Dreams of the New Land

When History Sleeps: A Beginning 13 DREAMS OF THE NEW LAND Africa I guard your memory Africa you are in me My future is your future Your wounds are my wounds The funky blues I cook are black like you—Africa Africa my motherland America my fatherland Although I did not choose it to be Africa you alone can make me free Africa where the rhinos roam Where I learned to swing Before America became my home Not like a monkey but in my soul Africa you are rich with natural gold Africa I live and study for thee And through you I shall be free Someday I’ll come back and see Land of my mothers, where a black god made me My Africa, your Africa, a free continent to be. Ted Joans, “Africa” 14 Freedom Dreams Schoolhouse Rock didn’t teach me a damn thing about “freedom.” The kids like me growing up in Harlem during the 1960s and early 1970s heard that word in the streets; it rang in our ears with the regularity of a hit song. Everybody and their mama spoke of freedom, and what they meant usually defied the popular meanings of the day. Whereas most Americans associated freedom with Western democracies at war against communism, free- market capitalism, or U.S. intervention in countries such as Viet- nam or the Dominican Republic, in our neighborhood “freedom” had no particular tie to U.S. nationality (with the possible exception of the black-owned Freedom National Bank). Freedom was the goal our people were trying to achieve; free was a verb, an act, a wish, a militant demand. “Free the land,” “Free your mind,” “Free South Africa,” “Free Angola,” “Free Angela Davis,” “Free Huey,” were the slogans I remember best. Of course, “freedom” was also employed as a marketing tool to sell us things like Afro wigs, hair care products, and various foodstuffs, but even these commodities were linked in our minds to the black struggle for independence, not just in the urban ghettos but around the world. “Freedom” even became a kind of metonym for Africa—the home we never knew, the place where we once enjoyed freedom before we were forcibly taken in chains across the sea. We drank Afro-Cola, which came in a blue can embla- zoned with a map of the African continent, partly because slick marketing executives told us it contained the taste of freedom, partly because we pretended it was nectar from the motherland. Of course, not everyone identified with Africa or associated the continent with dreams of freedom, but we were living in Harlem, of all places, during the era of the “black freedom movement.” Formal colonialism had ended throughout most of Africa—the exceptions being southern Africa and the Portuguese colonies— so those who paid attention to such things were excited by the prospects of a free and independent Africa. By the time I enrolled at California State University at Long Beach, the Black Studies program there reignited my nascent, underdeveloped Pan- Dreams of the New Land 15 African vision of the world. Our professors turned diehard party people and wannabe Greeks into angry young “Afrikans.” And we had good reason to be angry. After twelve years of public misedu- cation, reading works by pioneering black scholars such as Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origins of Civilization, George E. M. James’s Stolen Legacy, Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction in America, J. A. Rogers’s World’s Greatest Men and Women of African Descent, among others, opened up a whole new world for us. We learned of the origins of Western racism, the history of slavery, the rise and fall of African kingdoms before the European invasion, the Egyptian roots of Western civilization. We were particularly ob- sessed with the large-scale civilizations along the Nile—Egypt, Ethiopia, Nubia—as were generations of Afrocentric scholars before us, as Wilson Moses recently pointed out in his valuable book Afrotopia. Indeed, the title alone explains why we junior Afrocentrists were attracted more to the powerful states of the ancient world than to the civil rights movement: We looked back in search of a better future. We wanted to find a refuge where “black people” exercised power, possessed essential knowledge, edu- cated the West, built monuments, slept under the stars on the banks of the Nile, and never had to worry about the police or poverty or arrogant white people questioning our intelligence. Of course, this meant conveniently ignoring slave labor, class hier- archies, and women’s oppression, and it meant projecting back- wards in time a twentieth-century conception of race, but to simply criticize us for myth making or essentialism misses the point of our reading. We dreamed the ancient world as a place of freedom, a picture to imagine what we desired and what was possible. Sometimes we couldn’t read fast enough; other times, we were so overtaken with emotion we put our books down and wept, or fantasized about revenge. More importantly, we began to see our- selves—as earlier generations of black intellectuals had—as part of an African diaspora, an oppressed “nation” without a homeland. Many of us gravitated to campus black nationalist groups, 16 Freedom Dreams imagining Africa as our true home, either as a place of eventual return or a place from which we were permanently exiled. At least in our minds, we joined a long line of black thinkers who be- lieved that to achieve freedom we first had to get out of Dodge. Exodus Few scholars or activists today take proposals to leave America and return to Africa or some other “homeland” seriously. Back- to-Africa proposals in principle are almost universally dismissed as “escapist” or associated with essentialist, romantic ideas about black cultural unity. Critics dwell on the impracticality of such schemes, or they point to sharp cultural and class differences that keep the black world divided. They are not wrong to do so, but any wholesale dismissal of the desire to leave this place and find a new home misses what these movements might tell us about how black people have imagined real freedom. The desire to leave Babylon, if you will, and search for a new land tells us a great deal about what people dream about, what they want, how they might want to reconstruct their lives. After all, the history of black people has been a history of movement—real and imagined. Repatriation to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Flight to Canada. Escape to Haiti. The great Kansas Exo- dus. The back-to-Africa movements of Bishop Henry McNeil Turner and Marcus Garvey. The 49th State movement. The Re- public of New Africa. The Rastafarian settlement of Shasha- mane, Ethiopia. I’m goin’ to Chicago, baby, I can’t take you along. Space is the Place. The Mothership Connection. All these travel/escape narratives point to the biblical story of Exodus, of the Israelites’ flight out of Egypt. It isn’t a coincidence that the stream of black migrants who fled the South for Kansas and Ok- lahoma in the late 1870s were called “exodusters,” or that one of the South Carolina emigration societies was called the Liberian Exodus Association. Indeed, as Eddie Glaude points out in his re- cent book Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nine- teenth-Century Black America, the book of Exodus served as the key political and moral compass for African Americans during Dreams of the New Land 17 the antebellum era, and it would continue to do so after the Civil War. Exodus provided black people with a language to critique America’s racist state and build a new nation, for its central theme wasn’t simply escape but a new beginning. Exodus represented dreams of black self-determination, of being on our own, under our own rules and beliefs, developing our own cultures, without interference. Even before New World Africans laid eyes on the Bible, the fundamental idea behind Ex- odus was evident in the formation of Maroon societies throughout the Americas. Maroon societies were settlements of rene- gades from the plantation system made up primarily of runaway slaves, some indigenous people, and, in a few instances, white in- dentured servants who rebelled against the dominant culture. These settlements often existed on the run, in the hills or swamps just outside the plantation economy. Africans tended to domi- nate these communities, and many sought to preserve the cultures of their original homelands while combining different Old and New World traditions. Over time, Africans adopted elements of various Native American cultures, and vice versa, and Euro- peans relied on aspects of these cultures for their own survival. In the words of political scientist Cedric Robinson, these movements were inventive “rather than imitative, communitarian rather than individualistic, democratic rather than Republican, Afro-Christian rather than secular and materialist[;] the social values of these largely agrarian people generated a political culture that distinguished between the inferior world of the political and the transcendent universe of moral goods.” The impulse to- ward separatism, defined broadly, is rooted in maroonage and the desire to leave the place of oppression for either a new land or some kind of peaceful coexistence. The problem with modern “Egyptland” is that it claimed to be a republic, and too many black people—slave and free—invested their own blood, sweat, and tears in building or protecting the country.

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