An African Odyssey - A Hopeful Journey To The Source Of The Black Diaspora But Finding It Worse Than Ever Imagined

Felicia Thompson had always wanted to go to Africa - Lucy and the origin of the species, the veldt, and the heart of the diaspora.  She would explore the inner cities of Lagos, Kinshasa, and Nairobi and find out about this mysterious, troubled place whose lands gave us musicians, dancers, and sports legends. 

She had been to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and marveled at the achievements of the descendants of slaves - runners, jumpers, horn players, and comedians had added cultural diversity to America, gave it soul and attitude, and rescued it from the sameness and predictability of white European culture. 

 

For far too long American history had been one of kings, courtiers, and empire followed by rich white men who fashioned the new nation out of old cloth.  The Founding Fathers, locked into the logic of Adam Smith, Voltaire, Kant, and Thoreau, created a nation of ideas rather than sensibility, and only after 1619 when the first African slaves were brought to the New World did America truly prosper. 

Even under slavery, African culture flourished and the animistic tribalism of the forest provided the spiritual and cultural foundation for a renascent black American culture.  Black culture was the inspiration that the nation needed to lead it out of the intellectual world of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams. It challenged the notions of white propriety and the archaic notions of a nuclear family, the confining nature of the Protestant work ethic, and the bland, prescriptive code of legacy religion.

Black culture was African - an uninhibited sexuality, a loose family structure, a native primitivism, and a joy in the physical - the pure, unadulterated, originalist notion of early man.  Attempts to confine  this native exuberance, fit it into white social norms, and make black people as white as can be, failed miserably and the ghetto survived intact. 

Criticized for its anti-social behavior - single motherhood, absent fatherhood, sexual abandon, crime, disobedience, and rejection of majority norms - the inner city was branded as an un-American, uncivilized knot within the larger body politic. 

Felicia was proud of progressive attempts to dispel this false and damaging stereotype.  She cheered the notion that the African was not at the bottom of the human pyramid but at the top and represented the most evolved expression of humanity, and it was progressive attempts to raise the black man to his rightful position which were long overdue, needed, and correct.. 

Felicia, like many Americans took the progressive canon to heart - crime, dysfunctional families, social ineptitude, and impossibly low socio-economic indicators were the result of slavery, Jim Crow, and decades of segregation.  What would one expect from a system that disintegrated families but encouraged random reproduction, deprived men of their civil and human rights, and kept them in ignorant bondage for decades?

And so it was that Felicia enthused by the thought of going to the source of primitive, ur-humanity, and seeing for herself the roots of cultural simplicity and endowed wisdom, headed off to Africa.

A large continent with very different tribal, colonial, and prehistoric themes, it was difficult for her to choose her first contact; but since the American black diaspora came from West Africa, it was there she would begin.  Nigeria, she learned, was the cultural center of slavery. 

In the early 20th-century, the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria had one of the biggest slave populations in the world, one to two and a half million slaves, a flourishing slave trade supplied by slave raids and thousands of slaves given as tributes to the Sultan of Sokoto and his emirs. Once African tribal chieftains realized the value these slaves represented to European traders, they initiated a lively, productive, remunerative European slave market.

 

Tribal chieftains up and down the west coast of Africa were quick to cash in on the new economic initiatives, and the transatlantic slave trade began apace.  West Africans ethnically were what the European trader was looking for - physical strength, durability, stature, and reproductive potential - so the perfect storm formed.  Ideal physical characteristics, an entrepreneurial tribal culture, and European capitalists anxious to make millions. 

Now, anyone who travels to Lagos understands their mistake the minute they get off the plane.  They are beleaguered by touts, thieves, con men, hustlers, and racketeers - the street culture that gave rise to the multi-billion dollar credit fraud rings in the United States and Europe. 

If and when the visitor makes his way out of the airport and into the city, he is overwhelmed by the chaos, the vast, sprawling slums, the heat, noise, and foul scenes of African life.  Here is the American inner city writ large, the famous cultural motherlode that Felicia was looking for, impossibly uncivilized, brutally raw, and intimidating. 

It was not what Felicia expected, but she had refused friends’ suggestions that she start with something milder, less inchoate, and more accommodating - Ghana, for example, a country which had supplied its share of slaves but which was culturally tamer, more attuned with Western moral and social values - but she had been adamant.  She wanted nothing but the purest experience, where the American inner city originated. 

Her Lagos hotel, the Fairleigh Arms, had no reservation for her, but for a nominal fee might see if something was available.  Her room was an airless dump - unchanged sheets, broken air conditioning, swarms of mosquitos, reddish-brown tap water, a clogged, broken toilet, and one flickering intermittent tube light. 

She felt alone, disconsolate, and miserable; but thought that getting out into the life of the city would restore the optimism and enthusiasm with which she had come to Africa; but no such luck.  A pretty, young white woman was a natural target for the thousands of itinerant black men roaming the streets.  She was accosted, harassed, abused until afraid and desperate, she ran back to her hotel, only to find her things piled in the lobby and told that her room was now occupied by another guest. 

Her money and passport placed in a hotel safe deposit box were gone, an unfortunate oversight the management said, of course to be reported to the police; but the damage was done.  She was without identification, money, or means, alone in this steaming, stinking city with no recourse.  Worst of all, and as much as she hated to admit it, she was surrounded by black people, hemmed in by them, suffocated by them, assaulted by them, with not one white face in sight. 

The American Embassy had many years set up a special section for Americans like Felicia, and helped her rebook her flight back to New York, arrange for a money transfer and a new passport; and saying prayers to a God she had long ago dismissed as part of the demands of the progressive canon, thanked him for her salvation. 

Now of course Felicia's experience is not representative of all African journeys.  Those travelers who have wisely booked well-organized safaris to the Serengeti have none of her problems; and international bankers and development consultants are always housed in five-star hotels, guests of Big Men beneficiaries of Western favors to assure a steady supply of oil and rare earth minerals.  

Yet Felicia's sojourn was real - the real Africa, the one behind the diaspora, the ghetto, the inner city.  Horrible as it was, it drew the parallel which neither she nor any of her progressive colleagues were willing to acknowledge or admit.  

Culture does matter, and the persistent dysfunction of the inner city is at least in part due to its African origins.  The slaves brought from Angola, Ghana, or the Gambia were not burghers from the West country, nor enterprising Italians from Sorrento, nor German and Scandinavian farmers - Christians, peasants and serfs at worst but solidly European in outlook.  Their history, however referential, was of kings, courtiers, and empires not of the jungle, the desert, or the veldt.

Colonialism helped to create an educated, Western-oriented intelligentsia - any diplomat or World Bank economist always returns with renewed respect for their African colleagues - and few deny the small-scale entrepreneurial energy of the people; but the truth behind the myth of the universal native sophistication of Africans, the source of the new age's cultural leaders, is hard to accept.  African countries from north to south, east to west, are ruled by despots, crooks, and petty dictators.  Their populations live either in pestilential urban slums or still-primitive Paleolithic villages. 

Felicia was met with surprise and disbelief when American progressives heard her story.  It simply couldn't be true, they insisted.  The fault was hers.  She didn't let Africa be Africa and spent her time there under false pretenses, under the yoke of white Europeanism.  No, she said. It wasn't her at all but the blighted, unredeemable horrible place it was. 

'Racist', her friends said when they heard her frightful tale; and that patently dumb, ignorant comment only showed the error of their ways.  Progressives had been confecting, weaving, stitching this cultural fantasy for years and refused to open their eyes. 

Epiphanies come in many shapes, colors, and varieties; and this trip to Africa was Felicia's eye-opener. Political life was a lot simpler without having to maintain a series of fictions.  Conservatives at least had that advantage; so without much ado and to the consternation of her friends and family she turned the corner and never looked back.