Born in America, at home in Africa. Are Negroes the Wandering Jews of Africa? The question arises because I, for one, am becoming aware of more and more Negroes wandering into South Africa — and often wandering in to stay.
Now take note: negroes with a small “n” is the
generality of us, both from home and abroad. Negroes with a capital “N”, on the other hand, ar e the people who make up about 10% of the population of the United States, some of whose ancestors originally arrived there in slave ships from Africa.
These kind of Negroes have frequently demanded to be called by other names, such as American Negroes, Black Americans, Americans of African descent, and, lately, just African-Americans. But, be that as it may, it is some of these “big N” negroes who are now making the return journey towards this African continent that has nurtured at least some part of their blood ? the rest probably being made up of Spanish, English, French, Dutch and Amerindian portions that, for political reasons, don’t really count.
Some of these New South African Negroes now number among my best friends. There is no wonder in that ? some of them were among my best friends in the old days anyway, or were friends of friends during the time when I, like them, was a wandering negro in my own right. We were fellow travellers in a wandering black diaspora, negroes old and new in a white world that we were hoping would some day finally change to our advantage.
In our different ways we were all wanderers with nothing more than a mythical, distantly imagined historical home to pin our dreams upon. And in that time, many black Americans gave many of us an emotional and spiritual home in the exile diaspora.
Today, many of these old friends have followed our trail back across the Atlantic, towards Johannesburg and Cape Town. They tend to burn with a kind of excitement that has long since left the more jaded among us as we have struggled to come to terms with the daunting realities associated with this return to our native land.
For those wandering Negroes who have dared to make the move out of Babylon, coming down to earth in South Africa still feels like arriving in the Promised Land.
One is obliged to ask them why. The answers are simple and direct.
Look at it this way. Colin Powell or no Colin Powell, Halle Berry, Denzel Washington and Michael Jackson aside, black people, even after 400 hard working years in the New World, still feel like aliens in America.
The place is set up that way. You can hear it in the alienated anger of rap culture. You can feel it in the searing, dissenting saxophone of Ornette Coleman. It is articulate in the shocking silence of Muhammad Ali, previously demonised in the loud persona of the “Louisville Lip”. And it is a constant visual reminder in the harsh realities of black suburbs like Harlem, South Bronx, Dixwell in the super-rich state of Connecticut, and Watts, just over the rise from that glittering dream factory called Hollywood ? to mention but a few.
So yes, it had been a long, bitter ride in the diaspora. And then, miraculously, there appeared a prophet called Nelson Mandela.
Mandela certainly had no intention of bringing the children of Israel, however they might identify themselves, home to South Africa. But having parted the waves, the prophet could hardly prevent the surge of Africa’s lost children pouring through the gap. Over the years they had tried Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa dream in Tanzania, even Haile Selassie’s proud, unbroken but destitute kingdom of Ethiopia.
The common theme was the search for a home in a black-ruled state, where blackness was not an automatic block to social and economic advancement ? a niche where the individual could slip unnoticed into a common black history.
The struggle had been hard up in the African north, dogged by confusions of language and culture, and a baffling will to fail on the part of a widening collective of native African dictators.
South Africa, ironically, became the Great White Hope of the black diaspora. Hell, people speak comprehensible English here. Telephones work. There’s a black president, a largely black Cabinet, black empowerment and a black economic elite which, even though they may show signs of moral confusion and fallibility, nevertheless symbolise a significant advance in the world- wide profile of the black world.
Black people can do business here ? which is what most of these black brothers and sisters are engaged in doing.
One cannot wait forever for the Promised Land to show up on your doorstep. For the sake of a quiet, perhaps moderately prosperous life, one can afford to turn a blind eye to the downside ? the far-flung physical and psychological impoverishment, and their associated statistics of crime and disease, as well as a lack of a certain kind of social openness, and the stimulation of free and open political engagement.
“Maybe we’re a little lazy,” says one of my new-found friends. “At the end of the day, to tell you the truth, although we’re proud to be African Americans, we’re still Americans. Americans like countries where things work. You have good roads, comfortable houses and the water always comes out of the tap. And you never run out of ice to put in your drink. These things are important to us.”
So the Negroes are coming home to roost. It might seem strange to call this land of displaced people home. It might be odd for a race whose ancestors were clearly wrenched from the western, rather than the southern region, of the continent to refer to this experience as a homecoming at all.
But perception, as someone once said, is 90% of reality. And for this small handful of black people who happen to have been born in America, the unreal reality of South Africa might just be as good as the Promised Land gets.
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