For a long period of time, there has been a long-existing history of an unfathomable and silently raging rift between Africans and African-Americans, or “Afro-Americans,” as some now refer. It should be noted that the relationship between these two races can never be erased or forgotten even though there seems to be a discouraging high-level of historical ignorance or lack of in-depth understanding, especially amongst the newer generations of both races.
Black, Negro, African, Colored, Afro-American, and African American are identifiers that reflect the variety of ways African Americans have identified themselves in the United States since forcibly landing on American shores in the 17th century. 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 claimed, “I’m not African, I’m American,” suggesting Africa is a part of a discarded past. Blyden emphasizes how the first generation of enslaved Africans did not have a conceptualization of Africa. They identified with their respective ethnic tribes. In exploring this long chronology, the author addresses the various ways African Americans identified with Africa throughout generations.
Proving that African Americans are not a monolithic group, Blyden emphasizes that the level of identification and interest towards Africa varied geographically in the 18th century. Enslaved African Americans in the South sought to maintain their traditions, while African Americans in the North hoped to integrate into the American polity. Additionally, the negative images of Africa, coupled with racist scholarship and the weaponized usage of Christianity, made some African Americans avoid an African identification.
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.
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Historical Context and Divergent Experiences
We begin by looking at the words of Audrey Smedley, who believes race or ideas about the difference in human color was developed during the era of African slavery. He believed up until the 18th century, Africans were generally positive people who engaged mostly in farming and cattle breeding. They had industries, arts and crafts, commerce and an existing form of government. After invading Africa, the Europeans realized Africans were better farmers and laborers, and immune to several diseases, which were perfect attributes in high demand within the colonialist world at the time.
African slave trading became a lucrative business avenue amongst the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, and after North America was colonized by Europeans, there were vast lands in dire need of labor which led to the purchase of the first permanent African slaves from Dutch in 1619. Due to their physicality and agricultural abilities, the slaves proved to be highly productive on the farms where they mostly cultivated cash crops ranging from sugar, rice and tobacco. After the abolition of slave trade, issues of race got more intensified due to the non-acceptance of black people and has since become the central point of human attention, interaction and relationship.
The creation and addition of a new race in form of Africa-America started a new chapter in human existence and history, which has led to a whole new level of feisty societal restructuring, rebalancing and rearrangements till date. Although whenever issues relating to racial differences arise, most people would most likely always refer to the forever existing tensed-filled relationship between African-Americans and the White race, but not so many would consider the possibility of any discord between other races, most especially Africans and African-Americans.
The early 19th century marked the first significant era of African American migration to West Africa-specifically Liberia and Sierra Leone. Though established as a deportation project by white clergymen and politicians, prominent Black political figures such as Edward Wilmot Blyden and Bishop Henry McNeal Turner saw emigration to Africa as an opportunity to become involved in Africa’s development and encouraged other African Americans to do the same. Additionally, some Black politicians and ministers saw returning to Africa as the only way to achieve sovereignty and freedom from American racism.
Blyden, however, levies a critique of the emigration movement. She contends it was saturated with the concept of ‘providential design.’ Many missionaries internalized negative ideas about Africa and believed they had an obligation to ‘civilize’ the continent. 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.
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By the mid-twentieth century, many African Americans politically identified with Africa and expressed interest in the continent’s uplift during Africa’s decolonization and the Civil Rights Movement. This political identification reflected the recognition of the global subordinate positioning of people of African descent. Conversely, some African Americans took a more domestic approach. They specifically focused on issues that impacted them in the 20th-century United States.
Alden Young is an associate professor of history and global affairs at Yale University. 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. By the middle of the 18th century, the British were annually shipping tens of thousands of Africans in chains from the west coast of Africa across the Atlantic Ocean, feeding their seemingly inexhaustible desire for enslaved labor to work their sugar plantations dotted across the Caribbean.
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. The Dahomey aristocrats forced captives to sever ties with their homeland. In the same vein, contemporary Afro-pessimist intellectuals argue that the Middle Passage means today’s Africans and members of the African diaspora have forgotten one another.
Historical records, however, show that occasionally, some captives, even after forcibly crossing the Atlantic, later returned to their homes in Africa as freemen. 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. 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. 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. Yet by the 1990s, the equation of self-determination with self-respect was being challenged from three directions. The Afro-pessimists reject the equation of the struggles of a permanent minority with anti-colonial nationalism in Africa and Asia. 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.
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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. 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.
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. 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.
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. Amissah, despite being captured, smuggled across the Atlantic and forced to work as a slave, was never stripped of his social relations or rendered kinless. In the end, his people used their political power to call him back to their land.
The desire to return to Africa remains a powerful impulse throughout the African diaspora. 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.
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. It is a skepticism about whether people of the African diaspora can find meaning in a shared narrative of the past or hope of the future that makes Hartman doubt the political potential of an identity like Africa.
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. 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 highpoint of Pan-Africanism was the anti-apartheid struggle. But in recent decades, African American civil society has been marked in part by a rising movement called American Descendants of Slavery, a popular nationalist movement that argues that the United States and Black Americans should sh... March 3, 2023
Map of the African Diaspora
Comparison of Suffering and Opportunities
The first reason to consider is the comparison debate between Africans and African-Americans, about who have suffered or continuously suffers the most. We begin by considering the latter’s historical slavery struggles which has obviously spilled over and transformed into the present-day inequality and inequity they are continuously forced to endure. History clearly made us realize the dehumanizing and disheartening low-level of inhumane treatments and conditions they had to go through before the abolition of slavery, and it is no longer news that the present American structure and system is continuously finessed to favor Caucasians who are majority over the minority blacks.
With this understanding, some African-Americans always see African immigrants as opportunist who are profiting from their struggles despite not having shared in their pains or experienced the horrible and derogatory racial discriminations like they did, which is a reason for their mutual relationship with White Americans. On the other hand, Africans continuously grieve their pathetic level of underdevelopment which evidence suggest came as a result of the European invasion. As earlier stated, the entire African continent was developing at a steady pace but lost the plot when valuable human and material resources were taken by the colonialists.
According to Nathan Nunn, slavery is the major factor for Africa’s underdevelopment till date; a phenomenon which has created ethnic fractionalization and undermined the effectiveness of several African nations. Recent studies suggest Africa’s 72% average income gap with the rest of the world would not have existed if not for slave trade. He believes the reason for the continent’s poor economic performance is due to the effect of slave trade and colonialism which has led to the endless poverty and incessant conflict, poor leadership, lack of basic social amenities and infrastructure, over dependency on foreign aid, poor health and educational facilities, amongst other challenges. It also affects the present cultural and social outcomes of the continent responsible for the present ethnic division, trust concerns, HIV prevalence, ethno-religious differences, and the high rate of polygyny.
Furthermore on the factors to consider, there is a wide belief or notion amongst Africans about African-Americans misusing their available opportunities despite enduring numerous challenges and difficulties. It is important to note that Africans alongside other races also, share in the belief that America is a land of dreams and opportunities and will always be a dream destination for many. As widely known, education remains one of the best and golden ticket to living a better life as individuals, which also helps improve the socio-economic growth and development of the community.
Based on this knowledge, it aches the heart to see Africans and African-Americans alongside other races have such a resentful, unfriendly and defensive relationship against one another till date. It is true we have all gone through various levels of hardship, turmoil, and suffering which serves as reasons we continuously hold deep grudges against others, but its high time we looked beyond and move on.
It is almost certain that whenever we cloud our minds with negative judgements before relating with others, we would most likely find a way to justify our negative thoughts about them irrespective of the outcome, as such, we all should always set aside our presumptions, perceptions and judgements when relating with others and it is only through this means, can we look beyond our racial differences and respect each other as humans.
Trust Issues and Cultural Misconceptions
Another reason to consider is the trust issues that exits between the two races. So many African-Americans have some misconceptions that Africans cannot be trusted due to their willingness in allowing their fellow brothers and sisters be taken or sold into slavery, while some perceive them to be highly promiscuous due to the high rate of polygyny in the region. To point out the fallacy with the former, studies have revealed that majority of African slaves were captured through acts of kidnappings, raids and warfare, and through judicial processes, while only a few were literally sold by their relatives or friends as slaves.
In the wake of Black History Month, it is crucial to address the adversity that too often exists between the African and African-American communities. Among both groups, there is much-internalized racism towards one another. One cause could be African-Americans’ assimilation into American culture, which for some could divert them from their African ancestry. As a child of Nigerian immigrants, I can attest to the fact that some Africans, unfortunately, do view African-Americans through a particular and negative lens. All year round, we should be empowering each other, rather than putting each other down.
In the United States, some scholars who have studied relationships between African-Americans and African immigrants have observed a “social distance” between both groups. In 2012, Adaobi Chiamaka Iheduru, a graduate student at Wright State University, Ohio, wrote her doctoral thesis on how “racism plays a prominent role” in shaping this dynamic. Internalized racism is the acceptance of stereotypes or beliefs that paint one’s racial group as “subhuman, inferior, incapable of dignified tasks, and a burden to society,” according to Laura M. Howard W.
“The overwhelming majority of black Americans are, at the very least, six or seven generations culturally removed from Africa,” Gay said in his 1989 article. “They speak no African language. Their religious beliefs and practices are non-African. Their daily cuisine is non-African. Their marital and family structures are typically non-African. In their study about relationships among African, African-American, and African Caribbean persons, Jennifer V. Jackson and Mary E. Communication problems are blamed on the history of slavery, its divisiveness, and the doctrine of divide and conquer.
Likewise, Iheduru observed that Western media representations of Africa as the “Dark Continent” have created negative images in the minds of African-Americans, who now see their ancestral homeland as a primitive place in need of civilization. And these few examples that exist are not perfect ones. Coming 2 America, Eddie Murphy’s recently released sequel to the 1988 comedy film Coming to America, has been criticized as another example of Hollywood’s poor representation of Africa.
“The only thing worse than lack of information is misinformation,” Hawthorne Smith, a psychologist and Director of the NYU/Bellevue Program for Survivors of Torture (PSOT), told me. Smith recounted how, as an African-American, he experienced a greater culture shock when he returned to the United States from Senegal, where he had traveled to study at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. After his return from Africa, Smith ran into an African immigrant who broke down in tears five minutes after they exchanged a warm greeting.
For Henry Ukazu, a Nigerian born immigrant in the US, the social distance between African-Americans and African immigrants is also a matter of competition for economic resources. A lot of Africans come here for different reasons. Some come for school, professional development, work, or vacation. When they are done with school, those who want to work are ready to start from scratch, accepting low income and entry level jobs.
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. “I personally do not like the sound of the word so I don’t use it,” said Oshomah John, a Nigerian immigrant in the US. Smith sees opportunities for healing, reconciliation, and collaboration between both groups.
| Factor | African Perspective | African-American Perspective |
|---|---|---|
| Historical Suffering | Grieve underdevelopment due to colonialism and slave trade. | Focus on the legacy of slavery and ongoing racial inequality in America. |
| Opportunities in America | Believe African-Americans misuse opportunities despite challenges. | See African immigrants as opportunists profiting from their struggles. |
| Trust | Questioned due to the history of the slave trade. | Misconceptions about promiscuity due to cultural practices like polygyny. |
| Cultural Differences | Accusations of assimilation into American culture and abandonment of African roots. | Negative stereotypes of Africa perpetuated by Western media. |
