The relationship between African Americans and the African continent is multifaceted, shaped by history, identity, and sociopolitical factors. This article explores the complex and evolving views of African Americans towards Africa, examining historical perspectives, cultural connections, and contemporary challenges.
Map of Africa
Historical Context: Severed Ties and Lingering Connections
The transatlantic slave trade, a brutal chapter in history, profoundly impacted the relationship between Africans and their descendants in the New World. In the West African Kingdom of Dahomey, before the Kingdom’s captives departed for the New World to be enslaved, they were forced “to march around the ‘Tree of Forgetfulness’ six times” so that they would remember neither their home continent nor the people they were leaving behind. These voyages have frequently been referred to as the Middle Passage, a one-way journey transforming Africans into Black slaves. Its irreversibility is a bedrock of the African American origin story.
Despite the cruelty of slavery throughout the Atlantic world and herculean efforts on the part of European and African elites to force the enslaved to forget their past, connections between the African diaspora in the New World and those who remained in Africa persisted and grew. Historical records, however, show that occasionally, some captives, even after forcibly crossing the Atlantic, later returned to their homes in Africa as freemen.
In 1777, a British slaver, Captain Benjamin Hughes, sold African navigators - who enjoyed the status of freemen along the Gold Coast - into slavery. Years before, according to Christopher Leslie Brown’s “Moral Capital,” nine Englishmen had been taken hostage over a similar incident. Fearing disruptions to trade, the British Company of Merchants Trading to Africa dispatched Cofee Aboan, a relative of the surviving captive Quamino Amissah, urgently to the West Indies to bring him home by way of England and sued Hughes for damages. This story demonstrates, Brown writes, that even at the height of Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, “the British were in no position to treat all black people alike.”
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Transatlantic Slave Trade Routes
Pan-Africanism: A Bridge Across the Atlantic
By the beginning of the 20th century, ties across the Atlantic gave rise to Pan-Africanism, which helped fuel the social movements that resulted in the wave of independent states in Africa and Civil Rights legislation in the United States during the 1960s. As an ideology, Pan-Africanism’s fiercest proponents - W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Sylvester Williams, C. L. R. James and George Padmore - argued that the struggle for national self-determination was essential to the reassertion of Black Africans’ rightful place on the world stage and their self-respect. Pan-Africanism sees the suffering of Black people throughout the world, whether from colonialism, slavery or segregation, as interrelated. No less a figure than Martin Luther King Jr. understood these struggles to be connected. In Ghana for the celebration of its independence from Britain, Dr. King said, “This event, the birth of this new nation, will give impetus to oppressed peoples all over the world.
Challenges to Pan-Africanism and the Rise of Afro-Pessimism
Yet by the 1990s, the equation of self-determination with self-respect was being challenged from three directions. The first and perhaps oldest line of critique, launched during the Cold War, argued that when nationalist movements came to power, they frequently created authoritarian states. The second, building on postcolonial authoritarianism, highlighted the ways in which African elites were impoverishing their peoples. Finally, a powerful strand of pessimism swept over Black American intellectuals in the 1990s, fueled by disappointment in the performance of postcolonial states and a growing sense that slavery and colonialism were not analogous to one another.
The Afro-pessimists reject the equation of the struggles of a permanent minority with anti-colonial nationalism in Africa and Asia. Afro-pessimism is a theory developed by Black American intellectuals like Frank Wilderson, Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, which holds that the experience of racism and slavery in the Americas makes the Black American experience so unique that it cannot be compared with the suffering of other peoples. Rendered strangers by the Middle Passage, Afro-pessimists see no shared identity that can serve as the basis for solidarity between Africans and African Americans. Because they insist on the particularity of the Black American struggle and refuse to see it as connected to and reflected in the struggles of other anti-colonial movements, they are more isolated from Africa than even earlier generations. This is despite greater migration over the last few decades and vastly increased communication and transportation links between the United States and the continent. The rise of Afro-pessimism in the 1990s has helped to freeze in place a view of the continent as “hopeless,” as the cover of The Economist announced in May 2000.
Writing in the immediate aftermath of the African Tragedy, Columbia University Professor Saidiya Hartman asserted that for Africans, “independence was a short century.” After a little less than a decade of independence, Ghana, in many ways the poster child for Pan-Africanism under the leadership of the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, experienced the first of several military coups in 1966. Coups swept the continent in the 1970s and ‘80s, and southern Africa and the Horn of Africa were ravaged by some of the last large-scale conflicts, outside of Afghanistan, witnessed by the twilight years of the Cold War.
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Intellectually, pessimism about the political capacity of Africans to govern themselves reigned supreme in the elite universities of the United States and Britain, as well as in foreign policy think tanks and large international financial institutions. In 1981, Harvard political scientist Robert Bates’ “Markets and States in Tropical Africa” captured the zeitgeist by pointing out that agriculture - the backbone of many African states’ economies - was declining in productivity due to the flagrant negligence of political elites, who favored their own political constituencies over the needs of the general population. In this context, one would be forgiven for seeing a connection between self-interested and shortsighted contemporary African elites, who traded immediate personal gains for the long-term interest of their states and people, and the African rulers during the centuries of the slave trade who made similar calculations.
South Africa's Independence and Lingering Disappointments
The Afro-pessimists of the 1990s came of age just as South Africa won its independence from white minority rule. This victory was a symbol of the political power of Pan-Africanism, as it grew out of decades of tireless activism by South African activists in the cities and townships, as well as the strength of a global anti-apartheid coalition. Despite the presence of staunch supporters for segregation inside Reagan’s administration, the State Department begin to distance itself from the apartheid government. This culminated in Nelson Mandela, the future president of South Africa and one-time political prisoner of the apartheid regime, visiting the White House to meet with President George H. W. Bush in 1990.
Yet when the subject of discrimination against Americans of African descent later came up during a town hall hosted by Ted Koppel, Mandela said that, while “the entire mass democratic movement in South Africa condemns racialism wherever it may be found,” it “would not be proper for me to delve into the controversial issues which are tearing the society of this country apart. has produced competent leaders of all population groups who are able to handle their own affairs very effectively.” This invocation of state sovereignty - a refuge unavailable to African Americans, destined to always be a minority - was offensive and disappointing to many Black leaders in the United States, who felt that they had put their own political capital on the line, only to receive so little in return. Similarly, in the works of Black scholars like Hartman, Moten and Wilderson, there is a pessimism about the utility of politics, particularly politics expressed through the institutions of the state.
Cultural Resonance and Reconciliation
The desire to return to Africa remains a powerful impulse throughout the African diaspora. Igbos, an ethnic group located in southeastern Nigeria who disappeared from enslavement in the New World, were often thought to have flown magically back to Africa. Being rescued by one’s African kin is a reoccurring theme in African American cultural consciousness. Just witness the plots of recent Hollywood blockbusters like “Black Panther” and “Coming to America 2.”
As “Black Panther” reveals, however, even cinematic reconciliation is fraught between a Black diaspora estranged from the continent and those who got to stay in the mythical kingdom of Wakanda, largely untouched by the slave trade and European colonialism. In the movie’s final moments, the King of Wakanda, T’Challa, offers Erik Killmonger, the son of a Wakandan abandoned to live in the New World, forgiveness for trying to kill him and overthrow his regime. T’Challa then tells Killmonger that he can return to Wakanda, that his exile can be ended. There is a place for him in Africa, and he does not need to wander any further in the diaspora. In what is perhaps the film’s most poignant line, Killmonger snarls at T’Challa and says, “Just bury me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped from the ships, ‘cause they knew death was better than bondage.” Staring out over Wakanda, Killmonger pulls a blade out of his chest and proceeds to die as T’Challa is left helpless to close the gap between them. Even if only allegorically, the filmmakers end the movie by reaffirming the intractable gap between the descendants of the dispossessed Black diaspora and the subjects of African sovereigns.
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Black Panther
Contemporary Challenges and Perspectives
It’s an irony that the United States’ relationship with Africa, outside of its ever-present security partnerships, grew weaker under its first Black president, Barack Obama. The United States has less of an economic and cultural presence on the continent today than it did at the beginning of the 21st century, though Africa has flourished since then. Between 2000 and 2019, Sub-Saharan Africa enjoyed an average GDP growth rate of 4.35%, according to the World Bank - well above the global average over that time period. These 20 years of respectable growth contrast sharply with what economists call the African Tragedy - the period between 1975 and 1999, when Sub-Saharan Africa’s percentage of global GNP shrank from 17.6% to 10.5%. Health, mortality and literacy rates there had all followed similar trends. The region also had the world’s highest rates of HIV positivity during the 1990s: fully 9% of adults there were living with HIV/AIDs at the turn of the century.
The pessimism in Hartman’s reading of African history stems from the belief that the African elites and the states that they control have for centuries been at best complicit in, if not at the root of, their own people’s exploitations. Even the children’s adaptation of The New York Times’ popular 1619 Project, “Born on the Water,” emphasizes that those of us of African descent in the United States are a new people. A recent review of the children’s book called the idea of being born on the water “beautifully reparative.” In this tale, the child making her family tree is encouraged to reflect on her people’s origins in the Kingdom of Ndongo - which by the 17th century was Catholic and in close alliance with the Portuguese, later fighting alongside them against the larger Kingdom of the Kongo and its Dutch allies.
The narrative arc centers the question of what sort of knowing state allowed its people to be captured and enslaved, before establishing - not without criticism - the idea that African Americans are the foundation upon which the United States is built. Nevertheless, the story is still one of an Africa that, even if not forgotten, willingly forsook some of its people and an imperfect republic in the United States that must be cajoled into accepting its original citizens.
Afrophobia and Prejudice
This article is about negative sentiment towards African peoples and societies, regardless of race. Prejudice against Africans and people of African descent has a long history, dating back to ancient history, although it was especially prominent during the Atlantic slave trade, the trans-Saharan slave trade, the Indian Ocean slave trade, the Red Sea slave trade, and the colonial period. Under the pretence of white supremacism, Africans were often portrayed by Europeans as uncivilised and primitive, with colonial conquest branded civilising missions. In recent years, there has been a rise in Afrophobic hate speech and violence in Europe and the United States. Anti-African sentiment and Afroscepticism are comparable terms to anti-Europeanism and Euroscepticism. Anti-Black racism is a specific manifestation of racism rooted in European colonialism, slavery and oppression of Black people since the sixteenth century.
Some Afrophobic sentiments are based on the belief that Africans are unsophisticated. Often capitalised, negrophobia was first recorded between 1810-1820, and later colourphobia (first recorded in 1834). It likely originated within the abolitionist movement, where it was used as an analogy to rabies (then called hydrophobia) to describe the "mad dog" mindset behind the pro-slavery cause and its apparently contagious nature.
In 2016, "Afrophobia" has been used as a term for racism against darker-skinned persons in China. In such usage, that is an inexact term because the racism is directed against darker-skinned persons from anywhere, without regard to any connection to Africa.
In the United States, some scholars who have studied relationships between African-Americans and African immigrants have observed a “social distance” between both groups. Part of the dynamics of social distance between African-Americans and African immigrants is the coinage of the term akata, a Yoruba name for “wild cat”-used by some African immigrants to describe some African-Americans, especially during hostile encounters.
Violet M. How do black immigrants negotiate national, ethnic, and racial identities? What is the extent of their knowledge and understanding of race relations in America? How do their interests and agendas converge with and diverge from those of native-born blacks? What is the level of race consciousness among black immigrants?
Traveling While Black: Perceptions and Realities
When travelling, being a national of a Western country, or at least appearing to be one, comes with a set of perks that can often transcend race. For, when you present as American (or Canadian, or British, or Australian, for that matter), nobody assumes that you’re over-staying your visitor’s visa, or engaging in another unsavoury practice readily assigned to nationals of developing (or woefully misunderstood) countries. You’re assumed to be educated, to have a decent amount of money to burn, and to be a boon (not burden) to the economy.
Now, while the red carpet isn’t exactly being rolled out for me, I’ve noticed that my presence in certain places is celebrated- not scorned- simply because I “won the birth lottery”. “We’re treated better. I’m a black woman who travels. The majority of my readership comprises black people who travel, or hope to travel at some point.
For certain, the response I get when I speak FIRST before I show my passport is 100% different while travelling. If I show that Green passport first, it’s interrogations all the way. When I meet people and speak English or French with a “French” accent, they’re always very nice and welcoming. When I introduce myself 1st with my passport and say I’m Congolese, most of the time it’s a completely different story, not always but most of the time, especially at airport passport checks and other border control.
Finding peace and community as a Black American in Portugal
African Americans and Africa: A New History
Historian Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden’s African Americans and Africa: A New History explores African Americans’ connection to the African continent and examines how this relationship influenced their historical self-identification. For centuries, African Americans debated their identifications with Africa in order to appropriately characterize their sociopolitical position in the United States. In spite of differential opinions about appropriate identifiers, Blyden’s central argument is that African Americans have always had a relationship with the African continent, though the relationship varies greatly among them. Considering that African Americans have never been a monolithic group, some identify strongly with their African heritage, while others, like Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman who claimed, “I’m not African, I’m American,” suggesting Africa is a part of a discarded past .
African Americans’ relationship to Africa came in three distinct classifications-identification, engagement, and interest. Her development of these classifications reinforces the varied ways African Americans related to Africa both personally and politically. Blyden emphasizes how the first generation of enslaved Africans did not have a conceptualization of Africa. They identified with their respective ethnic tribes. Additionally, the negative images of Africa, coupled with racist scholarship and the weaponized usage of Christianity, made some African Americans avoid an African identification.
The early 19th century marked the first significant era of African American migration to West Africa-specifically Liberia and Sierra Leone. Moving forward chronologically, the author consistently identifies African Americans’ multifaceted connections with Africa in the 20th century. Blyden explores how prominent scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson emphasized that African American culture was influenced by African precedents.
Given the rapid increase of African immigrants to the United States in the 21st century, Blyden poses the question of how African immigrants (who migrated voluntarily to the United States) characterize their relationship with Africa in relation to African Americans. One can only surmise that the relationship that recent generations of Africans have with the continent is primarily tied to their country of origin, as opposed to African Americans who are unable to identify a country of origin, causing them to view the whole continent as the source of their ancestry.
While many Black studies scholars argue that the contemporary relationship between African Americans and continental Africans is nuanced, that assessment is not easily determined in Blyden’s discussion of several continental Africans who traveled to the United States in the early 20th century. Though not an exhaustive text, as admittedly stated by Blyden, it encourages readers to examine how Africa has impacted African Americans’ self-conceptions both historically and contemporarily.
African Americans and Africa: A New History
