My early thoughts on Black Americans

Blacks remain quintessentially African anywhere in the world

VICTOR KALALANDA, October 1, 2021*

In his magnum opus titled How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, famed historian Walter Rodney thus wrote: 

“Absence of data about the size of Africa’s population in the 15th century makes it difficult to carry out any scientific assessment of the results of the population outflow.”

Dr Rodney was arguing in reference to slave trade and what population of Africans it had hoisted onto the Americas, the Atlantic islands and Europe.

He observed that some scholars tend to downplay the impact slaving had on Africa when they suggest that only about 10 million people had been shipped out of the continent.

To him, the actual figure must be millions much larger and far more disturbing if it has to include Africans who also died under galling circumstances, at the hands of their captors, during the oft-cited four centuries of slavery.

Though these arguments are beyond the scope of this article, it’s important to read and understand them because they partly explain the ancestry of black people around the world, this case in the United States of America, especially when they are compared to their African counterparts.

As a black African myself, born and bred in Africa, I was interested in what differences—if at all any—would be exhibited by my black colleagues who live in the USA after I arrived in that country for graduate school.

Such would most likely be anybody’s first instinct because of that feeling of self-awareness that hits you the moment you meet somebody of similar skin colour on a train or bus in the West.

Outside my home country Zambia, I have also stayed in Switzerland, but it is in the USA that blacks intrigued me much more because I meet a lot of them in the streets or at my university in Illinois.

When I first encountered them, I was raring to find out: do they identify with me? What do they eat? How’s their worldview? Do they have any peculiar differences?

I am proud today that I can speak with first-hand confidence about the nature of black people in the USA because not only do I learn and eat with them, but also because my association with them now runs deeper, given my current role as President of the African Students Association (ASA) at the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

To begin with, black people have long been an integral part of US history and greatness.

Even while condemned to a Negro slave existence, black people made enormous contributions to the US economy through their labour while working on plantations in such states as Virginia and Carolina.

But over the years they have gone on to serve even more pronounced relevance in the USA in many fields of human endeavour such as education, health, science and politics.

In sports alone, as recently pointed out by Alex Aultman, who edits the American newspaper Alestle, “[America] relies on Black excellence to fuel its ego with medals . . .”

But accomplishments aside, there is, on a personality level, a natural magnetic attraction that tends to govern my relationship with black people of African parentage in America.

I would earlier labour under the impression that they were quite distinct from me.

However, I have noticed that although they tend to speak fast, just as is typical of a Western accent, they are unpretentiously and spontaneously enthusiastic about life in Africa, as though that is where they were born.

“I don’t really know where I come from because my whole family has been living here (USA) all along,” one ASA member told me recently. “But I feel like I am Nigerian because many people say my traits of being aggressive and trying to always find my way in life is a Nigerian thing.”

So many black folks I meet often demonstrate an identity bias towards Africa, even as evidenced by the questions they ask me: where are you from? Where were you born?

Their reactions are actually consistent with observations made by John F. Kennedy, the 35^th US President, in his book called A Nation of Immigrants.

“The ideal of the ‘melting pot’,” Kennedy wrote, “symbolized the process of blending many strains into a single nationality, and we have come to realize in modern times that the ‘melting pot’ need not mean the end of particular ethnic identities or traditions.”

I have also met black Americans who use Ancestry.com on the web to determine their ancestry, obviously out of curiosity. Though some question the platform’s accuracy, which associates many with sub-Saharan Africa, searching for their roots turns out to be an enthralling pastime.

Not only is ancestry a fuss among anonymous black Americans, but it’s an activity black celebrities engage in, too.

It transpired in the past that Oprah Winfrey, once referred to as the most influential black person of her generation, believed she was Zulu, while the University of Chicago linked her matrilineal ancestry to the Kpelle tribe of Liberia.

But while many black Americans would want to ascertain their ancestral origins, available means such as DNA tests tend to be mere hints, forcing some to trawl through family documents that also offer a limited alternative.

But I also find that beyond matters of identity, the black American also loves to try out African music, food and clothing, and the young men fantasize about going back to Africa someday to look for a wife.

It’s actually tempting to think that black people are merely on a big vacation in America, hardly waiting to reunite with their continent and civilisation.

From my experience, as such, it appears that Africans in America are just like Africans in Africa, without any major substantive differences.

I should point out that many Africans who probably share my view, especially after wide travel, eventually take up residence in Africa and die there.

An example is W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black to receive a doctorate from Harvard University, who relocated to Africa and died there after becoming a Ghanaian citizen.

It’s also a fact that black American girls readily marry black boys, who come to America from Africa, as was the case with Zambia’s Prof Mubanga Kashoki, who went to the USA for his university education.

“I met him when we were working [during a summer break],” says Kashoki’s wife, Juanita. “He was a very good writer. He would write some very convincing romantic letters and I saw him as a person I could trust, [who] I could have a future with.”

The bottom line, therefore, is that black people are just a global community of like-minded people, who remain quintessentially African even in a country as far afield as the United States of America.

 Original copy was first published in the Zambia Daily Mail on the stated date*