Spanning seven decades, from the post-war period to the present day, and encompassing sources ranging from literature, film and music to accounts by missionaries, aid workers and travel writers, African, American is a fascinating deconstruction of 'Africa' as it exists in the American mindset.
Spanning seven decades, from the post-war period to the present day, and encompassing sources ranging from literature, film and music to accounts by missionaries, aid workers and travel writers, African, American is a fascinating deconstruction of 'Africa' as it exists in the American mindset.
African, American: From Tarzan to Dreams from My Father - Africa in the US Imagination
400
African, American: From Tarzan to Dreams from My Father - Africa in the US Imagination
400Paperback
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Overview
Spanning seven decades, from the post-war period to the present day, and encompassing sources ranging from literature, film and music to accounts by missionaries, aid workers and travel writers, African, American is a fascinating deconstruction of 'Africa' as it exists in the American mindset.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783608539 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2017 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
David Peterson del Mar is an associate professor of history at Portland State University, and the founding president of Yo Ghana!, a charity devoted to promoting friendship and understanding between students in Ghana and the Pacific Northwest.
Read an Excerpt
African, American
From Tarzan to Dreams from My Father - Africa in the US Imagination
By David Peterson Del Mar
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2017 David Peterson del MarAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-853-9
CHAPTER 1
'BRIGHTEST AFRICA' IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
Early in the twentieth century Americans found Africa more compelling and inviting than ever before, an interest bound up with their unprecedented prosperity. More people had the wherewithal to undertake long vacations abroad and, more to the point, the spread of comfort prompted Americans to search out, directly or vicariously, more exotic, even dangerous, experiences.
This growing openness to places and activities considered primitive affected black as well as white. Darkness had lost much of its stigma in the early twentieth century; white people sought the sun to darken their complexions. White urbanites showed their sophistication by frequenting jazz joints such as the Cotton Club where African-Americans played and danced to 'jungle music.' Millions more listened to black artists such as Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington on record players and radios. Black culture offered white Americans a respite from modern strictures: 'pure sensation untouched by self-consciousness and doubt,' as historian Nathan Huggins puts it. Primitivism was now allowed, even encouraged — up to a point. The Harlem Renaissance also represented a shift within black culture, particularly for the young and better educated. Poets such as Langston Hughes embraced African motifs; Josephine Baker headed off for Paris and there became famous for her banana costume. Aspiring black Victorians had kept Africa at arm's length and embraced piety, education, hard work, temperance, and other expressions of self-control. Now black college students, like their white counterparts, were drawn to creativity and spontaneity, characteristics long associated with blackness and with Africa.
Victorian culture had posited rigid distinctions between husband and wife, child and parent, black and white, lower class and middle class. The new ethos invited adults to become more youthful, parents and spouses to become 'pals' with their children and each other, and respectable white people to join their black and working-class counterparts in shedding inhibitions. As historian Cornelia Sears so ably demonstrates, American views of Africa shifted apace, from the Dark Continent motif of the late Victorian era to the Edenic Africa of Teddy Roosevelt and other manly hunters to the Brightest Africa of taxidermist Carl Akeley and filmmaker Martin Johnson which predominated by the 1920s and 1930s. This Africa invited masculine searches for transcendent self-actualization. It also created space for women adventurers interested in Africa's people. Black Americans' African quests were more focused on people than animals, but here, too, it was a woman traveler, Esmelda Robeson, who most focused on actual Africans.
AFRICAN VISIONS: EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS AND MARCUS GARVEY
The two most influential interpreters of Africa in America by the 1920s had little in common, save that neither ever set foot on the continent they described so fulsomely. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Marcus Garvey made Africa compelling to white and black Americans, respectively, in ways that no one had done before or has done since.
Burroughs was early into his career as a highly popular if not particularly polished novelist when he started writing a story about a white male raised by the apes of savage Africa. Tarzan quickly spread from a syndicated set of stories in 1912 to a long series of cheap novels to the screen and beyond.
Tarzan blended savagery and civilization without ceding any agency or competency to black Africans. He combined the purported superiorities of the 'white race' (intelligence and morality) with primitive ferocity. Millions of white youth could now imagine themselves at home in Africa without ceasing to be white. West Africa's 'simple native inhabitants' and 'savage tribes' are bit players right from the inaugural Tarzan of the Apes, first published in 1912. Animals are more important and virtuous. It is Kala the ape, after all, not a black African, who rescues and nurtures the infant Tarzan after his aristocratic British parents perish. The first group of natives the young Tarzan encounters has the appearance of 'low and bestial brutishness,' and are readily thrown into 'jabbering confusion.' One of them kills Kala. Tarzan reflects: 'these people were more wicked than his own apes.' Tarzan is superior to his black counterparts in every respect. He is stronger, smarter, and, thanks to his racial heritage, innately more civilized.
The first Tarzan film, Tarzan of the Apes, 1918, also marginalizes black Africans. The local black villagers are weak and stupid. Tarzan easily throttles Kala's killer, and the villagers '[i]n superstitious awe of the strange white being ... for days made offerings to appease his wrath.' Again, Tarzan's superiority is moral as well as physical. The large, leering black African who carries Jane off clearly intends to rape her. Though upon touching Jane Tarzan is 'thrilled with a new emotion' and 'throbbing pulse-beat,' he heeds her admonition: 'Tarzan is a man, and men do not force the love of women.'
By the 1920s and 1930s Tarzan's Africa had become less savage but remained very racist. He routinely aids animals in distress, such as the deer caught in a hunter's snare in The New Adventures of Tarzan of 1938, and he can count on elephants, hippos, chimpanzees, or other charismatic megafauna to rescue and nurse him. Jane has become a bit more important. In Tarzan and His Mate, from 1934, she fends off a lion and has her own yell. Their Africa has become more bucolic than savage, as shown in several extended underwater swimming scenes, including one in which the censors found Jane's nudity offensive. Indeed, Jane refers to their swimming hole as 'a little Garden of Eden' in Tarzan Escapes, 1936. But if Jane's stature rose between the wars, black Africans' did not. Potent villains are either Africans played by white actors, such as Boris Karlof in Tarzan and the Golden Lion of 1927, or ruthless Europeans hunting for easy wealth. In Tarzan Escapes the expedition leader orders his assistant to check the feet of the black porters for thorns to see if they will be ready to travel in the morning, as if they were brute animals incapable of looking after their own bodies. In Tarzan Finds a Son, 1939, 'Boy' is fortunate that monkeys carry him out of the wrecked plane before the 'dreadful savages' arrive. On the eve of World War II, Tarzan's chimpanzees and elephants were still much higher on the evolutionary ladder than its black Africans.
Africa's savageness is central to Tarzan's identity and superiority over other white people; it reflected America's embrace of primitivism as well as the persistence of racism. Jane's father and other educated westerners are impractical and ineffectual, if well intentioned. The second and third installments of Burroughs' Tarzan novels, The Return of Tarzan and The Beasts of Tarzan, published in 1913 and 1914, respectively, are dominated by Tarzan's battle with Rokov, a Russian who is both more intelligent and more evil than anything Africa can produce. Africa is innocent; it remains a foil to the West. Tarzan expresses a turn to the primitive in American culture, an impulse that historians have traced to respectable white men's growing interest in boxing, football, the outdoors, and the emergence of the western genre of literature early in the twentieth century. Tarzan draws his strength from the jungle's savagery, a strength that makes him both physically but also morally superior to Europeans. If Conrad's Africa reveals western man's evil nature, Burroughs' Africa redeems it.
Garvey, a charismatic Jamaican immigrant, had a different sort of African redemption in mind; he was the person most responsible for prompting African-Americans to think of black Africa as a home rather than a heathenish embarrassment. The dark-skinned Garvey grew up in the middle ranks of a highly stratified Caribbean society that was even more class than race conscious. Largely self-educated, it was not until he read Booker T. Washington's paean to black self-determination, Up from Slavery, that Garvey knew that he would become 'a race leader.' In 1914 he started what would become the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica but was far from famous when he moved to Harlem two years later, where his oratorical and promotional skills created a black nationalistic movement of unprecedented breadth and depth.
Garvey posited Africa as the great social, cultural, and political fact of 'the Beloved and Scattered Millions of the Negro Race,' as the wording on the UNIA's membership certificate put it. The UNIA was not a one-trick pony. It offered life insurance policies and founded businesses. But what Garvey was really selling was hope and dignity, and Africa as a black homeland, and the Black Star Line as a vessel to that end was central to his program; shares in the Black Star Line were the organization's biggest money maker. In 1920, at the first international conference of the Negro peoples of the world, the audience of 25,000 jumped to its feet and roared when Garvey uttered these words: 'If the Englishman claims England as his native habitat, and the Frenchman claims France, the time has come for 400 million Negroes to claim Africa as their native land.'
As historian Mary G. Rolinson points out, Garvey's message struck religious, even millennial chords. 'I pray God for the redemption of Africa,' was a common refrain. Emily Christmas Kinch, who had served as an African Methodist Episcopal missionary in Liberia, cited polygamy and witch doctors in urging black American Christians to undertake their special role 'in the salvation of our brothers and sisters in the fatherland,' but she also described Africa as 'a land that flows with milk and honey,' a place 'that would receive you gladly.' 'Africa,' she concluded, 'wants you.' William Henry Moses, a prominent Baptist clergyman, defended Garvey in a speech delivered in New York City in 1923: 'I see a larger day. I see a city of schools and churches,' cities stretching across Africa, and 'this race of mine walking up, hand in hand, American and what not ... having a home together.' 'Under God the hour will come,' he assured his listeners, 'when Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hand unto God and black men shall hold their heads high.' 'Back to Africa' constituted a revitalization impulse in which the cruelties of American racism could be transcended, the clock reset as if the trans-Atlantic transportation of millions of Africans and its brutal, centuries-long aftermath had never occurred.
The actual history of the UNIA in Africa was prosaic and disappointing. The steamship line and plans for emigration to and trade with Africa crumbled, despite the monies invested bythousands of hopeful black Americans. Part of the problem was a lack of coordination with black Africa. 'He talks of Africa,' noted fellow Jamaican-American Claude McKay, 'as if it were a little island in the Caribbean Sea,' not a vast continent of diverse black ethnic groups and polities with their own agendas. When Garvey complimented Africa, he focused on Egypt, rather than West Africa, which, like black American leaders before him, he described as in need of uplift. By 1920 West Africans were complaining of Garvey's presumptuousness in assuming the title of President of the African mega-nation he had posited. The UNIA's effort to get land in Liberia fell apart when President King publicly rebuffed Garvey. The UNIA was left with no Africa to return to.
Yet Garvey's widely publicized 'Back to Africa' program introduced millions of ordinary black Americans to the idea that Africa could be more than a source of shame, that it might constitute a refuge and a home. 'We shall be,' asserted a New Orleans domestic worker, 'a nation respected by the world.'
Black missionaries in Africa in the early twentieth century often continued to set themselves apart from Africans even as they took issue with racist stereotypes. Baptist C.C. Boone in 1927 was often blunt in his assessments of the Congolese, remarking that their 'houses do not amount to much,' that they were 'exceedingly superstitious,' and 'have no standard of right or wrong.' Indeed, he wrote in passing and without comment that the natives referred to him as a 'white man.' Neither Congo as I Saw It nor Liberia as I Knew It, from 1929, indicated that he made close friends with black Africans, let alone that he felt at home in the Congo or Liberia. But Boone praised black Africans. 'I was never more surprised in my life than to find when I reached Congo, a stable form of government, upheld by the natives themselves,' he remarked. Theft and illegitimate births were rare. In terms of achieving civilization, black Congolese were on the same course as 'the Celts and Barbarians of Europe' not so long ago. His assessments of the natives of Liberia were generally positive.
More liberal, secular-minded black Americans embraced Africa more fulsomely by the 1920s. References to African vistas, jungle beats, and particular groups, such as Zulus, peppered the poetry and songs of the Harlem Renaissance. Black sculptors and painters such as Aaron Douglas featured African motifs. Countee Cullen's 'Heritage' is the most cited example. Its famous first line, 'What is Africa to me,' was followed by enticing images of vitality and innocence, such as 'Strong bronzed men, of regal black' and 'Spicy grove, cinnamon tree.' The poem suggests Cullen's 'alien-and-exile' approach to Africa, of a lost child wanting to make his way back to an unremembered, exoticized home, an act of self-exploration and self-flight, with Africa serving as 'both opiate and intoxicating whirl.' Africa is abstract, romantic.
Garvey and Burroughs were romantics, too, though they appealed to very different American audiences. Their widely consumed images of Africa shaped the viewpoints of millions of Americans, made both black and white people much more interested in and receptive to the continent than their Victorian counterparts had been. The growing number who went there in the early twentieth century expected magic.
MANLY WHITE MEN IN AFRICA
Before Tarzan there was Teddy Roosevelt. From a child right through his Presidency, the undersized, sickly son of patrician parents honed his body and character into a new, more vigorous model of masculinity by seeking out rugged landscapes and challenges.
Africa seemed tailor-made for Roosevelt, so when the first celebrity-President headed there with son Kermit shortly after leaving office in 1909, it was big news. Newspaper reporters jockeyed with each other for stories on board his ship, and Roosevelt wrote nearly every day while on his year-long journey. Scribner's won the bidding war for his account and published fourteen of his articles from October 1909 to September 1910. African Game Trails appeared soon after, in 1910.
Roosevelt's African adventure expressed his belief that men of the white American 'race' required continual exposure to danger to avoid going soft. Sensitive to critics who charged him with slaughtering helpless, often endangered, animals, he presented his safari as a scientific expedition to gather specimens for the Natural Museum of History. Indeed, pioneering taxidermist Carl Akeley had played a major role in persuading Roosevelt to go to Africa in the first place. But few puzzled over his primary motive. The middle-aged man who had courted death and danger in the Dakotas and who would identify, before dying, his life's peak experience as killing a Spanish officer on San Juan Hill, the man who brought boxing to the White House, was not headed to Africa for the climate.
Indeed, one of the trip's high points occurred when Roosevelt stood steady in the face of a 'burly and ... savage' lion. Roosevelt 'felt keen delight' when his companion's shot missed the charging beast. Now everything depended on his own nerve: 'he galloped at a great pace, he came on steadily — ears laid back and uttering terrific coughing grunts.' Roosevelt was up to the test. His aim was true, the bullet found its mark on the center of his worthy adversary's chest, and it fell. 'Certainly,' Roosevelt concluded, 'no finer sight could be imagined that that of this great maned lion as he charged.' As they made their way back to camp, night fell: 'the half moon hung high overhead, strange stars shone in the brilliant heavens, and the Southern Cross lay radiant above the sky-line.' Sublime Africa — and Roosevelt — had delivered.
Roosevelt often returned to this theme of Africa's salutary brutality. 'The sentimentalists who prattle about the peaceful life of nature do not realize its utter mercilessness,' he remarked. Hunting, particularly hunting in a place as dangerous as Africa, returned man to this state of nature, forced him to hone instincts grown flaccid in modern life. Shadowing elephants, for example, in thick vegetation 'made our veins thrill,' as one had to be 'ceaselessly ready for whatever might befall.' African Game Trails is suffused with the excitement and danger of the hunt; it constitutes another extended illustration of Roosevelt's assertion that western civilized man required at least occasional retreats to harrowing places and activities to maintain his moral as well as physical fitness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from African, American by David Peterson Del Mar. Copyright © 2017 David Peterson del Mar. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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