in the United States. When the organization met in the spring of
1832, Maria Stewart addressed the Black women present and implored “O[h]
woman, woman! Upon you I call; for upon your exertions almost entirely
depends whether the rising generation shall be anything more than we have
been or not. O[h] woman, woman! Your example is powerful, your intelligence
great.”
Black American females actively resisted the institution of slavery and the
propaganda of pro-slavery men and women in the country who argued that
enslavement was good for Black people. Many women of color invested large
amounts of their time and resources toward the destruction of slavery. It must
be remembered that overt and covert resistance together undermined slavery. It
can never be said, therefore, that enslaved and free Black American females did
little to weaken the institution of slavery. It can also never be asserted that
Black women were not almost everywhere actively involved in self-help work,
919
mutual aid assistance, and philanthropic giving and charity to the needy. Most
important is the fact that Black women ignored the illusion of invincibility that
the white settler-imposed slavery presented. Many may attribute the actual
collapse of the institution of slavery to the Confederacy's defeat, but, in
significant ways, slavery died as each day of subversive thinking, speaking, and
acting empowered Black people and their progressive white allies to
persistently and continuously weaken the basis of its mental, economic, and
political hold on the nation.
920
Freedwomen
Freedom from enslavement was legislated by Congress following the Civil
War. Black American women were among the 4.5 million freed persons who
needed help and encouragement, and constituted a significant number of those
who offered and were called upon to “administer” much needed assistance.
Educated Black American women immediately turned their attention to
assisting in the massive effort to provide for millions of Black people,
emancipated, and yet poor, largely illiterate, and in need of communities that
could nurture and support them. Sizeable numbers of these women worked as
schoolteachers, nurses, and missionaries.
Efforts to promote the civil and human rights of Black Americans
preoccupied Black American women in the decades following Emancipation.
The most dramatic and significant work undertaken by them in the years
between emancipation from enslavement and the turn of the century arose from
focused efforts on behalf of promoting self-determination within Black rural
and urban communities. For the first time on American soil, Black American
women joined with Black American men in celebrating a newfound freedom.
The challenges before them were numerous, but none as ominous as the
challenges they had already faced in helping bring down slavery. Nonetheless,
hard times followed slavery's demise, primarily because a nation of white
people set about either to promote, or watch and tacitly condone, racial
segregation and second-class citizenship for Black Americans.
Organized white terrorism emerged as the agenda of white supremacy in
such groups as the Ku Klux Klan. Violence against Black American people
intensified in the form of lynching, rape, burning, mutilation, and sexual assault
against Black American girls and women (see Dray). Professor Kidada E.
Williams has authored an immensely important recent volume that recounts
testimonies of the racial violence inflicted on Black persons by white men
during Reconstruction. In They Left Great Marks on Me: African American
Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I, Blacks
provide poignant accounts of the violent transgressions they experienced in the
years following their emancipation from slavery. These testimonies were
sometimes delivered at congressional hearings as Black folks attempted to prod
Congress for protection from enraged whites in the Southern states. The
scourge of lynching devastated Black families whose sons were murdered by
lynch mobs in the South and outside of Dixie, often at the instigation of the
921
white press (see Dray; Wood; Kato; Pfeiffer).
A Black American female leadership remained committed to realizing the
rights and privileges of citizenship for Black Americans. Black women like Ida
B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1930)—journalist, lecturer, social activist, clubwoman,
feminist, and anti-lynching crusader—worked assiduously to publicize and
expose the atrocities being committed against Black people in the South. When
personal friends of Ms. Wells-Barnett were murdered by an angry white mob in
Memphis for no reason other than that the Black men operated a successful
business that the whites envied, Wells-Barnett understood for the first time that
the allegations of Black men raping white women were actually clandestine
maneuvers by violent whites to shroud their violence against successful Blacks
in ambiguity and denial.
It was in her capacity as a journalist that she worked most effectively,
documenting white terrorism against Black people in the South. Her accounts
of the barbaric treatment directed at hundreds of Black Americans contributed
significantly to an increasing anti-lynching movement in the U.S. and abroad
amongst progressive-minded white newspaper editors and their constituencies
in countries like England. Thus, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, just as the Black
American activist women who preceded her in their struggles against injustice,
often risked injury or death to challenge the lynching and physical violence
directed against Black American initiative (see Wells).
Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) was yet another vibrant, active, and
committed Black American woman who, in the years following emancipation,
worked as an educator, clubwoman, writer, and activist. For the most part,
Black women's historians have been the scholars and writers who have brought
many of the Black America clubwomen out of obscurity. Intensifying their
efforts between 1890 and 1895, Black American women sought to use the club
movement to build a national self-help movement. Ms. Terrell is credited with
working with many other women to help empower Black women, who had
fewer rights than Black men. By the 1890s, Ms. Terrell was a founder and the
first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).
Terrell, Wells-Barnett, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Anna Julia Cooper were
among the Black American women instrumental in establishing a Black
Women's Club Movement around the myriad and varied activities in which
Black women involved themselves following the demise of slavery.
For many of them, their involvement as “clubwomen” signaled the
continuation of the race and gender activism that had evolved earlier in the
922
century. Indeed, the dual agenda of racial uplift and progress for the race's girls
and women rang clear as necessary goals of the Black Women's Club
Movement. The clubs and the movement stood for anti-racism work, while at
the same time the movement promoted the uplift, education, and protection of
Black American girls and women from virulent white male sexual violence.
Indeed, clubwomen pressed for reform as an active part of good civil
leadership. Thus, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842–1924) emerged as a
powerful activist on behalf of Black women's rights. She is also recognized, as
Jessie Carney Smith points out in Notable Black American Women (1992), as
“a charter member of the Women's Era Club, the National Federation of Afro-
American Women, the National Association of Colored Women, and the
Northeastern Federation of Women's Clubs.”
The Black Women's Club Movement, embodied in the formation of the
National Federation of Afro-American Women and the Colored Women's
League, existed alongside other women's self-help efforts. Black American
women started schools and colleges and engaged in financial ventures. Francis
Jackson Coppin (1836–1913), who was born enslaved, attended Oberlin
College to fulfill a desire to become a teacher after her aunt purchased her
freedom. In fulfilling her life's goal, Coppin eventually founded the Institute for
Colored Youth, which would later become Cheyney State College in
Pennsylvania. Also born enslaved, Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), activist,
feminist, writer, and Pan-Africanist, graduated from Oberlin College and
earned a doctorate in 1925 from the Sorbonne in Paris. She was an eloquent
speaker and prolific writer, authoring significant works such as A Voice from
the South: By a Black Woman from the South (1892), Slavery and the French
Revolutionists (doctoral thesis), Life and Writings of the Grimke Family, The
Third Step, and Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne. Most important is the fact that
Cooper, like so many other Black American women, never faltered in her dual
commitment to the racial uplift of all Black Americans and to women's self-
help empowerment.
It bears remembering that, through much of the twentieth century, the issue
of racism and Jim Crow segregation severely limited opportunities and options
for the majority of Black Americans. Throughout the decades of racial
exclusion from all but the most marginal levels of economic development in
America, Black American women and men struggled to survive and pave a way
for their children. Many working-class Black American women living in the
deep South had taken their children and moved north to escape the debilitating
effects of the crop-lien system. While historians have emphasized the “lure” of
923
jobs and education opportunities in the cities, one should be mindful that
tenancy, share-cropping, white greed, and violence all conspired to “push”
thousands of Black Americans out of the South.
The vast majority of Black American women worked just to make ends meet,
doing the most menial work in society. In fact, through the nineteenth and into
most of the twentieth century, working-class Black American women have
been virtually excluded from union membership, as have been large numbers of
Black American men. Most important, white racism worked to obstruct Black
talent from taking its rightful place in American society. Even as lynching and
sexual violence against Black American men and women continued, and
economic marginality in a society that professed opportunity for all was held
constant by the ideology of white supremacy, Black American women were
among those persons who stood up for civil rights and racial uplift.
The survival of the Black family has been a major issue in Black
communities. In many ways, Black American communities resemble colonized
communities of people of color in what is often called the Third World. Why?
Until very recently, Black Americans and other people of color in the United
States were specifically excluded from economic development and
participatory democracy, reminiscent of past third-world colonial conditions
where skin color and gender determined colonial status. In the U.S., one sees a
historical pattern of internal colonialism, whereby Black labor and productive
capacity have been held captive by white nation-building goals and strategies.
While an enforceable body of human and civil rights law has made the essential
difference in the capacity of Black Americans to change the operation of the
law, and to some extent the operation of social custom (that is, some discernible
barriers to inclusion have come down, like signs marking segregated public
facilities), large numbers of Black Americans have been held in poverty by
policies and practices that maintain systemic disadvantage and exclusion. We
have to begin to name this process of exclusion from development in urban
ghettos and impoverished rural areas, so as to see through the illusion of “lazy,
shiftless, bad people” to a more astute understanding of how the system
excludes and marginalizes people it targets as “unworthy” because of skin color
and sex.
In the 20th century, there were civil rights activists who worked assiduously
to strengthen and protect the very fabric of the Black family, for, at some point,
unmitigated poverty destroys peoples' capacity even to stay together as a
family. While many Americans have suffered, during hard times, racism and
924
sexism have acted to accentuate suffering for people of color, and in the context
of this anthology of essays, for Black American people in particular. For
example, historians of Black American “history” have often focused their
attention on Black male leadership in this century—Washington, DuBois,
Garvey, Powell, Randolph, King, Malcolm X, Jackson—often to the exclusion
of identifying and assessing the work of Black American women who either
attained positions of authority or marked the decades in which they lived with
personal commitments that helped “racial uplift” move forward.
As a civil rights activist, government official, educator, and women's rights
advocate, Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) became one of the most
important Black American women in the country. Born as the fifteenth of
seventeen children in Sumner County, South Carolina, Ms. Bethune grew up on
a small family farm. Her parents had been emancipated by the Union victory
over the Confederacy in the Civil War. Fortunate to attend a small rural mission
school, the young Bethune, like so many of her age, was tremendously
influenced by the ideas and the knowledge she gained while in school.
Although she initially prepared herself to serve as a missionary in Africa,
Bethune was gravely disappointed when her application was turned down on
the grounds that the Presbyterian Mission Board did not appoint Black
Americans to such positions. It would not be the first nor the last time that
exclusion based on race would disappoint the young Bethune.
Having been turned away from service in foreign missions, Ms. Bethune
turned her attention to becoming a teacher in Georgia and South Carolina. Her
experiences as a teacher convinced her to start an educational institution. Thus,
in a rented house with barely the essentials, Bethune started the Daytona
Educational and Industrial Institute in Daytona, Florida, in 1904. The school
proved a success, and by 1922 it had registered three hundred girls. Among
other subjects, the institute taught nursing and teacher preparatory training. In
1923, Bethune's Institute merged with the coeducational Cookman Institute in
Jacksonville, Florida, becoming Bethune-Cookman College in 1929.
Professor B. Joyce Ross, in an article in Black Leaders of the Twentieth
Century describes the hard-working and determined Mary McLeod Bethune as
having been someone who, rising from poverty to distinguished leadership, had
several careers: “as an educator, she was the architect of Florida's Bethune-
Cookman College; as founder and president of the National Council of Negro
Women, she was a central figure in the development of the Black Women's
Club Movement; and, as a worker in politics, she was one of the few Blacks
925
who held influential posts in the federal bureaucracy during the administration
of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Bethune is credited with working to ensure that
Black Americans received the relief and recovery provisions (food allowances,
clothing, commodity surpluses, and low-cost housing) allocated by the federal
government during the New Deal era. Very real constraints operated to thwart
the work of Bethune and that of others. On paper, benefits and provisions were
to be dispensed according to the white racial dogma of “separate but equal,”
which ordered all social relations in America. In reality, the grossly unequal
distribution of subsidies, rations, and allocations of spending for basic services
predominated everywhere. Bethune used her appointment in the Roosevelt
cabinet to press national, state, and local governments to do as much for the
nation's suffering Black communities as they were doing to assist white
communities.
While the 1950s are acknowledged as the decade of change, it should be
remembered that significant events in the 1940s intensified the relationships of
people of color with power. By the 1940s, significant events absorbed many
African-American women in work, war, and avid activism on behalf of change.
Between 1942 and 1944, the Department of War organized the Women's
Reserve of the Navy (WAVES) and the Women's Reserve of the Coast Guard
(SPARS), and admitted Black American women, though into segregated units.
With large numbers of American men at war in Europe, including nearly
980,000 Black American men, as many as one million more Black American
women entered civilian jobs in 1944 than in 1940, although it should be noted
that they were seldom ever paid the same wages as the men who performed
similar tasks.
As the decade of the 1940s unfolded, an increasing Black American female
militancy began to explode into action that prompted and reinforced the
existing dissatisfaction felt by Black American women. In addition to their
increased involvement in the club movement, sororities, mutual aid societies,
and numerous other Black American self-help activities, Black American
women emerged as forceful agents of change in the lives of rural and urban
Black Americans. Many Black American women and men knew and
understood that they were never going to break even, let alone get ahead in the
rural South. Many of these were working women who for the most part raised
large numbers of children on barely subsistence wages. While their lives were
not filled with social festivities and the honors earned by working to build
educational institutions, many were instrumental in the survival and uplift of
large numbers of Black children who grew up understanding that their task was
926
to insist on inclusion in American society. For those dreams to become a
reality, many of them had to impress their mark on American society by pulling
down the contrived boundaries of racial exclusion and sexual subjugation.
Generally, students of Black history think of Rosa Parks as the first Black
woman to refuse obedience to the white South's adherence to strict observance
of segregation in public facilities. Yet, eight years prior to Rosa Parks' daring
act of disobedience, a courageous and determined Black American woman
named Irene Morgan sued a bus company and the Commonwealth of Virginia
over her right to challenge segregation laws when traveling via interstate
carriers. Like several other landmark Supreme Court cases in the 1940s,
Morgan vs. Virginia (1946) opened the way for still greater activism by Black
Americans on behalf of realizing long-denied civil rights. Progressive
precedents often enable people to keep the momentum of positive change ever
moving forward. Many Black American women understood that a system of
second-class citizenship had to be challenged for the good of Black people
then, as well as for the future of as yet unborn Black children who would inherit
the same nightmare in the American society that Black adults struggled to
reform. Hence, all civil rights activism in the twentieth century and since has
been undertaken with a sense of purpose and purposefulness.
Black American women have also distinguished themselves as civil rights
activists and human rights advocates. Few realize that the great awakening of
the twentieth century—the Civil Rights Movement—stands as one of the
important precursors to the contemporary human rights movement. Forceful
and often intensely purposeful Black American women, like their predecessors,
rightly answered the marginality that white America imposed on the majority of
Black people with political protest, community organizing, and advocacy for
women's rights. It was an everyday woman, Rosa Parks (1913–2005), who tired
of Jim and Jane Crow segregation and who, by refusing to move to the back of
the bus in Montgomery in December 1955, became a civil rights activist.
Immediately following the arrest of Ms. Parks, it was the politically minded and
courageous Black women of the Women's Political Council of Montgomery
Alabama (led by Professor Jo Ann Robinson), that swung into motion the
mobilization of Montgomery's Black community to raise a challenge against
racial segregation on Montgomery's buses. Knowing full well they had the
Supreme Court's Brown ruling on their side, Montgomery's Black residents
organized and initiated an effective boycott of Montgomery's buses for twelve
and a half months. The direct action social protest movement that followed the
Montgomery Association Protest changed the segregated South and America.
927
Ella Baker (1903–1986), educated at Shaw University, distinguished herself
as a Civil Rights Movement theoretician and grassroots-level organizer. As
important as Ella Baker was to the Civil Rights Movement, however, it was not
until PBS produced the documentary Fundi (1981) that people understood
Baker's central importance to many of the movement's key activities and
achievements. For instance, having graduated from Shaw University in the
1920s, Baker busied herself in helping to organize the Young Negro
Cooperative League in 1932. By the 1940s, she was very much involved in the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and,
following Brown vs. Board of Education, Topeka, K.S. in the 1950s, committed
herself to assisting in the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC).
It was from her vantage point as associate director of the newly formed civil
rights organization that Baker traveled to her alma mater in the winter of 1960
to meet with Black student activists who would eventually, with her support,
form a new organization—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). It is interesting to note that, against the wishes of many of her own
peers and colleagues in the SCLC, Baker chose to support Black students and
their white allies who met in Raleigh, North Carolina, in their quest to fashion
an organization where their voices would shape policy. Many of Baker's
contemporaries, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wanted to see the
students who met at Shaw University in February 1960 form themselves into a
youth chapter of the SCLC. Essentially, her leadership style helped pave the
way for a bridge between the older adult leadership of civil rights organizations
like the NAACP, the SCLC, CORE, and the student-led SNCC.
Still later, in 1964, the enigmatic Baker was pivotal in the establishment of
the organization which, presided over by Fannie Lou Hamer, represented the
political aspirations of terribly disenfranchised Blacks in Mississippi, namely,
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. As an organizer, civil rights
activist, and educator, Ella Baker was, indeed, one of Black America's most
precious and prized leaders. Other Black American women activists in the Civil
Rights Movement made significant contributions: Daisy Bates (1920–1999),
president of the Arkansas NAACP and editor of the Arkansas State Press, a
Black newspaper, volunteered in the efforts of nine Black students to integrate
Little Rock's Central High School; Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977), a
grassroots organizer who challenged the pain and marginalization of Jane Crow
segregation in Mississippi and who rose to represent Black political aspirations
928
in the democratically formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; and
Diane Nash (b. 1938), a student activist and leader in Southern sit-in protests,
who having inherited the legacy of struggle and resistance stepped forward in
1960 to help organize and lead a successful challenge to segregation in
Nashville, Tennessee. Unfortunately, many of these women are unknown to the
average student, and yet the very progress that many now celebrate following
the tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement is inextricably linked with
their personal activist agency. Simply stated, the movement could not have
gone forward without the vision, foresight, commitment, courage, and
organizing skills of these and many other Black American women.
Alongside the women who were visible in local, organizational, or student
leadership in the movement, have been Black American women like long-time
civil rights advocates Dorothy Height (1912–2010), teacher, civil and women's
rights activist, and president of the National Council of Negro Women from
1957 to 1998; Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005), author and elected official to the
New York State Assembly and the United States House of Representatives, and
founder of the National Political Congress of Black Women (NPCBW);
Constance Baker Motley (1921–2005), elected borough president of Manhattan
and the first Black woman appointed as a federal judge(by President Johnson in
1966); Barbara Charline Jordan (1936–1996), lawyer, educator, appointee to
the Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial Chair in National Policy, and elected official
to the Texas State Senate and, in 1973, to the United States House of
Representatives; Eleanor Holmes Norton (b. 1937), attorney, head of the New
York City Human Rights Commission in 1970, and, most recently,
Congresswoman delegate to Congress on behalf of the District of Columbia;
Marian Wright Edelman (b. 1939), lawyer, children's rights activist, and
president of the Children's Defense Fund; and Angela Davis (b. 1944–),
university professor, who was once listed on the FBI's most wanted list and
worked as a civil, human, and prisoner rights activist. While these few names
highlight very visible Black American female leadership, it is important to note
that many others in civil rights, education, business, entrepreneurship, science,
law, medicine and technology, government service, the arts, sports, and
entertainment have contributed accomplishments and service to their families
and communities.
The Civil Rights Movement markedly changed the social terrain in the
United States and created opportunities especially for educated Black
Americans, including Black women. In the early 1970s, Congresswoman
Chisholm entered the presidential race as a candidate, and while she did not
929
win, the seriousness of her intentions put everyone on notice that Black women
were setting their sights on still another level of self-help and racial
advancement. By 1979, Patricia Roberts Harris (1924–1985), once dean of the
Howard University Law School and United States Ambassador to Luxembourg,
was appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; she was the first
Black American woman to serve in a cabinet post and as an ambassador. In the
same year, Lieutenant Marcella A. Hayes became the first Black American
woman pilot in the U.S. military, and in 1987, Dr. Mae Carol Jamison (1956–)
celebrated becoming the first Black American female astronaut. In 1990,
Maxine Waters (b. 1938), a California State Assemblywoman was elected to
the United States House of Representatives, representing an economically
challenged district in California. Like so many other Black women and men
elected to public office-holding, her election depended on the presence of the
most far-reaching civil rights legislation ever enacted, the Voting Rights Act of
1965. The same might be noted about the 1992 election of the first Black
American woman ever elected to the United States Senate, Carol Moseley
Braun (b. 1947–). Finally, in 2001 university provost Condoleezza Rice (b.
1954) became the 66th United States Secretary of State, the first Black
American woman to occupy such a prestigious position.
The number of Black women elected to public office holding has increased,
especially in the South. The Congressional Black Caucus continues to be the
organized voice of Black Congressional Representatives. Barack Obama's
election as the 44thpresident of the United States was an immense step in the
right direction for the entirety of American society. Many Black people were
stunned and elated that a Black man was elected the leader of all Americans
and the leader of the free world. While Barack Obama's election to the
presidency was something many thought would not happen in their lifetimes,
the momentum of his campaign and his victory have to be viewed as one of the
crowning achievements of the far-reaching progressive changes created by the
Civil Rights Movement. Of course, there were immediate issues that his
candidacy addressed that were not directly related to Black peoples'
advancement. But, Barack Obama's election and successful re-election had far-
reaching consequences, namely: his widely respected stature as an educated,
successful professional, an extraordinarily capable political leader, a passionate
defender of American democracy, and last but hardly unimportant, a Black man
with a successful marriage, happy wife (no mistresses), and well-loved
daughters. His eight years in the presidency created a strong legacy of
achievements that improved American society.
930
First Lady Michelle Obama, a brilliant and successful attorney in her own
right, and also a model of health (attention to diet, exercise, and being engaged
in meaningful activities that build community), loving wife, and mother,
became an advocate for using healthy food to transform and improve children's
health. Michelle also was a passionate advocate for military families whose
loved ones served to protect our nation. Many scholars and pundits agree that
First Lady Michelle Obama served our nation well.
Black women have endured unique burdens, but in their tradition of
organized self-help, professional Black women like Michelle Obama are not
only the beneficiaries of progressive social reform but are themselves social
reformers. Michelle Obama's legacy is that she embraces a life that quite
literally in American society means to have moved historically from being
“chattel” to being a first lady, and while other Black girls and women may not
make the same journey they know that age-old destructive stereotypes of
“wench,” “Jezebel,” “Sapphire,” “Mammy,” and more recently “Welfare
Queen” (the political attack on poor Black women receiving state assistance)
have been swept aside by the power of Michelle Obama's presence and bearing.
Other Black American women have also created accomplishment and even
fame for themselves; in the process they have broken through racist and
misogynist barriers: Jackie Joyner-Kersee (b. 1962) was the first Black
American woman to earn two Olympic gold medals in different events. Black
women writers and artists forged pioneering inroads into honors previously
reserved for males: Rita Dove (b. 1952), Maya Angelou (1928–2014), Toni
Morrison (b. 1931), Alice Walker (b. 1944), and Natalie Cole (1950–2015)
have been in the forefront of what has now become a tradition among the
creative writers and artists acknowledged with Pulitzer Prizes, Nobel Prizes for
Literature, Grammys, Emmys, and Oscars. Popular culture has some Black
women icons as well: Oprah Winfrey, Queen Latifah, Salt-N-Pepa, Lauryn Hill,
and Beyoncé.
Economic, social, and political indicators show that home ownership rates,
educational levels, employment levels, and rates of entrepreneurship have
increased for many in Black communities, and some Black women have used
greater access to opportunity as a stepping stone into vertical mobility in
America. In the decades since the movement's impact of civil rights laws and
practices, and Black people's continuing emphasis on self-help and race
betterment, the disparity between Black and white income has lessened
somewhat as more Black families enter the middle class.
931
But, the continuing legacy of disparate and unequal treatment in the criminal
justice system bears negatively on far too many Black women and especially
Black men. Private for-profit prisons require inmates to fill them up so that they
turn a profit. While the issue of incarceration is complex, the criminalization of
especially Black men has always adversely impacted especially Black working-
class communities. As such, the growth of disproportionate rates of Black
incarceration compels us to look closely at whether there is a conflict of interest
involved in the criminal justice system being complicit in helping to fill up for-
profit prisons that have every incentive to warehouse poor Black and Brown
men (for Black statistics, see Morris). In addition, we must ask some hard
questions about rights as we observe an increasingly militarized police presence
that is continuing to threaten the very fabric of Black people's lives. That's what
Black women and Black men and allies are doing as they have come together in
the streets and on social media to protest increasing police violence across the
nation to organize for effective political interventions (see Taylor).
To be clear, while the positive changes created by the movement opened
doors for many, others already locked in poverty in Black communities have
remained there, as the numbers of children being raised in poor, single, female-
headed households has steadily increased, Black-on-Black crime has increased,
as have instances of domestic violence against Black women. And, tragically,
the incidence of incest in Black communities remains a serious social problem,
and Black women are more likely than white women to die in childbirth.
Many more Black female youths are joining gangs, and gangs are more and
more disruptive in especially working-class and poor Black neighborhoods.
Health and wealth disparities continue as a class and racial divide impacts the
lives of many Black American women, men and children. The class divide in
Black American communities has meant that many more Black folks than ever
are living a middle and upper middle-class life, while at the same time
intergenerational poverty in poor Black communities has continued to damage
lives. The gender divide means that since Black women earn less than men and
are usually expected to carry the responsibility of single motherhood, the
intersection of being Black and female and poor means that many more Black
women and children have been living in intergenerational poverty. Black
women head more than 60 percent of Black households; and 3.7 million Black
children live in poverty. On the other hand, with so many absent fathers, poor
Black mothers and grandparents are the principal resources for their children's
survival.
932
Despite the obstacles to racial uplift and women's rights presented by very
real impediments to participatory democracy in this century, many Black
American women have worked to provide a way for their children and the
children of those who will come in the future to have a meaningful first-class
citizenship in American society. It is imperative that Black people's tradition of
struggle and resistance be documented, so that they will be mindful of where
they have come from. It is also vital that opposition and risk do not deter them,
and that individual achievements on behalf of a “common good”—racial uplift
and women's and children's rights—and a collective whole continue in the
minds, hearts, and actions of Black American women. It has been and is quite
literally the case that Black American females hold up one-half of Black
people's destiny.
933
Summary
This chapter is important precisely because it seeks to set out the major
theoretical and conceptual issues, even as it also presents a brief chronology of
the major historical events within the scholarship relating to the major issues,
themes, and personalities in Black American women's “herstory.” Hence, the
chapter requires the student to examine (1) assumptions about the consequence
of the intersection of race and sex; (2) the impact of the societal construction of
the meaning of gender; (3) the myriad experiences deriving from female gender
that have been shaped and influenced by misogynist beliefs and practices; (4)
perceptions about white cultural values and beliefs; (5) assumptions that
undergird imprecise language and biased naming; (6) the consequence of
starting a people's history in their experience of domination and exploitation;
and (7) the uses of “history” and “herstory” for those living now, as the past
lives among us in the present in the form of beliefs and attitudes about what is
and what is not so.
It is because Black American women have been marginalized in Black
history that this chapter is so necessary. In recent years, scholars of history and
a variety of other academic disciplines have been challenged to reconsider the
consequence of the invisibility and objectification of females, and, in this
instance, Black American females in the historical narrative. Too often, Black
American females have gone unidentified as persons and as active subjects in
history. For instance, throughout most of the scholarship on American or Black
American history, the habit of referring to enslaved African females as “slaves”
thoroughly obscures the personhood, nationality, and consequences of the
experience of female sexuality for enslaved Africans, and then subsequently,
Black American females. A “slave” is a unit of production, and it is the object
of beliefs about owning people as property. Scholars who uniformly reference
an enslaved persons or people as “slaves” tacitly or explicitly objectify the
persons they are discussing. The habit of doing this to Black people's “history”
is so widespread that picking up almost any American history book will
illustrate the point.
Because our thinking has been so influenced by the tendency to see women
as passive “objects” that men act upon, we need to be mindful that the illusion
of passivity creates “victims” in our own understanding of history. In much the
same way that white scholarship has encouraged us to see all people of color as
“objects,” always acted upon by the will and actions of white males, so, too,
934
sexism encourages us to see all women as “objects” who are acted upon by
white men, and all other males of color. Such thinking about Black people and
especially Black women who have so intensely resisted oppression belongs in
the realm of mythology.
At issue is the inherited tradition in American history of seeing white males
as active subjects on the stage of evolution, doing, controlling, conquering, and
always dominating others. At the other end of the “mythological” spectrum are
people of color (women and men), and all women, who are represented as idle,
lazy, passive, compliant, acquiescing, waiting to be led, and eager to be
dominated and told what to do. Such a mythology ends with white males
ordering the world and white females being the objects of white male desire
and the receptacles of white male children, while everyone else is on a lower
level. Men of color either never achieve manhood, and are perpetually called
and treated like “boys,” or are perceived to be “bestial,” thereby justifying the
very worst animalistic impulses of white males to castrate, lynch, and burn
Black men alive.
Women of color, especially African women in America's history, have been
treated as breeding machines, white men's concubines, work mules, and as ugly
“caldrons” against which the virtues of white womanhood (beginning with the
white female's skin being the ticket to acceptability or privilege) could be
compared and exalted. In other words, the oppression of African women in
North America has been intensely physical, psychological, and spiritual. Racial
slavery evolved, that is, a captive labor force grew naturally because of the
existence of captive African women, on whose backs rested the full burden of
reproducing a Black American labor force in the New World.
Treated as sexual prey and as objects of sexual license from the moment of
capture, we will never know or feel the misery suffered (perhaps to the point of
death) by countless, and now nameless and faceless, enslaved African women.
Ironically, the writer can barely remember a scholarly examination of slavery
that stated that African women were most certainly used as sexual objects in the
barracoons (fortress-like encampments along the West African coast where
captive Africans were forcibly detained) and on the slave ships that crossed the
Atlantic Ocean. Nor has there been a penetrating analysis of how white males
used coercive authority, such as withholding food from Black women who
resisted or refused the sexual overtures of white males.
We know that wherever African women were held in slavery, white men
talked and wrote innocuously about white male propriety to the point where
935
whites, and apparently some Blacks, came to believe that it was promiscuous
Black women who presented such a problem for civilized white Christian
males. This kind of “blaming the victim” mythology has taken hold in
American culture because of the relatively unquestioned sexism that has existed
alongside a virulent racism—licensing and re-enforcing the institution of
slavery and concubinage in America. It has even been the case that some Black
male scholars and writers in this century have directed their anger at Black
women for being vulnerable to white men. Hence, Black women have been
violated and exploited by white men, and, in the twentieth century, sometimes
scorned by Black males and blamed for their own victimization. There is much
work to be done to clarify the basis for this new direction in Black male anger.
As far as the historical record is concerned, however, there appears to be no
evidence, either in published sources, letters, or the slave narratives, that Black
American males blamed Black American females for the power the white
settler males exerted over Black females in earlier centuries.
Misogyny, like racism, transfers the blame for oppression not onto those who
exploit and victimize, but onto those who do not control the production of
information, and, hence, image and myth making. For as long as racist,
misogynist, and sexist views obstruct the historical record, then females and
males of color will be victimized by the historical record, after having been
victimized by the oppression that the historical record obscures. If African
peoples in Black American history have been reduced to non-humans—
productive units because of the imprecise use of language—and if the tendency
is to attribute more power to white settler culture than it is due and to make
assumptions about the absence of a Black culture, then scholars have also been
remiss in their assessment of issues that involve an analysis of the intersection
of race and sex. In other words, misogyny is as powerful as racism in obscuring
or denying that there are significant issues that are particular to women of color
that should concern us all. “Herstory” means that the facts about the
experiences of female sex, and, in the context of Black women and girls, what
the intersection of race and sex has come to mean, are examined in a serious
way.
For too long and in too many varying contextual situations, the issues that are
significant in the lives of Black American females have been ignored or
presumed to be addressed by a concern to articulate a voice for racial uplift of
the “nation.” At issue is the fact that the practice of speaking in a mono-sexual
voice about an entire people obscures the diverse range of real life issues that
the construction of gender has generated. The student explores issues that are
936
significant to Black American females not just to illuminate how the experience
of being a person of color and a female in a society that is intensely anti-female
and anti-people of color complicates matters, but also to assess how the
experience of being a female in Black communities that have internalized
misogyny brings its own set of issues and problems. We might wish that racism
and sexism were only issues that affect Black people across racial and sexual
lines, but the truth of the matter is that misogyny also undermines and destroys
the viability of relationships between Black American females and males.
Between 1620 and 1865, the majority of African women, whether
involuntarily transported via the Middle Passage, or born to African women in
white settler colonies, were enslaved. Two points stand out in stark contrast to
many scholarly discussions about slavery that linguistically de-gender slaves,
but actually hold male issues constant. For instance, in most history books on
slavery, the discussion about slavery generally proceeds with an analysis of the
intensification of racism in white settler attitudes towards Blacks and native
people of color. Many scholars either look for examples of overt resistance or
protest to slavery's domination, or they attempt to document some amount of
kindly white paternalism. The student must question what is missing from such
analyses.
This chapter has suggested, to begin with, that discussing slavery only from a
series of questions that assume gender uniformity is theoretically problematic
and inaccurate. Enslaved African women were treated with a degree of violence
against their persons that differed from the violence transferred onto captive
African males; they were workers and breeders of slaves. To be sure, the
European white males who came face to face with African women were
socialized to see captive African women as their personal property. Captured,
vulnerable, and enslaved women could be and most often were seen and treated
as common property and raped by white men. That is, European male
patriarchal beliefs pre-dating the Middle Ages by centuries had long
encouraged the treatment of captured women as objects of violence and sexual
license. Humans who are, in fact, treated as non-humans are the most
vulnerable since it is precisely their humanity that is categorically denied for a
very long time. Many scholars have denied the manner in which captive
African women, obliged to bear the sexual violence of white men who cared no
more for them than if they were animals, were treated.
This chapter has accorded Black women and girls an Old World cultural
context. Not without a cultural past, African first principles everywhere
937
influenced the formation of values about personal identity, and the significance
of kinship and one's family. African first principles shaped the development of
people's values and beliefs about the material world, resources, and institutions
of governing. Many traditional West African societies were more like
“partnership societies” than “dominator societies.” Within these, the austere
forms of patriarchy associated with European male domination of women did
not exist. For instance, European men created a belief system in which they are
purported to “own” European women and possess the legal power of life or
death over women and children. In the centuries before the European
penetration of Africa's interior, many West African women did not live under a
system of individual male domination over others through property relations in
persons and things. In addition, many West African women earned and accrued
respect as workers, traders, mothers, mediums, and healers.
The concept of a “common good” served as one of the foundations of
African philosophy, and it has continued as a highly valued concept and guide
for personal action towards one's familial and communal good. Many historians
have long been more interested in perceiving Black Americans to be without
culture, than in identifying and articulating the mechanisms for the conveyance
and transference of the African first principles—principles that were apparent
in the formation of Black self-help, mutual aid, benevolent, and secret societies
during the antebellum period. It is important to remember that culture derives
from ideas; ideas travel in people's heads, and peoples' commitments to ideas
travel in their hearts and manifest in their hands. Culture is destroyed when a
people are destroyed; enslavement, however, was not analogous to genocide
directed at extermination, for, if it were, Black Americans would not be here
today.
Although the mythology created by white Southerners invoked images of
either a docile Mammy or a harlot Jezebel, the reality of Black women's lives
(where plantation slavery defined sexual and material exploitation) required
Black women to find and use whatever wellsprings of personal power they
possessed. Simply stated, enslavement robbed each successive generation of
Black people of an unfettered freedom. Enslavement also meant
underdevelopment for Black people and self-development for whites, not
because, as whites insisted, Africans were an inferior people destined to be
dominated by whites, but because whites were an aggressive nationalistic breed
determined to expropriate other people's lifetimes in order to erect their own
entitlement privileges. As each decade passed, the deepening of white settler
resolve to hold African women in slavery was met with the evolution of a
938
pronounced and willful tradition of resistance.
Just because white settlers were inhumane towards enslaved African females,
it should not be assumed the Black American females became inhuman. Black
women resisted enslavement and white settler attempts to destroy the souls of
Black people. While white males controlled Black female reproductive
capacity, Black females chose who they would love and to whom their primary
commitment belonged. Free and enslaved Black American women were also
instrumental in organizing a kinship system around their children and the
children of other Black women. By such actions, they often named and taught
their children in ways that served the kinship needs of Black people, not white
settlers.
Whether born free, manumitted, or escaped, free Black women worked to
build the Black communities in which they lived, worked, raised children, and
built institutions along with Black American men. Many Black American
women involved themselves in the nineteenth century's liberation struggle by
working to undermine and abolish the institution of slavery. Harriet Tubman,
Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Linda Brent, and many other Black American
women deserve recognition as abolition and women's rights advocates.
Emancipation brought Black Americans immense joy and, at the same time,
great concern to protect their human and civil rights and to uplift and improve
themselves. The growth of the Black Women's Club Movement provided a
national organizational forum through which to address the joint goals of
“racial uplift” and “women's rights.” Many women worked hard to build the
self-help movement that historically has always been so important to Black
American progress. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Francis
Jackson Coppin, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, and many other
Black American women have been instrumental in forging organizational and
self-help efforts on behalf of all Black Americans.
Throughout all of the decades in which people of African descent have toiled
in the Americas, the vast majority of Black American women have always
worked a double-duty day. In addition to being partners who toiled to help
make ends meet, Black American women have been the cornerstones of Black
families, and Black extended kinship networks, without which many Black
children and adults would have perished. Educated, working, middle-class
Black American women have been instrumental in prompting and promoting
civil rights reform and in starting organizations to channel reform efforts in
Black communities. Some acted as individuals like Irene Morgan and Rosa
939
Parks; others, like Ella Baker, Diane Nash, Daisy Bates, Fannie Lou Hamer,
Dorothy Height, Marian Edelman, Elizabeth Duncan Koontz, and Faye
Wattleton, mobilized the creative energies of others and profoundly influenced
the movement and its aftermath. There are an increasing number of Black
American women who have been elected to public office: Shirley Chisholm,
Barbara Jordan, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Maxine Waters, and a host of
others whose terms in service to Black people and the nation exemplify the
progress that has been made in civil and women's rights during the later
decades of the twentieth century through the present.
As Black American females look to the future, longstanding issues such as
civil rights and women's rights remain as important as ever, and access to
education and entrepreneurship as significant aspects of economic development
must be pursued. Finally, Black Americans need to know that African-
American females have contributed to a tradition of protest, resistance to
oppression, commitment to Black American familial viability, self-help and
self-determination to survive and prosper and utilize creative initiative in
organization building. Quite literally, Black women can still draw strength from
Anna Julia Cooper's poignant words spoken in 1886: “When and where I enter,
in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and
without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters
with me.”
940
1. What are the issues of contention in the present historiography on Black
American women?
2. Discuss how enslaved African women survived the institution of slavery.
What were the obstacles and what were the values that kept their hopes
throughout the period?
3. What has been the impact of Black American women—both during the
slavery period and thereafter—on the uplift of the Black communities?
4. Compare and contrast the philosophy and impact of Harriet Tubman and
Fannie Lou Hamer on the times during which they lived.
941
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Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black
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946
27
Africa Anew: Reinventing

Community Alliances and
Indigenous Ways in the Age of
HIV/AIDS
Almaz Zewede
947
Introduction
The role African people and communities play in responding to health and
development challenges and opportunities is often ignored in academic and
policy studies, government and donor project designs, and implementation.
This study identifies and analyzes empirical and historical cases of how African
people self-mobilize to rapidly and effectively respond to health and related
challenges using indigenous and, when available, conventional medicines and
technologies. African people have traditionally recognized that the health of
society is the foundation of other development efforts. African communities
have proven to be trailblazers in initiating rapid and cost-effective ways to fight
HIV/AIDS and tackle other challenges. The lesson learned is that government-
and donor-sponsored projects should learn to benefit from local peoples'
resourcefulness and eagerness to change their condition to achieve measurable
and successful outcomes.
This brief study will start with very brief glimpses at African traditional
medicine and healing practices and move on to examine the neglect of
traditional medicine as Western medicine occupies and dominates medical
services and education in Africa. The gradual return of traditional medicine in
African medical education and services during the new millennium will also be
discussed as Africa continues to face unending cycles of epidemic challenges,
the latest and most severe being HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. The
urgent task of combating and controlling these scourges still falls largely on the
utilization of Western medicine. All too often, only the roles played by
governments and international donors form the subjects of study in matters of
epidemic disease crisis and its management. In actual fact, self-mobilized
grassroots groups or communities in Africa are both trend-setters and important
players in making medical intervention successful and cost-efficient, and most
importantly in caring for and nurturing the devastated victims. This study will
include a few instances where such grassroots groups played key roles so as to
provide a cursory look at their importance.
Realization that health is the foundation of human well-being and prosperity
is deeply ingrained in the very fabric and consciousness of traditional and
contemporary Africa. There has always been a great deal of preoccupation with
health and remaining holistically healthy in African cultures and traditions. By
holistic health is meant the integrated concern with a person's physical,
psychological, emotional and social well-being. African traditions see all these
948
dimensions of life as inseparable in the human condition. Certain metaphysical
practices, often misunderstood as negative superstition by outsiders, are
mechanisms to attain holistic healing and attempts to ward off potential
physical and mental afflictions.
Major terms and concepts: African traditional medicine, biomedical
(Western) medicine, traditional healers, HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS, Global Fund,
malaria and tuberculosis, international donors, community-based local
innovations, Independent Group for Health in Africa (IGHA), Mobile Task
Team, DOTS strategy, grassroots organizations.
949
For millennia, Africans relied on their own traditional medicine and medical
practices to prevent or remedy illnesses. African traditional health science and
practice is traced by some scholars to as far back as 4,000 years.1 This ancient
medical practice was continuously applied until Africa was opened to the
influence of Western biomedical medicine and health management practices
some 130 years ago (Good, 1987, 71). Since this time, Africa's health and
healing practices have benefited from both biomedical (Western) and
traditional medical systems. In addition to the application of herbal and other
traditional treatments, African caregiving traditions emphasized personal and
environmental cleanliness and isolation of persons infected with communicable
disease as critical to successful and rapid recovery and containment of diseases.
This researcher recalls childhood memories when a child or adult contracted
small pox—a dreaded disease. The infected were quickly isolated and placed in
meticulously cleaned rooms adorned with fragrant herbs and medicinal leaves,
and their clothes washed fresh. Only people with known immunity cared for
them.
As far as this researcher recalls, immunity could be had by traditional means
of vaccination. Tiny bits of pus from small pox blisters of an infected child
would be laced on to a sanitized scratch of a healthy child's body—usually the
upper arm. The child or children were then secluded in very clean spaces also
adorned with fragrant fresh herbs and medicinal leaves and were well fed.
Within a short time, the inoculated children showed symptoms of the small pox
presence in the body, like fever and scattered, weak blisters. Typically, the
children got well soon after and would be considered immunized for life against
small pox. This was how children were inoculated against small pox in a few
cultures known to this researcher until modern vaccination became available.
Even then, modern vaccination reached very few people until the start of the
global campaign to eradicate small pox around the 1960s. Isolation and hygiene
were observed in other epidemics like typhoid fever.
Disease control and prevention requires certain minimum preconditions.
First, the people's economic condition, level of education or awareness need to
be such that they are able to actively seek and acquire information about critical
disease risks and the means of preventing or controlling their potential spread
and harm. Second, there needs to be a health infrastructure adequate enough to
950
address health needs. Third, people need to be economically able to afford
essential treatments to keep them and those who surround them healthy. Fourth,
society needs to have developed the means for producing medicines and
medical supplies on a scale necessary to supply the population in need of such
items. Needless to say, these preconditions for the maintenance of a healthy
population do not obtain in much of contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa. This
makes the spread of aggressive diseases like HIV/AIDS overwhelming.
In Africa's pre-colonial spacious and sparsely populated towns and villages,
people could meet these health preconditions through traditional medical and
economic networks and institutions.2 But then, traditional medical
infrastructures, methods, skills, knowledge, and institutions were not what
Africa invested in subsequent to its contact with Western medicine.
Independent Africa turned its attention only to Western biomedical approaches
and looked to build their replicas. However, owing to many cost and
skill/knowledge factors, the development of Western-type medicine and
medical institutions remains very limited in scope, leaving an estimated 85 to
90 percent of the African population to rely primarily on underdeveloped
traditional medical services provided by untrained traditional practitioners and
healers.3 The question here is not so much about choice between Western or
African healing, but concern about which one is accessible and affordable.
951
The Development of Western Medicine in Africa: A Brief
Overview
Since independence, African countries have hurried to organize medical
schools and medical services fashioned after Western traditions. In many Sub-
Saharan African countries, as much as 85 percent of the health budget is used to
organize hospitals and outpatient facilities that effectively serve no more than
10 percent of the population (Warren, 1982, 94). Warren gives some glimpses
of rural-urban disparities in the distribution of Western biomedical medical
services. He provides a picture of Ghana during the 1980s, putting the urban
physician/population ratio at 1/10,000 and that for rural areas at 1/100,000.
Even in the new millennium, this great rural-urban divide persists.
Africapedia provides an update for doctor-patient ratios for all African
countries in 2007. Though not disaggregated by rural/urban categories, the data
confirms the scarcity of doctors relative to populations. According to the data,
Seychelles fares best at 151 doctors per 100,000 population. Some countries
like Lesotho and Rwanda have ratios of 5/100,000. Ghana has a doctor-patient
ratio of 15/100,000.4 If we look at the combined figures given for the 1980s by
Warren and the more recent figures, the situation in Ghana has not improved.
Even more updated figures available for 20105 show no big improvement in
doctor-population ratio for most of Sub-Saharan Africa. Seychelles remains at
151/100,000 and Ghana too is shown as 15/100,000 while Kenya has a
doctor/population of 14/100,000 and Rwanda remains the same at 5/100,000. A
United Nations study indicates that this stagnation in doctor/population is in
large measure due to brain-drain and not lack of focus on training medical
doctors and other health professionals.6 The majority of the trained doctors
emigrate to the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, and other
Western countries. Under this scenario, African people generally, the urban
poor included, depend on traditional medicine and healers, rather than Western
biomedicine, to meet their health needs. The World Health Organization
(WHO) estimates that around 80 percent of the African population depends on
traditional medicine.7 This is somewhat less than some other estimates of
African peoples' dependence on traditional medicine at 85–90 percent.8
Western health service in Sub-Saharan Africa is shown by some data to have
expanded somewhat during the latter years of 1990s, though the
doctor/population ratios cited above do not speak favorably for the claimed
952
expansion. From 1990 to 1999, the average physician/population ratio for
countries that provided data stood at around 6/100,000 (UNDP, 2002, Table 6).
Some African sources put the doctor/population ratio, for the same period, at a
more favorable 1/15,000.9 Such a positive figure raises many questions.
953
Though traditional medicine played a very important role, medical education,
research, and institution building in all Sub-Saharan African countries
neglected, even actively marginalized, traditional medical systems (Reid, 1982,
128) until very recently. Whether private organizations or government were the
entities engaged in medical education, research, and service delivery, they were
all oriented to Western medicine at the expense of traditional medicine and
healing systems. This picture has started to change in a number of African
countries quite dramatically. Given the multiple epidemic challenges
(HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other epidemic diseases), the continent
has been obliged to look to its own traditional resources, in addition to Western
ones, to cope. The cost of Western medicine is prohibitive and makes its
widespread use to confront the enormous health threats Africa faces very
difficult. It needs to be mentioned, however, that with the help of international
donors, and improved expenditure on treatment by a number of African
governments, as of July 2016, 17 million out of a total HIV/AIDS infected
population of 36.7 million, were receiving antiretroviral treatment and living
healthy lives.10 In May 2016, South Africa declared to the world that it
commits to provide all of its HIV-infected citizens with the treatment they
need. The country's plan is to eliminate the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030.11 On
top of massive international aid, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS
Relief (PEPFAR) had also spent $5.6 billion to fight HIV/AIDS in South Africa
alone since 2004.12
African people are believed to seek traditional and Western-style medical
service in comparable proportions, depending on the accessibility to both
(Warren, 1982; Table 1, Kramer and Thomas, 1982, 166; Reid, 1982, 121). A
number of researchers find that both supply constraints of Western medicine
(Reid, 1982, 129; Warren, 1982; World Bank, 2004, Table 3) and the trust
people have in the holistic approach of traditional medicine (Reid, 1982, 130–
137; Kramer and Thomas, 1982, 166–169) still steer people toward traditional
medicine. The problem of scarcity and lack of expansion of Western-style
biomedical service has worsened since the start of implementation of World
Bank Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) starting in the early 1980s
(Koblinsky, Timyan and Gay, 1993, 608). Part of the SAP requirement was
trimming down all government expenditures on social services such as health
and education. Without people's heavy reliance on traditional medicine,
954
hospitals and clinics organized in the Western medical tradition would simply
be overwhelmed by demand and unable to provide even the meager services
they render to the few.
Given the marginalization of African holistic (the culture of dealing with the
whole person rather than only a specific illness) traditional medicine by African
modern health professions and professionals, the Organization of African Unity
(now the African Union) underscored the need to take a serious look at
traditional medicine as an essential component of Africa's strategy to meet its
epidemics and health challenges. It deliberated on African traditional medicine
at its summit held in Lusaka, Zambia, during July 9–11, 200113 and raised the
status of traditional medicine as alternative and complementary to modern
medicine. The summit also designated the period of 2001–2010 as the decade
of African Traditional Medicine. This was followed by the designation of May
31 as African Traditional Medicine Day by the heads of state and governments
at their meeting in Maputo in July 2003.14 One of the most enthusiastic
countries to embrace the new drive for research in and application of traditional
medicine was South Africa,15 a country hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic
and suffering from other widespread diseases, but also a country with well
developed health institutions and infrastructure relative to other African
countries.
Encouraging progress has been made since the Lusaka declaration to
mainstream African Traditional Medicine and the designation of 2001–2010 as
the decade of African Traditional Medicine. Emeka Johnkingsley's study16
shows that by 2010, 22 African countries did research on malaria, HIV/AIDS,
and other diseases with promising results. WHO reports, in addition, show that
by 2010, 36 countries had formulated national traditional medicine policies; 21
countries had developed legal frameworks for traditional medicine practice; 18
countries had developed national code of ethics for the practice of traditional
medicine safety and quality, and 15 countries had concrete plans on how to
implement their policies and programs.17 The same report reveals that a number
of African countries conducted research on medicines for the treatment of
HIV/AIDS and other diseases with a significant number reporting promising
results, partly demonstrated by reduced hospital visits and much improved
school attendance. The report also tells that academically, Nigeria, Ghana,
Guinea, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Kenya, Mali,
Cameroon, Congo, and the DRC offer some form traditional medicine
education in their medical colleges and schools of pharmacy.
955
By all accounts, Sub-Saharan Africa remains the hardest hit region by the
HIV/AIDS epidemic. According to avert.org report, which uses UNAIDS
sources for 2016, the world hosts 36.7 million HIV victims. Of these, 25.5
million are Sub-Saharan Africans (19 million in Eastern and Southern Africa,
6.5 million in West and Central Africa).18 This means that Sub-Sahara Africa is
still home to nearly 70 percent of the global HIV/AIDS burden. Of the African
continent, Eastern and Southern Africa account for most of this tragedy. The
region accounts for 52 percent of the global scourge.19 It is curious to note that
the proportion of Africa's HIV/AIDS infection rate relative to the global
distribution of the problem mirrors the rate of infection among African-
Americans relative to other population groups in the United States. According
to the Kaiser Family Foundation and the CDC, in 2015, African Americans
represented 13 percent of the US population but accounted for 40 percent of the
total HIV/AIDS population.20, 21 This, to be sure, is an improvement over 2007
figures, which had put the African-American HIV/AIDS burden at 48 percent
of total infected population in the US.22 Of course, any comparative parallels
will end with proportionality of rates of infection among the respective
populations. The magnitude of health problems in Africa and treatment
opportunities makes the African case far different from the African-American
case.
Many funding organizations have been created to deal with global
HIV/AIDS epidemic and associated diseases. The Global Fund was established
to strengthen the campaign against the triple global health threats that
particularly target Africa. The Global Fund is a cooperative endeavor of public-
and private-sector initiatives and funding. Its goal is to attract and distribute
additional resources for the prevention and treatment of all three epidemics:
HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.23 Its target is to raise an additional 10
billion dollars a year to help combat and defeat the triple disease epidemics.
PEPFAR was initiated in 2003 by the then President George W. Bush. Since
2004, it has spent billions in Africa for the fight against HIV/AIDS and
associated diseases, with South Africa alone, as noted earlier, being the greatest
single country beneficiary.24
The Global Fund is, perhaps, the biggest source of funds as it receives money
from governmental and private sources. The Bill and Melinda Gates
956
Foundation is also a major contributor to the Global Fund. Of the $1 billion the
Gates Foundation donated in 2003, $120 million was allocated to fight malaria
in Africa.25 UNAIDS, on the other hand, comprises different multilateral
organizations: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),
United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), World Food Program (WFP),
United Nations Development Program (UNDP), United Nations Fund for
Population Activities (UNFPA), International Labor Organization (ILO),
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),
World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Bank. The aim of UNAIDS
is to pull together all funds from these organizations and other sources for the
multifaceted campaign against HIV/AIDS. The results of these funding efforts
have been impressive. United Nations report shows that since 2005, for
instance, HIV/AIDS-related deaths have been cut by half worldwide. Eastern
and Southern Africa, which account for over 50 percent of the global health
burden, managed to reduce death rates by 30 percent between 2010 and 2016.26
Africa's health problems, which challenge its prosperity, society, and family
structure, reached crisis proportions by the middle of the first decade of the new
millennium. Early on, during the mid and latter years of the decade of 2000,
many African countries tried to ignore the raging epidemic. They were in
denial. South Africa, in particular, denied the severity of its HIV/AIDS
epidemic. This was during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki.27 Ultimately, South
Africa, along with the whole continent, accepted the crisis and started to try and
do something. They soon realized that without resorting to Africa's own
centuries-old medical knowledge, wisdom, and community resources, it would
be difficult to effectively fight and defeat the serious threats of diseases,
especially HIV/AIDS. We have already seen above the fast development in
traditional medicine since this continental shift of attitudes towards traditional
medicine in Africa. All this is critically important as the long-subdued
communicable diseases like malaria and tuberculosis are on the rise. They seem
to provide mutually reinforcing effects to exacerbate the HIV/AIDS assault.
South Africa, which had a complicated approach to its HIV/AIDS challenges, is
now a leader on the African continent in its determination to defeat it with all
means at its disposal. As mentioned earlier, a May 13, 2016, press release by
UNAIDS revealed that the South African government had committed to make
antiretroviral drugs available to all infected citizens and end the HIV/AIDS
epidemic by 2030.28 Other countries too are making progress on this front. As
we will see below, in most cases, grassroots organizations are significant
957
participants in this effort and its sustainability.
958
Western Medicine and Africa's Campaign against Major
Diseases
There have been successful campaigns in Africa against major disease
epidemics using Western biomedicine that was made available through
international cooperation and intervention.
The most successful application of Western medicine in Africa has been in
the area of eradicating menacing epidemic diseases like measles, small pox,
malaria, and river blindness. These diseases always existed in Africa (Azevedo
1978). However, it needs to be mentioned that, in the case of small pox, the
variety that existed in Africa prior to its sustained and extensive contact with
the Middle East and the West, was more benign, easily treated, and easily
contained, causing little death. Death rates due to small pox were estimated at
around 2.8 percent (Jenzen and Feierman, 1992, 90–92). Since Africa's
extensive contact with the outside world, however, the more severe form of
small pox became prevalent. This means that traditional methods of control and
prevention of the disease could no longer apply. African governments and
people, therefore, had to turn to Western medicine that was designed to address
the new varieties of old diseases. The continent has partnered with the
international health and medical community to confront the spread of epidemics
like small pox, polio, measles, malaria, tuberculosis, and most recently
HIV/AIDS.
Through international preventive campaigns, Africa has been active in the
control and eradication of a number of the above diseases, which prevailed in
Africa prior to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Dates were set to eliminate each disease.
But their elimination by targeted dates has proved illusive. Since much of the
African region is hot and humid most of the year, it creates an environment
conducive to many disease-causing microbes and parasites to breed, thrive, and
infect people on a sustained basis. Thus, such diseases as malaria, tuberculosis,
bilharzia, and river blindness continue to pose big problems in addition to
global diseases like small pox, measles, and polio. The struggle to permanently
eradicate the latter diseases is ongoing. Malaria and tuberculosis, which were
nearly eradicated during the 1970s, reemerged as major health threats in the last
few decades. It is estimated that malaria kills 3,000 African children under the
age of five every day and 900,000 adults each year.29 Tuberculosis also exacts
heavy loss of life.
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Struggling to emerge from colonial legacies of neglect and underdeveloped
institutions, Africa has yet to build health infrastructures and institutions
comparable to the challenges it faces. This, coupled with other development
deficits, imposes heavy burdens of poverty and ignorance, which hugely
increase the vulnerability of the African population to new and old epidemics.
Chaisson and Martinson (2008) find that, in addition to the health burdens
mentioned earlier in this piece, Africa carries 29 percent of the global
tuberculosis afflictions and accounts for 34 percent of the world's deaths from
it. The authors confirm the popular knowledge that tuberculosis coexists with
HIV/AIDS as the former preys on bodies whose immune systems have been
weakened by the latter. This means that Africa has had to count on Western
assistance like UNAIDS, PEPFAR, the Global Fund, and many others to help
with its struggle against the crisis of HIV/AIDS and other epidemics like Ebola.
Ebola was not included in this study owing to its limited geographic location
and because it was quickly contained.
Western medicine, when it is made accessible, has a vast potential in
eradicating the epidemic diseases that afflict millions. Instances like the near
eradication of measles, small pox, and polio30 can be mentioned to illustrate the
importance of Western medicine and global partnerships when done in the right
way. The right way involves having the buy-in, full participation, and trust of
local communities in the virtues of Western medicine and international
partnerships, as the case of polio in Nigeria discussed below will illustrate.
Small pox was actually eradicated in 1977 through vaccination campaigns in
Africa and globally. This was followed by a goal to eradicate measles by 2000.
Except for a few occurrences in Nigeria in 2004, measles has more or less been
eradicated.31 Polio, a crippling disease that attacks and weakens human limbs,
was also successfully subdued. Through persistent vaccination campaigns
spearheaded by the World Health Organization at a cost of $4.6 billion, the
disease was to be fully eradicated by 2000.
This target had to be extended to 2005 as some anti-polio vaccine attitudes
were spread in major population centers of Northern Nigeria, which was a hot
spot of polio incidents and also happens to be predominantly Muslim.
Conspiracy theories and suspicion of the negative health effects of the polio
vaccine were widely spread among the population of Northern Nigeria,
resulting in mistrust of the eradication campaign.32 This resulted in the
obstruction of necessary vaccinations and follow-ups, leading to new infections
in the region. Of the 667 global cases of polio recorded in 2003, Nigeria
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accounted for 300, triggering stern blame from the World Health
Organization.33 During the latter part of 2004, Nigeria launched a vigorous
information campaign to counter the spread of conspiracy theories, fears, and
suspicions and to have all children in Northern Nigeria vaccinated against
polio. Community fears and suspicions were, at least for a time, overcome. The
success of the vaccination drive was affirmed by the World Health
Organization Report on global health conditions.34 As of July 2017, WHO has
still been advocating continued polio surveillance as a few cases were being
reported globally, with Nigeria (which reported 2 cases in 2016), along with a
few Southeast Asian countries being the sources.35 In a globalized world, the
occurrence of communicable diseases like polio, small pox, or measles in one
locality is still a matter of global concern as it can quickly spread
internationally.
The Nigerian experience with polio vaccination highlights the necessity of
informing and fully engaging local communities in what is going on in their
environment. Too often, local involvement in development, including health, is
too narrowly interpreted to mean involvement of the “national elite or experts.”
The national level involvement is a critical marker of the extent to which
governments take responsibility for the welfare and advancement of their
people. But mere involvement of national elite makes the effort top-down and
alienated from the people. The national elite often focuses on bureaucratization
of solutions with a focus on technical fixes to problems. Human problems such
as communicable diseases and epidemics are not amenable to mere technical
fixes. They require the full participation of informed, educated, committed
people and communities.
Malaria remains a major health problem for Africa, though it affects many
other developing regions. The International Medical Corps and the WHO state
that worldwide, 300–500 million people were affected by malaria each year
prior to 2010. One million deaths occurred from malaria each year during the
same period, 90 percent of these occurring in Africa and costing it $12 billion
in lost GDP annually.36 WHO reports for 2015, show that there were only 212
million malaria cases and 429,000 deaths, with Africa accounting for 90
percent of malaria cases and 92 percent of malarial deaths.37 Though Africa
still carries the brunt of the malaria problem, the problem for Africa and
globally has been considerably reduced. For instance, the WHO Regional
Office for Africa indicates a reduction in the global rate of malaria infection. It
gave a figure of 247 million global infections with Africa accounting for 88
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percent of the total infections and 91 percent of all the deaths the disease caused
in 2006.38 The WHO Regional Office acknowledged that, “In some countries
where a comprehensive package of malaria prevention and control
interventions have been scaled up, there have been substantial reductions in
malaria morbidity and mortality.” This, according to the WHO Regional Office
for Africa, will continue to be enhanced through country-level program funding
by the Global Fund, the United States Presidential Malaria Initiative, and the
World Bank Malaria Booster Program. The WHO's Decade to Roll Back
Malaria program, which ended in 2010, was also active in the fight against
malaria. It declared malaria in Africa “to be both a disease of poverty and a
cause of poverty. Annual economic growth in countries with high malaria
transmission has historically been lower than in countries without malaria.”39
This is why this researcher focuses on health issues among African populations.
Reduced health adds to the complex problems of black people's struggle to
achieve the social and economic progress which they deserve. The WHO
remains vigilant in its malaria control efforts until the plan to eradicate the
disease by 2030 is fulfilled.40
Tuberculosis (TB) is also a reemerging threat. The World Health
Organization estimated in 2004, that one third of the world's population had the
bacteria that cause tuberculosis,41 though millions among them may not know
that they carry the disease. This number holds for 2010 as well.42 That means
more than two billion people potentially carry the tuberculosis risk. The disease
is the seventh leading cause of death.43 In 2007, there were 9.27 million active
TB cases, an increase from 9.24 million in 2006, and 8.3 million in 2000.44 Of
these, 55 percent were in Asia and 31 percent in Africa.45 In 2004, the figure
for Africa was 26 percent, which means that the problem appears to be tending
upwards globally and in Africa since 2000, according to some global
statistics.46 According to the facts, there were 10,400,000 tuberculosis cases
globally in 2015, and, for a change, Africa claimed only 2,720,000, much less
than Southeast Asia, which had 4,740,000 cases. The figure of 10,400,000 is
higher than that for 2007 and 2010. Experts believe that TB vulnerability in
Africa is generally exacerbated by HIV/AIDS prevalence.47 Recent statistics
confirm these diseases' cohabitation.
The chance to contain and even reverse the TB epidemic looks more
promising as inexpensive methods and strategies to treat and control TB have
been emerging since the last decade of the last millennium. Africa and other
regions had adopted a major strategy referred to as DOTS (for Directly
962
Observed Treatment, Short-Course), which consists of key elements in TB
control and treatment:48
government commitment to sustained TB control

detection of TB cases through sputum smear
uninterrupted supply of cheap but highly effective drugs for six to eight
months (six-month treatment costs only $6 per person)
monitoring and reporting system installation
The 2009 WHO Report centers around treatment and detection strategies in
DOTS to meet its goal of halving TB prevalence and death rates by 2015.
Clearly, this goal has not been met, as we saw above. The same can be said
about malaria, which the WHO is vigilantly striving to control and finally
eliminate by 2030.49 What does this say about expert-only driven top-down
design and delivery of services?
The African Summit on Roll Back Malaria, held in Abuja in 2002, endorsed
inexpensive but effective strategies for malaria control.50 These included
insecticide-treated nets (ITNs), most of them scheduled for production in
Africa. In addition, potent drugs to treat drug-resistant strains of malaria have
been put to use. An African group of scientists and doctors petitioned the WHO
to allow indoor spraying of DDT to increase malaria control effectiveness.51
The debate on the use of DDT as a measure of malaria control seems to be
generally unresolved, as witnessed by a recent on-site visit to some African
countries. In its winter 2008 posting, the online magazine onEarth reported the
disagreement between one African doctor who advocates the use of DDT and
entomology researchers who oppose its reintroduction.52 Research about the
use of DDT inside the home to kill the malaria vector (the mosquito) yielded no
significant information. Malaria and tuberculosis remain Africa's pressing
health challenges, next only to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
963
Despite the many diseases that confront Africa, its population keeps on
growing. Africa's population in 1980 was estimated at 379 million. This grew
to 614 million by 1997 (World Bank, 1998/1999, Table 3, 194–195). Despite
high death rates caused by HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, by 2002
Africa's population had reached 688 million (World Bank, 2004, Table 1, 253).
The continent's population for 2009 was estimated to be 991,002,342.53 In 2017
the African population passed the 1,216,129,814 mark.54 World Meters put this
figure slightly higher—1,240,504.815.55 Such phenomenal growth in the face
of multiple existential challenges is surprising. It is important to note that 60
percent of this population is under the age of 25 years.56 This in itself may
make Africa's future amazing to watch. African youth are already creating
alternative enterprising environments of their own, often in spite of pressures
from regimes to drag them backward. To see this, it is sufficient to visit the
growing number of YouTube postings. Social media is helping African youth to
share knowledge, experiences, and aspirations and to appreciate the youth-led
silent social and economic revolutions struggling to emerge across the
continent.
964
Empowerment and Development through Health:
Positive Lessons from the Anti-River Blindness Project in
Africa
According to the African Natural Resource Center of the African
Development Bank, Africa owns one-third of global natural wealth in the form
of minerals.57 Add to this its biodiversity, valuable ebony and mahogany
forests, wildlife, and other resources, and Africa is unquestionably the
wealthiest continent on planet earth. And despite the many diseases that
confront it, Sub-Saharan Africa, as we saw above, has a huge and growing
population. Yet, at present, the African people are very poor—often the poorest
and most beleaguered in the world (Commission for Africa, 2005). The
continent has not yet used its immense natural resources to develop a people-
centered economy based on industrial processing of some of its natural
resources to create a modern economy that provides sustainable streams of
income and wealth for its people. There are many complex reasons for this into
which this paper will not venture. Poor people means very small public coffers,
since there is not a large and prosperous population base that can pay taxes to
government. Therefore, though African governments allocate budgets ranging
from 3.4 to 8.6 percent of their GDP and 1.9–12.3 percent of their budgetary
expenditures to health (WHO World Health Report 2003, Table 5), in monetary
terms, the allocations are tiny compared to the need. This means that large
portions of Africa's health care and disease eradication costs need to come from
the developed world in the form of aid and loans.
We have already seen the success stories with regard to small pox, measles,
and polio. We can add one major health and economic success story resulting
from the joint application of Western and local efforts against a major disease
scourge, river blindness, to segue to our brief exploration of the role of local
community mobilization and innovation that helped to control, and in a few
cases, to reverse severe health challenges, the most difficult at present being the
HIV/AIDS.
As we saw earlier, the application of Western medicine and medical
technology has been most successful in the control and eradication of menacing
epidemic diseases like measles, small pox, malaria, and other communicable
diseases. River blindness is another menace in Africa which has destroyed the
lives and economic well-being of tens of millions of Africans. The case of the
965
campaign to control and reverse a river blindness epidemic, which had
devastated the human spirit, the economic and social fabric of a huge region
spanning West, Central, and Northeastern Africa, is one case of productive
cooperation between African governments, African communities, international
aid agencies, and private corporations (in this case the pharmaceutical company
Merck). An initiative to eradicate this disease and allow the reclamation of
millions of hectares of fertile land, abandoned because of the disease, was
urgently needed. Peoples' lives were reduced to poverty as a result of the
disease. African states, local communities, and international donors cooperated
to tackle the problem of river blindness. The story begins back in the early
1970s. The success of this international and local cooperation is well presented
in a documentary video produced by the External Affairs Office of the World
Bank. The documentary is titled Optimism for Africa. Much of the account
below is derived directly from this documentary video.
In 1968, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID),
the World Health Organization (WHO), and some African countries, concerned
with a variety of growing health threats in Sub-Saharan Africa, initiated
discussions in Tunisia to study and assess priorities among the pressing health
and development problems facing the continent. By 1972, Robert McNamara,
then president of the World Bank, joined the conversation and together, the
African and international groups determined that river blindness, which was
disrupting the lives of tens of millions of people across the continent, needed to
be addressed as a priority.
River blindness is caused by a parasitic worm that latches itself in the human
body. The eggs of the worm hatch, breed, and migrate all over the human body,
eventually reaching the eyes and causing irreversible blindness. The disease is
transmitted by the female black fly, which sucks blood from infected patients
and injects it into the bodies of healthy people, similar to how the mosquito
spreads malaria. The parasite favors shallow banks of rivers to breed and thrive.
The banks of Africa's networks of large rivers form fertile agricultural land on
which large populations depend. Farming communities are attracted by the
fertility of the land and the availability of water. The river banks and their
contiguous river-fed lands also become the favored habitat of the disease-
causing parasite. Therefore disease and man compete for the same natural
environment and resources (water and land). In this struggle, the disease had
won and chased people out. In rural Ivory Coast, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Niger,
Togo, Mali, and many other countries, the disease chased people out of fertile
river banks and adjacent agricultural areas. The people escaped to arid, infertile
966
lands that proved safer from river blindness. The escape to drier and poorer
land meant greatly reduced agricultural output. Poverty became severe and
endemic for tens of millions of people, a large group of whom continued to
suffer from river blindness even after they escaped to dry land as they had
already contracted the disease before their escape.
Multilateral aid to start intervention to eradicate river blindness started in
1974 with concerned African countries and communities as full partners in the
effort. This was an exemplar model of successful cooperation between African
governments, local communities, civil society groups, international donors, and
even a private pharmaceutical corporation, Merck. The World Bank, USAID,
and European countries made needed finances available. The campaign was to
control the disease by treating the breeding grounds of the disease—the shallow
waters of networks of rivers—by distributing the drug Mectizan to treat the
afflicted population while river banks were also made hostile to mosquitos.
Merck donated free of charge the drug Mectizan, which it had developed.
African governments, local communities, and their civil society organizations
were included as key players. They provided their accumulated local
knowledge about the disease and local conditions surrounding it. The
communities in particular became important means of implementing the
eradication program. Governments trained staff, strove to build national
capacity to run and maintain the program, and made whatever resources they
could available.
By 1993–1995, the disease was virtually eradicated from the five initially
participating countries, and the number of countries covered had expanded to
11. By the end of 1995, 220 million people living in the 11 countries included
in the eradication program were experiencing newfound health and the early
stages of their fast-growing agricultural development and economic prosperity.
The documentary shows marketplaces flowing with a variety of fruits, nuts,
vegetables, and cereals. The World Bank affirmed that 25 million hectares of
“formerly evacuated arable lands have been made safe for settlement and
agriculture. These lands have the potential to feed an additional 17 million per
year using indigenous technologies and methods.”58
The second phase of the program expanded the effort to cover the remaining
19 countries infested with river blindness. This second phase was called the
African Program for Onchocerciasis Control (APOC).59 It was estimated that
the expanded program would reach 65 million people annually by 2007.60 Yet,
this successful work was estimated to cost only $550 million by the end of
967
2002. This came to less than a hundred dollars for the entire treatment regime
per individual infected by the onchocerciasis bacteria. The whole project
demonstrated how development partnership between the international
community, African states, and ordinary citizens can produce spectacular
success at minimum cost.
This was why many development observers hoped that this model of
development involving the partnership of local people, governments, and
international donors would become a standard paradigm in designing
development and international cooperation in Africa. Local people know what
their priority needs are and, if opportunities existed, what they could do to
address these needs in very efficient and cost-effective ways. Unfortunately, the
high experts of the development industry and the gurus of globalization have
not allowed the replication of this development model. Instead, billions of
dollars have been wasted on projects designed and implemented by
international and national experts. Hence, the charge of Dead Aid (Moyo,
2009), which irrefutably demonstrates the utter failure of international
development aid practiced as top-down, expert-driven enterprises.
968
Future Africa: Community Self-Mobilization in the Age
of HIV/AIDS and Other Challenges
All the earlier mentioned disease control and eradication successes
notwithstanding, we see that Africa still faces multifaceted crises. The current
crises arise from the HIV/AIDS pandemic, exacerbated by the reemergence of
malaria and tuberculosis epidemics. While all of these afflictions menace other
regions of the world, none is as hard hit as Africa. It does not seem to be a mere
coincidence that Africa, which is the most disadvantaged and marginalized in
the global economic arrangements,61 is also the region most savagely ravaged
by HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.62, 63 Poverty increases people's
vulnerabilities in so many ways and the direct association of poverty and
disease prevalence in Africa seems to affirm this. Among the reasons for this
correlation between disease and poverty is poor peoples' lack of timely access
to information on diseases and the ways diseases can be prevented or risks
minimized. Disease vulnerability is also aggravated by a lack of adequate and
well-balanced nutrition among the poor.
By 2016, Africa's HIV/AIDS share of the world's infected population had
risen to 69–70 percent.64 The same was true for its share of malaria and
tuberculosis. UNAIDS and the WHO put Africa's share of AIDS deaths at 72
percent of the aggregate global deaths from the disease in 2008.65 As we have
seen, these figures hold steady till 2016.66 Despite all efforts, Africa carries the
heaviest burden of new infections and UNAIDS reports that in 2008 alone, an
estimated 1.4 million people died in Africa of AIDS.67 This devastation has left
the continent with 14.1 million of the world's 17.5 million orphans.68 Given the
level of campaign against the crisis, why has the problem not abated? It can be
surmised that inherent human and social tensions that fuel the problem have not
been addressed. Only organic groups rooted in the community can understand
and help address these tensions. This is why the broad involvement of
grassroots as an essential part of the campaign should be advocated.
969
Community Responses to the Health Crisis: The Stephen
Lewis Foundation Model in Africa
People in communities, including disease victims, have been heroically
organizing to do their best to deal with the health crises at hand even when
stigma, denial, and superstition surrounded the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa. To
give an example, as far back as the mid-1980s, against all hardships and stigma,
Ugandans, in their different communities, organized themselves to throw away
all the taboos, superstitions, and denials that surrounded the HIV/AIDS
epidemic and started to give holistic care to the stigmatized HIV/AIDS victims
and to nurture children of the community orphaned by the disease. They strove
to learn and share information about the disease as much as they could. This
grassroots movement caused the Ugandan authorities not to hide behind
denials, false assumptions, and ignoring the problem. The Ugandan government
joined the popular sentiment and humane approach to victims of the disease and
offered what little treatment could be afforded. The primary force in combating
the disease was not treatment, but the drive to contain its spread through
education and information on how to prevent contracting it. By the early 1990s,
it was said that “Uganda is widely hailed as Africa's AIDS success story,” its
infection rate having dropped from very high levels to 16 percent by 1992, and
4–6 percent by 2003.69 Since that time, African communities in more and more
countries have taken it upon themselves to take charge of their HIV/AIDS and
related crises, and whenever possible, partner with government and donors to
accelerate prevention and to make medical intervention relevant, inexpensive,
and much more successful, as the Stephen Lewis Foundation has proven. The
Foundation is a Canadian non-profit with serious commitment to work with
local self-mobilized groups, with proven strategies for sustainability of their
programs, to accelerate solutions to HIV/AIDS and other urgent problems. The
foundation identifies and works with innovative grassroots organizations in
Africa boldly confronting the HIV/AIDS crisis. Established in 2003,70 the
foundation's strategy has been to minimize bureaucratic red tape and to work
directly with self-organized, innovative, and committed groups struggling to
cope with the monumental health challenges their communities face.71
Its founder, Professor Stephen Lewis, is a Professor of Distinction at the
Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, and Professor of Practice in Global
Governance Institute for the Study of International Development at McGill
970
University and served as deputy executive director of UNICEF for many years
during the 1990s and as United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa
in the first decade of the new millennium. Stephen Lewis Foundation has a
growing partnership with grassroots groups that, at the present time, include
300 entities in 15 African countries72 in such countries as the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi,
Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda,
Zambia and Zimbabwe. To recap, we have seen that the Eastern and Southern
Africa region accounts for 50 percent of global HIV infections.73, 74 The
problem is exasperated by the fact that about 45 percent of those carrying the
disease do not know that they have it.75 This is where community self-
mobilization to own the crisis and not only focus on helping those already
afflicted or orphaned by the crisis, but also help people to overcome ignorance
and shame and get tested for the disease. Grassroots movements also help
governments and communities to overcome their inertia, denial, superstition,
and stigma.
Sustainability is key to any long-term achievement of goals. People and
communities can be helped to shape their own methods of rendering services
and financing them to whatever level they can. This is where international aid
can be helpful. It can help enhance local capacity building where the peoples'
readiness to move forward is hampered by severe financial constraints and
maybe technical skills also. No international aid remains in any community
indefinitely. Aid people and agencies work for a while and must leave as
international aid is inevitably finite. All too often, they leave behind what we
typically call “white elephants,” that is, dead or dying edifices.
971
Summary
Finally, the catalytic role of international assistance needs to be fully
appreciated. Appropriately applied, international aid and partnership can
definitely help jump-start a development process. Poor countries and
communities need external technical and/or financial input to get them on a
road of self-sustaining change and progress, not to make them passively
dependent on outside intervention. The impressively efficient river blindness
project, the Stephen Lewis Foundation grassroots partnerships, as well as the
effectiveness of other partnerships in self-mobilized communities mentioned
earlier are all examples of international cooperation done right. The additional
experience of Uganda and Senegal, where Muslim and Christian religious
leaders joined forces with community movements to produce remarkable
reversals in the spread of HIV/AIDS epidemic (Gordon, 2013), can be added to
the success stories of local mobilization in confronting local problems. All over
Africa today, community groups including pop musicians and sports clubs are
joining the drive to inform and educate people on the nature of diseases and
how to avoid contracting them. This makes Africa's future look brighter even
beyond successfully confronting the present health crisis.
Since we made reference to the parallel between the African and African-
American HIV/AIDS experience, a brief mention should be made of the
parallel trend of self-mobilization against the disease and beyond, observable in
the African-American community. Without attempting to represent this very
important segment of the African-American experience, a few examples will be
mentioned here. A dizzying variety and number of community or grassroots
groups like Minority AIDS Project (MAP) (Los Angeles), Women Alive (Los
Angeles), Us Helping Us (Washington DC), and Blacks Educating Blacks
About Sexual Health (BEBASHI) (Philadelphia, PA)76 are just a few cases that
can be mentioned to illustrate the new and seemingly growing trend of
grassroots engagement in black communities. One only needs to google, using
well selected and relevant key words, to see the scope of this phenomenon.
With the internet being the preferred site of communication and data storage,
one is endowed with good opportunities to explore the subject. Here too, the
rise of self-aware activism may imply other unforeseen constructive outcomes.
Many of the African-American initiatives already appear to embrace
extended visions and programs to empower poor blacks economically,
972
educationally, and socially, in addition to their HIV/AIDS and other health-
related missions. One can be confident that, given the very rich economic
environment, these grassroots initiatives may be endowed with the necessary
financial resources through government grants and private contributions to
invigorate their civic-minded engagements. In Africa, the trend towards
community or people-centered development and service engagement extends to
other development areas too. We mentioned trends among African youth
earlier. Grassroots people in Africa are adopting new perspectives on the idea
of self-reliance and self-directed development. This researcher is in possession
of a number of recent documentary videos shared by leaders of grassroots self-
help development groups, including ones in the DRC. Recent observations by
this researcher in a few African countries, which will not be dealt with here,
confirm the emergence of new attitudes and perspectives on African
development by a growing number of youth. If such grassroots trends grow
stronger, Africa may see a true development and transformation renaissance
and the world will be the better for it. The overwhelmingly youthful population
of the African continent and its abundant resources might find proper alignment
to push the continent's progress forward in a sustainable way and in a way that
benefits the people.
973
1. Why is it important that people own and participate in matters that affect
their health and development?
2. Can governments and donors alone design successful programs to pull
people out of disease and poverty? Why? Why not?
3. Why were indigenous medical remedies and other technologies marginalized
even when they were widely used by the people and proved to be effective in
solving problems?
4. In recent decades, African institutions have started to incorporate indigenous
medical remedies and other technologies in their education programs. Why,
do you think, is Africa tending this way?
5. What role should international aid play in Africa's development and
transformation?
974
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982
28
Debunking the Myth of the Doctrine

of the Discovery of Africa
Jeremias Zunguze
983
Introduction
And today the indictment is brought against it ... on a world scale, by
tens and tens of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set
themselves up as judges.
(Aimé Césaire)
This chapter analyzes the papal bull, Romanus Pontifex, issued by Pope
Nicholas V on January 8, 1455, and other fifteenth-century primary documents
to debunk the Portuguese myth of the Doctrine of Discovery of Africa,
exposing the enduring epistemic and cosmological legacies imposed on the
African continent. Official history in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa
teaches that the Portuguese “discovered” parts of Africa while trading with the
continent and searching for a route to the Far East. In other words, their alleged
objective was commerce. The bull Romanus Pontifex, however, reveals
otherwise, i.e., that this widely mythologized version of history is false. Behind
the veil of supposed Portuguese trade and discovery, papal decrees, in reality,
prohibited commercial relations between Christian and non-Christian societies.
Therefore, I argue that Pope Nicholas V's Romanus Pontifex, instead, ordered a
crusade against the non-Christians of Africa and beyond. This chapter reveals
that, in the Doctrine of Discovery, there is a premeditated religious, spiritual,
political, and economic order for Christendom's domination—to conquer,
colonize, enslave, and dispossess not only Africa but also other continents and
their indigenous people.
This epistemic and cosmological attitude—a Eurocentric way of thinking and
seeing sanctioned by the bull Romanus Pontifex—is foundational to the
invention of modern Africa. It set forth lasting cosmological and epistemic
consequences, persisting in justifications for the subjugation of the continent
and its people. These effects include the nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa
as well as Western humanists' and social scientists' practices of “epistemicide,”
“epistemic fundamentalism,” and “epistemic violence” towards Africa and
African subjectivity and systems of knowing. Such metaphysical views and
behaviors continue to set up the current Western global order's attitudes and
practices towards Africa today.
Major terms and concepts: papal bulls, the myth of the Doctrine of
Discovery, the European (Portuguese) Age of Discovery, Christian Crusades,
the Scramble for Africa, European colonization, Christianization, Eurocentrism,
984
Western-centrism, epistemicide, epistemic fundamentalism, epistemic violence.
According to the European official history as taught in the former Portuguese
colonies in Africa, early explorers, particularly the Portuguese, “discovered”
parts of West, South, and East Africa, while searching for a viable sea route to
trade for gold on the African continent and spices in Asia (Arnold 2012),
particularly in India. Even today, in an Internet search for Vasco da Gama, the
“infamous” Portuguese navigator and explorer of Africa, one still comes across
this unchallenged meta-narrative absorbed and perpetuated even by present-day
African school children. The media has reinforced these myths by broadcasting
romanticized versions of the expansion of the Portuguese Empire as official
history, as in the report by RTP (Radio and Television of Portugal),
interviewing João Félix, a 12-year-old boy from Mozambique Island (where da
Gama once made his rest stop on his way to India). Little Félix describes his
own understanding of history: “Vasco da Gama arrived here in 1498. His boss,
King John II, sent Vasco da Gama to discover the sea route to India. That is
how he found Mozambique.”
Viewing the Portuguese Age of Discovery as a search for a feasible nautical
route for intercontinental trade obscures the full story behind the “discoveries.”
Such historical euphemism presumes that no other societies had sailed these
seas to find new lands and that these lands were uninhabited. In fact, as noted
by David Arnold, “[o]ther navigators—among them Arabs ... had accomplished
spectacular transoceanic journeys before the Europeans of the fifteenth and the
sixteenth centuries” (2012). The European Age of Discovery also implies an
epoch of genuine economic interest in fair trade with other societies. However,
Frances Davenport notes that medieval “popes prohibited all commerce with
the infidels” (1917); that is, non-Christians, including Africans, Muslims, and
Jews.
In fact, the so-called Age of Portuguese Discoveries in Africa falls within the
same time period of Portugal's crusades in Northern Africa (Beazley 1910).
Davenport further stresses that “[t]he early voyages sent out by Prince Henry
along the west coast of Africa were connected with the crusade, which after the
conquest of Ceuta, the Portuguese carried on against the Saracens in Morocco.”
Absolute control over “[c]ommerce and the crusading spirit motivated
Portugal's early maritime expansion in the name of God and of profit” (Love
2006). Religious fundamentalism, economic monopoly—from a zero-sum
game logic—and world domination, implied the radical exclusion of other
societies hidden behind the European Age of Discovery. In Romanus Pontifex,
985
Pope Nicholas V unambiguously asserts and sanctions this conquest,
Christianization, enslavement, and dispossession of Africans and other societies
throughout the world.
The bull Romanus Pontifex is the birth certificate of modern Africa, and the
Eurocentric epistemic and cosmological attitude towards the continent, its
people, its resources, and its knowledge base. The decree also served as the
archetype for the European religious entitlement and secular authority in the
Scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century through the distorted and
racist meta-narratives in the humanities and social sciences. This Eurocentric
epistemic attitude has been defined in different ways. Gayatri Spivak has called
this radical exclusion of indigenous peoples, in particular, from practicing
knowledge, “epistemic violence,” “a destructive practice done by discourses of
knowledge that carve up the world and condemn to oblivion the pieces [people,
cultures, and systems of knowing] that do not easily fit” (Leitch 2001, author's
insertion). Ramon Grosfoguel has named this radical exclusion of other
knowledges and ways of knowing “epistemic fundamentalism” or a perspective
that assumes its “own cosmology and epistemology to be superior and as the
only source of truth, inferiorizing and denying equality to other cosmologies”
(2010). Boaventura de Sousa Santos defines it as “epistemicide,” or “the
murder of knowledge,” adding that, “[u]nequal exchanges among cultures have
always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture, hence
the death of the social groups that possessed it. In the most extreme cases, such
as that of European expansion, epistemicide was one of the conditions of
genocide” (2014). This ethnocentric epistemic and cosmological attitude
initiated by the bull Romanus Pontifex codified the enduring views and values
that continue to impact the African continent—politically, economically, and
subjectively—from colonization through the present global order.
986
Papal bulls are Roman Catholic Church canonical decrees issued by the
pope, resolving any legal issue between the Church and the society at large.
With origins in the sixth century, some of these declarations include the
establishment of a new religious order, clarification of previous doctrines,
ratification of documents, the creation of a new university, convocation of a
general council, and declaration of a jubilee (Mann 2016). During the Middle
Ages, the pope possessed supreme power as a judge because he was the leader
of the Church and simultaneously the king of the Papal States (Gosselin 1853).
As such, the pope and papal bulls also ordered, authenticated, and secured
properties, charters, land titles, and world exploration. Such is the case of the
following documents: Pope Nicholas V's Dum Diversas, of June 18, 1452, and
Romanus Pontifex, of January 8, 1455, granted Portugal dominion over the
northern and western coasts of Africa (Davenport).
Pope Alexander VI's Inter Caetera, of May 4, 1493, and the Tordesillas
Treaty of 1494 assigned the Spanish “crown the exclusive right to acquire
territory, to trade in, or even to approach the lands lying west of the Meridian
situated one hundred leagues west of any of the Azores or Cape Verde Islands”
(Davenport). All these documents share one thing in common: a papal decree
for the Portuguese and the Spanish to sail around the globe and find new lands,
claiming them as a way of spreading Christendom, rather than Christianity. As
Grosfoguel observes, “Christianity is a spiritual/religious tradition,
Christendom is when Christianity becomes a dominant ideology used by the
state. Christendom emerged in the fourth century after Christ when Constantine
appropriated Christianity and turned it into the official ideology of the Roman
Empire” (2013). While Christendom is a religion of the state, which granted
secular princes and religious authorities the divine right, Christianity is a belief
system of the church (Newcomb 2008). The dissemination of the principles of
Christendom started with the conquest and attempt to make the world into a
Christendom empire.
987
From Non-Christians to People without Religion:
Christendom's Conquest, Cosmological Fundamentalism,
and the Origins of Modern Africa
Pope Nicholas V's Romanus Pontifex was addressed to Alfonso V, King of
Portugal, granting him the moral right to own the territories that his navigators
encountered along the southwestern coast of Africa. As a follow-up to Dum
Diversas (1452), Romanus Pontifex confirms the Portuguese Crown's claim to
the already conquered lands and the “right of conquest ... to be extended from
the capes of Bojador and Não, as far as through all Guinea, and beyond toward
that southern shore” (Davenport). Meanwhile, Portugal and Spain had been
competing for territorial possession along the Atlantic Islands (Azores,
Madeira, and Canary Islands) and the northern coast of Africa (Davenport).
Both Portuguese and Spanish kingdoms, in order to legally claim and secure
their possessions, had to petition the pope—as the supreme judge, “arbitrator
between nations ... [and] spiritual authority, in particular [with] his powers of
excommunication and interdict,” provided that their territorial expansions were
to disseminate Christendom (Davenport).
Behind the Portuguese Doctrine of Discovery, the bull Romanus Pontifex
unveils the following papal order addressed to early Portuguese navigators—in
the name of “Catholic kings and princes ... athletes and intrepid champions of
the Christian faith”—to venture, crusade, and conquer the African continent
and other parts of the world:
We [therefore] weighing all and singular the premises with due
meditation, and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of
ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid
King Alfonso—to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all
Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ
wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities,
dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods
whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to
perpetual slavery (Davenport).
This authority is clearly and assertively articulated through such violent orders
as “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans
... and other enemies of Christ.” In hindsight, the Catholic Christendom
conquest becomes the foundational Eurocentric cosmological fundamentalism
988
—or Western belief system assumed as the superior and only form of legitimate
spirituality—in the origins of modern Africa. Although many often set the
temporality of modern Africa in the nineteenth century, with the 1884–1885
scramble for the continent and the formal establishment of European
institutions, the author argues that the nineteenth-century partition of Africa
was nothing more than a secular repetition of the fifteenth-century religious
conquest of Africa. The practices and legacies founded by the bull Romanus
Pontifex—such as conquest, colonization, and Christianization—are repeated
throughout the history of modern Africa.
Upon arrival to the presumed “newly found lands,” Europeans performed
various religious rituals associated with soldiers of Christ. As Valentin Y.
Mudimbe affirms, the “mass celebrated on the Guinea coast in 1481 ...
displaying royal arms of Portugal, symbolized the possession of a new
territory.... Vasco da Gama erected a pillar, engraved with the Portuguese royal
coat of arms on the east coast in the kingdom of Melinda [Melindi] and Diego
Caon [Cão] constructed another in 1494 at the mouth of the Congo River”
(1988). The transplantation of pillars bearing the Portuguese coat of arms, the
celebration of religious rituals and services such as the Mass, and/or the
establishment of “trading posts” are all imperial landmarks and rites of
possession associated with the Christian Crusade that clearly mark the religious
conquest and control over Africa's coastal lands. The conquistadors brought
gold, captives, and other resources to prove their successful conquests to King
Alfonso (Davenport). These are certainly not the marks of trade, nor are they
the artifacts of a search for India.
The conquest rituals were usually followed by “a multitude of several acts,”
writes Mudimbe, which affirmed the rights of the Church and the Christendom
sovereigns of the world that were mandated by the bull:
The same King Alfonso, his successors, and the infante, in the
provinces, islands, and places already acquired, and to be acquired by
him, may found and [cause to be] founded and built any churches,
monasteries, or other pious places whatsoever, and also may send over
to them any ecclesiastical persons whatsoever, as volunteers, both
seculars, and regulars of any of the mendicant orders (with license,
however, from their superiors), and that those persons may abide there
as long as they shall live, ... and also administer the ecclesiastical
sacraments freely and lawfully, and this we allow and grant to Alfonso
himself, and his successors, the kings of Portugal who shall come
989
afterwards, and to the aforesaid infante (Davenport).
Following the papal order, the Portuguese first conquered, then built and/or
authorized other European conquerors, like the Dutch, to build infrastructures
such as forts, castles, churches, and missions. Finally, Portugal sent
missionaries abroad who “played an essential role in the general process of
expropriation and, subsequently, exploitation of all the ‘new found lands’ upon
the earth” (Mudimbe). Missionaries used the Bible to defend the practical work
of appropriating indigenous lands by converting, “paganizing,” and
“gentilizing” African belief systems. As Jomo Kenyatta puts it, “[w]hen the
Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the
Bible. They taught how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them,
they had the land and we had the Bible” (Odoette 2004). European missionaries
—ironically, in the name of God—politically dismissed the existing African
spiritual and belief systems in Guinea, among the Akan, Dahomean, Kikuyu,
and the Yoruba as well as those of Islam, just to name a few. Disguised in the
form of trade, the crusade of European Christendom was empowered by a sense
of divine entitlement to eliminate African spiritualities and transplant itself as
the only authorized cosmological narrative.
The bull Romanus Pontifex expresses the cosmological assumption that
Africa and Africans, respectively, are a space and a people without religion,
because they are not under Christendom domination. According to Grosfoguel,
“not having religion in the Christian imaginary of the time was equivalent to
not having a soul—that is, being expelled from the realm of the human” (2013).
Because non-Christians were presumed non-humans, they were plotted within
the biblical myth of Ham, whose post-facto conquest and reduction “to
perpetual slavery” became justified by many but not all Christians. Defenders
of slavery, in fact, have used this distorted interpretation of the Old Testament
not simply to explain the European mass enslavement of black Africans, but
went so far as to completely legitimize it as a moral and divine imperative.
Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., estimate that between
eleven and twelve million Africans were kidnapped and sold to the Western
Hemisphere from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries (2005), making the
Transatlantic Captive Trade an unprecedented history of enslavement on the
globe. There is an intrinsic connection between the Christendom cosmology
and the Transatlantic Captive Trade revealed in the bull Romanus Pontifex.
That is why the Portuguese, the European pioneers in the enslavement of
Africans, were spiritually, religiously, and economically devoted to the captive
990
trade. The enslavement of Africans was, for Europeans, a religious and moral
act, as much as it was an economic enterprise (after all, the pope, God's
spokesperson, had clearly decreed this mission for Christendom). When a
matter binds together religion, economics, and other values, it becomes a
spiritually and materially rewarding occupation and investment, which explains
the four long centuries of African enslavement.
Othering Africans as heathens and enemies of Christ and presuming them to
be non-humans also gave Europeans the moral license and prerogative to
dispossess them from their land and property. In fact, the bull Romanus
Pontifex is sweeping in its scope: It orders the conquest of all “kingdoms,
dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and
immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them.” Besides forbidding
free trade with Africans, Europeans dispossessed Africans of their property and
displaced the people from their lands, while morally authorizing these practices
on the premise that Blacks were non-Christians. Due to their presumed “non-
human” condition, Africans were devoid of the rights of ownership of land and
property. This resulted in a mass looting of their goods, artifacts, and natural
resources throughout the history of conquest. This sad era also marked the
beginning of the modern mass involuntary displacement of Africans through
slavery and the captive trade, creating an unprecedented African diaspora and
making way for European settlement.
By sanctioning the European Age of Discovery, the bull Romanus Pontifex
speaks of Africa and other parts of the world as a blank slate. The Christendom
cosmology views the continent from what Santiago Castro-Gomez calls an
“hubris of the zero point” (2005)—that is, a point of absolute “nothingness”
upon which the observing subject (the pope, Europe, Europeans) makes the
observed object (Africa, Africans, and Muslims) an empty cosmological and
epistemological space to be filled by his/her own narrative (i.e., Christendom
cosmology and Eurocentric epistemology). The ironic invention of “Terra
nullius ... a land or earth that is null or void ... empty, vacant, or unoccupied”
(Miller 2008), politically ignoring that there were indigenous people already
living there (with their own social, economic, political, and spiritual systems),
is a crucial element of the Doctrine of Discovery and the hubris of the zero
point. Simply put, the bull Romanus Pontifex becomes the cosmological and
epistemological codification of the colonial world whose organizing principle is
the cosmology, epistemology, racism, and white supremacy of the established
Christendom.
991
From Non-Christians to the “Zone of Non-Being”:
Conquest and the Order of the Colonial World
Looking at Africa through the prism of the hubris of the zero point, the bull
Romanus Pontifex sanctions the Portuguese conquest and colonization of the
continent. As Davenport affirms, “On January 8, 1455, doubtless in accordance
with the request of King Alfonso, Nicholas V issued the bull Romanus Pontifex,
which marks a definite stage in the colonial history of Portugal.” The concept
of European colonialism starts by what de Sousa Santos calls the drawing of
“abyssal lines” (2007) sanctioned by papal bulls. According to him, the
“abyssal lines” are a Eurocentric way of thinking that demarcates the cultural—
legal, cartographic, socioeconomic, political, linguistic—hierarchical divisions
of the globe between the Global North and the Global South, Western and
Eastern, Occident and Orient. The “first modern global line was probably the
Treaty of Tordesillas between Portugal and Spain (1494), but the truly abyssal
lines emerge only in the mid-sixteenth century with the amity lines,” says de
Sousa Santos. The “amity lines,” according to Michael Mann and Ineke Phaf-
Rheinberger (2015), were a verbal agreement between “the French and Spanish
negotiators of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. They were to be the
tropic of Cancer and the prime meridian passing through Ferro in the Canaries.
On the European side of both lines, the treaty was to be binding; west and south
of them it was to be disregarded. The agreement was a belated recognition of
what had long been the practice” (2014). As alluded to earlier, both the “line of
amity” and the Treaty of Tordesillas were conceived and preceded by Dum
Diversas, Romanus Pontifex, and Inter Caetera. All these lines drafted by papal
bulls have their origins in the religious binaries between Christian and non-
Christian, the foundational structure of what Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of
the Earth (1961), calls the “colonial world”:
The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obviously as
superfluous to recall the existence of native “towns” and European
towns, of schools for “natives” and schools for Europeans.... The
colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border,
is represented by the barracks and the police stations.... The native
sector is not complementary to the European sector. The two confront
each other, but not in the service of a higher unity.... This
compartmentalized world, this world divided in two, is inhabited by
992
different species.
In the conquest, colonization, and Christianization of Africa, Romanus Pontifex
also orders the drawing of a radical line between the colonizer and the
colonized marked by an ordered, forced, and reinforced difference in terms of
space, subjectivity, and knowledge (e.g., socioeconomic, political, linguistic,
and mythological). The African colonized world, as Fanon puts it, is
“Manichean,” arranged through polarities, which are inherently hierarchical and
unequal in power, time, being, and meaning. The former Portuguese colonies in
Africa aggressively introduced these dichotomies to order the colonial world in
the nineteenth century. In Angola, for instance, Luanda was built against the
sanzala (Angolan village in Kimbundu language). In Guinea-Bissau, Bissau
was founded vis-à-vis the tabanka (Creole word for village). In Mozambique
too, Maputo was established in opposition to the mato (Portuguese word for
countryside). The Portuguese town is always materially affluent, “built to last,
all stone and steel” (Fanon), making the statement that the “civilized” city is the
humane, positive, superior, and exemplar home of the European Catholic
Christians, a space, ironically, associated with absolute good.
On the other hand, Fanon further notes that the “native town,” the village,
“the shanty town, the Medina, and the reservation” is made up of shacks
patched by precarious ephemeral matter. Stricken by poverty, famine, violence,
and misery, they are constantly inferiorized, negativized, dehumanized, and
seen as spaces inhabited by non-Christians, paradoxically associated with
“absolute evil” (Fanon). As seen by Fanon, “[t]his compartmentalized world,
this world divided in two, is inhabited by different species.” The resulting
inequality in space and “species” is actively maintained and persistently
preserved by the colonial machine to establish an insurmountable divide
between the colonizer and the colonized.
The settler, in fact, was abiding by the letter and spirit of the orders decreed
by Romanus Pontifex. Christendom's commercial relations prohibited the sale
of “iron[,] ... wood used for construction, and other things and goods ... to be
carried to infidels, or ... [to] teach those infidels the art of navigation”
(Davenport). The African was banned from the right to fair trade and
knowledge in trading, hence deprived from access to resources and wealth. The
papal order of excluding non-Christians from trading marks the birth of poverty
and inequality that prevails in modern Africa. Ever since, Africa and Africans
would not be integrated as partners within the global market.
Furthermore, by sanctioning colonialism, Romanus Pontifex allowed the
993
reproduction of polar and unequal versions of the “human being.” The
Christendom antagonism between Christians and non-Christians ultimately
reproduces a “line of the human” (Grosfoguel 2016) divided between the “zone
of being” versus the “zone of nonbeing” (Fanon) in which race becomes the
organizing principle (Grosfoguel). Following the decree of the bull, a white
person is synonymous with a Christian, and Christian is presumed to be
“human.” On the other, a Black person is presumed non-Christian and “non-
human.” The racial line intertwined with religion becomes the line of humanity
versus inhumanity in the social order. Below the line is the “zone of nonbeing,”
occupied by the “Other,” the Black, the “Guineamen and other negroes” whose
humanity has constantly been inferiorized and reduced to such negative
metaphors as “barbarian,” “savage,” “uncivilized,” “sub-human,” and “non-
human.” Bearing the history of colonialism and enslavement, the colonized
African has become a metaphor of everything that is supposedly opposite to the
European colonizer. Above the line of the human is the “zone of being,”
occupied by the historical narrative's first-person “I,” the “civilized,” the
“human,” made superior in socioeconomics, politics, knowledge, and
subjectivity (Grosfoguel). These dualisms, based on the fifteenth-century
Christendom cosmology, run throughout the history of modern Africa. The
Scramble for Africa and the European decisive occupation of the continent
between the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century relay this Manichean
attitude towards Africa.
994
From Non-Humans to People without Art, History, and
Science: The Scramble for Africa, Epistemic
Fundamentalism, and the Secular Reconquest of the
Continent
Romanus Pontifex is the archetype in the Scramble for Africa. The nineteenth
century partition of the continent among European superpowers—France,
England, Germany, and Belgium, among others—was informed by previous
papal bulls. As such, it marked the second—or the secular and Protestant—
conquest of the continent. Aimé Césaire affirms that “the great historical
tragedy of Africa has been not so much that it was too late in making contact
with the rest of the world, as the manner in which that contact was brought
about; that Europe began to propagate at a time when it had fallen into the
hands of the most unscrupulous financiers and captains of industry” (1972).
Césaire refers to the late “nineteenth century, emphasizing the coexistence of
‘imperialist’ ideology, economic and political processes for extending control
over African space, and capitalist institutions which ultimately led to
dependence and underdevelopment” (Mudimbe). The “unscrupulous financiers
and captains of industry,” who divided up Africa amongst themselves between
the late 1800s and mid-1900s, were Europe's capitalists, political leaders, and
religious ministers—most of them Protestants, secular Catholics, and/or self-
proclaimed atheists no longer under the pope, who had lost his supreme
authority after the Enlightenment.
At this time, René Descartes had already introduced “a new moment in the
history of Western thought” (Grosfoguel). As Grosfoguel affirms, the Cartesian
method had replaced God with the European man as the foundation of
knowledge. What was once attributed to God was now conveyed through the
white man. As aforementioned in the introduction, the Western imperialist
attitude was, and still is to some degree, manifested in the continuous practices
of “epistemicide,” “epistemic violence,” and “epistemic fundamentalism” on
Africa, Africans, and African systems of knowledge by many humanists and
social scientists.
Western reason rationalized Africa and Africans through an endless chain of
deficits. Undeniably, the radical “othering” of Africa and Africans runs
throughout Western knowledge as practiced by the pillars of Western
philosophy. For instance, in the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant posited that
995
“The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the
ridiculous ... not a single one has ever been found who has accomplished
something great in art or science or shown any other praiseworthy quality,
while among the whites there are always those who rise up from the lowest
rabble and through extraordinary gifts earn respect in the world” (1764). This
assumption is traced by David Hume who also asserted, “I am apt to suspect the
Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a
civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in
action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no
sciences” (1826). The presumed lack of “arts” and “sciences” imposes the
absence of “civilization” on Africa, and therefore, their “inferiority” vis-à-vis
the Europeans. Additionally, presuming that Africans do not have God, law,
and/or morality, Hegel ousts Africa from the realm of existence in the world, as
he wrote in his Philosophy of History:
Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained—for all
purposes of connection with the rest of the world—shut up; it is the
Gold-land compressed within itself—the land of childhood, which lying
beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark
mantle of Night.... In negro life the characteristic point is the fact that
consciousness has not yet attained the realization of any substantial
objective existence—as for example, God, or Law—in which the
interest of man's volition is involved and in which he realizes his own
being (1900).
This assertion forecloses the possibility of Europeans from recognizing Africa
as an agent of knowledge. Imposing divine, legislative, moral, scientific, and
artistic deficits on Africa not only excluded the continent from the world, but
also worked to “justify the perpetuation of asymmetrical power relations and to
authorize various forms of external interventions into Africa” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni
2013). According to Mário Azevedo, “[e]ven though, at times, Western denial
of a worthy African past was done unconsciously, it was often a deliberate act
to justify and maintain European subjugation of the continent and its people.
Europeans claimed that Africans should be enslaved and colonized in order to
be saved from extinction and rescued from their own barbaric ways of life”
(2005). Despite the epistemic limitations of their time, Hegel's, Kant's, and
Hume's, among other Western humanists and social scientists' universal
projections of inferiority to the African continent, have informed Western
attitudes towards Africa, all Africana people, and their knowledges and systems
996
of knowing. Their Eurocentric-Western-centric values, says Azevedo,
influenced the Westerners' view of civilization as a “white man's burden,”
which justified the Scramble for Africa as Europe's mission to “civilize”
Africans. Their othering epistemes and cosmologies have continued to drive the
legacies and practices of colonialism that affect contemporary Africa,
particularly what some have called the continuous “coloniality of power”
(Quijano 2000, Mignolo 2011); that is, the present global hegemonic model of
power based on highly unequal relations (socioeconomic and political
domination of knowledge and subjectivity) rooted on racial hierarchies as
established during colonialism.
997
Summary
The subordinate condition under which Africa lives today can be traced as
far back as the fifteenth century with the issue and execution of Romanus
Pontifex. This document, as argued in this chapter, exposes the lasting
religious, socio-economic, political, knowledge, and subjectivity legacies on the
continent; debunking the Portuguese myth of the Doctrine of Discovery of
Africa, which claims that the Portuguese found new lands while looking for
commerce, on their way to India. Masked in white mythology of “discovery”
are papal decrees prohibiting any trading relations of useful resources—wood,
iron, gold—between Christian and non-Christian societies. In fact, no exchange
of any knowledge and systems of knowing—navigation, mapping, technology
—that would benefit both parties was allowed. In a word, the history of the
Portuguese Age of Discovery conceals the Christendom bloodthirsty sword,
religious fundamentalism, political domination, and economic monopoly,
which culminated in conquest, colonization, enslavement, and dispossession of
Africa and other indigenous peoples around the globe.
This Eurocentric worldview founded contemporary Africa. It instituted a
certain behavior and ideology towards the continent manifested throughout its
history in the last five centuries: Africa as a space of “perennial lack” (Ndlovu-
Gatsheni 2013), a continent without and full of deficits. As mentioned, in the
fifteenth century, Christendom cosmology sanctioned the assumption that
Africans did not have religion because they were not Christians. The non-
Christian misclassification gave birth to Blacks as “non-humans,” which in turn
led to the enslavement of Africans. This foundational classification has since
created a chain reaction of deficits related to Africa and Africans. As Ramón
Grosfoguel puts it, “[w]e went from the sixteenth century characterization of
‘people without writing’ to the eighteenth and nineteenth century
characterization of ‘people without history,’ to the twentieth-century
characterization of ‘people without development,’ and more recently, to the
early twenty-first century of ‘people without democracy’” (Grosfoguel 2011).
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni sees these Western-centric views and values
towards Africa as an infinite chain of shortfalls, “an unending discourse
that invents particular ‘lacks’ suitable for particular historical epochs so
as to justify perpetuation of asymmetrical power relations and to
authorize various forms of external interventions into Africa.” Africa as
a space of “lacking” and “without” has indeed justified a series of
998
interventions on the continent including the Christianizing, civilizing,
developing, democratizing, and bringing about of human rights
missions. In sum, Western control over Africa was derived from these
religious, social-racial-socioeconomic, political, and cultural hierarchies
structured on Eurocentric metaphysical traditions that for the last five
centuries have governed the relationship between the West and “the
Rest.”
999
1. What is the key mandate of the papal bull Romanus Pontifex?
2. Compare and contrast the myth of the Doctrine of Discovery to the realities
of conquest.
3. What is the Treaty of Tordesillas? How did the treaty and other papal bulls
divide the world?
4. Describe the binary order of the colonial world in terms of space and human
identity. Explain the irony of this system and its enduring consequences.
5. Critique how nineteenth-century humanists and social scientists viewed
Africa and Africans.
6. Give concrete examples of how Romanus Pontifex had a lasting impact on
the modern world, particularly on Africa and the African diaspora.
1000
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Part VI
Appendixes
1004
Appendix A
Selected Maps
1005
Pre-Colonial Africa
1006
Colonial Africa
1007
Present-Day Africa
1008
The Caribbean
1009
1010
Appendix B
B.C.
5000 Agriculture in Egypt
3100 Unification of Egypt under Menes
1000 Founding of Axum (later Ethiopia)
814 Founding of Carthage
750 Kashta of Kush begins conquest of Egypt
600 Egyptians circumnavigate Africa
538 Napata abandoned in favor of Meroe in Kush
332 Alexander the Great conquers Egypt
218 Second Punic War: Hannibal threatens Rome, but is not defeated until
202
200 Nok culture: knowledge and use of iron in West Africa
90 Introduction of the camel into the Sahara
31 Rome conquers Egypt
A.D.
100 Beginning of Bantu migrations
230 Origen exiled from Alexandria for heresy
330 Donatist Council held at Carthage with 270 African bishops attending
350 Axum destroys Meroe after battle of Fort Kemalke
396 Augustine consecrated bishop of Hippo
429 Vandals arrive in North Africa with 20,000 soldiers and 60,000
“Barbarians” under Genseric
622 Founding of Islam in Mecca
690 Founding of Gao
706 Arabic made official language of Egypt
800 Founding of Ghana
975 Founding of Kilwa in East Africa
900 Founding of Benin
1011
1077 Ghana temporarily conquered by Almoravids
1235 Founding of Mali by Sundiata
Probable Founding of University of Senkore in Mali
1350 Beginning of the Congo dynasty
1415 Portuguese conquest of Ceuta in Morocco
1441 First capture of Africans by the Portuguese
1445 Fort Arguin built by the Portuguese
1450s Probable date for the building of the Great Zimbabwe
1492 First blacks reportedly arrive with Columbus in the New World
1497 Vasco da Gama begins his expedition to India by sea; disembarks in 1498
1526 First blacks arrive in the future United States
1593 Fort Jesus in Mombasa under construction until 1639
1595 Moroccans overrun Songhay
1597 Augustinian friars arrive in Mombasa
1619 First twenty indentured Africans land in Jamestown, Virginia
1625 The French take Haiti from Spain
1641 Massachusetts becomes first colony to legalize slavery
1642 The French introduce African slaves in Martinique
1652 The Dutch begin settlement in the Cape
1669 Beginning of nine slave uprisings in Jamaica, ending in 1734
1679 Slave revolt in Haiti
1688 Mennonite Quakers sign anti-slavery resolution in Germantown,
Pennsylvania
1697 Osei Tutu founds Kumasi
1711 Pennsylvania Assembly outlaws slavery; nullified by the British
government
1712 Slave revolt in New York
1721 The French occupy Mauritius
1725 Founding of First Church of Colored Baptists
1738 Signing of a treaty between the Maroons and the British, giving
autonomy to the former in Jamaica
1770 Crispus Attucks killed in the Boston Massacre
1780 Founding of African Union Society
1787 Prince Hall founds Grand Masonic Lodge 3459, Boston, Massachusetts
1788 Andrew Bryan founds Bryan Baptist Church, Savannah, Georgia
1012
1790 Founding of Brown's Fellowship Society, Charleston, South Carolina
1791 Absalom Jones founds St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania
L'Ouverture's unsuccessful uprising in Haiti
1793 Fugitive Slave Act enacted by Congress in Philadelphia
1795 Toussaint L'Ouverture wins the first battle against the French in Haiti
Mungo Park explores Senegambia
1796 First Zion Methodist Church founded
1800 Gabriel Prosser's conspiracy suppressed
1803 L'Ouverture dies in prison
1804 Usuman Dan Fodio declares a holy war against Gobir Haiti's
independence
1807 Parliament abolishes the slave trade in the British dominions
1808 Gambia and Sierra Leone become Crown colonies
Rev. Thomas Paul founds what is now known as the Abyssinian Baptist
Church, New York City
1810 Founding of African Insurance Company
1815 Founding of Burial Ground Society of the Free People of Color,
Richmond, Virginia
1816 Founding of first African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia
1818 Founding of Zulu kingdom by Chaka
1820 Missouri Compromise
Slave revolts in Martinique, Puerto Rico, Antigua, Cuba, Jamaica,
Tortola, and Demerara
1821 Founding of first African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church
1822 Denmark Vesey conspiracy
1822 Founding of Liberia by ex-slaves
Dom Pedro proclaims Brazil's independence from Portugal
1827 Freedom Journal published
1830 David Walker's Appeal published
1831 Nat Turner revolt
1832 Founding of Afric-American Female Intelligence Society, Salem,
Massachusetts
1833 Founding of Anti-Slavery Society
Slavery abolished in Jamaica
1837 Madame Bernard Couvent founds Free School for Black Orphans
1013
1838 Founding of Female Benevolent Society of Troy, New York
1840 Pope Gregory XVI declares slavery incompatible with Christianity
1841 Slave revolt on the ship Creole
1843 Founding of Ladies Union Benevolent Society, Charleston, South
Carolina
Founding of New York Benevolent Branch of Bethel for Women
Founding of Union Band Society of New Orleans
Founding of Colored Missionary Society, Mobile, Alabama
1844 The Dominican Republic proclaims independence
1847 Liberian independence
1849 Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery in Maryland and initiates the
Underground Railroad, eventually freeing three hundred slaves
1850 The Clay Compromise, reinforcing the 1793 Fugitive Act
1851 Edward Wilmott Blyden settles in Liberia
1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act passed
1856 Under Kabaka Suna, Buganda reaches its zenith
1857 Dred Scott decision
1859 John Brown with thirteen whites and five blacks assaults Harpers Ferry
arsenal: two blacks killed, two blacks captured, and one black escapes.
Brown hanged in Charlestown (in present-day West Virginia)
1861 Civil War begins
1863 Emancipation Proclamation in effect
1865 End of Civil War
Founding of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee
1865 Thirteenth Amendment approved
1866 Fourteenth Amendment ratified
1867 First Reconstruction Act
1868 Fourteenth Amendment ratified
Fifteenth Amendment ratified
1869 Completion of the Suez Canal
1875 Civil Rights Bill against discrimination in public facilities
1876 King Leopold II takes the Congo Free State as a personal possession after
Henry M. Stanley secures fraudulent treaties with African authorities
1881 The Mahdi Rebellion in Sudan ends on January 28, 1885 with the slaying
of British Governor-General Gordon
1014
1883 Supreme Court declares the 1875 Civil Rights Bill unconstitutional
1884 Berlin Conference; ends February 1885
1886 Slavery abolished in Spanish dominions
1888 Slavery abolished in Brazil (750,000 slaves freed)
1892 Defeat of Italians at Adowa by Menelik II of Ethiopia
Helen Cook elected first President, Colored Women's League,
Washington, D.C.
Founding of Loyal Union of Brooklyn and New York Black Women
1893 Founding of Harper's Woman's Club, Jefferson City, Missouri
1894 Founding of Belle Phoebe League, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Founding of Woman's Mutual Movement Club, Knoxville, Kentucky
Founding of Phyllis Wheatley Club, New Orleans, Louisiana
1895 Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin founds National Federation of Afro-American
Women in Boston
Founding of Women's Club of Omaha, Nebraska
1896 Mary Church Terrell founds the National Association of Colored Women
Plessy vs. Ferguson (“separate but equal” doctrine decided)
Founding of Sojourner Truth Club, Providence, Rhode Island 1898
Fashoda Incident
Cuban independence
1899 Beginning of Boer War; ends in 1902
1900 First Pan-African Congress in London (gathering of African and New
World intellectuals)
1902 End of Cuban Occupation by the United States
1904 Mary McCleod Bethune founds Daytona Educational and Industrial
Institute; later merged with Cookman Institute to become Bethune-
Cookman College in 1929
1905 The Niagara Movement established in Fort Erie, N.Y.
1905 Beginning of Maji Maji Rebellion against the Germans in Tanganyika,
ending only in 1907
1908 Due to scandalous treatment of Africans, the Belgian government takes
the Belgian Congo from King Leopold II
1909 Founding of the NAACP
1911 Founding of National Urban League
Founding of UNIA by Garvey in Jamaica
1912 Founding of the South African Native National Congress, later known as
1015
the African National Congress (ANC)
1915 Carter G. Woodson founds the Association for the Study of Negro Life
and History and the Journal of Negro History
1919 Paris Pan-African Congress
Lynching of eighty-three African-Americans in the South
Founding of the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA) in
Accra, Gold Coast
1921 The Harlem Renaissance begins
1923 Garvey sentenced to five years in jail for mail fraud in New York
Founding of Nigerian National Democratic Party in Lagos
1926 Founding of Negro History Week by Carter G. Woodson
1927 Garvey deported to Jamaica
1930 Founding of Temple of Islam by Fard Mohammed in Detroit
1933 Elijah Muhammed founds the Nation of Islam
1935 Mussolini overruns Ethiopia (until 1941)
1941 Announcement of the Atlantic Charter
1942 Founding of CORE
1944 Nnamdi Azikiwe founds National Council for Nigeria and the
Cameroons
1945 Black troops distinguish themselves in Germany and Northern
Italy Manchester Pan-African Congress
Founding of the United Nations in San Francisco
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—IBRD
(World Bank) created
1946 Felix Houphouet-Boigny of Côte d'Ivoire and leaders from French-
speaking Africa launch the Rassemblement Democratique Africain at
Bamako, Mali
End of forced labor (corvée) in the French territories
1948 Founding of the Union des Populations Camerounaises
Victory of the Nationalist party in South Africa: formal apartheid begins
1949 Kwame Nkrumah founds the Convention People's Party (CPP)
1951 Independence of Libya
1952 Beginning of Mau Mau uprising in Kenya; ends in 1956
1953 Central African Federation (Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, and Southern
Rhodesia) formed
1016
1954 Brown vs. Board of Education
Establishment of Tanganyika National Union (TANU)
Gamal Abdel Nasser wrests power after 1953 coup against King Faruk of
Egypt
1955 Rosa Parks refuses to sit in the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama
Martin Luther King, Jr., initiates boycotts and marches for civil rights
First Non-Aligned Movement Conference in Bandung, Indonesia
1956 Independence of Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia
Establishment of Loi Cadre, giving autonomy to French colonies and
abolishing the dual college (which was based on race)
1957 Federal paratroopers force Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas
to integrate eighteen black students
1957 Ghana's (Gold Coast's) independence
Martin Luther King, Jr., founds the SLCC
1958 General de Gaule's referendum on French-speaking Africa (only Guinea,
under Sekou Toure, opts for independence)
Economic Commission for Africa created
1959 The Leakeys find the remains of Zinjanthropus (1.7 million years old)
Conseil de L'Entente created
1960 Four black students “sit-in” at a Woolworth counter in Greensboro, North
Carolina
First wave of African independence in Sub-Saharan Africa: Cameroon,
Chad, Central African Republic, Congo (Brazzaville), Benin, Gabon,
Cote d'Ivoire, Malagasy Republic, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria,
Senegal, Somalia, Togo, Burkina Faso, and Zaire achieve independence
Sharpville Massacre in South Africa
1961 Central African Federation dissolved
Formation of Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU)
Founding of Kenya African National Union (KANU)
Beginning of war of liberation in Angola by the MPLA
1962 Federal marshals force integration at University of Mississippi (James
Meredith attends classes)
Independence of Algeria, at war with France since 1954
Uganda's independence
Emperor Haile Selassie annexes Eritrea to Ethiopia
Beginning of Eritrean liberation war (by the Eritrean Liberation Front)
1017
Jamaica's independence
Trinidad and Tobago achieve independence
1963 Medgar Evars assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi
First military coup in Sub-Saharan Africa: President Sylvanus Olympio
assassinated
Kenya's independence
Establishment of the Organization of African Unity
Formation of Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU)
PAIGC, under Amilcar Cabral, wages guerrilla war against Portugal in
Guinea-Bissau
African Development Bank (ADB) created
1964 Civil Rights Bill approved by Congress
Tanganyika and Zanzibar united as Tanzania
FRELIMO under Eduardo Mondlane declares liberation war against
Portugal
1965 Selma-Montgomery March
Voting Rights Bill
Assassination of Malcolm X in Harlem
White settlers in Southern Rhodesia announce their independence
(Unilateral Declaration of Independence, simply known as UDI)
United Nations Development Programme created
Organisation Commune Africaine et Malgache created
1966 Kwame Nkrumah overthrown by the army
Military coup in Nigeria
Stokely Carmichael heads SNCC
Founding of FROLINAT in Sudan and beginning of civil war in Chad
1967 Biafran War in Nigeria begins and continues until 1970 Arusha
Declaration
1968 Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, Tennessee, April 4
1969 Eduardo Mondlane, FRELIMO's President, is assassinated in Dares-
Salaam
Civilian government restored in Ghana under Dr. Busia as Prime
Minister
1971 Anguilla's independence
The Commonwealth of Nations created at Singapore's meeting of Heads
of State
1018
1972 Coalition against Blaxploitation in L.A.
Shirley Chisholm runs for U.S. president
Amilcar Cabral of the PAIGC is assassinated
Lt. Col. Ignatius Acheampong overthrows Busia's civilian government
1973 Independence of the Bahamas
Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA) created at
Algiers Arab Summit Conference
1974 Independence of Grenada
Communeauté Economique de l'Afrique de l'Ouest (West African
Economic Community) created
Overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia
1975 Independence of Portuguese-speaking Africa (Guinea's was recognized in
1974)
Establishment of the Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS) at a Lagos meeting
Comoros independence
1976 Spain withdraws from Spanish (Western) Sahara and conflict begins
among Morocco, Mali, Algeria, and the POLISARIO
Angolan civil war
1977 Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia begins but does not end until
1978
RENAMO is created
1978 Allan Bakke Supreme Court decision
1979 Amin overthrown by Tanzania's and Milton Obote's armies
Lt. Jerry Rawlings assassinates Acheampong in Ghana and takes over the
government
Nigerian civilian government restored, with Shehu Shagari as president
Southern African Development Coordinating Conference created
(SADCC)
1980 Independence of Zimbabwe
1980 Sam Doe overthrows Tolbert in Liberia and becomes the first non-
Americo-Liberian leader in the country
President Leopold Senghor of Senegal resigns from power voluntarily,
the first to do so in Africa, and is replaced by Abdou Diouf
1981 Reagan initiates review of civil rights regulations
1982 Hisseine Habre's victory in Chad over Gukuni Weddey and Libya
1019
President Ahmadou Ahidjo resigns and hands over power to Paul Biya in
Cameroon
1983 Saint Kitts-Nevis's independence
1984 Jesse Jackson runs for president of the United States
1985 President Julius Nyerere retires, replaced by Ali Hassan Mwinyi
1986 The Reagan administration bombs Libya in April
President Samora Machel of Mozambique dies in airplane crash in South
African territory and is succeeded by Joaquim Chissano
1988 Jesse Jackson again runs for president, winning primaries in five states
Beginnings of pluralistic democratic movements in Africa
1989 Douglas Wilder elected first black Governor of Virginia
Ronald Brown appointed National Chairman of the Democratic Party
First African-American Summit in New Orleans
Nelson Mandela released from jail
1990 Independence of Namibia
Liberian civil war
Hisseine Habre is overthrown by Idris Deby in Chad
1991 First African and African-American Summit in Abidjan
Africa's international debt estimated at $272 billion
Conservative Clarence Thomas takes seat on the Supreme Court
Siad Barre of Somalia is overthrown: violence, chaos, and famine follow.
UN relief effort begins in August
President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia is defeated in the country's first fair
presidential elections
1992 First presidential and parliamentary elections in Angola
Peace negotiations concluded between FRELIMO and RENAMO
UN massive food assistance to Somalia
1993 Second African and African-American Summit, Libreville, Gabon
1994 US troops leave Somalia
1995 Ethnic warfare erupts in Rwanda, with thousands massacred
The University of California ends all Affirmative Action policies
1996 University of Texas Law School Affirmative Action policy struck down
by Federal Appeals Court
1997 Laurent Kabila ousts through war Joseph Mobutu, President of Zaire
1998 President Clinton's 12-day visit to Africa
1020
1999 Thebo Mbeki elected President of South Africa, succeeding Nelson
Mandela
2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia
Related Intolerance convened by the UN in Durban, South Africa
Kabila assassinated and son, Joseph Kabila, succeeds in Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC), former Zaire. Civil war ensues, with
neighboring countries involved
2002 Launching of the African Union in Durban, South Africa
Jonas Savimbi assassinated by Angolan government troops
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva: Brazil's first president to declare himself black
2002 2,000 people die in a capsized ferry boat in Senegal, off the Gambian
coast
2003 Supreme Court's decision on the University of Michigan Affirmative
Action
Joseph Kabila inaugurates power-sharing government, but violence
continues in DRC
Darfur civil war
2004 Haiti's President Jean-Bertrand Aristide ousted; US troops and UN
intervene to restore law and order; yet, instability continuing even by
mid-2005
Sporadic war continues in DRC; 3.8 million people estimated to have
died since 2001
2004 Birth of Boko Haram in Yobe state, Nigeria
2005 Ratification of the agreement between the Sudanese government and the
Sudanese People's Liberation Movement; Darfur refugee situation
worsens
Edgar Ray Killen, former pastor and KKK leader, found guilty in
Philadelphia, MS, for the 1964 murder of civil rights workers James
Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, with an imposed
sentence of 60 years in jail
Tony Blair's Commission for Africa pleads for forgiveness of all Africa's
external debt; the G8 decide to follow-through for several developing
countries
Independence of South Sudan
2007 First democratic elections in Togo
2008 Rebels in Chad almost topple Deby government in Chad
1021
2010 Darfur and Sudan sign a cease-fire agreement
2011 Civil war erupts in South Sudan
2014 Ebola erupts in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone killing 11,310 people
2016 Hisseine Habre, former dictator of Chad, found guilty of crimes against
humanity, war crimes, torture, rape, and torture during an extraordinary
trial in Senegal and sentenced to life imprisonment
2017 Jose Eduardo dos Santos relinquishes power in Angola
2018 End of war between Ethiopia and Eritrea
End of war in South Sudan
Dictator Robert Mugabe is removed from the presidency “peacefully” by
the army
Corrupt President Jacob Zuma of South Africa is toppled from
government by the African National Congress
Ebola virus outbreak in Equateur Province, Western Democratic
Republic of Congo, killing some 11,310 people
1022
Appendix C
Selected Periodicals and References in Africana Studies
Available in the United States
Africa (News)
Africa: South of the Sahara (Reference)
Africa Confidential (News)
Africa Contemporary Record (Reference)
Africa Currents (News)
Africa News (News)
Africa Press Clips (News)
Africa Report (News and Articles)
Africa Research Bulletin (News)
Africa Today
African Affairs
African Arts/Arts d'Afrique
African Economic Digest (News)
African Economic History
African Historical Dictionaries (References)
African Language Studies
African Literature Today
African Studies Review
African Writers Series
Afrique Contemporaine
Art Journal
Black Enterprise
Black Music Research
Black Scholar
Black Studies Journal
1023
Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines
Caribbean Economic Almanac (Reference)
Caribbean Insight
Caribbean Journal of Education
Caribbean Journal of Religious Studies
Caribbean Quarterly
Caribbean Review
Caribbean Review of Books
Caribbean Studies
Caribbean Update (Reference)
Canadian Journal of African Studies
A Current Bibliography on African Affairs
International Journal of Modern Historical African Studies
Jamaican Journal of African Music
Jamaican Journal of Modern Historical African Studies
Jeune Afrique
Journal of African History
Journal of African Languages and Linguistics
Journal of African Music
Journal of African Studies
Journal of Asian and African Studies
Journal of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Journal of Black Music
Journal of Black Music Research
Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Journal of Modern African Studies
Journal of Negro History
Journal of Religion in Africa
Journal of Southern African Studies
Liberian Studies Journal
Marchés Tropicaux et Méditerranéens
New African (News)
1024
Phylon
Quarterly Conflict
Research in African Literature
SAGE: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women
Sierra Leone Language Review
Social Science and Medicine
Third World Quarterly
TransAfrican Journal of History
Western Journal of Black Studies
West Africa (News)
1025
Index
Pages with tables are indicated with “T.” Pages with illustrations are
indicated with “fig.”
Aba Women's War, 213–15

abakua tradition, in Caribbean, 337
Achebe, Chinua (Things Fall Apart), 443, 587
Africa, continent of, 57–72
African explorers, to the “New World,” 78
agricultural revolution in, 63–64
Bantu expansion, 64–65
disease environment, 60
early African kingdoms and states, 70–72
early humans in, 60–61
Egypt, history of, 65–68
geography of, 58–60, 72
human development and culture, impact of, 57, 72
Intertropical Convergence Zone, definition, 59
languages in, 65
map of, 702 fig.
Nubian (Middle Nile) region, 68–70
prehistoric ages, 60–62
transatlantic slavery in, 80–82, 87–89, 91
transhumance, definition, 59
Africa, disease and community health efforts in, 657–77
African Program for Onchocerciasis Control (APOC), 672–73
African traditional medicine, 658–59, 661–63
African Union, 662
1026
African youth, trends among, 670, 676–77
Anti-River Blindness Project, 670–73
community responses, to health crisis, 674–75, 676
community self-mobilization in, 673–74, 676–77
DDT, use of, 669
doctor-patient ratios, statistics, 660–61
Global Fund, 663, 664
healing methods, accessibility and affordability of, 659
HIV/AIDS and associated disorders, 657, 663–65
HIV/AIDS and associated disorders, statistics, 661, 663, 673–74
holistic health, definition, 658, 662
malaria, statistics, 665, 667–68, 669
Nigeria, polio and vaccinations in, 666–67
PEPFAR, 663–64
population growth, statistics, 669–70
small pox, 658–59
South Africa, HIV/AIDS in, 661, 664–65
Stephen Lewis Foundation model in, 674–75
Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), 662
sustainability, in international aid, 675
tuberculosis, statistics, 665, 666, 668–69
Uganda, HIV/AIDS in, 674
Western medicine in, 660–61, 665–69
Africa, exploration/conquest of, 123–39. See also Africa, religious
conquest of
African Association, 124
assimilation and “association” policies, 133
Berlin Conference, 128–30, 132, 138
colonial disputes/policies, 132–35, 138
colonialism, impact of, 123, 135–37, 138–39
explorers, 124–28, 137–38
imperialism vs. capitalism, as justification for, 123, 130–32
“indirect rule” policy, 133
1027
maps, 703 fig., 704 fig.
Africa, nation-building by, 239–61
African National Council, 254
African Union (AU), 250–53, 260
China in, 257–58
class struggle (Afro-Marxism), 244
Cold War, 246–47
demarginalization strategy, 259
direct investment in, statistics, 249–50
disease/plagues (HIV/AIDS), 245–46
ECOWAS, 232
education, 245
foreign debt, 242–43, 259
future challenges for, 260–61
globalism, 249
Group of 77, 247
imperialism, importing goods and, 247–48
independence, periods of, 239–40
International Monetary Fund, 244, 248, 259
irredentism, 240–41
LDCs, 248
Nelson Mandela, 256, 260
map, present-day, 705
marginalization of, 241–42, 249, 252–53
military rule/intervention, 243–44
national unity, challenges building, 240–41
NEPAD (New Economic Partnership for African Development),
249, 252–53
non-alignment policy, 247, 259
oil prices and, 249, 250
political change (1980s-1990s), 244–45
poverty, approaches to, 241–42
Republic of South Africa, 253–56, 259–60
1028
SADC, 245
socio-economic stagnation, causes of, 243–44
South Sudan, 256–57
structural adjustment program, 259
trade imbalance in, 248–49, 259
UNCTAD, 248
urban situation, statistics, 250
World Bank, statistics by, 242, 259
Jacob Zuma, 260
Africa, religious conquest of, 94–96, 683–94
Age of Discovery, Portuguese crusades and, 684–89
by Catholicism, using papal bulls, 685–89
Vasco da Gama, 684
Inter Caetera, 96, 685–86
Portugal, as discoverers of, 683, 684
religious/conquest rituals, 687–88
Romanus Pontifex, colonialism and, 94–96, 689–91
Romanus Pontifex, purpose of, 683–84, 685, 686–89, 693
“Scramble for Africa,” as epistemicide, 685, 692–93
slavery, religious imperative of, 688–89
African American families. See families, of African Americans
African American National Black Arts Festival, 313
African American Studies, 41–52
Black Panther Party for Self Defense, 43
Black Power Movement, 42–43
Black Studies, at HBCUs, 47–48, 51–52
Black Studies programs, 41, 44–46, 46–47
Civil Rights Movement and, 42
early funding for, by Ford Foundation, 48–49
early scholarship, 41
functions and roles of, 49–50
Jim Crow segregation and, 42
1029
Jubilee, 47
nomenclature, 49
prominent scholars, 50–51
renowned graduate programs, 51
student movement, 43–44
African Americans and Africans, relationships of, 291–317
“African,” 294
“African American,” 294–95
African American National Black Arts Festival, 313
African leaders, on immigration of African Americans, 303
Belgium, atrocities by, 305
“black,” 294–95
black churches and missionaries, 304–5
black colleges and universities, 304
black newspapers, 305
Civil War, 299
conferences, summits and, to build unity, 315–16
cooperation, calls for, 291, 292
creative writers, 307–8
diplomats, 307
DNA testing, 315
double-consciousness, 294
emigration schemes, 295–304
emigration statistics, 299
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, 297
institutions, scholars and, 304–13
“negro” and “colored,” 293–94
Nigeria, 311
racial designations, 293–95
racism in US, African influence on, 312
relations, tensions in, 292, 313–16
relationship, nature of, 292
1030
scholars and writers, 305–7
Kwame Ture, 302–3
UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association), 300, 301
Oprah Winfrey, 315
African art. See art, of Africa
African diaspora (contemporary), 263–88. See also art, of African
diaspora; religion, African diaspora and; slavery, African diaspora
and
Africa and, history of, 263–64
African and Caribbean migrants, statistics, 265
African communities, 277–78
African immigrants, statistics, 274T, 275T
Afropolitan, 277
Black America, composition of, 265T
Black Power Party, 272
to Brazil/Americas, 283–84
Caribbean, map of, 706 fig.
Caribbean immigration to US, 270T
to Caribbean islands, 264–65
Caribbean migration, 270–73
Civil Rights Movement, 272
contributions by immigrants, to society and politics, 265–66
contributions by immigrants, to TV and film, 279–80, 287
diversity of, 284
Diversity Visa Lottery program, 276
ethnic identity, as challenge, 282–83
to Europe, 285–86
to France, 286
global economic conditions, instability and, 266–67
to Haiti, 267
immigration laws, changes to, 268–70, 272, 276, 286
languages, retention of, 284
to Middle East/Asia, 285
1031
music, contributions by immigrants to, 280–82
post-2000 migrants, 276–77
professionals, from migrant communities, 271, 272, 275, 276, 287
refugees, 267, 268T, 273
religion, retention of, 284
Siddi, in India and Pakistan, 285
slavery and, 264–65
structural adjustment programs (SAPs), 266
to US, 266–70, 270T, 273–78, 287
African families. See families, in Africa
African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), 568–69
African National Council, 254
African Program for Onchocerciasis Control (APOC), 672–73
African Studies, 3–21, 26–31. See also African American Studies
generally, 3–4
“academy,” definition, 4
African art, 18
African philosophy, 19
African religion, 18–19
African Studies Association, 21–26
African universities, state of, 26–28
African urban areas/cities, study of, 30–31
Africana Studies, role of, 29–30
ancestry connections of, 32
anthropologists, 10–11
basic vs. applied research, 5, 11
behaviorism, 15, 17
bourgeois, 14
canons, definition, 4
cultural pluralism, 14
economists, 19–20
ethnocentrism, 11, 30, 33
1032
Eurocentric vs. Afrocentric perspectives, 8–9, 26
evolution of, 5–7, 32–33
geographers, 17
historians, 8–9
linguists, 17–18
methodology, of historians, 9–10
military coups, 13–14
political scientists, 13–17, 33–34
sociologists, 11–13
structural-functionalism, 15, 17
technology in Africa, study of, 31–32
terrorism and religion, study of, 32
theoretical models of, 14–15, 17, 20–21
in US, mid-1960s and 1970s, 28–29
African traditional medicine, 658–59, 661–63
African Union (AU), 234–35, 662
Africana Studies, 51
“Africanisms,” 108, 360–61, 363, 427–32
The African Child (Laye), 444
Africology, history of term, 9
Afro-Marxism, 244
Afrocentricity, definition, 46
Afrocology, history of term, 9
Afrofuturism, 466
Age/Doctrine of Discovery, 94–98, 115, 684–89
American secular law and, 98
Christian monarchies, rights of, 95
definition, 75, 94–95
function of, 96–97
Portugal, colonialism by, 95–96, 689–91
Portuguese crusades and, 684–89
Protestantism and, 97, 98, 691–92
1033
Spain, rights of, 96
Triangular Trade and, 96
agricultural revolution, in Africa, 63–64, 66
Aidid, Safia, 213
Alcorn, George, 474
Aldridge, Delores, 51–52
Alexander, Archie, 474
Alexander, Margaret Walker, 47
Ali, Muhammad, 457
Allen, W. R., 514
Ambiguous Adventure (Kane), 444
American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA), 308–9
American Revolution, 111–12
ancestors, role in traditionalism, 539, 558
Anim-Addo, Joan (Framing the Word), 612–13
animism, 540
Anti-River Blindness Project, 670–73
antislavery societies, 112–13, 115
Armstrong, Howard, 362
Arn'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (White),
629
art, of Africa, 417–27
chapter overview, 417–18, 434–35
adornment functions of, 423
African American art, Africanisms and pioneers of, 427
African Studies and, 18
Edward Bannister, 429
Robert Duncanson, 429
images of (websites), 437–38
Joshua Johnston, 428
Edmonia Lewis, 429–30
Scipio Moorhead, 428
Nigeria, contemporary art in, 424–27
1034
spiritual functions of, 423
Henry Ossawa Tanner, 430
traditional African art, ancient cultures and, 421–24
traditional African art, in Western museums, 418–21
art, of African diaspora, 427–32
Africanisms in, 427
art in US, early history of, 427–28
artisans, 427–28
Aaron Douglas, 430–31
Harlem Renaissance, 430–31
Jacob Lawrence, 431–32
painters, 428–29, 430, 431–32
printmakers, 428
sculptors, 429–30
art, of Caribbean, 433–34
ASA Restoration Project, 310
Asante, Molefi Kete, 46, 52
Asantewaa, Yaa (queen mother), 590–91
Ashanti, 585, 586, 590
Ashcroft, Bill, 450
ATA (American Tennis Association), 487
Australopithecus, discovery of, 61
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Johnson), 463
back-to-Africa scheme. See emigration motives/schemes

Baker, Ella, 642–43
Baker, Josephine, 482
Baker, Samuel White, 125
bala (balafon), 326
Bambaataa, Afrika, 394
bamboula, in the Caribbean, 335
Banneker, Benjamin, 474
Bannister, Edward, 429
1035
Basie, William “Count,” 373, 377–78
Bates, Robert, 16
Bath, Patricia, 476
Beard, Andrew, 474
bebop music and artists, 378–79, 382
Belgium, colonial policy in Africa, 134, 135, 195–96, 305
Belize, musical traditions of, 339
Berger, Iris, 25–26
Berlin Conference, 128–30, 132, 138, 196
Bethune, Mary McLeod, 640–41
Biebuyck, Daniel, 18
Black Arts Movement, 153, 168, 170
Black Baptist churches, in US, 569–70
“Black Belt,” 106
“Black Codes,” 100–101
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (Gutman),
630–31
Black feminism, Black female stereotypes and, 150–52, 170–71
Black Panther Party for Self Defense, 43
Black Power Movement, 42–43, 164–65, 233
Black Power Party, 272
Black Student Movement, 168
Black Studies
Ford Foundation funding for, 48–49
at HBCUs, 47–48, 51–52
programs in, 41, 44–46
Black women. See women, of Africa; women, of America; women, of
the Caribbean
Black Women's Club Movement, 638–39
Blair, Henry, 474
Blassingame, John, 515, 517
Blitz the Ambassador (“African in New York”), 280–81
blues, African influence on, 363–69
1036
Boogie Woogie vs. Ragtime, 367–69
classic blues, 365–66
early urban/urban blues, 366–67
Eastern Ragtime, 368
folk narratives and, 457
harmonics of, 364
migrations and, 365
Mississippi delta blues, 364
Jelly Roll Morton, influence of, 368
New Orleans ragtime, 367–68
origin of, 363–64
scholars of, 363
St. Louis Ragtime, 368
Texas blues, 364–65
Blyden, Edward W., 203, 225, 299
Boahen, Adu, 76
Bohannan, Paul, 509
Bolles, Lynn, 604–5
bomba, in the Caribbean, 337
bondspeople, 109, 110–11
bongo dance, in the Caribbean, 335, 336
Boykin, Otis, 474
Braithwaite, Edward Kamau, 450
Brazil, African diaspora and, 104, 283–84, 574–76
Brempong, Arhin, 590
Brent, Linda, 634
Britain
Caribbean, independence from, 187
colonial policy of, in Africa, 133, 134, 135, 196
imperialism by, 222
Pan-Africanism in, 229
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 460–61
1037
Brown, James, 389
Brown, Sterling, 460
Brown, William Harvey, 127
Brown, William Wells (Clotel; or, The President's Daughter), 456,
458–59
Bundy, McGeorge, 48
buranbur (poems), 213
Burr, John A., 474
Burton, Richard Francis, 122, 124
buru, in the Caribbean, 334–35
Bush, Barbara, 603
Bush, George W., 172–73
business ownership, African Americans and, 476–81, 490–91
banks and, 478
“black capitalism,” 479
black farmers, statistics, 479, 480
business owners, profiles of, 480, 490–91
business ownership, statistics, 479, 491
family financial holdings, statistics, 479
Free African Society and, 478
higher education and, 478
institutional racism and, 477
land ownership and income, racial gap in, 480
National Negro Business League, 478
OIC (Opportunities Industrialization Centers), 479–80
racial wealth ownership and income, statistics, 481
racism and, 479, 480
slavery heritage and, 477
successful entrepreneurs, 478
Butler, Octavia E., 466
CAAR (Collegium of African American Research), 470
1038
Caillie, Auguste Rene, 125–26
calypso, in the Caribbean, 347, 352, 353
Campbell, Robert, 224
Caribbean, 181–90
abolitionists, 184–85
African religious traditions in, 574–76
Baptists missionaries in, 577
Creole language, 188, 190
Cuba, conditions in, 186
decolonization of, 186–87
Dominican Republic, 181
emancipation, 185
geography of, 182
Haiti, conditions in, 186
independent black church movement, 576–77
labor movements in, 186
languages in, 187–88
map of, 706 fig.
marronage/maroon communities, 184
migrations from, 185–86
neo-African religions, 188–89
Nobel Prize winners from, 181
Pan-Africanism in, 224–25
population statistics, 181
religions in, 188–89, 190, 574, 581
slave revolts in, 101–2, 183–84
slavery in, 182–83, 332–33
Virgin Islands, conditions in, 186
Caribbean, African diaspora and, 264–65, 270–73, 270T
Caribbean, art of, 433–34
Caribbean, music and dance of, 330–54
African musical fusions with, 353–54
1039
African stylistic features, 333–34
Asian influence on, 343
carnival traditions, 341–43
in Carriacou, 335–36
collective nature of, 344, 349–50
“Congolese sound,” 354
Creoles, history of, 338–39
creolization process, by slaves, 332
in Cuba, 337, 342
dance traditions, 336–40
diversity of, 344–45
in Dominican Republic, 337
drumming traditions, 333–36
in Dutch Caribbean, 338
European religious music, influence of, 341
in French Guiana, 338
global market for, 352–55
in Guadeloupe, 338
in Guyana, 336
in Haiti, 337–38, 341
history of, 330–33
individualism of, 344
“inter-African syncretism,” 332
in Jamaica, 334–35, 341, 345–46, 348–49, 350
in the Lesser Antilles, 335
musical events, of slaves, 332–33
new musical forms, 351–52
polymusicality of, 345–46, 350
popular music, 346–52
in Puerto Rico, 337
religions and, 335, 337–38, 339, 341
religious chants, 341
1040
songs for social commentary, 343–44
in St. Kitts and Nevis, 342–43
in Suriname, 338
survey of, 333–46
topical songs, 350, 356
in Trinidad, 336, 342, 347–48
in US, 349–50, 350–51, 352
village bands, 340, 343
in the Virgin Islands, 335
wake traditions, 341
work songs, 341
Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture), 46, 233, 272, 302–3
Carolina Chocolate Drops, 362
Carruthers, George, 474
Carver, George Washington, 474
Catholicism. See also Age/Doctrine of Discovery; Protestantism, in
Africa
conquest of Africa by, 685–91
slavery and Jim Crow era, 573–74
Chad, yondo, as rite of transition in, 505
Chapman, Steven, 530
Chatmon family, musical legacy of, 361–62
Chazan, Naomi, 13–14, 15–16
Chesnutt, Charles W., 462–63
Chikamoneka, Julia, 582
Child, Maria (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), 634
children. See also circumcision; rites of passage/initiation
child abuse, 520–21, 609
child and family welfare services, 518, 527–29
childhood, resistance and identity in, 631, 651
children, primacy of, 507, 532
children, status of, 515–17, 527T, 628
marriage and, in Caribbean, 605–6
1041
mulatto children, during antebellum period, 516
naming patterns for, 630–31
Traditionalism, exposure to, 540
Childress, Alice, 466
China, in Africa, 257–58
Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, 440
Chisholm, Shirley, 172
Christianity, in Africa, 542–50
archbishops and cardinals, as Africans, 547–48
Church scandals, 548–49
circumcision and clitoridectomy, in Kenya, 546
conversion, methods and rates, 548–50
early Christianity, and African nationalism, 200–201
famous clerics, 543
hypocrisy of, 549–50
independent churches, 546
indigenous clergy, training of, 544
Islam vs., growth rates, 548, 549, 558
messianic and fundamentalist teachings in, 546–47
nationalism and, 556
Portuguese religious crusades, 543–44, 559
post-modern status, 548
problems, 545, 549
Protestant missionaries, work of, 544–45, 559–60
rite of passage and, 546
spread of, 542–43
statistics, 544
as threat, to African families, 509
Christianity, in African American literature, 469
Christianity, in US, 567–74
African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), 568–69
Baptist faith, 569
1042
Black Baptist churches, 569–70
Catholics, slavery and Jim Crow era, 573–74
Church of God in Christ, 572
civil rights, support for, 571, 572
education, support for, 571
evangelical Christianity, slaves and, 567
Free African Society, 568
gospel music and, 403–7, 410–11
Great Migration and, 571
“invisible Church,” 567
megachurches, 572
Methodist faith, 568
ministers, as leaders, 571
morality and, as sport trend, 484–85
neo-Pentecostal churches, 572–73
Pentecostalism, 570–71, 580
slavery and African diaspora, 98, 100, 109
circumcision
of females (FGM), 505, 546
of males, 505
Civil Rights Act of 1964, 312
Civil Rights Movement
African American Studies and, 42
African diaspora and, 272
business ownership, by African Americans, 479
Christianity and, in US, 571, 572
soul music and, 388
struggle, for equality, 156–59, 161–65, 176
women, as civil rights activists, 640–44, 651
Civil War, 299
Clara Ward Singers, 404
1043
Clark College, Atlanta, African American Studies, 47
Clarke, John Henrik, 78
class struggle (Afro-Marxism), 244
classical music, African Americans in, 407–9
Clinton, William J., 170
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (Brown), 456, 458–59
Cold War, 197–200, 246–47, 311
Cole, Johnnetta, 599
Collins, Merle, 613
colonialism
African nationalism and, 194–96, 200
Christianity and, in Africa, 545–47, 558, 559
colonial disputes/policies, 132–35, 138
impact of, in Africa, 123, 135–37, 138–39
Romanus Pontifex and, 94–96, 689–91
women, status under, 591–92, 595
Commission of Inquiry Record (1930), 214
concubinage, 499, 516
conferences, 226–27
congos dance, in the Caribbean, 337
Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), 309
conjure (hoodoo) tradition, 457, 565–66
convince tradition, in the Caribbean, 335
Coppin, Francis Jackson, 639
Council on African Affairs, 308
court decisions, in struggle for equality, 147, 149, 159, 160–61,
166–67
Crosthwaith, David N., Jr., 474
Cuba
Cuban refugees, during African diaspora, 267
Mariana Grajales de Maceo, 604
Regla de Ocha, 576
slavery in, 104
1044
Cuffee, Paul, 224, 296–97, 477
cumfa dances, in Caribbean, 336
Curtin, Philip, 509
da Gama, Vasco, 684

Dahomey, history of, 71
Danquah, J. B., 76
The Darkest Child (Phillips), 469
Davidson, Basil, 88
Davis, Douglas (Doug E. Fresh), 395
Dean, Mark, 476
Declaration of Independence, slavery and, 105
Delaney, Martin R., 224, 298–99
Diversity Visa Lottery program, 276
divorce, in African families
in matrilineal societies, 503, 510
in patrilineal societies, 501, 502, 510
djembe ensembles, 328
Doctrine of Discovery. See Age/Doctrine of Discovery
Dominican Republic, women in, 607–8
Doug E. Fresh (Douglas Davis), 395
Douglas, Aaron, 430–31
Douglass, Frederick, 109–10, 113, 297, 458, 483–84
Drew, Charles, 474–75
drums, 326–27, 329
Du Bois, W. E. B., 50–51, 93, 150, 204, 291, 306–7, 484
du Chaillu, Paul, 126
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 459
Duncanson, Robert, 429
Dutchman (Jones), 467
ECOWAS (Economic Council of West African States), 232

education
1045
advanced degrees and, 519–20, 531
African universities, state of, 26–28
business ownership and, 478
Christianity support of, in US, 571
evangelization and, as motives for emigration, 296
literacy and, 109–10, 148
sport and, 490
Egypt, history of, 65–68, 69–70, 589
elected officials. See also Obama, Barack
Black women of America as, 644–45, 652
political participation (franchise and elective), 144–45, 146–47,
165
statistics, 146–47, 165, 169, 172, 174, 519, 531
Ellington, Edward “Duke,” 373, 374–78
about “jazz,” 374
compositions of, 375
contributions of, 376–77
Count Basie vs., 378
musical attributes and innovations by, 376
musical philosophy of, 374–75
Ellison, Ralph, 457, 465
emancipation, 114
African American families and, 517
in the Caribbean, 185
equality and, 142–43
Emang Basadi (Stand up Women), 593
emigration motives/schemes, 295–304
back-to-Africa movement, 295–99
dual citizenships, 302
emigration statistics, 299
evangelization and education, as motives, 296
Garveyism, 299–301
to Liberia, 301–2
1046
nationalism, as motive, 296
Nationalist-Negro Movement, 301–2
OAAU, 302
racism in America, as motive, 303
to US, as reverse migration, 303–4
equality, quest for, 141–76
affirmative action, 166–67
Afrocentricity, 170
Black Arts Movement, 153, 168, 170
Black Power Movement, 164–65
Black progress, white resistance to, 143–44, 145–46, 147, 166,
168–69, 175
Black Student Movement, 168
cashless debt peonage system, 145, 148
civil rights/human rights struggle, 156–59, 161–65, 176
William J. Clinton, 170
constitutional amendments, 144
court decisions, 147, 149, 159, 160–61, 166–67
disease/health, in Black communities, 170
disfranchisement, 145
economic/political development, post-Reconstruction, 147–48
education, literacy and, 148
emancipation, 142–43
“forty acres and a mule,” 145
gay/lesbian Blacks, 171
the Great Society, 168
Harlem Renaissance, 153
Hurricane Katrina, 171
immigration, 171
Martin Luther King, Jr., 161–62, 163–64
leadership, post-Emancipation, 152
migrations, 154, 176
military, Blacks in, 155–56, 176
1047
“New Negro” Movement, 153
New Right conservative backlash, 168–69
Barack Obama, 171–72, 173–74
political participation (franchise and elective), 144–45, 146–47,
165
population in 1870, statistics, 146
poverty, 170
protest tradition, Black churches and, 152, 175
racism, 157–58, 159
Reconstruction Era, 141, 142–54, 175
reparations, 169–70
scholarship on, differing traditions, 141–42
segregation, de jure vs. de facto, 154, 159–60, 164, 175–76
self-determination, self-help and, 141–42, 150, 152, 155, 167, 171,
175, 176
“separate and unequal” doctrine, 147, 156, 159
social progress and, opposing forces, 141
TARP, 172–73
voting franchise, elected officials and, 146–47, 169, 172, 174
Malcolm X, 164
Equiano, Olaudah, 86, 443
Ethiopia, 229–30, 589
Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 463–64
Falola, Toyin, 215

families, in Africa, 497–511
bride service, 504
bride-wealth, 499, 510
brothers of women, in matrilineal societies, 502–3
cash cropping, 506, 507
Christianity as threat to, 509
circumcision, of males, 505
clan relationships, 500–501
1048
communalism and primacy of children, 507, 510–11
concubinage, 499
cross-cousins, 500
divorce and, 501, 502, 503, 510
domestic violence, 507
external forces on, 497
family planning and contraceptives, 508–9
family structure, 497–99
“female genital mutilation” (FGM), 505, 507–8
fertility in Africa, statistics, 509
initiation, 505
kin groups, 500
lineage relationships, 500
marriages and, 498, 504
married males, statistics, 510
migrant labor and, 506
passage, as rite of transition, 505
patrilineal societies, 499–502, 504–5, 510
polygyny, 498–99, 508
poro, secret societies, 505
poverty and, 509
social media, impact on, 508
wage labor, impact of, 506, 507
women, social roles of, 501, 503, 507
yondo, 505
families, of African Americans, 513–32
in antebellum America, 515–16
black males, incarceration statistics, 523–24
black married couples, 522, 525
business ownership, statistics, 521
child and family welfare services, 518, 527–29
children, primacy of, 532
1049
children, status of, 515–17, 520–21, 527T
Church's role, in marriages, 517
concubinage, 516
disease (HIV/AIDS), statistics, 524–25
early community efforts for, 518
education and advanced degrees, 519–20, 531
elected officials, statistics, 519, 531
emancipation and, 517
empowerment of, 529–30
female heads of households, statistics, 522–23, 525
household income, 521
interracial marriages, 524
job market, preparation for, 530–31
kinship ties and marriage stability, 514–15
land ownership, statistics, 532
lynching and, statistics, 518, 519T
military's role, in marriages, 517–18
model family, black vs. white, 513, 532
poverty, statistics, 522, 525
present conditions, 525–27, 531–32
racial inequality, 526T
racism and discrimination, 530
resources for, 529
richest businesses and individuals, 521–22
scholarly debate on current state of, 513
as sick vs. adaptive, 513–14
slave families, 515–16, 517
survival of, 526–31
teen birth rate, statistics, 520
unemployment and, 523, 530
Fieldhouse, D. K., 131–32
Fifth Pan-African Congress (1945), 230–31
1050
film industry, African Americans in, 481–83
“blaxploitation” films, 482
changes in, 481–82
Oscar nominations, 483
Renaissance of 2013, 483
stereotypical roles, 482
Finnegan, Ruth, 443
flutes, 326
folk narratives/tradition, 442, 449, 457–58, 458–59
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow
is Enuf (Shange), 467
Ford Foundation, funding for Black Studies by, 48–49
Framing the Word (Anim-Addo), 612–13
France, African diaspora and, 133, 134–35, 196, 228–29, 286
Franklin, Aretha, 405, 406
Franklin, John Hope, 51, 312, 515, 516
Franklin, Kirk, 406
Frazier, E. Franklin, 50, 513, 515
Free African Society, 478, 568
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, 297
funk music, 389–90
Gallagher, J. A., 132

Ganda people (Buganda kingdom), 591–92
Garnet, Henry Highland, 224, 297, 298
Garvey, Marcus, 153, 204, 227–28, 299–301
Gasman, Marybeth, 51–52
gasse-co tradition, in the Caribbean, 338
gay/lesbians, 171, 469
Geiger, Susan, 211–12
geography
of Africa, 58–60
of Egypt, 65–66
1051
geographers, in African Studies, 17
of Nubia (Middle Nile region), 69
Germany, colonial policy of, in Africa, 135
Ghana, 70, 231, 590
Ginindza, Thoko, 588
Global Fund, 663
gospel music, 403–7, 410–11
Gourdine, Meredith, 475
Grajales de Maceo, Mariana, 604
Grandmaster Flash, 395
Grandmaster Theodore, 395
Grant, George F., 486
Great Depression (1930s), 604
griot, 325
Grosfoguel, Ramon, 685, 686, 688, 691, 692, 694
group music, 324, 325
gumbe dances, in the Caribbean, 334
Gutman, Herbert G. (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom,
1750–1925), 630–31
gwoka tradition, in the Caribbean, 338
Haiti
art in, 433–34
Haitian migrants, discrimination against, 273
Haitian refugees, 267
Haitian Revolution, 111
Vodou in, 575
Hall, Katori, 468
Hall, Lloyd Augustus, 475
Hammon, Jupiter, 459
Hampton, Robert L., 520
Hansberry, Lorraine (A Raisin in the Sun), 467
hard bop music and artists, 379–80
1052
Harlem Renaissance, 153, 430–31, 460, 463
Harper, Michael, 461
Harris, E. Lynn, 465–66
Hayden, Robert, 460
Hays, Carlton J. H., 131
HBCUs
black colleges and universities, 304
Black Studies at, 47–48
Ph.D. programs at, 51–52
post-Reconstruction, 148
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (Philosophy of History), 692
hemiola, 329, 356
Herskovits, Melville, 513
Hill, Henry A., 475
Hill, Robert, 529, 530
Himes, Chester, 464
Hinton, William A., 475
hip hop, rap music and, 394–400
criticisms of, 398–99
early rappers, 394–95
elements of, 395–97
“gangsta rap,” 397–98
Jay-Z, 399
Kendrick Lamar, 399–400
new directions and significant contributors of, 399–400
rap, by regions, 397–98
Kanye West, 399
HIV/AIDS and associated disorders
community alliances against, 245–46, 657, 663–65
statistics, 524–25, 661, 663, 673–74
statistics, in Caribbean, 611–12
Hobson, John, 130
1053
Homo habilis species, 61, 62
Hornaday, Robert G., 480
Horton, George Moses, 459
Howard University, 46–48
Hughes, Langston, 457, 460, 466
Hurricane Katrina, 171, 470
Hurston, Zora Neale (Their Eyes Were Watching God), 463–64
immigration
equality, quest for, 171
Immigration Act of 1990, 276
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 272
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 269–70, 272, 276
immigration laws, changes to, 268–70, 272, 276, 286
imperialism
African Americans' influence on Africans and, 311
British imperialism, 222
capitalism vs., 123, 130–32
importing goods and, 247–48
literature in Africa and, 445
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs), 458, 634
indentured servants, 99–100
initiation. See rites of passage/initiation
Inter Caetera, 685–86
International Monetary Fund, 244, 248, 259
Intertropical Convergence Zone, definition, 59
“invisible institution,” definition, 109
Irele, Abiola, 8, 440
irredentism, 240–41
Islam, in Africa, 509, 550–58
Christianity vs., growth rates, 548, 549, 558
conversion factors, 553–55, 559
impact of, 555–56
1054
jihads, conversions by, 551, 552, 558–59
maps, of Africa, 702–5 fig.
Muhammad, 551
Muslims and Christians, statistics, 550–51
nationalism and, 556
origins of, 551
Qur'an, 551
sects, 551–52
Southern Africa, conversion in, 555
spread of, by traders, 553
state societies and, 553–54
in Sub-Saharan Africa, 556–57
in Sudan, Christianity vs., 552–53
Swahili, 553
tariqa (brotherhoods), conversions by, 552, 555
terrorism, religious fundamentalism and, 557–58, 559
women and, 559
Yao, of Mozambique, 554, 555, 559
Islam, in US, 578–81
Immigration Act of 1965, 580
immigration and, 578–79, 581
Middle Passage and, 579
NOI (Nation of Islam), 579–80
religious movements, 579–80
Sunni Islam, 580
Italy, in Africa, 134, 305
Jackson, Augustus, 474

Jackson, Jesse, 172
Jackson, Shirley, 476
Jackson State College, Black Studies Institute at, 47
Jacobs, Harriet (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), 458
Jahn, Janheinz, 443
1055
Jamaica
Nanny (Maroon leader), 603–4
women in, 606, 610
James, C. L. R., 229
James, Rick, 389
jazz, African influence on, 369–85, 409–10
“Africanisms” in, 363
avant-gard, free, and creative music, 382–83
Count Basie, 373, 377–78
bebop, 378–79
brass bands, 371–72
Duke Ellington, 373, 374–77
evolution of, 370–72, 409–10
5-man group, 372
hard bop, 379–80
jazz fusion, funky style and, 380–81
jazz rock, 381
musical/non-musical trends in, 383–85
musicians and scholars of, 369–71
New Orleans jazz, 371
7-man group, 372
soul jazz, 381
swing music and bands, 372–74
third stream, 381
Jemie, Onwuchekwa, 440
Jim Crow segregation, 42
Johnkingsley, Emeka, 662–63
Johnson, James Weldon, 459–60, 463
Johnson, Lonnie, 475–76
Johnson, Mat, 470
Johnston, Joshua, 428
Jones, Jim, 129
1056
Jones, LeRoi (Dutchman), 467
Jordan, Michael, 487
Jua, Natang B., 25
Jubilee (Alexander), 47
Julian, Percy, 475
Just, Ernest E., 475
Kalina/calenda dances, in the Caribbean, 336

Kane, Cheik Hamidou (Ambigous Adventure), 444
Kayongo-Male, Diane, 12–13
Kennedy, Dane, 127
Kenya
circumcision and clitoridectomy in, 546
women's nationalism in, 212
Kenyatta, Jomo, 201–2
Keyes, Alan, 314
Khapoya, Vincent, 193
Ki-Zerbo, Joseph, 7
King, Bruce, 443, 447
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 161–62, 163–64
play about, 468
stressing cooperation with Africa, 291
Kingsley, Mary, 126
Komunyakaa, Yusef, 461–62
Konadu, Kwasi, 30
Kool Herc, 394–95
kora, 326
Kountz, Samuel L., 475
“Kromanti dance,” in the Caribbean, 334
Kush, history of, 68–69, 69–70
Lagos Market Women's Association, 215

Lamar, Kendrick, 399–400
1057
Langer, William, 131
languages
linguists, in Africa, 65
linguists, in African Studies, 17–18
Latimer, Lewis Howard, 475
Lawrence, Jacob, 431–32
Laye, Camara (The African Child), 444
Lenin, V. I., 130
Lewis, Edmonia, 429–30
Liberia, 223–24, 301–2, 303
The Life of Olaudah Equiano (Equiano), 443
Lincoln, Abraham, 113–14
literature, African American, 455–70
Afrofuturism, 466
anthologies, 470
“badman” heroes, 457–58
black community focus of, 465
CAAR (Collegium of African American Research), 470
Caribbean literature, 612–13
conjure women in, 457
drama, 466–68
encyclopedic and internet resources, 470
fiction, 462–66
fictional portraits of African Americans, 463–64
folk tradition, as inspiration, 457–58, 458–59
gay/lesbian materials, 469
graphic novels, 469–70
Harlem Renaissance, 460, 463
horror narratives, 466
man-of-words tradition in, 457
music and, 456–57
neo-slave narrative, of fiction, 465
1058
New Black Aesthetic movement, 461–62
oral narratives, 456–57
poetry, 459–62
poets, prize-winning, 461–62
slave/freedom narrative tradition, 458–59, 469
Southern territory in, 468–69
“Street Literature,” 469
literature, in Africa, 439–47
African folklore, 442
African literature, definition, 440–41
African women writers, 446–47
early African fiction, 443
genre differentiation, 442
on Igbo history, 442
imperialism, effect on, 445
in indigenous African and non-African languages, 443
literary classics and award winners, 439
modern African literature, 444–46
modern African poetry and drama, 446
music and, 442
Negritude movement, 444
performance as “text,” 442
socialized nature of, 445–46
traditional oral/written literature, 439–40, 441–43, 451
literature, in Caribbean, 447–50
Creole dialect use in, 449–50
effect of geography on, 448
emigration as theme, 448–49
history of, 447–48
matriarchal social structure in, 449
nationalism of, 448
poverty and folk themes in, 449
1059
regional nature of, 447
traditional African theme vs. Caribbean identity, 450
Livingstone, David, 124, 195
Lumumba, Patrice, 207
lynching, statistics, 518, 519T
Madubuike, Ihechukwu, 440

Mair, Lucille Mathurin, 602
malaria, statistics, 665, 667–68, 669
Malcolm X, 164, 291, 579–80
Mandela, Nelson, 256, 260
Maroon colonies, in Caribbean, 101, 184, 338–39, 603
marriages, 498, 504, 605–6
Marxist model, of African Studies, 20–21
matrilineal societies, 502–3, 504, 510, 625. See also patrilineal
societies
Mazrui, Ali, 264, 585
mbira, 326
Mbiti, John, 586
McAdoo, Harriet Pipes, 513–14
McAfee, Walter, 475
McCoy, Elijah, 475
McKay, Claude, 460
McMillan, Terry, 465
Meadows, Eddie S., 361
Meatzinger, Jan, 475
meringue dance, 351, 352, 354
Meriwether, W. Delano, 475
Methodist faith, 568
Mexico, art in, 434
Middle Passage, 85–87, 90, 98–99, 579
migrations. See also African diaspora (contemporary); emigration
motives/schemes
1060
in African American literature, 458
and blues, African influence on, 365
from Caribbean, 185–86
equality, quest for, 154, 176
Great Migration, Christianity and, 571
Miles, Alexander, 475
military, 13–14, 210, 212, 243–44
Mintz, Sidney, 202
Mkdandawire, Thandika, 23–24, 27
Mohamed, Bibi Titi, 210–12
Moorhead, Scipio, 428
Moorland Spingarn Research Center, at Howard University, 47–48
Morgan, Garrett A., 475
Morgan, Irene, 642
Morrison, Toni, 466, 468, 470
Morton, Jelly Roll, 368
Moseley, Beauregard F., 486
Motown recording label, evolution of, 390–92
Moynihan, Daniel, 513, 532
Mozambique, Islam and, 554, 555, 559
Muhammad, of Islam doctrine, 551
mulattos, legal status of, 628–29
“Muscular Christianity” movement, 484–85
music, African American genres of, 359–411
“Africanisms” in musical traditions, 360–61, 363
bebop, hard bop and, 378–80
blues, African influence on, 363–69
Carolina Chocolate Drops, 362
Chatmon family, musical legacy of, 361–62
contributions by immigrants to, 280–82
Euro-American classical music, 407–9
funk, 389–90
1061
hip hop, rap and, 394–400
jazz, African influence on, 369–85, 409–10
Eddie S. Meadows, 361
musical culture, variation in musical styles and, 359–60
neo soul, 393–94
old-time music, 361–62, 411
recording labels and marketing of, 386–87, 390–93
regional rap, 397–98
religious music, 400–407, 410–11
rhythm and blues, doo-wop and, 385–87
scholars, of blues genre, 363
soul music, 388–89
swing music, 372–78
Tennessee Chocolate Drops, 362
Richard Waterman, 360
Olly Wilson, 360–61
music, traditional instruments/vocal styles of Africa, 323–30. See also
Caribbean, music and dance of
African women and, 327
choral singing, 327
dance, 325
drums, 326–27, 329
ensemble performances, 328–30
flutes, 326
griot, 325
group music, 324, 325
hemiola, 329, 356
listener's music, 324–25
musical instruments, 326
personal music, 324
polyrhythm feature, 328–29
praise songs, 327–28
scholarly debates on, 354–55
1062
singing styles, content and, 326–28
vocal polyphony, 329–30
work songs, 328
NAACP (National Association for the advancement of Colored

People), 157, 160, 161
Nanny (Maroon leader, in Caribbean), 603–4
National Negro Business League, 478
nationalism, of African Americans, 296
nationalism, of Africans, 193–217
Aba Women's War, 213–15
African nationalism, definition, 193
African solidarity, 205
African women and, 208–13
Berlin Conference, 196
Edward W. Blyden, influence of, 203
buranbur (poems), 213
Cold War, 197–200
colonialism, establishment of, 194–96
W. E. B. Du Bois, influence of, 204
dualism, 209
early Christianity and, 200–201
explorers, 195–96
Marcus Garvey, influence of, 204
influences on, 200–205
Kenya, women's nationalism in, 212
Jomo Kenyatta, influence of, 201–2
Lagos Market Women's Association, 215
Patrice Lumumba, influence of, 207
military, women in, 210, 212
missionary churches, 200–201
Bibi Titi Mohamed, influence of, 210–12
mothering, 209–10
1063
movement, beginning of, 205–8
nationalism, from colonial period, 200
nationalists, 206–8
Nigeria, women's nationalism vs. women in nationalism, 210,
213–16
Kwame Nkrumah, influence of, 206–7
NSSM 39, 199
Julius Nyerere, influence of, 207–8
Pan-Africanism, 202–5
political parties, 206, 216
precursors to, 197–200
self-determination, 193–94, 216
Leopold Senghor, influence of, 202
Somalia, women's nationalism in, 212–13
South Africa, 199–200
Soviet Union in, 198–99
Tanzania, women's nationalism in, 210–12
US policy in, 199–200
Sylvester Williams, influence of, 203–4
women's nationalism, 208–13, 217
WW I, 197
WW II, 197, 215–16
Nationalist-Negro Movement, 301
Negritude movement, 444
neo soul music, 393–94
NEPAD (New Economic Partnership for African Development), 249,
252–53
New Black Aesthetic movement, 461–62
“New Negro” Movement, 153
Nigeria, 311
contemporary art in, 424–27
history of, 70–71
Oshobgo workshop (“Mbari Mbayo”), 426–27
1064
polio and polio vaccination in, 666–67
women's nationalism vs. women in nationalism, 210, 213–16
Nketia, Kwabena, 359–60
Nkrumah, Kwame, 206–7, 231, 291
Nottage, Lynn, 468
NSSM 39, 199
Nubian (Middle Nile) region, of Africa, 68–70
Nunnally, Bennie, 480
Nyamnjoh, Francis B., 25
Nyerere, Julius, 207–8
Nzinga, warrior queen in Angola, 589
OAAU (Organization of Afro-American Unity), 302

OAU (Organization of African Unity), 302
Obama, Barack
as not “African American,” 314
as president, 171–74, 181, 645
as second-generation African immigrant, 287
Obama, Michelle, 645
Obeah, in Caribbean, 575
Obeng-Odoom, Franklin, 31
Ohaegbulam, Festus, 6, 20
The Ohio Players, 389
OIC (Opportunities Industrialization Centers), 479–80
Ojaide, Tanure, 445
Onabolu, Aina, 425
Onoge, O., 12
Onyango, Philista, 12–13
Operation Crossroads Africa, 308
Optimism for Africa (documentary video), 671
oral narratives
in African American literature, 456–57, 465, 466
in slave/freedom narrative traditions, 458–59, 469
1065
Organization of African Unity (1963), 231–33
origins, 221–23
Oshobgo workshop (“Mbari Mbayo”), in Nigeria, 426–27
Our Nig (Wilson), 458
Paddock, Adam, 215

The Palm-Wine Drinkard (Tutuola), 443
palos dance, in the Caribbean, 337
Pan-African Conference (1900), 222
pan-African model, of African Studies, 21
Pan-African Movement, 221–35
African Union (AU), 234–35
Black Power movement, in US, 233
Edward Blyden in, 225
British imperialism, in West and Southern Africa, 222
Robert Campbell in, 224
in Caribbean, 224–25
conferences, 226–27
Paul Cuffee in, 224
definition, 221
Martin Delaney in, 224
early emigrations, 223–25
Ethiopia, Italian invasion of, 229–30
Fifth Pan-African Congress (1945), 230–31
in France, 228–29
Henry Highland Garnet in, 224
Marcus Garvey in, 227–28
in Ghana, 231
in Great Britain, 229
C. L. R. James in, 229
in Latin America, 224–25
Liberia, 223–24
in London, England, 228
1066
militancy of, 230
Kwame Nkrumah in, 231
Organization of African Unity (1963), 231–33
origins, 221–23
Pan-African Conference (1900), 222
repatriation experience, 223–24
1980s, events of, 233–34
Sierra Leone, 223–24
Henry McNeal Turner in, 225–26
Henry Sylvester Williams in, 222
papal bulls
historic background of, 94–95, 685–86
Inter Caetera, 685–86
Romanus Pontifex, colonialism and, 94–96, 689–91
Romanus Pontifex, purpose of, 683–84, 685, 686–89, 693
Park, Mungo, 124
Parks, Rosa, 642
Parks, Suzan-Lori, 467–68
passage rites. See rites of passage/initiation
patenting, by African American scientists, 474–76, 490
patriarchal societies, 583–84, 624–25, 650
patrilineal societies
in Africa, 499–502, 504–5, 510
divorce in, 501, 502, 510
grooms' responsibilities in, 501–2
women in, 501
Peace Movement of Ethiopia, 301
“peculiar institution,” 112, 515
Pentecostalism, 570–71, 580
PEPFAR, in Africa, 663–64
Phillips, Delores (The Darkest Child), 469
Philosophy of History (Hegel), 692
1067
Poitier, Sidney, 482
Portugal. See also Age/Doctrine of Discovery
colonial policy of, in Africa, 133, 134–35
as discoverers of Africa, 683, 684
Portuguese crusades, into Africa, 543–44, 684–85
rights of, 95–96
poverty
in Africa, 241–42, 509
folk themes in, 449
in US, 170, 646
in US, statistics, 520–21, 522, 525
praise songs, 327–28
Price, Richard, 202
protest tradition, 152, 175, 464–66
Protestantism, in Africa, 97, 98, 544–45, 691–92
Puerto Rico, women in, 607–8
queen mothers, 585, 590–91

Qur'an, 551
racial discrimination, in US
African American families and, 530
African reactions to, 311–12
against Haitians, 273
in sport, 484
racism, in US
African influence on, 312
business ownership and, 474, 477, 479, 480
in history of Black women, 621–22, 647–50
as motive for emigration, 303
quest for equality against, 157–58, 159
slavery and, 103–4
in sport, 486, 487–88
1068
rada traditional songs, of the Caribbean, 336
A Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry), 467
Randolph, Philip, 156
rap music. See hip hop, rap music and
Rastafarianism, Dread and, 189, 578
Reconstruction Era, 141, 142–54, 175, 637–38
recording labels, of soul/funk music, 390–93
reggae, from the Caribbean, 348–49, 350, 353
religion, African diaspora and, 565–81
African religious traditions, 574–75
Black Church movement, in US, 568–74
Christianity, in Caribbean, 576–78
Christianity and slavery, in US, 567
conjure (hoodoo) tradition, in US, 565–66
Islam, in US, 578–81
Rastafarianism, in Jamaica, 578
Vodou, in Haiti, 575–76
religion, in Africa. See Christianity, in Africa; Islam, in Africa;
Traditionalism
religious/conquest rituals, 687–88
religious music, 400–407, 410–11
gospel music, 403–7, 410–11
spirituals, origins and performers of, 400–403, 410–11
reparations, 169–70
repatriation experience, 223–24
Republic of South Africa (RSA)
African nationalism in, 199–200
anti-apartheid activism, 169–70
history of, 253–56, 259–60
HIV/AIDS in, 661, 664–65
Women's Coalition, activism by, 593
Richardson, Marilyn (Maria W. Stewart: America's First Black
Woman Political Writer), 633–34
1069
Rillieux, Norbert, 475
“ring shouts,” 566, 567
rites of passage/initiation. See also circumcision
in African families, 505
Christianity and, 546
Traditionalism and, 540
Robeson, Paul, 482
Robinson, R. E., 132
Rodney, Walter, 82–83, 84–85, 88
Romanus Pontifex. See also Age/Doctrine of Discovery
colonialism and, 94–96, 689–91
purpose of, 683–84, 685, 686–89, 693
“root doctors,” 566
Rostow, W. W., 19
Rotberg, Robert, 127, 128
Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre, 638–39
rumba dance, in the Caribbean, 342, 352
Russwurm, John B., 297
Rwanda, post-genocide in, 594–95
SADC, 245
Sahelanthropus Tchadensis, discovery of, 61
salsa dance, in the Caribbean, 349
sasa, in Traditionalism, 539
science, African Americans in, 473, 474–76, 490
“Scramble for Africa,” as epistemicide, 685, 692–93
segregation, de jure vs. de facto, 154, 159–60, 164, 175–76
self-determination, self-help and
activism, by African Americans, 141–42, 150, 152, 155, 167, 171,
175, 176
Black women, subversive resistance by, 631–32, 633, 636–37
by freedwomen, 637–47
mutual aid societies and, 635–36, 645, 651
1070
uplift, struggle for, 646–47
Senghor, Leopold, 202
Sertima, Ivan van, 78
Shange, Ntozake (For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide
When the Rainbow is Enuf), 467
Shippen, John, 486
Sierra Leone, 223–24, 303
ska music, in the Caribbean, 348, 353
slavery, African diaspora and, 93–116, 264–65
glossary, 115–18
abolitionists, 113
Africanisms, definition, 108
Age/Doctrine of Discovery, 94–98, 115
American Revolution and, 111–12
anti-colonizers, 113
antislavery societies, 112–13, 115
“Black Belt,” 106
“Black Codes,” 100–101
bondspeople, 109, 110–11
in Brazil and Cuba, 104
“breaking in” regimens, 102
Christianity and, 98, 100, 109
conjure (hoodoo) tradition, 565–66
Declaration of Independence and, 105
dehumanization of, 100–101
destinations, 99
economics of, 99–100, 102, 105–6, 115–16
education and literacy, 109–10
emancipation, 114
freed blacks, 109
Haitian Revolution, 111
heritage, business ownership and, 477
indentured servants, 99–100
1071
indigenous peoples, as slaves, 99
Industrial Revolution, 105
“invisible institution,” definition, 109
legal status of, 107, 115
manumission, 107
Maroon colonies, 101
Middle Passage, 98–99
oppression of, 107–8
“peculiar institution,” 112, 515
pro-slavery sections, of US Constitution, 105, 115
rationale for, 93–94
religious dissenters, 112
religious imperative of, 688–89
resistance, rebellion and, 101–2, 603
revolts, list of, 101
“ring shouts,” 566, 567
“root doctors,” 566
“saltwater” enslaved, definition, 102
“Seasoning” regimens, 102
secession, 113–14
slave masters, mistreatment by, 107
slaves, profiles of, 108–9
in South Carolina, 517
spirituals, use of, 400–402
statistics, 98, 104–5, 106, 115
Underground Railroad, 112
in US, 102–8, 111
in Virginia, 103–4, 105–6, 515–16
small pox, 658–59
soca, in the Caribbean, 347–48
Somalia, women's nationalism in, 212–13
soul jazz, 381
1072
soul music, 388–89
South Africa. See Republic of South Africa (RSA)
South Carolina, slave families in, 517
South Sudan, 256–57
Soviet Union, African nationalism and, 198–99
Spain, colonial policy of, 134
Speke, John Hanning, 124–25, 127
Spiritualism, in Caribbean, 189
spirituals, origins and performers of, 400–403, 410, 456–57
sport, African Americans in, 483–90, 491
Asians in, statistics, 489
baseball, 485–86, 488
basketball, 488–89
black women in, 489
boxing, 486, 488
early historical perceptions of, 483–84
education and, 490
golf and tennis circuits, 486–88
horse racing, 485
Latinos in, statistics, 489
leagues, 486, 489, 490
“Muscular Christianity” movement, 484–85
race relations in, 485
racial discrimination in, 484
racism in, 486, 487–88
science and, 485
“separate but equal” in, 485
speed cycling, 486
statistics, 489, 489T
tennis professionals, 487–88
track and field female athletes, 489
Staniland, Martin, 33–34
1073
Stanley, Henry Morton, 125, 195–96
Staple Singers, 404–5
Stax Records recording label and sound, 392–93
Stephen Lewis Foundation model, 674–75
Stewart, Maria W., 633–34, 636
Maria W. Stewart: America's First Black Woman Political Writer
(Richardson), 633–34
Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), 662
Sudan, Muslim vs. Christianity in, 552–53
Swaziland (eSwatini), 584–85, 588
Sweetman, David, 589
swing music and bands, 372–74
Swinton, David, 479
tambo (tambu) tradition, in the Caribbean, 334, 338

Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 430
Tanzania, women's nationalism in, 210–12
TARP, 172–73
Tennessee Chocolate Drops, 362
Terrell, Mary Church, 638
They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of
Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (Williams),
637–38
Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 443, 587
Thompson, Joe, 362
Tindley, Charles, 404, 410
Todaro, Michael, 19–20
towa, 330
traditional oral/written literature, in Africa, 439–40, 441–43, 451
Traditionalism, 537–42
ancestors, role of, 539, 558
animism, 540
benefits and detriments, generally, 537
1074
children, exposure to, 540
future of, 542
magic, 541–42
overview, 537–38, 558
sacrifices and prayers, 539–40
sasa, 539
shrines and rituals, 540
sorcery, 541
superstitions in, 540–41, 558
time, concept of, 539
traditional healers, 541–42
zamani, 539
traditionalist model, of African Studies, 20
transatlantic slavery, 75–91
in Africa, 80–82
African explorers, to the “New World,” 78
dehumanization of, 83, 85–86, 90
enslaved Africans, 79–80
enslaved Amerindians, 78–79
epistemicide, cause of, 89, 91
epistemology, African vs. European, 76, 91
Europe, dawn of modernity and, 75–76
European explorers, to the “New World,” 77–78, 90
indentured servants, as early slaves, 78–79
Inward Passage, 87
modes of acquisition, 83–85
relationships from, 310–11
slave dungeons, in West Africa, 85
slave ships (Middle Passage), 85–87, 90
slavery, legitimacy of, 75, 90
socioeconomic impact on Africa by, 87–89, 91
in Sparta and Athens, 80
1075
statistics, of slaves, 82–83
Triangular Trade, 87, 90
Trethewey, Natasha, 462
Triangular Trade
Age/Doctrine of Discovery and, 96
transatlantic slavery, 87, 90, 182
Truth, Sojourner, 633–34
tuberculosis, statistics, 665, 666, 668–69
Ture, Kwame (Stokely Carmichael), 46, 233, 272, 302–3
Turner, Henry McNeal, 225–26
Tutuola, Amos (The Palm-Wine Drinkard), 443
Uganda, 509, 674

UNCTAD, 248
Underground Railroad, 112
UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association), 300, 301
US Constitution, pro-slavery sections of, 105, 115
Van Peebles, Melvin, 482

Virginia
slave families in, 515–16
slavery and African diaspora in, 103–4, 105–6, 515–16
vocal polyphony, 329–30
voting franchise. See elected officials
Voting Rights Act of 1965, 312
Walcott, Derek, 450

Walker, C.J., 478
Walsh, William, 449
Washington, Booker T., 148–50, 478, 484
Waterman, Richard, 360
Wells, Ida B., 150–51, 638
West, James E., 476
Wheatley, Phillis, 459
1076
White, Deborah Gray (Arn'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the
Plantation South), 629
Williams, Carol, 529–30
Williams, Daniel Hale, 475
Williams, Henry Sylvester, 222
Williams, Kidada E. (They Left Great Marks on Me: African
American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to
World War I), 637–38
Williams, Michael, 524
Williams, Sylvester, 203–4
Williams, Walter E., 525, 530–31
Wilson, August, 467
Wilson, Harriet (Our Nig), 458
Wilson, Olly, 360–61
Winfrey, Oprah, 315
women, of Africa, 583–95
activism by, 592–93, 595
African religions, roles in, 624
as agriculturists, 585–86
associations of, 587–88
colonialism and status of, 591–92, 595
current situation for, 594
economy and, 585–86
female presidents, 595
Islam and, 559
matriarchal vs. patriarchal societies, 583–84
motherhood and, 585
political engagement of, 588–89
queen mothers, 585, 590–91
in Rwanda, 594–95
supernatural powers and, 588
traditional African religions and, 586
traditional status and roles of, 583, 595
1077
women writers, 446–47
women's movements, post-independence, 593
women, of America, 619–52
African cultural philosophy and, 623–24
antebellum-era organizations, 635–36
as atheletes and artists/writers, 645
Black family, survival of, 639–40, 641–42
Black feminism, Black female stereotypes and, 150–52, 170–71
Black women leadership, 638
Black Women's Club Movement, 638–39
childhood, resistance and identity in, 631, 651
children, matrilineal legal status of, 628
children, naming patterns for, 630–31
as civil rights activists, 640–44, 651
as elected officials, 644–45, 652
enslavement, Black “history” of, 621–23, 648–50
free Black American women, post-emancipation, 634–37
gender identity, as African, 622–23
as human rights activists, 642–43
incarceration of Black men and, 646
incest taboo, 626
intersectionality, 619–20
literacy and religious principles of, 632–33
matrilineal descent, partnership structures with, 625
misogyny, in history, 649
mulattos, legal status of, 628–29
patriarchal societies, male and female roles in, 624–25, 650
plantation roles, 629–30
poverty and, 646
racism, in history, 621–22, 647–50
Reconstruction, racial violence during, 637–38
self-determination, freedwomen and, 637–47
1078
self-help and mutual aid societies, 635–36, 645, 651
shared heritage, of Black American women and men, 619
subversive resistance by, 631–32, 633, 636–37
union membership and, 639
uplift, struggle for, 646–47
West African women, as leaders, 625–26
women, as sexual objects, 626–28
women, of the Caribbean, 599–613
Amerindian cultures, 600–601
analysis of, generally, 599–600
Caribbean history, legacies of, 600–605
child abuse, sexual assault rates and, 609
children, marriage and, 605–6
female-headed households, 606–7
gender iniquities, statistics, 609–10
glossary, 614–15
independence of, 608–9
in Jamaica, 606, 610
literature, in the diaspora, 612–13
maroons, 603
Nanny (Maroon leader), 603–4
population by gender, statistics, 602
in Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and, 607–8
racial/ethic backgrounds of, 601
sexuality, HIV/AIDS and, statistics, 611–12
slavery, insubordination by, 603
tourism, women's work and, 610–11
worker insurrections by, 604
Woods, Eldrick “Tiger,” 487
Woods, Granville T., 475, 476
work songs, 328
World Bank, statistics by, 242, 259
1079
Wright, Louis T., 475
Wright, Richard, 464
X, Malcolm, 164, 291, 579–80
Young, Carlen, 51–52
zamani, in Traditionalism, 539

Zambia, economic contributions by women in, 585–86
Zimbabwe, history of, 71
Zuma, Jacob, 260
1080
Contents
PART I
INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE
1 · African Studies and the State of the Art
Introduction
The Disciplines and the “State of the Art” in African Studies
The Surfacing and Re-Emergence of Old and New Issues in
African Studies: The Twenty-First Century
Summary
References
2 · African American Studies and the State of the Art
Introduction
Historical Context
Early Funding for African American Studies and the Ford
Foundation
Summary
References
PART II
PEOPLES OF AFRICAN DESCENT AND THEIR PLACE IN HISTORY
3 · Africa and the Genesis of Humankind
Introduction
1081
Bantu Expansion
Egypt
The Middle Nile
Summary
References
4 · Transatlantic Slavery and the Underdevelopment of Africa
Introduction
The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Africa's Underdevelopment
Summary
References
5 · Diaspora Africans and Slavery
Introduction
Resistance and Rebellion: A Recurring Response to Oppression
Summary
Glossary
References
6 · European Exploration and Conquest of Africa
Introduction
Summary
References
7 · The Quest for Equality: From Reconstruction to Obama
Introduction
Reconstruction: Education, Leadership, and the “Negro”
1082
Movement
Summary
References
8 · The African Experience in the Caribbean: Continuity and
Change
Introduction
Post-Emancipation Caribbean: Labor Movements and
Decolonization
Social Issues: African-Caribbean Languages and Religions
Summary
References
9 · African Nationalism: Freedom for Men, Women, and the
Nation
Introduction
Precursors to African Nationalism: WWI, WWII, and the Cold
War
The Movement Begins
Women in Nationalism or Women's Nationalism? A Nigerian
Case Study
Summary
References
10 · The Pan-African Movement
Introduction
Summary
References
1083
PART III
THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE OF THE BLACK WORLD
11 · The Contemporary African World
Introduction
Southern Africa
The Chinese Puzzle: Neo-Colonialism or Assistance to
“Comrades in Arms”?
Summary
References
12 · The Contemporary African Diaspora
Introduction
Pull Factors
Caribbean Migration
The First Phase
The Second Phase
The Third Phase
African Migration
The First Phase
The Second Phase
The Third Phase
African Communities
Popular Culture Representations of African and Caribbean
People
Television and Film
Music
Identity
Other Diasporas
The Americas
Europe
Summary
1084
References
13 · Continental Africans and Africans in America: The
Progression of a Relationship
Introduction
Summary
References
PART IV
CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE BLACK WORLD
14 · Music in Africa and the Caribbean
Introduction
Music in Africa
Summary
References
15 · African American Music: An Introduction
Introduction
Cultural Spheres
Richard Waterman
Olly Wilson
Eddie S. Meadows
Old-Time Music
Africa in Blues
Classic Blues
1085
New Orleans Ragtime
St. Louis Ragtime
Eastern Ragtime
Africa in Jazz
Jazz Styles
5-Man Group
7-Man Group
Swing
Duke Ellington
Count Basie
Bebop
Hard Bop
Soul Jazz
Jazz Rock
Third Stream
Issues, Trends, and Developments in Jazz, Past and Present
Soul Music
Funk
Recording Labels
Motown
Stax Records
The Stax Sound
Neo Soul
Hip Hop
Hip Hop Culture
Regional Rap
Religious Music
Spirituals
1086
Gospel
1900–1930
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970–2017
Summary
Selected References
African Origins, Retentions, Transformations, and
Reinterpretation
General
Spirituals
Gospel
16 · The Art of Africa and the Diaspora
Introduction
Toward an Approach to Understanding Traditional African Art
Summary
References
Images in Videos and Website Articles of Artwork for the Early
Part of This Chapter
Rock Art
Maasai
17 · Literature in Africa and the Caribbean
Introduction
Definition
1087
Summary
References
18 · African American Literature: A Survey
Introduction
Summary
References
19 · Contributions in Science, Business, Film, and Sports
Introduction
Summary
References
PART V
SOCIETY AND VALUES IN THE BLACK WORLD
20 · The African Family
Introduction
Family Structure
Summary
References
21 · The African American Family
Introduction
Summary
1088
References
22 · Religion in Africa
Introduction
Summary
References
23 · Religion in the Diaspora
Introduction
The Church in the Caribbean: Missionary Work on the Islands
Prior to Emancipation
Rastafarianism
Summary
References
24 · The Evolving Roles of African Women
Introduction
Religion and Status
Two Queen Mothers
1089
Case Study: Rwanda
Summary
References
25 · Women of the Caribbean
Introduction
Overview of Caribbean Women's Literature in the Diaspora
Glossary
References
26 · Lifting as We Rise: Women in America
Introduction
Freedwomen
Summary
References
27 · Africa Anew: Reinventing Community Alliances and
Indigenous Ways in the Age of HIV/AIDS
Introduction
The Development of Western Medicine in Africa: A Brief
Overview
Western Medicine and Africa's Campaign against Major
Diseases
Empowerment and Development through Health: Positive
Lessons from the Anti-River Blindness Project in Africa
Future Africa: Community Self-Mobilization in the Age of
1090
HIV/AIDS and Other Challenges
Community Responses to the Health Crisis: The Stephen Lewis
Foundation Model in Africa
Summary
References
28 · Debunking the Myth of the Doctrine of the Discovery of
Africa
Introduction
From Non-Christians to People without Religion: Christendom's
Conquest, Cosmological Fundamentalism, and the Origins of
Modern Africa
From Non-Christians to the “Zone of Non-Being”: Conquest and
the Order of the Colonial World
From Non-Humans to People without Art, History, And Science:
The Scramble for Africa, Epistemic Fundamentalism, and the
Secular Reconquest of the Continent
Summary
References
PART VI
APPENDIXES
Appendix A
Selected Maps
Pre-Colonial Africa
Colonial Africa
Present-Day Africa
The Caribbean
Appendix B
Appendix C
Selected Periodicals and References in Africana Studies
Available in the United States
Index
1091

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Africana Studies

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Azevedo, Mario Joaquim, editor, author.

Carolina Academic Press, LLC

Printed in the United States of America

1 · African Studies and the State of the Art

2 · African American Studies and the State of the Art

3 · Africa and the Genesis of Humankind

4 · Transatlantic Slavery and the Underdevelopment of Africa

5 · Diaspora Africans and Slavery

6 · European Exploration and Conquest of Africa

7 · The Quest for Equality: From Reconstruction to Obama

8 · The African Experience in the Caribbean: Continuity and Change

9 · African Nationalism: Freedom for Men, Women, and the Nation

10 · The Pan-African Movement

11 · The Contemporary African World

12 · The Contemporary African Diaspora

13 · Continental Africans and Africans in America: The Progression of a

14 · Music in Africa and the Caribbean

15 · African American Music: An Introduction

16 · The Art of Africa and the Diaspora

17 · Literature in Africa and the Caribbean

18 · African American Literature: A Survey

19 · Contributions in Science, Business, Film, and Sports

20 · The African Family

21 · The African American Family

24 · The Evolving Roles of African Women

25 · Women of the Caribbean

26 · Lifting as We Rise: Women in America

27 · Africa Anew: Reinventing Community Alliances and Indigenous Ways

28 · Debunking the Myth of the Doctrine of the Discovery of Africa

I am extremely pleased that, after years of careful thought, methodical

Intellectual Foundations of the Black

African Studies and the State of the

African American Studies and the

Peoples of African Descent and Their

Africa and the Genesis of

1. The physical environment conditions and constrains human activity and,

Major terms and concepts: Paleolithic age, Neolithic age, a continent of

From Sahelanthropus Tchadiensis to Homo Sapiens

The Middle Nile

Other Early and Late African States

1. On the scholarly controversy over Egypt and Afrocentricity, see Chapter 2.

Transatlantic Slavery and the

Diaspora Africans and Slavery

European Exploration and Conquest

The Quest for Equality: From

The African Experience in the

African Nationalism: Freedom for

The Pan-African Movement

The Present and the Future of the

The Contemporary African World

The Contemporary African Diaspora

Table I: The Composition of Black America

Table II: Number of Refugee Arrivals into the US

Table III: History of Caribbean Immigration to the US

The First Phase

The Second Phase

The Third Phase

Table IV: Number of Africans Coming to the US on Immigrant

Table V: Immigration Trends in Select African Countries

The First Phase

The Second Phase