WordUp - kalamu's words

TRAVEL WRITING: TARZAN CAN NOT RETURN TO AFRICA / BUT I CAN (parts "W" and "X")

-W-

         FLIGHT LT. JERRY JOHN RAWLINGS, PRESIDENT OF GHANA.

            "Commitment!"

            He looks like Larry Fishburne. The jutting jaw. The cinnamon brown. The beard. The muscular frame.

            "What do we do with armed robbers?"

            Our second day in Accra, a crowd caught a thief and killed him.

            "We execute thieves."

            "These people driving these cars irresponsibly. Accidents? No. It's manslaughter. It's murder they're getting away with. Let the courts convict one of them. I will sign the execution."

            He had a script and he had some deeper stuff he wanted to get off his chest -- and brother man did go off. In addition to the prepared script he talks about family planning, sanitation, and some things in a language I don't understand but which delights the crowd.

            When he speaks, I look at the people.

            The shine of their eyes. The smiles set to break into laughter as the punch line is delivered.

            When he talks about executing irresponsible drivers, these people who spend a large part of every day walking -- walking with water on their heads, with food on their heads, with trays of vegetables, boxes of canned goods, chewing gum, walking, a load of firewood, maybe a baby on the back, oranges, pineapples, walking, bolts of fabric, walking, a sack of rice, walking, roasted corn, walking, walking, walking, through dust, down miles and miles of dirt road, walking, to the market, walking, pausing and backing up for speeding cars, the drivers leaning on their horns, walking, bus broke down, walking, car broke down, pushing and walking, waiting to sell to tourists coming out of the castle, standing, hoping to get closer to the president, standing, walking, sandals, walking, bare feet, walking, hopping cross open sewers, walking, legs bruised, open sores, walking, pants the wrong size, walking, lacy dress soiled, worn and torn, walking and then waiting, waiting and then walking, standing, silent, glancing at us up and down, whispering something to each other, teeth missing from big beautiful smiles, laughing, standing, shyly touching your hand, hello, akwaaba, welcome, siss-taa, braaaa-thaaaa, eyes looking up from the smoke fish fire, bread on the side of the road, walking straight up like some mothers used to make girls do with books on their head for posture practice, walking, pausing while suckling child, hawking wares, standing, looking, waving, bending, walking, lifting, working, sleeping, walking, eating, walking, eating and walking, walking to eat, walking, braiding hair, those dark skinned people, little girls with close cropped hair and their hands hiding the hope light of their smiling lips, walking, children and elders everywhere, walking, these people, these people, my people, walking, me, when he talks these people listen, and cheer, and clap.

            Execute irresponsible drivers.

            "Commitment." He says we have knowledge. We have skills. We need commitment. He says in the States a Ghanaian away from home wanted to know what the government was going to do to help all of the people who are moving from the rural areas into the cities.

            Rawlings encourages the brother to come home. Encourages all Africans to come home. Whether continental or diasporan, come home.

            In terms of development, it can be said that Africa is the rural area and the West are the cities. We need you in the rural areas to help us develop. Together we can develop our rural areas. Leave the cities. Come home.

            "Commitment."

             What do we do with thieves?

            This is Ghana. The streets are safe at night. And the people whom dark finds three hours walk from home, can set down their load and sleep where they are, wherever they are in Ghana.

            It's murder these people driving these cars irresponsibly.

            The people who walk love the President. The people. Who walk. Love. The President.

            When the President arrives he walks onto the field. He walks around the field and greets each king who has been carried in the Durbar procession of the kings, carried in these boats held aloft on the waves of muscular shoulders. Boats shaded by umbrellas. Preceded by the court. Followed by drums. The chiefs rode in waving and dancing. The President of the country walked around the soccer sized field and greeted each king individually. The President walked.

            The people who walk love the President who walks.

            Walking is the Ghanaian way.

            Commitment!

            Surely there are those who hate this man. The wheelers have different values from the walkers.

            Commitment!

            The people who walk.

-X-

         IN THE HINTERLANDS OF OUR SOULS.

            I have been to Africa before so I am prepared. I know that I am not going to visit an unspoiled land, and unsullied people. I know that I will encounter more than Africans in Africa. I know that I will also meet Tarzan there.

            He will be there to greet me. I know this. I know this because even though I am African, a descendant of those Africans who were enslaved, I know that I, like every African, especially we Africans in the diaspora, we carry Tarzan within us. Indeed, a major part of our value to the motherland is that we have African souls and Tarzan personalities, with all the positives of skills and technology that implies, and all the negatives of individualistic material and moral decadence it also implies.

            Tarzan will arrive at the same time I do, if and when I am frustrated in my search for hot water to bathe or angry about the unavailability of iced, chilled drinks to consume. Or when I am turned off by dust and dirt everywhere, repulsed by hot sun and daily heat. Tarzan will be gleaming in my eye as I am aroused by all the opportunities I spy to run the con games and hustles which are the daily fare of life in the industrial world, especially when my schemes and dreams are clothed in the brotherly cloak of helping my people to develop the motherland. We could put up a hotel there. Open a specialty restaurant here. Put an import record store over there. Import this. Start up that.

            I can not help it, I was reared in America to be like Tarzan. My brothers and sisters on the continent were reared to believe they need a Tarzan.

            Tarzan, as the big White man can not revisit Africa, but I am coming weighted by the terrible knowledge that we all have a Tarzan to expel from the interior of our African souls.

***

            After the Revolutionary War when the American colonialists beat the British, some of us vanished from these shores. Thus, Sierre Leone, a british colongy in West Africa which was partially colonized by American born Africans reintroduced into Africa. Some of us had fought against the colonialists, had sided with the British. Had been promised freedom. When the British lost, we won a return trip to Africa.

            As has ever been our history, we African Americans always seem to be on both sides of the battle line. Crispus Attucks the first to fall, martyr defending American freedom. On the otherside, unnamed others boarded English ships fleeing America's freedom.

            Sierre Leone was our first major return. British subjects reinserted into Africa.

            The second coming was Liberia -- and a bigger mess could not possibly have been made. Tarzan was in full effect.

            The bible and the gun. Liberia. The so-called first Black republic. Liberia declared itself sovereign on 26 July 1847. From jump street it was a colonial missonary state.

            We went there (or more accurately, were sent there) for the expressed purpose of establishing a Christian colony. We were literally pilgrims in Black face. And true to our Christian creed, true to our God, true to our "native land" (i.e. the U.S.A. who sponsored us), we came, we saw, and we conquered. Committed all sorts of unspeakable cruelties.  Wallowed in all sorts of corruptions.

            Meanwhile, the American Colonization Society, peopled and funded mostly by Whites, acted on their conviction that the way to respond to the slave question was to take Lady MacBeth's advice: "out, out damn spot." In Historical Lights Of Liberia's Yesterday And Today, author Ernest Jerome Yancy, writing in 1954, breaks the history down. 

            ...Liberia is a by-product of the complex conditions of American society resulting from the American Negro slavery.

            A careful study of the American economic, political, and social conditions beginning in 1619 at Jamestown, VA.--a nursery of slavery--to the organization of the American Colonization Society in December 1816 at Washington, D.C., avails one the opportunity of knowing the conditions under which the colonization society was organized and that the founding of Liberia was an attempt to adjust those conditions. In this respect, Sir Harry Johnston wrote: "Its inception" (the American Colonization Society) "grew out of the institution of slavery and represents an endeavor on the part of early statesmen and philanthropists to solve a vexing situation in America which was confronting them."

            Historical data show that at this time there were free men of color in America and it is claimed that they had an evil effect on the slaves and menaced the institution of slavery. Many criminal acts were charged to these freemen of color and Negroes, and in some instances, we are informed, they were guilty of these charges. Under these two-fold conditions it became necessary for something to be done in order to save American society and the institution of slavery.  Therefore, with these dual motives, statesmen, philanthropists, and former slaveholdres joined in devising means by which they could solve the problem. As a result of these efforts, the American Colonization Society was organized for the purpose of assisting free men of color to return to the continent of Africa.

            The first president of the American colonization Society was Judge Bushrod Washington, nephew of George Washington, and among the founding organizers was Francis Scott Key, author of the "Star Spangled Banner." Their exclusive aim was to remove free folk of color from America.

            Back on the block, Negro leaders, principlely Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, were intransient in their opposition to colonization. Wasn't going nowheres. Saw no future in it. No win. Wanted their piece of the rock. Insisted on making a home of where they were born.

            Of course, there was always a current that wanted to return to Africa, a current whose water level rose and fell at various junctures in history. The biggest problem was simple, most of us didn't know precisely where to return to and there was no welcoming committee specifically prepared to receive us.

            All other American immigrants could return to specific countries. Specific cities, towns and villages. Specific familes and friends. A church where they used to worship. A field where their fathers and mothers worked. A farm house where they were born. Or something specific.

            Most of us couldn't hit our nativity marks with a blunderbus at point blank range, i.e. land us in Africa, anywhere we wanted to go and we still couldn't find home. Once we got back to Africa we were literally lost.

            So much of Africa had been cut off from us. Amputated. When we went to scratch the Africa itch, we rubbed bare air. The nerve endings were tingling but the aching African leg had long ago been shot off.

            Amputees are we, dumbly trying to utter something sensible with the muteness of tongueless mouth. Our African tongue had been callously severed. The resultant loss of language was one of the major, literally unspeakable traumas of chattle slavery. Instead of a dark mother tongue, a mutant mulatto tongue grew and spoke an Africanized English. Which didn't do us a whole lot of good in Wolof, Akan, Fulani, Twi, etc.

            We wanted to return but... and those of us who went back? Well. Tarzan was with us. Even the most supportative of chroniclers had to note that we acted White, acted arrogant, inflicted on the indigenous "savages" the same indignities that had been heaped on us. For example, in Liberia the indigenous peoples were not considered citizens and could not vote. Sound familiar?

            Even the official and sympathetic chronicler Yancy notes:

            These backward conditions and slow progress as were found in Liberia prior to President W.V.S. Tubman's administration, in our opinion, may be attributed to the following four major causes or shaping forces, namely: (1) the lack of pioneering spirit and initiative to migrate on the part of the earliest colonists, (2) foreign aggressions, intrigues, and the absolute disregard for Liberian authority, (3) tribal or primitive problems of all types and complexities and (4) financial difficulties and entanglements. These four causes in the aggregate have been the shaping forces of Liberia.

            The pilgrim fathers being removed from the injustices of "the land of the brave and the free" found solace and repose in their new home and gave themselves to leisure, self-indulgence and little constructive work. They reclined, as it were, in the arms of relaxation, freedom, supremacy and authority; they concerned themselves chiefly with those things which they thought would demonstrate one's ability and capacity to govern himself, and those things which exhibit one's power and authority to rule and govern others. Whereas, they very sparingly attacked those things which are essential, and indispensable in any national sub-structure.

            The spirit of pioneering, self-initiative to migrate and the spirit of ingenuity akin to the spiritual equipment of the pilgrim fathers of the United States and those of other countries were apparently lacking among the first group of settlers of Liberia. This may, however, be accounted for when one considers the educational, cultural, social, economic background and preparedness as well as the purpose and philosophy of these settlers.

            Yancy believed that the Tubman administration would correct nearly a century of ineptitude and political backwardness.

            Therefore in 1944 the Tubman administration embarked upon an extensive Five-Year Economic Development Program, the like of which had never been attempted in the history of the country. It also undertook to make fundamental changes in the national structure and policies of government. Thus the indigenous element of the citizenry was granted representation in the national legislature; women were granted suffrage; election laws and practices were revised and tribal customs and traditions were given more consideration.

            The present administration, knowing that additional aid and zest resulting from new blood are very necessary to put over its policies and program, instituted an open-door policy for immigrants form all parts of the world.

            The early settlers found in Liberia thirty-three tribes with their several and different philosophies, customs, habits, practices, religious beliefs, forms of government and languages or dialects. These in themselves have presented many problems of baffling nature; the problem of lack of uniformity in language, customs, habits; the problem of education, and the problem of injecting into these tribes the spirit of the Western civilization.

            From the very beginning of the Republic there have been territorial fueds, disrespect and disregard for Liberian authority on the part of white aliens who, for the most part, were and are merchants.

            These problems, happily are being resolved by means of a vigorous national literacy campaign; universal education, economic developments and humane and liberal policies of the present administration.

            If you want the specifics, in all their gory and embarassing details, you'll have to piece it together. Although the whole story has yet to be told, an excellent place to start is African Americans And U.S. Policity Toward Africa 1850-1924, In Defense of Black Nationality by Elliott P. Skinner, an African American scholar and Franz Boas Professor of Anthopology at Columbia University and former United States ambassador to Burkina Faso.

            In any case, there is a reason that returning is so hard. Africa doesn't want Black face Tarzans swinging through it. I mean, why accept an imitation of oppression when the real deal is always waiting in the wings? One of the reasons that Africa has been so reluctant to reach out for the diaspora is because the diaspora can act so un-African once it gets back to Africa.

            Just to give you an example of how bizarre it can get, consider this. After the Civil War, the Liberian government thought it was an affront to them that the United States would send a Black ambassador. These transplanted Negroes wanted a White ambassador so that they could feel that they were being respected like other countries.

            The monkey jumped up with tears in his eyes. "My people, my people" the monkey cried.

            What can you said? You can't say nothing.

            So when the Liberian orgy of savagery kicked off in the eighties.  Charles Taylor's people hacking up Samuel Doe's people. Prince Johnson's people cutting off penises and ears. Doe multilated on video tape. Broadcast to the nation. Most of us didn't hear a mumbling word about it, nor see it. The few of us who did notice. Sort of recoiled in horror and wished it would go away. But the various peoples of Liberia, from the enclave of Negro colonialists who sold the country to Firestone and other moneyed interests, to the peoples of the interior who were mired in continuous wars against each other, to the ubiquitous military and mercenary types who wanted to assure themselves a line or two in the annals of iniquity commenserate with their heritage of being slave merchants, to the foreign diplomats and business people who feigned innocence and repulsion as if their respective nation states and corporate employers had no interests nor involvement in the Liberia entanglement, all of the parties contributed to the melange of African madness. A melange which makes it hard for any sensible African to naively advocate the return of African Americans to Africa.

            This is an ignoble aspect of our history. The diasporan fishbone that sticks in our continental craw. The mark of pestilence blighting our body politic. This is our closet and we've got to deal with these bones rattling around.

            At every juncture of my self-education, I reach a point where I think I have some sort of understanding of the meaning of my life. I step off, moving in a direction I consider forward, step off with knowledge, or so I think. And then I run into reality, run into a thick block of ignorance which lets me truly know just how much I don't know.

            If I hadn't gone to Ghana, I probably would never have learned very much about Liberia. And that's the whole point of a pilgrimage to Africa: If nothing else, Africa will teach you just how ignorant you really are.

             Just go. Go. GO!

            Whether you dig it or hate it, fall in love or get repulsed by dirt, dust, disease and underdevelopment. Go as a hustler looking to get rich off a business scheme, or as a romantic dreamer seeking ancestral roots; a committed Pan Africanist seeking to participate in development, or a tourist looking for a unique travel experience. It really doesn't matter how you get there, cause Africa will touch you. In one way or another. Touch you to the core.

            And once touched? Then you will decide for yourself what to do with the transformed self you've become as a result of feeling Africa's caress of your inner soul. For some nothing substantial will happen. For others it will be a life changing experience. For most it will be somewhere in between, an uneven mix. But it will be something. Something will happen. Just go.

            Clap your hands. Stamp your feet. Swing on the vine. In the jungle. The jungle that is Africa in your mind, in your heart, in your gut, in your groin. The Africa you imagine and the Africa you experience. Scratch the itch and watch what happens.

            No one should deny themselves a chance to touch the womb of their being.

            What follows touch? That is your choice to make.

***

            I really believe the best way to experience Africa is in silence.

            Don't talk too much. Just immerse oneself and by osmosis, let Africa seep into the pores. Don't think. Don't discriminate. Just go with the flow. If you feel something, heed the stirring.

            Africa is both extraordinary and just another day in the life. Both special and eternal. At core always simply about taking life and tasting life one day at a time. Birth. Life. Death. Rebirth. Over and over. That's all. Just specifically ours. Our birth. A chance to live our lives. To die natural deaths. And be reborn again in the embracement of a home from which we have been long time gone.

***

            I hoisted Tarzan's carcass atop the funeral pyre. And then climbed astride. Dropped my torch and went up in flames. My weeping cleansed my skin. The white dirt washed away. I stood naked. And had to make a choice.

            Walk out of the flames or die with Tarzan's tongue in my mouth. Uttering all kinds of inanities about how much better progress was, how much better it was to be in the West.

            Our singed skulls, flesh burnt off, faced each other. My skull as white as Tarzan's skull. Tarzan's skull, blackened by soot and ashes, is as dark as mine. Two heads facing each other, in death indistinguishable one from the other.

            African Americans have an intrinsic African dream. We dream of flying. Literally flying through the air.

            Flying. Our birdness could be sankofa, but only after the rise. First we must be phoenix. Fly up out of the ashes and return to yard to pick ancestral corn. First we must fly up.

            Get up out of the ashes of Western demise. Beyond the smoke. Away from the fascination with flame. Fire is to temper us. Fire is to free us. But fire is not home.

            Tarzan burns. Colonialism burns. Inevitably festering areas of our acculturated consciousness simultaneously go up in smoke. The only question is what is left. And where do we go from here.

            From the flames a pale hand reaches out to me. The skull calls: "don't leave me here."

            Tarzan's last words. "Don't leave me."

            From the forest, comes calls in languages I don't understand. Soft Black voices I don't understand. Inbetween me and my ancestral people are all the contemporary horrors: from Black male gun runners shooting up our nights to junior Tarzans/Black politicians picking over the bones of our desert days. The trauma of containment within colonial culture tumors our brains. Western addictions and fantasies direct our desires.

            The funeral pyre burns. Will I turnaway or turn toward the fire, enchanted by the flames, too fascinated to feel the heat?

            "Don't leave me."

            Or will I fly outward seeking self by burrowing forward into Africa. The Africa inside myself. And the Africa outside myself. Africa the people. Africa the land. The Africa that calls "Join us."

            And that has always been our destiny. The one choice, in either ignorance or consciousness, by active commision or inactive ommision, the one choice each African American makes in her or his lifetime. Fully flying forward or returning backward. Vacillating between. Or committed and cleaving to one end of the spectrum.

            Tarzan: "Don't leave me."

            Africa: "Join us."

            One way or another, we respond.

            Acknowledging what we hear or ignoring the pleas. Acting one or both calls, or rejecting one or both. One way or another; a third way or no way.

            We respond.

***

            The essential problem of twoness is that every journey is made one step at a time. So even if we go one step forward and then one step backward, one step up and one step down, even if we stand and rock from side to side. It's all still just one step at a time. And at every point we must ask ourselves: which way? Which call will I heed? Which direction will I turn?

            One way or another, our inner spirits always respond.

            Geronimo would ask, "where is your heart?"

            The old folks would say, "where you gon run to, all on that day." Standing at the crossroads, which way should I go. Lord, lord, lord, what should I do, which way should I go? And how shall I get there?

 —kalamu ya salaam

TRAVEL WRITING: TARZAN CAN NOT RETURN TO AFRICA / BUT I CAN (parts "U" and "V")

-U-

         OH, WHAT A FEELING. 

            Riding in a car or bus on the recently asphalted road up the coast from Accra to the Cape Coast Castle is rough enough. It is super hard to imagine being driven to the castle on foot, chains around your neck and your ankles, trodding barefoot through the bush. This is not "jungle" area, but heavy bush, rocky ground in some places.

            As we drive for better than two hours my eyes get tired and I doze. My ancestors herded like cattle, were force marched for hours beneath sun with whiplash licking their bare backs. They too were tired, but they were never allowed to doze.

            Standing in the magazine where they kept the powder and looking through the portal down into the dungeon where people are now standing with torch light in the very spaces where their ancestors were crowded, peering into those ancient spaces, I do not feel anger, I do not feel spirits calling me, I do not feel anything. I simply understand that we did not stand a chance. And that is a cold and helpless feeling.

***

            After one of the symposium I was talking to Kofi Anyidoho, complimenting his presentation, "Slave Castle, African Historical Mindscape & Literary Imagination".

            He touched my hand.

            I held his unforced touch.

            There are no words for all of this.

***

            My oldest child, my daughter Asante preceded me to Ghana. Back in August 1994 she went for six weeks. An opportunity to travel presented itself and she jumped on it. She and Jelsy, a Haitian born artist friend. The trip was important for Asante.

            Many, many years ago, in 1969, Tayari, Asante's mother and my ex-wife, spent a summer in Ghana with Operations Crossroads. And now I am crossing the sea to this place. What is it? Ghana calling? What?

            Asante laughs one day as we are talking about something and comments on how fragile men are. "Men are so fragile. They have this tough ego shell, but inside they're so fragile. They're just like all the shell creatures of nature. Without their shell, they can't make it."

            I am standing here holding a grown man's hand.

            It takes some getting used to.

            Reentry into Africa is an emotional strip search for self.

            Crawling out of my red, white and blue shell. Crawling out of my negro shell. Crawling out of my dominant male ego shell. Crawling out of my shell and wondering will I ever learn to fly -- where are my wings?

            Maybe.

            And that's all I can say right now. Maybe.

-V-

         THE WHOLE OF OURSELVES

            Our African identity, like all of life, is contradictory in nature. We have both great negatives and great positives that we must face. At certain periods of negritutinal reaction to racism and colonialism, we romanticize our positives. At other periods after fighting and sacrificing for so long, we wallow in the self indulgence of shams. Sham development. Sham socialism. Sham democracy. Sham capitalism. Sham nationalism.

            What we must face and embrace is the whole of ourselves and not simply those parts which are acceptable to Tarzan or those parts which make us feel big like Tarzan.

            Emulating Tarzan is easy, but what does that lead to but one or two junior European cities per country, with mayors and presidents who, on an international level, exhibit the same impotence as did traditional tribal chiefs who, when confronted by European military might, were forced to "negotiate" with, and eventually capitulate to, the kings and presidents, generals and mercenaries, merchants and bankers of Europe.

            What we must do is extract the lessons of history from our historic encounters with Tarzan, and we must do so realistically rather than romantically.

            Tarzan is a difficult character for us to deal with because we both hate and admire Tarzan. We want to expel him from our lives on the one hand and yet, on the other hand, the cumulative effect of our desires and fantasies is to recreate ourselves into an idealized Tarzan. Our national bourgeoisie, they are Tarzan. Most of our elected officials and nearly all of our heads of state, especially the dictators, they are Tarzan. Tarzan in Black face.

            The rub is that Tarzan taught us that we were all Black but he also taught us that being Black was a bad thing. There are too many examples of our contradictions to even begin enumerating. Every African's mirror contains at least one major contradiction, if not more. But at least one.

            Unfortunately for us, we African Americans have internalized the psychology of the oppressed. After fifteen generations or more of subservience, Black inferiority is all we know. A major corollary of our inferiority complex, is a high tolerance for suffering. Indeed, our tolerance of downpression verges on an addiction to suffering.

            I am no longer a Christian. I do not believe in the redemptiveness of suffering. Oh how they oppressed us with that one.  Under Tarzan's religious tutelage, suffering became such a great part of our worldview that we were not happy unless we were unhappy.

            "Woe is me" became our daily bread.

            "Deliver us from evil" we asked of Tarzan's god while we looked forward to an almost certain lifetime of hell and fervently believed in a hoped for eternity in heaven.

            "Deliver us from Tarzan" is what we should have said. But we were so good at suffering. And Christianity taught us that we were born to suffer. That "man is born of sin" and that Jesus will redeem us in heaven.

            Meanwhile, down here on the ground, Tarzan rules. And when Tarzan is absent, Tarzan's flunkies and trainees stand in for the master and rule. And when neither Tarzan nor his flunkies are present, Tarzan's ideas rule and we create our own Tarzans as we await deliverance to arrive from outside ourselves.

            Our deliverance as a people, however, cannot be given to us by others, nor passively accepted. Deliverance must be fought for and seized. Deliverance is a birthing process requiring hard labor, rupturing of the womb, and the flowing of blood if new life is to be created. Some of us have worked for deliverance for a long time, most of us have been awaiting deliverance for an equally long time. But, to date, howsoever long it has been, deliverance has not come.

            How long has it been, 500 years? In all this time, for all his omnipotence, Tarzan has been unable to deliver us. Tarzan's failure has taught us well. If we want to be delivered, we will have to deliver each other. Give birth to ourselves. The kingdom that we create in the here and now is the only kingdom we will ever enjoy in this life on earth.

            And to kill Tarzan we must desire to be ourselves. A truly revolutionary behavior.

***

            On the second morning in Accra, we were bussed to Drago's Restaurant for a breakfast. We assumed that it would be a program of some sort. That assumption was a mistake. Not only was there no program, everyone didn't even get to eat. But it did afford us the opportunity to meet and talk with some of the people attending PANAFEST whom we did not already know nor know of.

            One of the people at our table recognized me and helped me remember him: Balozi Harvey. One of the early members of Maulana Karenga's US Organization. Present at the founding of Kwanzaa. Present at the Black Power Conferences of the sixties. The Congress of Afrikan People. We began exchanging stories and reminiscences about people, places and events. Behind all we talked about was an assessment of our failure to make revolution in the United States and our hopes for Africa in the future.

            Revolution.

            Today, in the nineties, revolution is such a lonely word. Discredited. Rejected. Some even declare that following the collaspe of the Soviet Union, that we have reached a period which wishful thinking calls "the end of history." Third World failures are sighted as evidence of the failure of revolution.

            They talk. The spread of democracy. The coming of the superhighway. The world becoming a free market.

            They whistle past their own graveyards. It's well past midnight.

            Revolution.

            Make fun of Castro. Bring out monster portraits of Mao.

            Revolution.

            At the breakfast table someone asked for papaya. The waiter nodded. Returned a little later and said, "papaya finished."

            That's what the Republicans want us to believe. Revolution finished.

            That's why "we're" in Haiti. In Somalia. Thinking about Rawanda. If-ing at Bosnia. Finished?

            A man is confronted by his wife. This man, it seems, was a philanderer. He would runaround. Cheat on his wife. And lie to her. Constantly. Her friends told her. People she didn't know, told her. At some point it became unbearable. She confronted him. He confessed his errors. Begged for another chance. She started to put him out but relented. Then one day she visited his office and caught him in a compromising position with his secretary. Before she could say a word he told her: "It's not what you think." She replied, "what do you mean, not what I think? I'm looking at you." He loudly protested that she was wrong and concluded with this challenge, "who are you going to believe? Me! Or your lieing eyes!"

            Who are we going to believe? Our downpressors or our lieing eyes?

            Revolution, finished?

            One of the colloquium participants, in a bold self critique, noted that apparently Nkrumah was wrong when he said "seek ye first the political kingdom and all things will be added thereto." Political kingdoms absent economic revolution has proven to be bankrupt. Those of us forty and over, still alive, halfway sane, and with even a modicum of strength and stomach left for struggle, we know. The real deal is to figure out how to economically sustain and develop ourselves.

            The real revolution is self development. What we used to call "Kujitegemea" -- economic self reliance. Balozi runs the Harlem, New York based Third World Trade Institute. We talk about effecting trade and economic development in Africa.

            Finished? We've hardly just begun. There are questions of the environment. Questions of affordable and appropriate technology. Questions of mass transit and urban development.

            In the West there's a mess. Every major urban center of the United States has problems. The really big ones have really big problems. In Brasil there are horrendous problems: in the Amazon, the lungs of the world are being burnt up and children are systematically slaughtered in Rio. Jamaica is Hollywood: the "wild, wild west" but with real bullets, real death and real destruction. Eastern Europe is a cauldron that no detente can hold together. The end of history? Who are we going to believe: the West or our lieing eyes?

            The end of history? No. The end of his story? Yes. At last. Yeahhhh booooyyyyyeeeeee! It is really now our time to decide how to live our lives.

            Revolution.

            To try to figure out how to get it together and move forward. And part of moving forward must be leaving a bunch of our badness behind. Jettison the European model. Fanon told us oh so long ago. But we did not really understand. Now with Paris looking the way it does. With London, with New York, with Moscow, Berlin. With all of that being what it is, which is not us. No map for our space. What we are faced with finally is a fight within ourselves to determine which way forward. And that's revolution.

            Why should anyone want to recreate the United States, England or France? How could we. Whom could we enslave by the millions? Which continents would we kill the indigenous inhabitants, remove most of the accessible mineral wealth, colonize, industrialize, pollute and declare to have reached the end of history? We have only ourselves and the spaces we occupy. The Caribbean isles are too small to sustain us. The West to covetous of what they have built up to share. We have only that which is yet to be developed.

            We have the dirt roads of Ghana. We have the hinterlands of Africa's West Coast. We have war weary central Africa. And the industrial jewel of South Africa. We have ourselves. We have a future. But it will take a revolution to actualize our dreams.

            A future for us requires a revolution in our lifetime. The real battle will be to overturn ourselves and become Black again, moving at our own pace, in our own space, in directions of our own choosing.

            And this is what we wrestle with at a breakfast without a purpose. We had the breakfast because that is what one does at conferences. Maybe we needed something else. Maybe what we need is to stop.

            Stop doing what has already been done. Create what does not now exist.

            Stop emulating the end of history. Honor the lives of our ancestors. Make and build a space where their spirits can be blessed by the smiles of future generations, walking in rhythm, living in harmony, enjoying the fruits (and vegetables) of a revolution that we accepted responsibility to wage.

            A revolution is more than simply a change of mind. Revolution is conscious engagement with the forces of history, the discarding or overthrowing of a dominating social order and the institution of a new social order. Every revolution fights two phases. First, the struggle (generally violent) to gain control of the productive forces and defend oneself from outside control and/or domination. Second, the struggle for social reconstruction and instituting the new social system.

            So far we have had no successful revolution of the second phase. From Haiti onward to independent Africa and the Caribbean, all of the revolutions which have succeeded in phase one have failed in phase two. In cases such as Mozambique or Grenada, phase two was aborted because they were not able to defend phase one against external aggression (Mozambique) or internal conflicts (Grenada). But the deal is to learn from, rather than be discouraged by, the mistakes and failures of our predecessors. Moreover, regardless of the outcome in the past, revolution is still what we need to built a secure future.

            One reason we need revolution is Euro-supremacist imperialism has no intention of leaving us alone. We can not simply withdraw into ourselves because they won't let us.

            Our oppressors and exploiters, our ex-masters and economic creditors, Western social engineers and scientists, dominate us even without their physical presence by actively seeking to incorporate us into the web of their influence either directly or through proxities and stand-ins. Without a revolution of our own making, we fight phase one and then simply end up with new masters trading places with old masters. The dominant and dominating systems staying in place, modified only in so much as necessary to accommodate the newly ascendant, and generally less competent, "native/petit bourgeois" ruling class.

            Western dominance is not simply a matter of ideology but also of institutions and individual behavior. Dominance is structural and behavioral. This is why Black faces in high places do not necessarily raise the level of life for the majority. Whether as heads of state and government functionaries for newly independent countries or as mayors and legislators in Western countries, more often than not, this new ruling elite ends up being caretakers of crumbling and disintegrating societies which are dependent on aid from the West. A flag and military don't make a country. Indeed, the maintenance of government bureaucracies and militaries often impoverish developing countries.

            To be real, a revolution must be able to improve the quality of life for its people by bringing about positive change at all three levels: ideology, institutions and individual behavior. This then is why and what a revolution is. A revolution of two phases leading to real power to define, defend, develop and respect our lives.

            Then, and only then, will we truly be able to know, taste, love, hold and procreate the whole of ourselves.

—kalamu ya salaam

TRAVEL WRITING: TARZAN CAN NOT RETURN TO AFRICA / BUT I CAN (parts "S" and "T")

-S-

         WHAT'S YOUR NAME?

            Wangui wa Goro is from Kenya. A long way from Kenya. She lives in exile in England. Unable to return to Kenya because of the clash of her human rights activism with Kenya's current barbaric administration.

            She is both a creative writer and a translator. Her most well known work is the translating of Ngugi wa Thiongo's books into English. She is often identified as Ngugi's translator. Some people even assume they are related.            

            So there is a double frustration in her life. She can't go home because home is politically inhospitable -- she will be jailed or, worse yet, assassinated should she return. Additionally, her important work of translating overshadows her creative writing.            

            For a day or so, Wangui stays at the Marnico guest house but eventually moves to another hotel. Later when we all return to Accra after the colloquium, we are staying together at the Mariset Hotel in the East Condonment area of Accra.            

            There are two Mariset Hotels in Accra. This one is a lovely little, isolated accommodation. There is original contemporary Ghanaian art decoring the walls. The rooms are, for my taste, more comfortable than the Novatel. They have a small fridge in each room. We use ours for water and juice concentrates. There's a basket in the room with a fragrant potpourri and the telephones have the "standard American plugs" on them. Mariset's brochure notes them as "international" telephone hook-ups. I resist the temptation to jump on line and check my E-mail.           

            We see each other at breakfast and are soon conversing.            

            Wangui is traveling with her six year old son, Mbuguah. A son who has never seen Kenya. "The only time he was in Kenya was when he was a small seed growing inside of me." Mbuguah nevertheless identifies Kenya as home.

            Wangui is also joined by Adotey Bing, the director of Africa Centre in London. I share some of the Tarzan manuscript with them.

            I have been working at night throughout the trip and have already completed over seventy-five percent of the writing. Fortunately, in Cape Coast I was able to print out the manuscript. My Mac Powerbook has Apple file exchange. I've brought both Mac and DOS discs with me. The setup in the temporary Cape Coast colloquium office is DOS-based. I transfer the file to a DOS disc and print with no problem. There is no way I could have written all of this without a portable computer.           

            Even while many of my colleagues continue to resist using computers and hooking up E-mail, the fact is the computer revolution is irreversible. In Accra, one small record store on a nondescript side street had a computer. Between computers and advances in telecommunications, Africa will quickly be able to close a significant developmental gap.

            Day to day communications across the continent, as well as between Africa and the rest of the world will take a gigantic leap in the next two or three years. This will unavoidably also advance Pan Africanism, a philosophy which seeks unity of the African world and thus grows closer to fruition simultaneously with increased, easier and more accessible communications. To my way of thinking, the computer revolution is a boon for our movement.           

            As the manuscript goes around the table, we talk. Wangui asks me about my name. She speaks Swahili and wonders how my Swahili name came about. I tell her I took my name at Kwanzaa in 1970 and that it was a political choice.

            While we knew that the majority of African Americans came from the West Coast of Africa, we chose Swahili because it was the only African language that was the official language of an African country. Most African countries use the former colonial language as the official language. Swahili was also a Pan African, trade  language spoken up and down the East Coast and throughout parts of Central Africa. It was a language that was not associated with any one people. It was easy to learn and had a basic grammatical structural.

            Wangui corrected me. Although it was widely used by various peoples, it nevertheless was the indigenous language of a specific group of people. She then commented that she liked my name: "pen of peace."

            Wangui is one of those gentle, iron-willed spirits who possesses a fierce quietness. As silent as a distant mountain in the moonlight, and just as unmoveable in her convictions. She speaks in a tone about two small steps above a whisper but she is also an independent thinker and a person of purposeful movement. From my brief observations during the few days we were together, I surmise there is very little wasted motion in anything she does. Because of her focused intensity, there is no danger that her quietness will be mistaken for shyness or timidness.            

            Wangui, her son, and Adotey had an earlier flight than we did, and so checked out early in the afternoon. At that time I saw a demonstration of her battle stancing, the kind of principle-based movement which I'm sure drove the Kenyan law and order fascists straight up their government walls. When the hotel bill was presented, Wangui refused to sign for the last day. Wangui's position, which she stated in calm nonnegotiable terms, was that they were not staying in the room that night and therefore should not be charged for it. The clerk said the policy was they should be charged for the night because they were checking out in the afternoon.

            The clerk couldn't believe what was happening because all she wanted was for Wangui to sign for the bill. PANAFEST was going to pay for it. The money wasn't going to come out of Wangui's pocket. But for Wangui it was about principle and not money. Finally, Wangui drew a line separating the charges and signed for the other two nights but did not sign for the last day.            

            The whole exchange took maybe five or six minutes. The clerk had struck a rock. Wangui was like a tree planted by the water in her intransigence. There was no doubt in my mind that a woman such as this would be killed in contemporary Kenya which is rent by divisive neocolonial tribal politics.

            The majority of African states are not politically ready to confront the limitations of tribalism and nationalism, a potent mix which is always self destructive. Moreover, as the conflagrations in Bosnia make clear, the extreme negative that results from mixing tribalism and nationalism is not a racial characteristic, even though, thanks to the cultural hegemony of colonialism, whenever one says "tribalism" one immediately thinks about either Native Americans or Africans.

            But regardless of the location or source, we must confront and overcome the limitations of tribalism and nationalism. This process of overturning ourselves is the life work of Wangui wa Goro.

            When confronted by a free thinking woman, there is no doubt that many of today's nominal African leaders (most of whom are not just male -- they are also "macho") will exhibit a negative response. Her traditional opponents notwithstanding, Wangui wa Goro's no nonsense, principled and fearless attitude is precisely the quality of leadership that (Pan-)Africa needs.

***

            Pan African leadership, as its history demonstrates, will come from unexpected places and in its own time. The first day we were in Accra we went to the DuBois Centre. DuBois, an ardent and globally significant Pan Africanist, is buried in Ghana.

            W.E.B. DuBois did not start off his professional life as a Pan Africanist. In fact, when he was a founding member of the NAACP, he was often the only person of color integrating these meetings. Eventually, he broke with the NAACP. As important as his NAACP work was, it was as a Pan Africanist that DuBois made his mark internationally. He was one of the chief organizers of the important Pan African Conferences, international gatherings which fueled the then nascent African independence movements. Attendees included many of the initial heads of state of countries such as Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria.

            DuBois' advocacy of Pan Africanism came as a surprise to some who identified DuBois as one of Garvey's staunchest and unremitting critics. In his book, Dusk of Dawn, DuBois sums up the conflict between himself and Garvey in a charitable fashion, displaying none of the bitterness and name-calling that was characteristic of their long running feud. 

            My first effort was to explain away the Garvey movement and ignore it; but it was a mass movement that could not be ignored. I noted this movement from time to time in the Crisis and said in 1920 that Garvey was "an extraordinary leader of men" and declared that he had "with singular success capitalized and made vocal the great and long-suffering grievances and spirit of protest among the West Indian peasantry." Later when he began to collect money for his steamship line, I characterized him as a hard-working idealist, but called his methods bombastic, wasteful, illogical, and almost illegal. I begged his friends not to allow him foolishly to overwhelm with bankruptcy and disaster "one of the most interesting spiritual movements of the modern world." But he went ahead, wasted his money, got in trouble with the authorities and was deported from the United States. He made a few abortive efforts later, but finally died in London in 1940, poor and neglected.

            The unfortunate debacle of his over-advertised schemes naturally hurt and made difficult further effective development of the Pan-African Congress idea. Nevertheless, a third Pan-African Congress was attempted in 1923. It was less broadly representative than the second, but of some importance, and was held in London, Paris and Lisbon. Thence I went to Africa and for the first time saw the homeland of the black race. 

            Eventually DuBois repatriated to Ghana and, in so doing, gave his personal answer to the question of "double consciousness" which DuBois eloquently articulated in the Souls of Black Folk. 

            ...It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

            The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. 

            What is most interesting is that only after visiting Africa is DuBois able to articulate the Negro "message for the world." In a word, it is humanism. Africa can teach humanism. Upon reading DuBois' reflections on seeing Africa, I felt that in December of 1994 I had seen the same essence of Africa that DuBois saw in December of 1923 and wrote about in Dusk of Dawn.

            And there and elsewhere in two long months I began to learn: primitive men are not following us afar, frantically waving and seeking our goals; primitive men are not behind us in some swift foot-race. Primitive men have already arrived. They are abreast, and in places ahead of us; in others behind. But all their curving advance line is contemporary, not pre-historic. They have used other paths and these paths have led them by scenes sometimes fairer, sometimes uglier than ours, but always toward the Pools of Happiness. Or, to put it otherwise, these folk have the leisure of true aristocracy -- leisure for thought and courtesy, leisure for sleep and laughter. They have time for their children--such well-trained, beautiful children with perfect, unhidden bodies. Have you ever met a crowd of children in the east of London or New York, or even on the Avenue at Forty-second or One Hundred and Forty-second Street, and fled to avoid their impudence and utter ignorance of courtesy? Come to Africa, and see wellbred and courteous children, playing happily and never sniffling and shining.

            I have read everywhere that Africa means sexual license. Perhaps it does. Most who folk talk sex frantically have all too seldom revealed their source material. I was in West Africa only two months, but with both eyes wide, I saw children quite naked and women usually naked to the waist -- with bare bosom and limbs. And in those sixty days I saw less of sex dalliance and appeal than I see daily on Fifth Avenue. This does not mean much, but it is an interesting fact.

            The primitive black man is courteous and dignified. If the platforms of Western cities had swarmed with humanity as I have seen the platforms swarm in Senegal, the police would have a busy time. I did not see one respectable quarrel. Wherefore shall we all take to the Big Bush? No. I prefer New York. But my point is that New York and London and Paris must learn of West Africa and may learn.

            ...African life with its isolation has deeper knowledge of human souls. The village life, the forest ways, the teeming markets, bring in intimate human knowledge that the West misses, sinking the individual in the social. Africans know fewer folk, but know them infinitely better. Their intertwined communal souls, therefore, brook no poverty nor prostitution -- these things are to them un-understandable. On the other hand, they are vastly ignorant of what the world is doing and thinking, and of what is known of its physical forces. They suffer terribly from preventable disease, from unnecessary hunger, from the freaks of the weather.

            Here, then, is something for Africa and Europe both to learn; and Africa is eager, breathless, to learn -- while Europe? Europe laughs with loud guffaws. Learn of Africa? Nonsense. Poverty cannot be abolished. Democracy and firm government are incompatible. Prostitution is world old and inevitable. And Europe proceeds to use Africa as a means and not as an end; as a hired tool and welter of raw materials and not as a land of human beings.

            I think it was in Africa that I cam more clearly to see the close connection between race and wealth. The fact that even in the minds of the most dogmatic supporters of race theories and believers in the inferiority of colored folk to white, there was a conscious or unconscious determination to increase their incomes by taking full advantage of this belief. And then gradually this thought was metamorphosed into a realization that the income-bearing value of race prejudice was the cause and not the result of theories of race inferiority; that particularly in the United States the income of the Cotton Kingdom based on black slavery caused the passionate belief in Negro inferiority and determination to enforce it even by arms.

            This is the DuBois who lived out his last years working in Ghana. This is the DuBois, his eyes opened by Africa, who committed class suicide by siding with the development of the African masses rather than remaining a lionized intellectual in America. This is the DuBois whom most of us seldom encounter. A DuBois who tired of the high wire, double consciousness balancing act, and decided to cast his total lot with Pan Africanism.

            DuBois was an intellectual: first, last and always. His was no romantic nor nostalgic cleaving to Africa. He was a rationalist unswayed by emotionalism and appeals to sentimentality. Here's how he described himself in Dusk of Dawn, his autobiography written when he was seventy years old as a summing up of his life:

            My leadership was a leadership solely of ideas. I never was, nor ever will be, personally popular. This was not simply because of my idiosyncrasies but because I despise the essential demagoguery of personal leadership; of that hypnotic ascendancy over men which carries out objectives regardless of their value or validity, simply by personal loyalty and admiration. In my case I withdrew sometimes ostentatiously from the personal nexus, but I sought all the more determinedly to force home essential ideas.             

       One of the most forceful of those ideas is this seldom quoted insight in which DuBois locates the fervor and future of Pan Africanism squarely in the masses of the diaspora.

        ...From the eighteenth century down the Negro intelligentsia has regarded segregation as the visible badge of their servitude and as the object of their unceasing attack. The upper class Negro has almost never been nationalistic. He has never planned or thought of a Negro state or a Negro church or a Negro school. This solution has always been a thought upsurging from the mass, because of pressure which they could not withstand and which compelled a racial institution or chaos. Continually such institutions were founded and developed, but this took place against the advice and best thought of the intelligentsia.

            Pan Africanism will have its day. Will future rise. But not because of ideas, no matter how prescient or how logical. Rather Pan Africanism will rise because the masses of we African people in the diaspora will find that their brightest future is located in the complex matrix/nexus of African unity and not simplistically in the countries wherever we may have been born as a result of colonialism and the slave trade. Our brightest future will be wherever we can band together and work with and for each other as a specific manifestation of Africa, whether that be at "home" in the Americas or abroad, in the diaspora or on the continent of Africa.

            The secret of Pan Africanism is that it is about Africa the people and not simply about Africa the land. Make no mistake, the control of Africa the land mass is important. But the ultimate measure of civilization is the social welfare of the people and not the material level of industrial development or lack thereof.

            Africa: The children smiling. The women toiling. The men struggling mightily to make things work: old cars, crumbling buildings, underdeveloped townships. The people. Waking up. Walking. Working. Talking. Touching. Singing. Dancing. Collectively.

***

            Tomika. Jamilla. Shaqiel. Kunta. Kwame. Lashawna. Tariq. Kenya. Rhodesia. LaToya. Keasha. Aiesha. Damieka. Damella. Shawneeka. Tupac. Assata.

            And the list goes on and on and on. African-sounding names picked by the working class to illustrate their identification with Africa even when they don't know one word of an Africa language.

            To some people this is all laughable.

            Pan Africanism is laughable.

            Africa is laughable.

            These nonsensical, totally homemade, made-up, crazy sounding names: laughable.

            Laugh if you want to, but Africa is alive. It's alive and its the working masses keeping Pan Africanism alive. All across the diaspora.

            A child is conceived in Kenya and born in England. His mother teaches him that Africa is his home.

            In Ghana we met elderly African American women. Quiet. In their sixties. Some of them married to Ghanaians. They've been there twenty, thirty years. Not thinking about returning.

            In America there are thousands and thousands, thousands and thousands of African Americans who will never return to Africa but who turned out to support both Winnie and Nelson Mandela when they separately toured the United States.

            The will is alive in the hearts of the masses.

            The worsening conditions of our inner cities waters the tree of Pan Africanism. As massive lay-offs increase and government entitlements decrease. As personal security can no longer be guaranteed, and, indeed, insecurity and fear become the norm. As family ties unravel and people find themselves living not blocks or a few miles away from the nearest relative, but living in different states separated by thousands of miles. And, conversely, as the world shrinks because of technological advances in telecommunications and computers. All of this contributes to the development of Pan Africanism.

            What is now a leap of faith, tomorrow may be but one small and rationale step toward a better life.

            As the skilled and semi-skilled working masses of us: the teachers and mechanics, social workers and industrial equipment operators, postal workers and truck drivers, nurses and medical care providers (e.g. x-ray and laboratory technicians, therapists and nutritionists), administrators and office workers, accountants and retail merchants, as those of us who work everyday and help make the world go round, as we assess our relative positions and, increasingly, opt to investigate and exercise other options, particularly the option of living and working elsewhere, for us Africa will become more and more attractive.

            Pan Africanism's most pressing problem is not a lack of will but a lack of leadership. Committed and inspiring leadership which can articulate and implement solid plans which provide linkage and opportunity. Leadership. But it's coming.

            And the bulk of this leadership will not be the extraordinary individual geniuses but rather will be composed of the ordinary, hard working laborers who will choose a historic option, and, in so doing, make real the promise of Pan Africanism. The leadership will rise from among the most capable of the masses. From those whose strange and funny names are illustrative of an undying African dream. From those who right now may not even have a clue. No concern for Pan-anything. Just young and full of themselves, looking to make a way in the world and sure to find no way. None of their names inscribed anywhere. And they will be forced, by circumstance and by the intransience of our historic oppressors (both internal and external), these young people, if they are to become even marginally productive as adults, these young people will have to struggle for their rights. Indeed, even if all they want to do is party, they will have to struggle for their right to party. They will have to struggle just to live.

            The nineties will be both the best of times and the worse of times to be young, not to mention gifted and black. But out of the ever encroaching social malaise which threatens to engulf all of us, a new wave of leadership will emerge. A leadership which will turn to Africa, the Africa within all of us as well as Africa the continent. Some of them will "choose" to turn that way. Others will turn toward Africa because they have no other viable choice. In the long term, in terms of the social development of the masses of our people, linking and uniting Africa, that is the only way ahead available to the leadership that is coming.

            From: Tomaniqua. Nefertteti. Ashanti. Cinque. The leadership is coming. From: Oduno. Latifa. Tiaji. Bomani. It's coming. Leadership, the last missing puzzle piece, is coming. 

-T-

         ROLLING ON A RIVER OF RHYTHM.

            In Cape Coast we go to a Durbar. All the chiefs in the central region are carried in procession to a program in an open field near the sea. They are all dressed like something Ebony Fashion Fair has yet to attain. Gold for days. Kente and brocade, weaves and prints in colors so vibrant every movement is a dance. Drummers everywhere.

            But what is most impressive to me is that these are elders lining up, patiently waiting until it is their turn to march in. There are young, strong men carrying the chiefs. There are young strong men beating the drums. But the elders are also there. Linguists with staffs. An occasional master drummer. Queen mothers sheltered under beautiful umbrellas, stunning as gigantic butterflies.

            Nobody pushes. Shoves. Or complains.

            The procession starts and for fifteen minutes shy of two hours they parade around the field. Each king has an assigned area. Nothing is running on time but everything is in order.

            A duo of athletic young men parades with twirling flags. Huge flags embroidered with signs and symbols. They strut. They jump. They squat, drop, duck walk, kick spin, lay on their backs in the dust, always keeping the flags flying through the air so violently fast they seem to stiffly stand straight out as if they were made of wood instead of fabric. As they pass you hear the rough flutter of the flags bull roaring through the air. Later in the program they dance before the kings and the president. The announcer explains that they represent resistance. The people would dance. The colonial police would try to stop them. The colonial powers would try to jail them. But they danced. They danced. All of this was acted out. Here was the cakewalk turned inside out. They danced.

            A real brass band comes strutting in. Young men, swaying, dipping, dancing as  they play trumpets, bugles, a flugalhorn, trombones, euphoniums, even a French horn, and of course snare drum, a bass drum and cymbals. They remind me of their counterparts in New Orleans, the same vitality. They even do a number with a one drop incorporating reggae into their sound the same way young bands are doing in the Crescent City.

            Then there is the procession of this group of sisters playing instruments, singing and dancing. Instruments that are traditionally played by men -- a cylindrical shaped horn patterned on an elephant's tusk, held horizontal and blown at the small end. The Mmenson Group are one of the musical highlights. I remember them from the castle procession. To hear them. To see them. They move with a graceful, syncopated gait, blowing their horns, beating their drums, and dancing as they parade. They are young, vital, a clear female compass for Ghana's future.

            At the rear of the procession comes what we would call a secondline. A band of poor folk beating on boxes, makeshift drums, and an old drum or two which has definitely seen better days. They parade around the whole field and then off the field. The police did not stop them. They laughed, and drummed, and sang, and danced. They had no king, but they were swinging.

            At one point there must have been four or five different drum things happening within twenty feet of each other. Each kept its own beat flowing. The sonorous cacophony of rhythm was astounding. A chaos of order.

            In this swirl of humanity, swirl of colors, swirl of sounds, within the sandaled procession of chiefs and elders, the vibrant ebullience of strutting youth, the amazement of visitors, amid all of this there was room for everyone. Everything was in order.

—kalamu ya salaam

TRAVEL WRITING: TARZAN CAN NOT RETURN TO AFRICA / BUT I CAN (parts "Q" and "R")

-Q-

         ABANUM.

            The castles were the seat of colonial government.

            The Ghanaians never had nor needed a word for jail or prison.

            The castles were where the prisons were.

            The Akan word for fortification is Aban.

            Along the coast where the castles were, the Akan coined a word for both the colonial government and for prison: Abanum.

            Literally, "inside the fortifications".

            Prison: the government has you.

            We have a hell of a lot of castles in America.

-R-

         FAMILY VALUES.

            There is something about this man thing.

            Tarzan was a man. Tarzan left his woman behind. Eventually they sent Jane, but Tarzan still dug Cheeta, the monkey. Tarzan and Jane didn't have any children. Then they sent boy. One child. Tarzan. Jane. Cheeta. And boy. Never a girl. The classic European nuclear family.

            Most Ghanaian men don't look or act anything like Tarzan. I'm closer to...

            Me, Tarzan. You, Jane. I'm in charge.

***

            I worked in my office literally until the last minute and there was almost no time left to return to the apartment, grab my unpacked bags, throw some clothes in (I'm sure I left something), stop to pick up my son who is caring for my car, and drive like crazy to get to the airport on time. Nia had already called me to let me know that I was late. This is her first trip to Africa. This is my first trip to Ghana. We make the Delta flight. With maybe two minutes to spare. No, I'm exaggerating. It was something like five minutes to spare.

            The plane stops in Atlanta. Stephanie Hughley is going. Steve Browser meets her there. He has recently returned from Ghana and gives her some pictures to take back to share with folk. Gives us both some good advice. I start feeling really, really good about this trip.

            Ghana Airlines is in the same terminal we arrive in on Delta. Everything goes smoothly. I've been up all night, so I slept from New Orleans to Atlanta. Slept from Atlanta to New York. And plan to sleep on the way over from New York to Accra.

            And then this Ghanaian brother gets on. He has on a big black coat. A big black hat. He's got all kinds of bags hanging off him. A little girl in tow. As he settles in, I see that one of the "bags" is actually a baby cradled against his stomach. The baby is two months old. Her older sister is 18 months old.

            Brother man carefully unstraps. Unpacks with precision. And for the next nine hours takes such loving care of those kids that everybody complements him. He wasn't the only one with kids on the plane. He wasn't even the only man accompanying kids. But he was so beautiful to watch.

            He says he loves his kids. He must. And they must love him. He fed them. Changed them. Rocked them to sleep. They were quiet.

             I mean when I first saw him coming down the aisle I almost passed him off as a hip cat dressed all in black with a felt hat cocked to a bad lean. After we got off in Accra, there was no doubt in my mind. This was a hip cat. A Ghanaian man. And his lean was straight and tall.

***

            To know the pear we must taste the pear. Knowledge is not the result of simply and solely thinking but rather the result of sensing and reflecting on our experiences. Regardless of whether the tasting is a result of our own direct experience or a vicarious tasting as a result of the experiences of others, some mouth has to taste the pear in order to fully know pearness, in order to fully conceive of the pear as a pear.

            There is a world of difference between thinking of (or imagining) how a pear tastes and knowing how a pear tastes. Obviously, it is both necessary and important to think, but thinking alone is insufficient. Moreover, if we start off any social investigation simply with thoughts then we have misled ourselves.

            We should start with "what is" (i.e. our social realities) and think of ways to either maintain or change reality. Maintain reality when it befits us and change reality when it is necessary. So while we argue that the battle is for the hearts and minds of our people, we also understand that ultimately that battle is a battle to influence the behavior of our people and to understand and celebrate the historic and hereditary aspects of our culture and ourselves, historic and hereditary aspects which are beyond our control to fundamentally change.

            The fact that many of us (including some of our most notable celebrities) have spent big bucks, long hours and suffered painful operations in order to physically change our appearance (e.g. the shapes of our nose and lips, the color of our skin, the texture of our hair) does nothing to alter the basic fact we are of a specific ethnic heritage. Genetically, we are still what we are, and, if we have children, they will not inherit our surgically changed features, but rather will inherit the features dictated by our ethnic DNA. The basic fact is that individual thoughts and actions, no matter how bizarre or deviant from the norm, do nothing to change our essential make-up. Our ethnic identity remains intact, regardless of how we alter our physical image. The same applies to our history.

            In order to influence how people think, we must first "recognize" and analyze our realities. Ignorance of our social, historical and ethnic realities is the biggest obstacle to our individual and collective development. After surveying the field, then and only then are we able to move forward with some degree of certainty in terms of influencing both "how" and "what" people think.

            The surest way to change one's mind is to engage in behaviors which indicate and reinforce the contemplated change. In fact, we have not actually changed our minds until we change our behavior, otherwise we have merely only "thought about" changing our minds. This is why the slave master is more concerned with controlling behavior than with controlling thinking.

            Among many of us it is popular to quote and misapply Carter G. Woodson's observation about educating a man to go to the back door and that once so educated, the man will always seek the back door, and if he does not find a back door, he will work to create a back door. This backdoor observation is used to illustrate the power of brainwashing the mind, but the truth is not to be found in the power of the mind, but rather the power of miseducation.

            We must realize that miseducation is not simply a thought in the master's mind put into the oppressed person's mind by osmosis, but rather is transferred through the process of dominant culture education which is itself a real practice designed to institutionalize specific behavior. The critical aspect of the backdoor theory is not what the backdoor man "thinks" but rather the "process of teaching" him to think the way he does, "and the social reinforcements" which make sure that he continues to think in backdoor ways.

            None of the above is to deny the power of the mind, the power of positive thinking (to use a well-worn catch phrase). However, the real question is what does it take to reach the hearts and minds of our people? How do we change people's mind? How do we change our own minds? Obviously, we must educate ourselves and reinforce the education. Education is process, a learned behavior.

            Moreover, from a philosophical standpoint, all thought should start with an assesment or appreciation of reality, then move to a critique of reality, then an application of the critique, and then an assessment of the success, or failure, of the application. This is not a linear process in the sense that everything happens sequentially, one, two and then three. Rather it is a dialectical process in the sense that starting with what is, we think about reality, move to change reality and/or change our behavior in response to reality, and then reevaluate reality in light of our "new thoughts" which thoughts are actually our new behavior and our new reality. So forth and so on.

            The Ghanian brother caring for his children is engaged in true revolutionary education. His thoughts about what it means to be a man, about the relationship of fathers to children, about the division of labor along gender lines, about nurturing as a male activity, all of that is profoundly affected by his behavior of actually caring for his kids on the plane from New York to Accra.

            Those of us who saw him were also affected. It may have caused some of us to reexamine our ideas, or seeing him may have reinforced some ideas we had. In any case, for him, for his children, for all of us who witnessed him, and for the future of the Pan Africa world, his social behavior was the critical intervention altering reality.

            On one level I don't know what brotherman thought about what he was doing. On another level, I know that his thoughts were profoundly human, profoundly caring, and ultimately inspiring. In fact, his thoughts were revolutionary, not because of what he thinks, but rather because of what he does and how his doing informs and reorders the social world. We need revolution in terms of social change, not simply philosophical conjecture about what was, is and could be. We need more brothers like brotherman, a baby strapped to his stomach, showering his daughters with nurturing attention that inculcates into them in particular, and all others who observe him, a new and revolutionary concept of African manhood.

            Did you ever see Tarzan feed boy, change boy's diaper, rock boy to sleep? Well?

—kalamu ya salaam

TRAVEL WRITING: TARZAN CAN NOT RETURN TO AFRICA / BUT I CAN (parts "O" and "P")

-O-

         THE FORTS AND CASTLES OF GHANA.

            In the absence of any physical landmarks of this historical journey into chaos, other communities of African people may seek refuge in collective amnesia as a natural defence against the unbearable trauma of the savageries of the slave trade. But for the people of Ghana, there can be no escape from a historical reality as palpable as the slave castle. Ultimately, Ghana's Pan African consciousness reaches far into a fractured, deeply wounded collective unconscious that insists on being uncovered so that it may be healed back to wholeness. The slave forts and castles are the most immediate though confusing gateway into the collective unconscious. To contemplate and, above all, to penetrate the puzzling, even frightening mystery of these mouments of enslavement is to come to terms with our history of fragmentation, the basis of Pan African consciousness and struggle.            

 —Excerpt from Slave Castle, African Historical Mindscape & Literary Imagination by Kofi Anyidoho, University of Ghana.

***

            Elmina - 1482. Built by the Portuguese, is the first of the slave castles. I ask questions. The more I try to find out, the less I learn. There is broad confusion as to how many castles there are in Ghana. In West Africa.

             Castles. These military forts which served as administrative centers for colonial government and the administration of the gold and slave trade, including the temporary housing of items of trade: guns, beads, alcohol, cloth from Europe and, sine qua non, gold and human flesh from Africa's interior.

            In Elmina I find one small book, Forts and Castles of Ghana by Albert van Dantzig, and one small pamphlet, The Castles Of Elmina by Tony Hyland of the Department of Architecture, University of Science & Technology, Kumasi.

            In her prescient manner, Nia somehow strikes up a conversation with Albert van Dantzig who just happens to be passing through at that time. I am upstairs in the little gift shop, feeling prideful because I have purchased these two writings and a few other books about Ghana. When I descend the steps clutching my catch, Nia introduces me to Mr. Dantzig. He is seventy some years old, from Holland, now living in Ghana. We talk briefly. He autographs his book for us.

            Danzig's book focuses on a chronological summary of the construction and administration of the 50 forts and castles of Ghana. Danzig suggests "To our knowledge the following list of castles, forts and lodges -- from west to east -- could be regarded as complete." Complete? Can there ever be a complete history of the slave trade and all of the institutions it engendered? For me Dantzig's book is a beginning, a point of departure, an indication, a partial map, the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

            Tradeposts, fortified or not, have been built in various parts of the world, but nowhere in such great numbers along such a relatively short stretch of coast. At various places, such as Accra, Komenda and Sekondi, forts were actually built within gun-range of each other. Within three centuries more than sixty castles, forts and lodges were built along a stretch of coast less than 300 miles (500 km) long. Many of these buildings are still in existence at the present, and if some of them could be regarded as important individual monuments, the whole chain of buildings, whether intact, runined or merely known as sites, could be seen as a collective historical monument unique in the world: the ancient 'shopping street' of West Africa. The 'shops' varied greatly in size and importance. If some could be  compared with department stores, others were hardly more than village stores. (P. vii)

             ...

            The essential purpose of all these buildings was to serve as store-houses for goods brought from Europe and bought on the Coast, and as living quarters for a permanent commercial and military staff. If the earliest of these buildings were mainly fortified on the land-side against enemies expected from that side, soon the real danger appeared to come rather from the side of the sea, in the form of European competitors. During the sixteenth century a growing number of French and English ships came to trade in what was supposed to be a Portuguese monopoly area. An even more serious threat to Portuguese supremacy on the Coast came from the Dutch, who had arrived in large numbers on the coast by the end of that century...(P. xii)

            ...

            It should be pointed out that the Europeans did not have any territorial jurisdiction beyond the walls of their forts; the very land on which they were built was only rented. Each European nation tried to reserve exclusive trading rights for itself with the local rulers. It is therefore not surprising that political disintegration set in all along the coast, and consequently the tradeposts had to be armed not only to drive competitors away, but also to protect the traders inside the forts or the people on whose territory they were built against attacks by neighboring African states.

            It was also for geographical reasons that all this European commercial activity concentrated in this relatively small area: first of all there is the obvious fact that Ghana is the only area where there are substantial gold deposits comparatively near to the coast. But Ghana's coast is also suitable for building forts because it is rocky, thus providing building material and strong natural foundations, and access from the interior to the sea is not, as in neighboring areas, interrupted by lagoons and mangrove swamps... (P. xiii)           

             The 96 page book has only eight indexed references to slavery, and most of those are cursory.

***

            Since 1876, down through the current administration, Christiansborg Castle has served as the seat of government.

            Some castles are used as prisons.

            Others as administrative offices, post offices and the like.

            Others are museums and national monuments.

            Some are in total disrepair.

            Some are merely decaying archeological sites.

            Elmina has been recently painted and remodeled. Ironically painted bright white. Whitewashed. Inside there is a photo exhibit with a narrative. The exhibit was created by the French. Plaques have been placed. Some original plaques have been preserved. A few new ones have been added. There is a sign listing the admission prices.

            All kinds of subterranean rumblings bash the stones of Elmina. Something, I can never get the straight of the story to say exactly what the "thing" was, but something about slavery was put up and then taken down. Taken down allegedly because the Ghanaians didn't want to offend whites.

            Didn't want to offend. Whites.

            Diaspora Africans living in Ghana are rightfully incensed by the vacillations.

            Outside Elmina there is a beach party.

            Butts shaking on sacred ground.

            Dr. Robert Lee who went to Ghana during Nkrumah's days. Whose son and wife died in Ghana. Dr. Lee who has spent over thirty years of his life in Ghana. Who operated a clinic for the poor of Ghana. Dr. Lee's pocket was picked during the solemn commemorative program at the castle.

             A brass band played. People danced. The procession was not so solemn.

            There was no written program. There were no informative speeches. No story telling. No rituals of remembrance.

            Frankly, this whole recognition effort is just now seriously getting underway and Ghana is not quite sure how to do it.

            I am told: If anything substantial is to happen with respect to the castles you people will have to make it happen. It will not be given to you. You will have to take it.

            They took the old door down. They painted everything pretty and new.

            When will the truth be told?

***

            Within the stones of the castle our ancestral spirits are entombed. They silently await excavation. Await our detailed investigation.

            A sankofa seed is planted. I want to return to Ghana and do a collaborative work with a Ghana scholar. I want to focus on the impact of the slave trade on Africans, both continental and diaspora. Towards the end of our trip, as the idea becomes clearer, I approach Kwadwo Tgyemang. He eagerly accepts.

            It's on. There is no concise, point of origin history of the slave trade, not to mention no afrocentric assessment of the impact of slavery. Let's look at the real history, who played what role. Let's investigate and meditate, confront and come to grips with the positives and negatives of our history.

            As significant as the castles are and as many of them as there are in Ghana, there is a paucity of documentation. This lack is a clear manifestation of Ghana's historic amnesia. But also a clear manifestation of diasporan ignorance. Yet what goes around, comes around.

            We were cast out. We shall return. Like a stone flung at the sun. Like a boomerang. Like a child separated from its mother.

***

            The history of people is movement. I can sense in the diaspora a slow turning. A serious seeking for alternative. In conversations throughout our stay in Ghana invariably the thoughts we expressed amongst ourselves pivoted on the notion of moving. Africa, in general, and Ghana, in particular, is a magnet.

            No news here, but certainly relevance. The communal implosion and resultant disintegration of social life in the United States will invariably fling individuals away from that center toward the peripheries where other realities exist.

            For practical reasons: life and development. For historical reasons: birth and essence. For cultural reasons: temperament and lifestyle. For the love of self and Blackness -- Africa. Africa, in all its contradictions, in all its weaknesses, revulsions, convulsions, repulsions, internal chaos and material un(der)development. Africa, remains a pulsing heart attracting her blood, her brood, back to herself.

            Most of us will not voluntarily go -- but more of us will return than have ever thought about it since the fifties. A significant number, providing leadership by example, will begin the pilgrimage back into ourselves. Of that number, some will remain and others won't, but life will go on. America will continue downward and Africa will keep struggling upward. This is not theory but the inexorable march of the life force.

            After maturity there is decline and death. Before maturity there is the opportunity for growth and development. Who is in a period of "decline after maturity" and who is struggling to develop? The distinction is plain. Especially when we look at the African world collectively, who we are, where we are, and what we have to live for.

***

            The forts are brute manifestations of penetration. Male movement into fecund  earth. Testimony to the mauling of Africa by marauders and by co-conspiratorial African merchants and mercenaries.

            Facing a fort, I feel my foreigness, my estrangement from this birth earth, but also I feel my essence, my connections. Both rupture and reproachment, as well as reentry and embracement.

            As an individual, I was born in a nation of immigrants, movement is my history -- and yet everyday, folk in America give you 57 arguments, 997 facts as to why going back to Africa is unrealistic. Just five hundred years ago the American migration started in earnest and now these conquering nomads argue that migration is an exercise in futility. The majority of Whites are less than five generations on American soil. Most came not speaking English and with only as much possessions as they could carry. When nomads consul that it is foolish to migrate, who should listen?

            Why are these forts here if moving here is so undesirable?

            There is more than gold in them there hills of Ghana.

            The old itinerant preachers and blues bards used to forcefully sing: "You got to move / When God get ready / You got to move!"

            Could it be that those castles, the last we saw of Africa, those prisons where we were held, could it be, that those symbols of slavery will become beacons, lighthouses, guiding us back into ourselves?

            Moreover, we are each other's completion.

            Africa may need the diaspora more than the diaspora needs Africa because Africa can never be whole until the diaspora is embraced.

            On purely a material level, our skills and resources are needed. On a social level, because we are without specific ethnic interest, we may be the only Africans capable of helping Africa transcend the limitations of tribalism. On a psychological level, we may be the lever to force Africa to turn over the rocks of colonialism and examine what has been hidden beneath. We may be the epiphany that sparks the memory, that shatters the amnesia, that cleanses the wound of slavery, that immense maiming that arrested the continent and continues to unbraid every developmental effort that does not confront this awfulness.

            If and when the diaspora returns, the returning will force the host to deal with a historic reality which, for so long, too long, has been ignored. Perhaps it's a larger plan than individuals in the diaspora returning home "to drink water from an ancient well" in hopes of quenching a thirst for completion that no other liquid can satisfy. Suppose that's only the romance.

            Suppose the real deal is that Africa can not rise without us. Suppose Africa needs us far more than any of us have yet admitted. Far more than any of us have ever imagined or thought about.

            Suppose we are the seed that must be planted in fertile soil, the only stone upon which the future can be built. I do not mean this as self flattery but rather as a reflecting on a most terrible reality: what continent can stand the removal of millions and millions and millions of its strongest and still develop?

            In some ironic manner befitting the convolutions of what it means to be African, the diaspora is the Africa that the continent is struggling to become. The Africa concerned with the whole of itself rather than self-defeatingly focused on specific and antagonist ethnicities and nationalities.

            I don't know. Fathomming this is more than my brain can contain. All I know is that I want to know more. I want to return and learn what I left, I want to return and understand the origin of what I brought over with me. I want to return. I am seeking myself.

            Rummaging through the history of a fort. Sitting next to a centuries old cannon. Standing in an empty storeroom, perhaps in the very spot a not too distance ancestor stood.

Everything I know is nothing compared to the immensity of what this fort teaches me I do not know. And the fort also teaches me an even more brutal reckoning: as ignorant as I am, I still know more about what happened then do the majority of Africans on the continent. As ignorant as I am, I am more aware of my Africaness precisely because I have no African nationality, no African ethnicity. I have no one tribe or nation. I have all of them, and in having all I transcend each one.

Both my consciousness and my ignorance are deep. Deep knowing. Deep ignorance. But that's no news; I'm African.

-P-

         STONE SONGS.

            #1

            the silent stone so

            full of voices, the spirit

            sound your insides feel

            #2

            i am tempted to

            go to the wall and tongue lick

            stone in search of words

            #3

            i want to piss on

            dungeon floor, spit on dungeon

            door, eye break stone down

            #4

            stone stand, stand stone, stone

            cold dead  at the auction stand

            stand  stone cold dead  still

 —kalamu ya salaam

TRAVEL WRITING: TARZAN CAN NOT RETURN TO AFRICA / BUT I CAN (parts "M" and "N")

-M-

         ALWAYS DON'T LAST.

            At the colloquium on the first day I heard a paper by Kwadwo Opoku Agyemang from the University of Cape Coast. "Culture Under Siege: The Making Of Africa's Heart Of Darkness" addressed the issue of how the slave trade affected those who were left behind. 

            A society that lives under a real and constant threat of enslavement consists of potential slaves; and a society of potential slaves will experience a psychological development peculiar to the environment. The culture of the besieged society will acquire certain characteristics and tendencies in order to fight, adapt to or in some way survive the catastrophe. When a society is so placed and must bend all its strengths to preserve its collective life and cannot grow beyond shrill survival, then its culture will fold into itself; it becomes a grim and conservative society, its people huddle together, furtive and afraid, in a state of shock and suffering traumata, a wounding. 

            He spoke about the phobias resulting from this trauma. He talked about moral breakdown. Moral stories that were told to children. In these stories the thief doesn't get caught nor punished.

            Kwadwo suggests that the point of the story was to teach children not to trust people. Why? Because, during the period of the slave trade, the people you trust just might be the ones to sell you into slavery.

            Some of the responses took exception. They offered no disproving evidence. They didn't even offer alternate theories. They just didn't want to accept that slavery had affected those left behind to that extent.

            Many Ghanaians are very, very proud of their traditions. But suppose a lot of what was created, was created in reaction and relation to the slave trade? Suppose significant aspects of one's proud culture wasn't really self-determined traditions but rather reactions to the slave trade? Suppose negatively reacting to the slave trade was a major part of one's cultural tradition?.

            Kwadwo talked about scarification. A concept almost indelibly identified with traditional Africa. Kwadwo searched for the beginning of scarification. He found periods where there was no sacrification. He found slave documents suggesting that slave traders avoided slaves with unsightly scars. He talked about "a little gem of a short story by the Senegalese writer and filmmaker, Sembene Ousmane," called "Tribal Scars or the Voltaique" in which a father brutally scars his little girl's face and body to protect her from slavery. He talks about the absence of scarification in the New World. He talked about how scarification was a survival tactic.

            During the question and answer period, I shared information I had read in The Bush Rebels, A Personal Account Of Black Revolt In Africa by Barbara Cornwall, a freelance, American journalist who walked through the bush with Frelimo in Mozambique and PAIGC in Portuguese Guinea. 

            Fortunately we were met by a Land Rover along the route and were soon rolling to a halt at the edge of a clearing where long columns of barefooted Mozambican civilians had set down their loads for barter. They were Makondes from a tribe in Cabo Delgado, a purportedly fierce people who at puberty carve geometrical designs across their faces and then rub charcoal into the fresh wounds. The scarring is done during a ceremony for both boys and girls and the final result on their dark skins is quite impressive. More startling at first encounter are two additional operations, both optional, during which a metal peg is driven into the initiate's upper lip and secured on each side by an iron disc, then the teeth are filed to points. The entire practice of maiming is a custom dating from the slave trade era when the Makondes hoped, often justifiably, that slavers would pass them over because of their grisly appearance. Their market price would not have covered the cost of their transport because few buyers would bid on a fanged slave when more presentable ones were available. (P. 20) 

            Kwadwo Opoku Tgyemany stated that when it came to analyzing the beginnings  and origins of some social practices, many, many Africans have an amnesia surrounding the slave trade. They simply say "that's the way things were always done."

            Kwadwo Opoku Tgyemany made me understand that "always" is only five hundred years long. Always is really not that long.

            Besides always is a Eurocentric concept used to justify their dominance. Nothing that is material or social is eternal. Everything must change. That law of life is our greatest hope. Always don't last forever.

-N-

         UNDER SIEGE TOO

            On 6 December 1994, the day Nia and I left for Ghana, New Orleans, the murder capital of the United States had reached 393 murders for the year. By the time we get back on 20 December 1994, the murder rate will surely be over 400. The overwhelming majority of these murders are "Black on Black."

***

            At first the major barter item was the gun. Guns came to Africa from Europe. Once in the hands of African mercenaries, then the slave trade began in earnest. Those who were without guns were preyed upon by those who had them.

            Soon guns were everywhere, even though everyone did not have a gun, and there was a complete breakdown of social order in the face of constant marauding, constant murdering and constant enslaving. The proliferation of guns historically has resulted in social chaos.

***

            The gun make you feel funny, feel like you different, almost invincible. Don't have to take nothing off nobody. Can do whatever you want.

            Gun culture is aggression and instantaneous obliteration of whomever troubles you.

            In a moment of anger, if you got a gun, you pull the trigger. Had it been a fist fight it would have been different. You may even have knocked the man down, kicked him once or twice, but rarely actually beat him to death with your hands. But with a gun, umh. Let that fellow look at you wrong, and, boy, he dead for sure. You fire him up.

            And the stuff happens so fast, so fast.

            Gun culture is swift death even before you have time to think about what you are doing. Put a gun in the hands of a man who feels less of a man than "the man" and the armed creature stiffens like an aroused prick.

            I watch the soldiers with guns in Ghana. You don't see them often. Around the President, at some official function when there are big people to protect. But wherever you see them, the hard stance is the same. Gun eyes look at you. Daring you to do something untoward, not to mention flat out wrong.

            Man with gun always speaks in bullets.

            Gun culture. The gun. You walk around with a perpetual hard-on, always ready to fuck someone.

—kalamu ya salaam

TRAVEL WRITING: TARZAN CAN NOT RETURN TO AFRICA / BUT I CAN (parts "K" and "L")

-K-

         PICK YOUR FAVORITE.

            Since 1918 there have been fortyeight Tarzan movies. Fortyeight. 40 + 8.

            1918   Tarzan of the Apes      

                        Elmo Lincoln

            1918   Romance of Tarzan

                        Elmo Lincoln

            1920   The Revenge of Tarzan

                        (unk.)

            1920   The Return of Tarzan

                        Gene Pollar

            1921   The Son of Tarzan

                        P. Dempsey Tabler

            1921   The Adventures of Tarzan

                        Elmo Lincoln

            1927   Tarzan and the Golden Lion

                        James Pierce or Frederick Peters

            1928   The Mighty Tarzan

                        Frank Merrill

            1929   The Tiger Tarzan

                        Frank Merrill

            1932   Tarzan, The Ape Man

                        Johnny Weissmuller

            1933   Tarzan The Fearless

                        Buster Crabbe

            1934   Tarzan and His Mater

                        Johnny Weissmuller

            1935   The New Adventures of Tarzan

                        Bruce Bennett

            1936   Tarzan Escapes

                        Johnny Weissmuller

            1938   Tarzan and the Green Goddess

            `           Bruce Bennett

            1938   Tarzan's Revenge

                        Glenn Morris

            1939   Tarzan Finds a Son

                        Johnny Weissmuller

            1941   Tarzan's Secret Treasure

                        Johnny Weissmuller

            1942   Tarzan's New York Adventure

                        Johnny Weissmuller

            1943   Tarzan's Desert Mystery

                        Johnny Weissmuller

            1943   Tarzan Triumphs

                        Johnny Weissmuller

            1945   Tarzan and the Amazons

                        Johnny Weissmuller

            1946   Tarzan and the Leopard Woman

                        Johnny Weissmuller

            1947   Tarzan and the Huntress

                        Johnny Weissmuller

            1948   Tarzan and the Mermaids

                        Johnny Weissmuller

            1949   Tarzan's Magic Fountain

                        Lex Barker

            1950   Tarzan and the Slave Girl

                        aka Tarzan and the Jungle Queen

                        Lex Barker

            1951   Tarzan's Peril

                        aka Tarzan and the Jungle Queen

                        Lex Barker

            1952   Tarzan's Savage Fury

                        Lex Barker

            1953   Tarzan and the She-Devil

                        Lex Barker

            1954   Tarzan's Hidden Jungle

                        Gordon Scott

            1957   Tarzan and the Lost Safari

                        Gordon Scott

            1958   Tarzan and the Trappers

                        Gordon Scott

            1958   Tarzan's Fight For Life

                        Gordon Scott

            1959   Tarzan the Ape Man

                        Denny Miller

            1959   Tarzan's Greatest Adventure

                        Gordon Scott

            1960   Tarzan the Magnificent

                        Gordon Scott

            1962   Tarzan Goes to India

                        Jock Mahoney

            1963   Tarzan's Three Challenges

                        Jock Mahoney

            1964   Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sor of

                        Taylor Mead

            1966   Tarzan and the Valley of Gold

                        Mike Henry

            1967   Tarzan and the Great River

                        Mike Henry

            1968   Tarzan and the Jungle Boy

                        Mike Henry

            1970   Tarzan's Deadly Silence

                        Ron Ely

            1970   Tarzan's Jungle Rebellion

                        Ron Ely

            1981   Gummi Tarzan

                        aka Rubber Tarzan

                        Soren Sjogreen

            1981   Tarzan, The Ape Man

                        Miles O'Keeffe

            1984   Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes

                        Christopher Lambert

            Fortyeight!

            Isn't the reoccurence a bit redundant?

            No. Not really. Not unless you think colonialism is redundant.

***

            I wish I heard more drums in the night. In Africa. Meaning the natives are restless. I would feel better if we were restless. Much more restless.

            The real Africa is life without western morality clouding the issues. Without the eternal heaven hanging over our heads. Without the eternal hell burning our feet. How is it we are always -- in all and every way: physically, mentally, spiritually, realistically, and, above all, imaginatively -- we are always closer to hell than to heaven?

            Does god want us in heaven? Why make heaven so hard to enter and so far away from our reality if god really wants us there?

            I can not imagine heaven.

            I can not imagine anything eternal.

            To be is to change. That which is unchanging does not exist. The very definition of what something is is what something isn't. In that sense in order for Christians to believe in heaven, they must believe in hell. Now, did god create heaven and hell or did man?

            Africa is hallcinatory.

            "You can say that again, old chap."

            You again.

            "Shall we finish our fifty questions?" Tarzan does not wait for me to answer. "What is an African?" Tarzan does not wait for me to answer. "That's a man who has gone through hell and believes in dying to get to heaven. Isn't that something?" Tarzan does not wait for me to answer. "What is a heathen?" Tarzan does not wait for me to answer. "That's a bloke who refuses to go through hell, would even commit suicide rather than submit, but at the same time he's not dying to get to heaven. Isn't that something?" Tarzan does not wait for me to answer. "What's a bloody revolutionary?" Tarzan does not wait for me to answer. "That's a guy who's living in hell, is willing to kill you to get out, and doesn't believe in heaven? Which one are you?" Tarzan does not wait for me to answer.

            Back in the States it's hard not to believe in White people. They're everywhere. They do everything. They have great luck. Like -- this is the absolute last part of the book to be written; everything else is complete except this little section, and yesterday this airforce pilot who was shot down in Bosnia walks out the forest essentially unharmed. This is the kind of shit that makes you think White people are invincible. They trumpet it in all the media. Thanks to CNN we have instant pictures. They start talking about survival training. His radio. His rations. His gun. And above all his belief in God and country. How he never gave up on western civilization. Wow. I wonder if this guy could have survived slavery. Wow. That's a "wow". Surviving slavery. But nine generations later, we are not feted, we are laughed at. And we are also confused. Too confused to answer fifty questions from Tarzan.

            And it's hard to believe in Black people.

            "I believe in Blacks. That's why I made so many movies. I know your potential better than you do."

            "You know us better than we know ourselves?"

            "As long as we're talking about the you that I created, of course, I do. But the rub, old chap, is that it's not about you. Tarzan is not about you, even though you may believe in Tarzan. Tarzan is about me."

            He sees I don't believe him, no, that I don't understand him. I believe him. If I didn't believe him, he couldn't appear as Tarzan. His naked truths wouldn't be clothed in myths.

            "Do you realize that most Tarzan movies are American creations. Yet, you blokes didn't have any African colonies even though you had one of the largest and most influential populations of Africans on the face of the earth. Besides my movies are philosophical. They're about desire and fantasy, and framing reality to conform to said drives. Whites were my audience more than you guys. You guys were... oh what's that term you use in Louisiana for something extra, lagging, napping, oh it's one of those French words?"

            "Langniappe."

            "Yes, that's it. Langniappe! That you guys believed in me was langniappe. Each of my movies was really designed to justify my need to bugger you. My need not just to conqueror you but to desire you. Me, Tarzan. My movies are the only place where it is respectible to 'go native'. Sure, I'm the king of the jungle, but the point is not only do I own the jungle, I also desire the jungle. The jungle is not my home but I desire the jungle." Tarzan falls suddenly silent. His face clouds.

            "Is that why there have been more Tarzan movies than any other single character? I don't think Jesus has had as many features."

            "Jesus would never have made it without me."

            "What do you mean?"

            "It's rather elementary, old chap. You wouldn't, indeed you couldn't believe in Jesus except that I conquerored you. My gun. My bible. My language. My morality. Those are the real drugs." Tarzan holds up the brandy sniffer. Quickly throws back the entire contents. "Besides, don't you understand that Tarzan means one thing to you and another thing to me." Pause. Tarzan looks at the brandy bottle. Pauses. His face brightens. "Enough. It's not good to get drunk in the presence of one's lessers."

            Tarzan walks off into the night. He has left a sign on his chair: "The Never Ending Saga -- Coming Soon To Theaters Everywhere. EVERYWHERE!"

-L-

         WHAT TIME IS IT?

            On our third day in Ghana we traveled to Cape Coast for a week long colloquium which opened with a special candlelight procession to the castle. Because we were so late, after checking into the guest house, we drove straight to the castle and arrived before the program began.

            Time is just another means of oppression. Tarzan introduces the concept of schedules, a clock that must constantly be adjusted to the sun, and a calendar that is always falling behind. Every four years they add a day trying to catch up. If we counted like that in traditional society, they would call us stupid. Since they are not stupid, they just say "leap year."

            Calendars and clocks are conveniences of government, necessitated by the need to time the arrival of troops, of ships, of supplies.

            "Tributes must be paid on..."

            "Taxes are due on..." 

            "You may apply for your license to sell the things you have made between..."

            "The plane arrives at..."

            "The ship leaves on..."

            Show me a government with an army and I guarantee they will have a calendar and clocks.

            Calendars and clocks are a hold over from creating a culture in a climate that would kill you if you did not plant at a certain time of the year.

            Calendars and clocks are not needed near the equator where the weather is roughly the same year round. You can plant yesterday, today and tomorrow. So, here we are imitating Tarzan with our pieces of paper. Putting numbers next to everything we want to do. A time for this. A date for that. And when we fail to be on time we blame ourselves. But we set ourselves up for our own fall.

            Because Tarzan is everywhere, calendars and clocks are everywhere. And everywhere we use Tarzan's calendar and Tarzan's clock, even if we already had one of our own. Even if people keep going the way they did for centuries, rising with the sun  and resting with the moon. We can not escape the tick tick tick of Tarzan's time whip. As long as we have to conform to Tarzan's time, we are not free.

***

            Ghana teaches you the wisdom of patience, of moving on a human scale, of taking conditions into consideration, of being inclusive. That's what the elastic time concept is about: embracing.

            Embracing everyone. Africans know time should be made to fit people rather than people forced to fit time.

            When we get to the airport to leave Ghana, we are informed that the outbound flight is delayed four hours. Instead of round midnight, estimated time of departure is now 4:00 a.m. in the morning -- emphasis on "estimated." It seems the plane had to go to London and was delayed in London which meant that it will get to Ghana late, which means that it will leave Ghana late.

            And what is wrong with that? What is wrong with dealing with changing conditions. Industrialism was the rule of the assembly line, the time clock, the schedule, and there was nothing human about it. We bent to it, conformed, fought, resisted, submitted, tied our stomachs in knots, made Excedrin rich. Headaches became the order of the day, and we keel over at forty-five, victims of Type A heart attacks and strokes.

            At the end of your life, a clock will not be the measurement of your contribution so why let a mechanical object determine how you move about and interrelate with others?

            I have never forgotten Malcolm X's admonition to organizers to respect people's time and to try always to be on time in keeping one's word. But I doubt Malcolm would mechanically apply that dictum, especially to the point of being impatient when people exhibit a non-Western sensibility.  

            Working in cultural production in the Caribbean throughout the '80s taught me to appreciate that the hustle and bustle characteristic of the business world in the USA just doesn't cut it in many places outside of the tyranny of computerized time keeping. My rule of thumb for doing business in the developing world is to plan no more than two appointments a day -- one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and to count myself lucky if I accomplish both.

            I know there are those who think I'm simply making excuses for people who would be better off joining the industrial world and learning to be punctual. I know there are those for whom the maxim "time is money" is gospel. But what is time to poor people, people who don't have a chance in the world of making a million dollars in their lifetime? Regardless of what being in the West might teach us, time is not money. Time is simply a measurement of change. Where change is slow moving. Where change is routine, grinding relentlessly the same, day after day after day. Where indigenously determined order is constantly subverted by external authority. In those places, time is, relatively speaking, expendable.

            Once immersed into the Third World, time, as both a thing and a concept, becomes subordinate to people. Life ceases to be measured by the ticking of a clock or the speed by which things are made.

            Making widgets on time is not living. Relating to others is living.

            Loving one's neighbor -- do we even know who our neighbors are? Rearing children. Dancing with friends. Sharing conversation and music. Traveling with a soul mate. Eating fresh food. Learning what one doesn't know. That's living.

            In Cape Coast at night we would sit out under the tree and talk. The art of conversation as the main source of adult "entertainment" is passÇ in the contemporary West, and I realized just how unfortunate that was as we sat exchanging ideas, drinking tea, water, juice, and getting to know one another in ways that don't happen at meetings and conferences, or at panel sessions and at formal banquets.

            Making quiet love in the morning, aroused by the continuance of a conversation that started yesterday is living. Being artificially aroused to sexual activity by subliminal advertising, or by explicit equations of random copulating with happiness and satisfaction is not living. That's being sexually manipulated.

            Once away from the constant stimulus of violence and sex which is the social ambiance of America, after awhile the body adjusts. I could actually hold a conversation with a woman without wondering how it would be to be in bed with her.

            We are under an unrelenting mindfuck in the USA, behavior modification so severe that it twists our every perception of what the nature of social relationships ought to be.  Because we go through life looking only for what we have been told to look for -- at 9:00 a.m. a meeting with..., at 7:30 p.m. we'll meet for dinner at..., at whatever "tick-tick-tick" time we will whatever... -- we are lost. We find ourselves unable to reach out, unable to communicate with others.

            Our ability to see what is in front of us becomes very, very myopic because we spend most of our time looking for the scheduled that is not there rather than appreciating the unscheduled that is always there.

            We had gone for a performance at the National Theatre in Accra. When we got there we found that it was really an upscale, Eurocentric oriented, US$50 per person fashion show with music performances interspersed. Rather than waste money, we decided to get something to eat in the adjoining cafe. After eating, Nia and I were sitting and talking. A fellow passed. I said he looked like he was from Trinidad. Something told me to speak to him. I spoke up, but he was already well pass me. He didn't hear me. I hadn't spoken very loudly. Then he came back and sat at the next table from us, talking with some people he obviously knew.

            I looked at Nia. I decided to try again. I reached over, "Excuse me. Are you from Trinidad." He was. "How did you know?" One thing led to another. We introduce ourselves and Bob Ramdhanie, Administrative Director of Black Voices, an acapella, female singing group from England, joins our table. We talk. Delightful coincidences abound. I have played selections by Black Voices on my radio program in New Orleans. Bob also knows Marta Vega of the Caribbean Cultural Center. Plus, he was a participant in one of the England based regional meetings of the Global Network for Cultural Equity. I am representing the Global Network at PANAFEST. We begin talking about people we both know in England. Before the night is over, Bob introduces us to F. Nii-Yartey, the Artistic Director of the National Dance Company of Ghana, who in turn invites us to see a children's dance program which we otherwise would not have checked out.

            The next evening, Nia and I attend Nii's program which focuses on the world of the children who basically live on the streets of Africa.

            The dancing was exuberant, some of it on a par level with any of the professional  companies we have seen at PANAFEST. There was a strong element of Western pop dance incorporated into many of the moves. I could not help but smile because what is generally identified as Western or American pop, is actually African American.

            Even though much of our culture is presented under the general rubric of "Western" and even though the "star" performers are often Whites, the fact is, at its core, Western musical culture is African.

            Part of Nii's praxis of choreography was the stylization of everyday movements. Children as young as five and six years old were performing as though they were professionals. At some point the dance floor was filled with at least forty children creating scenes of chaos, brutality, caring, anger, love. All with a minimum of dialogue. It was smoking.

            Suppose I hadn't reached out to Trinidad? My tendency is to remain aloof, but everywhere we went in Africa, people were there, people who, to an extraordinarily large degree, shared our interest in Africa and development. In the West we ride through our lives encased in shells and don't routinely reach out to others.

            In the West we are living under threat of a slave culture, a culture which enslaves and arrests the human spirit. We don't trust each other. The person we talk to might turn around and rob us. Kill us. Steal our dreams.

            It's not about rejecting Euro-centric concepts of time in an abstract sense but rather about making the embracing of other humans the primary consideration of our living. Choosing to elevate the creation of community rather than the manufacture of things. The patient embracing of each other, in all our contradictory and sometimes inspiring, sometimes disappointing humanity, rather than the artificial adherence to a schedule which forces us to flagellate ourselves with the Western whip of time until our social backs are bloody.

            How can we be free if we have neither the time nor the temperament to love and relate to each other?

—kalamu ya salaam

TRAVEL WRITING: TARZAN CAN NOT RETURN TO AFRICA / BUT I CAN (parts "I" and "J")

-I-

CAPE COAST CASTLE.

            We were early. Or, I should say we arrived before the procession got to the castle. We had paid attention to the schedule rather than to the reality of the people marching through the streets, walking to the castle with candles. So we arrived when the paper with the numbers on it said that things should start. Of course, none of our trio was surprised when nothing had started "on time." We took the opportunity to explore.

            At the back edge of the castle, we stood in the semi darkness at the precipice facing the sea. Stood beside the cannon.

            Where I stood, centuries before a European soldier stood, a slave trader stood, a ship's captain stood. And perhaps they and I wondered the same thing. How will this venture turn out for me? What, if anything, will Africa mean to me?

            Isn't it pathetic that it is easier to identify with the mind set of the colonialists then to imagine all the misery and anguish of our raped innocence? What did our ancestors think? Under the conditions they faced, what was it possible to think? But of course none of our ancestors were allowed to stand here on the wall and look out across the water, listen to the waves and leisurely dream of lands far away.

            I am stymied. I hear the sea. I feel the fort's immensity. I am covered in the dust of African travel. And I can not even imagine what to think. This is the trauma of birth. I am leaving the certainty of a Black womb and cast into something so shattering I can not even think. No wonder they characterized us as dumb and stupid. We were probably catatonic, unable to do little more than move.

            The dungeons have stone floors. We were chained there. Pissed there. Shat there. Some of us probably were even born there. Lay there. Spit and cried. And bled. The whole life cycle of Africa seeped into and absorbed by those stones.

            Peering into the unlit magazine (the small room where they kept the munitions), I try imaging that dark as it appeared centuries ago. Imagine being wrapped in that dark. You go down into the dark and everything is damp with body fluids, and the doors are closed and you are left alone, chained in your misery. Your sense of sight is useless. You can't see anything. You wish you couldn't smell anything. Every odor is pungent. And it seems that everything you touch moves, or slips, or slides, or is slimy, or something. Everything is moving except the dead body next to you, but everything else moves when you touch it. And of course, in the dark, you hear everything. Everything. And what you don't hear, you imagine you hear. You hear memories. You hear that seabird you heard cawing days ago when they first pushed you down the stairs into this sinking hole. You hear your heartbeat. You sharply hear a multitude of sounds. Noises. You can not imagine what causes all the sounds you hear. It is sensory overload.

            What must it have been like to breath there. Every time you breath in you suck up the tears and terror of someone next to you. They characterized us as scared of our own shadows, as believing in ghosts.

            Suppose you woke up naked, enchained, on a cold stone floor wet with your own piss that you tried to hold but couldn't, and your arms are wrapped around your brother who is dead. Over in another room, your sister is having the same experience but you do not know what she is experiencing.

            Suppose you woke up after a night of shifting shades of darkness. Of different languages shouted, languages you've never heard before. Some praying, some cursing the name of a god you did not even know was a god.

            Suppose you woke up and found yourself still alive but hugging a corpse for warmth. It had been cold in that hole, and you clung to each other for sanity. Clung desperately to this body which had been breathing when you fell asleep a few minutes ago, a few hours ago.

            Suppose the live one was you, could you still be sane? 

            You have to go to Ghana to understand. You have to wade through the vibrancy of the people and confront the mute witness of white rock castle. You have to stand facing the sea. Walk the yard. Look into the darkness you are afraid to confront even with a  torch or flashlight.

            At the bottom of one stairwell where there was nothing except solid wall surrounding a small floor, even when we shone the light the roaches did not scurry away.

            Imagine being there in the dark and insects are crawling all over you. Across your lips pressed tightly close you feel little legs running toward your nose and because you are chained one to another, you can not always get your hand up fast enough, so you exhale hard trying to blow the roach off your face or at least keep the thing out of your nose. This is when you learn to press close to the person beside you, press your face into the back of their hair and smell the sweat of their fear all night and wake up to discover that you have embraced a dead person. Could you handle it?

            No matter what you know intellectually, you have to go to Ghana to even begin to grasp the magnitude of this deflowering of our innocence. I always thought the middle passage was where we suffered, but climbing back up the steps out of the dungeon, I now know. I know. Men separated from women. Each of us going through hell and having no words to tell each other about it. Only the look. Only the haunted look of surviving the castle experience.

            You are a human being when you are marched into the fort, and if you survive howsoever long you are held captive there, if you survive you face the middle passage. And if you survive that, you face chattel slavery in the new world.

            How can any human remain human after centuries of that? Look at how fanatical the Jews are after less than two decades of Hitler (1933 - 1945).

            Tarzan has been among us for generations.

            Our psychosis as a people started in the castles. At the top of the steps, pausing as I cross the doorway into the yard, I wonder what cure can there be for the illness that the castle wrought?

            This is too much to think about. There are no words for this story. There is no language to talk about this. Tarzan's yells? The chants of traditional Africa? Standard American English? No, none of that is enough to communicate the transformation that the castle wrought.

            I have never known this before. I may have thought about it a little, but never  really imagined it. When I left New Orleans, flying north to New York and then southeast across the Atlantic into Africa, I had no way of knowing that everything I thought I knew about how we became Africans and what being an African (in the generic sense) meant had to be revised significantly in the face of the reality of the castle.

            I had been to East Africa. I stood in the sand and touched the chains. I understood slavery. I had seen ancient auction block in Africa. In the Caribbean, even in the USA. I had read books and talked with wise women and men, but I never understood before now the profound reach of history.

            If you want to know why we hate ourselves and each other. Why African dictators can be so brutal sometimes. Why we have these blood feuds which divide us even more than fighting Europe unifies us. Why we never ever seem to be able to get it all together. If you want to understand anything, everything. You must visit the castles of Ghana and realize that this experience was the birth of both the African and unavoidably also the nigger.

            Both the African and the nigger were conceived in the mind of a White man, and born in the womb of the slave castle because only the African and the nigger survived that. When you left the castle either you were dead or you were irreversibly changed forever. Some of us became more of one than the other, but all became at least a little of each. We became really Black (and blue) there in the stone wombs of those castles.

            We became something new. We became an African: an all encompassing identity that overrode whatever social identity we had, and, at the same time, we became that traumatized individual who can never fully trust his brother, never fully love his sister, never again fully be a member of the group, the tribe, the village, the land because most of us were captured by Black hands and sold into slavery.

            I understand the mitigating circumstances.

            I understand that the chiefs were often overwhelmed and forced to either capture others and sell them into slavery or watch their own people be marched off to never-never land.

            I understand that more than a few fought, and that our weapons of warfare were far inferior.

            I understand that many of the chiefs had no idea of what slavery meant in the new world and how it was so unlike being a slave in Africa.

            I understand all of that now, but a few centuries back, enchained in that roach laden, dark, filthy, lightless hole, I am not sure what I understood, or even if there was anything I could have understood.

            How does an adult understand that everything they have been they no longer are, and, while reflecting on that awesome thought, simultaneously understand that an identity they could never have conceived on their own, they are now in the process of becoming?

            As is the case with all humans, while most of us are not stupid, the majority of us are not geniuses -- it would have taken an African genius to figure out slavery at that moment. What slavery meant, how it happened, and how not just to survive, but to overcome. Based simply on the weight of numbers, the luck of the draw, there were probably more than a few geniuses among the millions who passed through those holes.

            I learned I wasn't one of those geniuses when my little white candle faded momentarily. Nia had handed the candle to me as I was the first to charge into the magazine. Earlier in the evening I had already gone part of the way in and had looked down through a portal at the processioners exploring the dungeon below where I stood. I had not felt any fear or any spirits for that matter, so I did not hesitate to take the candle and go further into the magazine.

            Moving resolutely into the unknown, I probably appeared to fearlessly trod down the steps. There was nothing there, just a dead-end cavity. After we saw nothing but a wall and a low ceiling, some bats and insects, everyone turned to go exploring other parts of the castle. Because I had descended the steps first and held the candle, I felt like I was the only one who walked around on the floor.

            Nia had been at the bottom too. This place does strange things to your sense of perception. Even though we were a group crowded into such a small space, I felt utterly alone. Utterly.

            As I started back up, my candle faltered while I was still on the bottom step. I looked up and could hear voices above me and see pinpoints of light bouncing off the curved wall, but around me and behind me was darkness and all I could think about eleven o'clock that Friday night on the 9th of December, 1994 was getting out of there.

            The candle flared back up quickly -- it was less than a second. But in that second, all I could think about was getting out. Getting out.

            The castle changes you forever.

-J-

         ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE.

            You know that the world is never the same after "the man" shafts whatever he encounters.

            In the process of being shaped into Africa, Africa was also raped and robbed. Africa suffers from the trauma of that rape and robbery. The lost of millions and millions of her strongest people. The lost of self esteem as her elders were rendered impotent, her traditions shattered, her culture trampled by the unmerciful wheels of commerce. The pain, the disease, the shame, the slavery. Centuries after centuries.

            Under European chattel slavery, a century is three generations, at best. Imagine over nine generations of us ground to human meal betwixt the rock and the hard place of racism and capitalism. Auschwitz was one generation. Elmina was Auschwitz nine times over.

            Before Tarzan built one church, Tarzan built the castle. A fort was his foothold and from there he swung through the countryside. But regardless of what Tarzan said in the bush, the fort reveals his real intentions.

            According to one of our guides, the coast of Ghana contains twenty-eight of the thirty-some existent slave castles. Pre-Hitler, concentration camps of whitewashed stone with holding cells instead of ovens. The vast majority of these thick walled way stations were the beginning of a long journey into an unimaginable new identity. Instead of a train ride to a ghastly hell of tattoos and death, the ticket of slavery led to a long boat ride into a living hell of generations of chattel existence for those who were so unfortunate as to survive -- and while millions and millions of us died, we were so strong that millions also survived.

            For every five of these wombs, these wounds on our humanity where we bled, and bled, and bled and dropped pitiful as poisoned cattle. For every five of these social cankers blighting the body of Africa's west coast, four festered on Ghana's shores.

            These castles were the dining rooms of Europe's ascending bourgeoisie.

            The traders picked over us, sucked the strong ones, the succulent ones, the ones who would build up mercantilism, industrialism, capitalism and all them isms. They ate us, belched and threw the bony ones of us aside, scraps for scavengers.

            Europeans literally consumed us in these castles, greedily shoved us through the maws of the front gates and defecated us out of small holes in the rear of the castles, loading us onto the ships, where we were packed into the bottoms destined to become the fertilizer of the "New World's" phenomenal economic growth. Capitalism was the cook and we were the meal.

            The scavengers of land, sea and air grew fat on the edge of Ghana. Huge, slow moving crabs feasting on fingers, toes, intestines and the soft parts of the face. Big bellied vultures plucking the delicacy of eyeballs. Huge-eyed hyenas laughing in the night dragging off thigh bones. The castles supplied nature's clean up crew with plenty, plenty dark meat.

            For every five of these terrible, fetid dining halls, four were in Ghana. Our flesh was not all Ghana born, indeed a small number of us came from as far as the East African coast, but even if we were born two months-walk away, no matter, four out of five of us left Africa with Ghana dust in our nose, coughing and hacking up blood while the Hamattan winds covered us with dull red granules of Saharan sand. Ghana air was the last of Africa we breathed.

            Thus, there is no surprise that Ghana is where the idea of Pan Africanism was really born. Here is where Africa's first bloody birth was consummated. Here is where Garvey and Padmore, C.L.R. and Walter Rodney got their intellectual ancestral start. Right in these slave castles: Cape Coast, Elmina, and twenty-six others. Locked up within these walls, our great philosophers first achieved the understanding that we were all Africans with the same immediate destiny: over the wall in death, on the ship if we lived.

            Even those who avoided capture because of stealth, or because of resistance, or because of, well, because of just plain luck, no matter, because even those who avoided captivity were traumatized in the bush by the cruel beauty of Tarzan. Whether Tarzan was called plantation master, or governor sir, or savior Jesus Christ.

            Don't you think the sudden shock of experiencing de-evolution at this level will produce at least one or two profound philosophers? In the castle we were stripped of everything except the essential spiritual kernel of our Africaness.

            Pan African was the indestrutible seed we carried into the Americas as we were literally wrenched naked out of Africa. When this philosophical seed sprouted, it would flower most articulately from the mouths of those thousands of miles and several generations removed from African soil. DuBois returned to work and die in Ghana because Dubois the philosopher was spiritually born in the castles of Ghana.

            The idea of unifying Africa and expelling Tarzan was born within the restrictions of the slave castles where hundreds of thousands of us died in captivity waiting sometimes as long as a year for a ship to transport us away.

            Up until imprisonment in the castle, some of us were willing to coexist, to accommodate, to seek what would later, in the post cold war world of international relations, be called "détente". We already knew resistance. But, within the castle was born the philosophy that there can be no coexistence with this evil, Tarzan must be expelled.

            The debate still rages today. Some of us can not live without Tarzan. Some of us can not live with him. All of us are having a hard time living.

—kalamu ya salaam

TRAVEL WRITING: TARZAN CAN NOT RETURN TO AFRICA / BUT I CAN (parts "G" and "H")

-G-

         WOMAN, NO MAN.

            Do you know that it was White men who first came into us. After they left their women to sail the seas. Left their women to see what lay beyond the edge of the world. Left their women. Behind. Do you know what I am saying?

            Why were they always leaving their women? Don't they love them?

             I know they love our women.

            You know there's the race issue. There's the class issue. And there's the ass issue. You know that's why they made the bustle the fashion rage during the colonial era.

            What kind of man leaves his woman. Or perhaps it is only men who leave women. Men go it alone and love it. You know, rape, pillage, plunder. Have fun. You know what I mean?

            If you're a man reading this, you know what I mean.

            If you are a woman reading this, you really, really know what I mean.

            Men leave and go it alone. A woman always brings/births family.

            When they came here they had no women with them. Now, look at the colors amongst us -- all the different shades, hues, and intensities of our skin.

            Do you notice that in the movies Tarzan is never shown with an African woman but where did all of the brown babies of black women come from?

            In the daylight, Tarzan swings with Jane, but at night, at night. Tarzan's fascination is obvious when you look at the way we look since Tarzan has made himself part of the family.

***

            One night I was sleeping and Tarzan was in the bed, snoring next to me. He must have been dreaming because he called your name. I woke him.

            "Man, you're keeping me awake."

            "So you woke me to tell me I was keeping you awake?"

            "You were dreaming."

            "And how the devil do you know I was dreaming?"

            "Because you called her name."

            "Whose name? Jane?"

            "No."

            I looked away.

            Tarzan stirred, throwing the covers back. He was naked and I looked at his member. It did not seem to be any longer than mine.

            "I was not dreaming. A dream is an imaginary thing. I was in fact and have been for a long time having quite a go of it with your woman, old chap. Well, she's not really yours, but she is quite a woman."

            Suddenly I saw you climb silently out of the bed. You were naked. When you saw me, you picked up a cloth from the foot of the bed, wrapped yourself, and stood smoldering beside the bed. I lay there fully clothed. You looked at me and said nothing. I looked at you and said nothing.

            "I say old chap would you like to have a go at Jane?"

            In the language of our eyes, you told me no. Don't go.

            "Or would you like to have a go at her when I'm done?"

            Tarzan motioned for you to drop the cloth. I jumped up, stalking out of the room. When I got in the hall slamming the door behind me, Jane was fleeing down the hall, running toward my room. I went to your bed and you were gone, probably still in Tarzan's bed. Jane was crying in the hallway, slumped beside my bedroom door. She looked so white lying there. And I stood not knowing where to sleep. Somehow, I never thought of lying in my own bed.

            "I say old chap would you like to have a go?"

***

            In a very perceptive and sensitively written, although provocatively titled, book Alex Shoumatoff, a travel writer and naturalist investigates the social reality of contemporary Africa. His book is called African Madness. A collection of four long essays, the fourth one, "In Search of the Source of AIDS" contains an interesting aside which suggests the fascination that African female sexual activity generates.

            Shoumatoff is careful to deflate the more sensationalist claims, and even casts a cold light on totally unreliable statistics which are often used to buttress a case for Africa as both the source of AIDS and Africa as the site of a raging AIDS epidemic.

            As he converses with an anonymous physician in Zaire about the high incidence of heterosexually transmitted AIDS in Africa, Shoumatoff makes the following observation:

            We talked about the risk of being infected by a single sexual contact with an infected person. Estimates range from one in ten to one in a thousand. There are no believable figures, but it would seem that the virus is not very easily acquired when both partners are healthy. It is more readily transmitted to the woman, which would suggest that Zairois men are more promiscuous than women if the sex ratio of AIDS cases is equal.

            He explained that heterosexual sex was a lot more risky and efficient as a mode of transmission in Africa than it is in the West because the levels of seropositivity are much higher and a lot more people have other diseases. I wondered if the way sex is performed has anything to do with it. For most Africans, sex is a matter of vigorous old-fashioned humping, often without foreplay, which means that there is insufficient lubrication, and the genitalia of both partners are therefore liable to abrasion. Some researchers have speculated that the duration of the sex act, and the frottement, or grinding, that the women of certain tribes are famous for, certain techniques like the titikisha, Swahili milling movement, and the okuweta ekiwoto, the frenzied twisting of the waistline of Baganda women, may play a role. In other tribes, like the Tutsi and the Kikuyu, the woman is not supposed to move during intercourse lest she be thought of as a prostitute. It seems reasonable that the longer the genitals are in contact and the more fluid that is emitted and the more frottement the greater the chance for infection. But like the theories about ritual scarification, female circumcision, and blood brotherhood, this is not supported by any scientific study.

             What scientific study supports the generalization that "For most Africans, sex is a matter of vigorous old-fashioned humping, often without foreplay..."?

            Are there no names for the "grinding" movements that the "men" of certain tribes are famous for?

            Why are women always the site of sexual attention in the West, from Freud's "penis envy" and "vaginal orgasms" to Shoumatoff's "frottement"?

            Could it be that the Western patriarchy, and by extension, most men in the contemporary world via the influence of Western media, are actually filled with envy and awe in the face of the undeniable power of the female womb to generate life, not to mention the immense attraction that the vagina/womb has to owners of penises, even to homosexuals who often adopt feminine characteristics?

            Women. Could it be fear and envy -- fear of female power, fear of what in comparison is perceived as male weakness; envy of female fecundity, envy of the ability of women to do everything a man can do except, of course, generate sperm?

            Tarzan's other name is Dr. Frankenstein. Not the monster, mind you, but the good doctor, the man who would create life. The dream of every generation of Euro-centric manhood. Articulated in the Greek mythology of Zeus giving birth to a goddess out of his brain. Proselytized in the Christian mythology of Adam giving birth to Eve. And institutionalized in gender chavanism, in the patriarchy of Western culture. All in an effort to supplant women, make women superfluous. Why?

***

            In her paper "The African Woman Today," Ghanian writer Ama Ata Aidoo noted: "In most countries of Africa whole sectors of the economy, such as internal trade, agriculture, agro-business and health care are in the hands of women."

***

            Chinwezu, a leading, if not "the" leading, African literary critic is from Nigeria. He is staying at the Marnico Guest House in Cape Coast, as is Ama Ata Aidoo. We are all here to participate in the five day long colloquium.

            From what I know and surmise based on my meetings with their respective nationals, Nigeria, by contrast to Ghana, is materially richer but spiritually poorer. In their contrasting attitudes Chinwezu and Ama Ata Aidoo suggest how Africa will face the hard row we have to hoe.

            Shortly after Stephanie, Nia and I first arrived at and checked into Marnico, Ama Aidoo's car pulled into the compound. However, she was told that there were no rooms. A discussion ensued. At first Ama Aidoo was going to try to find another place. The manager said they were full. PANAFEST had reserved 10 rooms and they were all taken -- the whole week I never saw ten of us in the hotel, but that is another story.

            Then the egg popped out. Some film crew guy had stopped by and told the manager that he might be back for three rooms, so the manager was holding three rooms aside just in case.

            Ama Aidoo is a matronly Ghanaian, and when the truth was finally out she asserted herself in the spirit of matrons: You give me a room now. I am not going anywhere else.

            She told the driver to unload her bags. The manager relented and she moved in. Hours later I heard some men come into the room across the hall. I don't know whether it was the film crew, nor how many of them they had.

            What was nagging at the back of my head is why would the manager try to deny a room to a woman who could easily have been his mother, in favor of a "possible" booking from someone he didn't know.

            It would be more than a few days later before I realized what I had run into. The lack of respect we African men have for African women, and the absolute fact that African women are beginning to demand respect. To note one without the other is a mistake because it is women's demands which will overcome men's ignorance.

            In many cases, we men don't even realize we are trodding on women.

            I know sometimes when I am excited about something, I will charge ahead and stampede Nia. I will put my "two cents" in and expect to talk even when the conversation is not about money. Fortunately, as is her way and in her characteristic tone, Nia will speak softly but firmly to me when I err. She reminds me to respect her space and howsoever she chooses to occupy that space, especially when she chooses to occupy space in ways that are vastly different from the way I would negotiate the territory.

            This is not abstract. Men not respecting women and not realizing they aren't respecting women is a real problem of the African world. The solution is for women to demand respect. Those of we men who are serious about building a future will listen to our sisters.

             "I know I don't say much, but when I decide to talk, I want to do so without you interrupting."

            I felt ashamed of myself when Nia criticized a particular piece of dumb behavior I exhibited. But I felt thankful and a lot better about myself when I was able to catch my tongue on the next occasion I was about to jump in unannouced. Fortunately for me, although my mouth sometimes is undisciplined, my ears work very well. And I try to stay particularly attuned to women when they speak to me, especially when I am being criticized.

***

            On Wednesday, 14 December, mother Aidoo left us for a short run to Accra. "I will see you back here on Friday when I come back and when you come back from Kumasi." As she pulled away, Nia and I were sitting in the wooden lawn furniture under a tree in the courtyard. The night before we had sat out past midnight talking with Chinwezu, Haile Gerima and mother Aidoo. It just so happens that early Thursday night, 15 December, Nia and I are sitting at the same table awaiting a ride when mother Aidoo returns from Accra. She joins us and we talk. "Whenever I think of Marnico, I will think of you two sitting here."

            We were supposed to go to Kumasi but never made it because we had planned to take a car early, early Thursday morning rather than catch the bus which left Wednesday afternoon. Youssou N'Dour was scheduled to play the castle on Wednesday night -- we went, he didn't and there was no explanation about what happened. Youssou N'Dour's no show at the castle happened after we found out that none of the cars were allowed to drive to Kumasi. We had hit our first string of bad luck on the trip thus far, but even the bad luck turned out good.

            Moving to Kumasi on Wednesday afternoon and returning to Cape Coast on Thursday night proved to be a logistical and programmatic disaster. The Kumasi move was especially negative for the Women's Day program which was held in Cape Coast.

            The program featured dance and poetry performances by schools, women's associations and individuals. One choir, who waited patiently for three hours, completed their three numbers they had prepared even when the eager emcee tried to talk them off the stage after two numbers. Another drama group, from the northern part of Ghana, did a long musical about marriage with specific moral and practical advice about family planning, sex before marriage and similar issues.

            There were welcome addresses and a strong speech from Dr. Mary Grant, who spoke on the need for women to actively assert themselves in all spheres of national development. She spoke in direct and simple terms, not in slogans or rhetoric. The assembled women, some in T-shirts and skirts, some in uniforms, some in Ghanaian dress, all responded with enthusiasm.

            Ama Aidoo was sorry to hear that she had missed the program. She asked how it went and said that she had heard that it was beautiful. I then brought up Chinweizu's book Anatomy of Female Power. On the cover of the book is a provocative quote: "For all men who have been confused, misused and abused by women, particularly since the coming of feminism; and definitely not for women." The book is subtitled "A Masculinist Dissection of Matriarchy."

            The dedication says: To the handful of women now in my life (platonic friends, lovers, ex-lovers, lovers-to-be); To the countless others who have slipped in and out of  my life; and especially To those who have attempted to marry me: From them I have learned most of what I know about women.

            Strangely absent in the dedication of a book purporting to analyze "Female Power" is any mention of his mother. Chinweizu sells his 136-page misogynist screed for US$10. Both Ama Aidoo and I had bought a copy from Chinweizu one night when we sat out talking. When I first started reading it, I thought the man had written a satire, a caricature, but as I read on, I was forced to judge him serious in his views.

            For example:

            A baby is a breathing, bawling, flesh-and-bones club with which a woman can beat a man down to the ground and compel him to toil for her. Even an embryonic baby, a mere speck of a foetus in her womb, will do just fine when a woman wants to bend a man to her will. When she gets tired of supporting herself, she can throw her cares unto some hapless man by getting herself pregnant by him, knowing full well that it would take a most heartless man to abandon their child, and that where the baby goes, she, its mother and nurse, would tag along. That is why their baby is probably a wife's ultimate tool for getting, holding and exploiting her husband. (Pg. 101)

            The above quote is not an especially virulent extract, in fact, it's about the norm of most of the book. I could quote paragraph after paragraph in a similar caustic vein. Chinweizu's main thesis is that women control, and thus have power over men.

            Female power exists; it hangs over every man like a ubiquitous shadow. Indeed, the life cycle of man, from cradle to grave, may be divided into three phases, each of which is defined by the form of female power which dominates him: motherpower, bridepower, or wifepower.

            From birth to puberty, he is ruled by motherpower, as exercised over him by his one and only "mummy dearest". Then he passes into the territory of bridepower, as exercised over him by his bride-to-be, that cuddlesome and tender wench he feels he  cannot live without. This phase lasts from puberty to that wedding day when the last of his potential brides finally makes herself his wife. He then passes into the domain of wifepower, as exercised over him by his own resident matriarch, alias his darling wife. This phase lasts until he is either divorced, widowed, or dead.

            In each phase, female power is established over him through his peculiar weakness in that stage of his life. Motherpower is established over him while he is a helpless infant. Bridepower holds sway over him through his great need for a womb in which to procreate; if he didn't feel this need, he wouldn't put himself into the power of any owner of a womb. Wifepower is established over him through his craving to appear as lord and master of some woman's nest; should he dispense with this vanity not even the co-producer of his child could hold him in her nest and rule him.

            There are five conditions which enable women to get what they want from men: women's control of the womb; women's control of the kitchen; women's control of the cradle; the psychological immaturity of men relative to women; and man's tendency to be deranged by his own excited penis. These conditions are the five pillars of female power; they are decisive for their dominance over male power... (Pgs. 14 - 15)

            This is Chinweizu who wrote The West and the Rest of Us and Decolonising the African Mind. This is a major intellectual force. A man whose work is widely known and widely admired. This is also a man who obviously feels that he has been "confused, misused, and abused by women". Although I know neither the cause nor the details, my brother's pain is obvious. He like many, many men in Africa feels intimidated and oppressed by the strength, fecundity and persistence of African women.

            As I study more and more about the period of the slave trade and the subsequent colonial period, it is clear to me that not only was Africa depopulated, but a large percentage of her strongest men were literally kidnapped often at the hands of mercenaries. In my opinion, those mercenaries are the immediate ancestors of some of Africa's most brutal Black military dictatorships. But deeper than that brutality, slavery and colonialism also account for the two major prototypes of African male behavior: the  macho and the meek.

            Chinweizu agrees with me that this is the normative profile of the male, but he, not surprisingly, attributes this to female power over men rather than to the psychology of the oppressed and repressed.

            To understand why men have not yet revolted in the wake of feminism, we ought to note that, in their attitudes to women, there are three basic types of men: the macho, the musho, and the masculinist. A macho is a brawny, and sometimes brainy, factotum who has been bred for nest slavery, and who is indoctrinated to believe that he is the lord and master of the woman who rules him. A musho is a henpecked version of the macho who hangs like a bleedy worm between the beaks of his nest queen. A masculinist is a man who is devoted to male liberty, and who would avoid nest slavery. (Pg. 124)

            The castration image ("bleedy worm") underscores the virulence of those males who blame women for the current state of powerlessness in world affairs that is the reality of most African men. What is most interesting is that Chinweizu never makes an assessment of the African reality. Most of the quotes are from American and European authors, especially the quotes on feminism.

            Choosing to ground his analysis in the psychological realm without first examining the material and the social is Chinweizu's major problem. We should look at the conditions first, then consider why and how we feel about our conditions.

            The hard truth is that African women on the continent generally work from sunup to sundown, toiling on foot and with hand tools to eke out subsidence in a world that is terribly skewed against them. Just on a physical level, everywhere one looks, one sees mostly women and children porting material on their heads up and down, the length and breadth of the countryside.

            In Ghana in particular, not only are women the numerical majority, and not only do women do an inordinate amount of physical labor, they specifically produce, distribute and market the bulk of indigenous agricultural foodstuffs. The market women are  "notorious" for their psychological and economic independence. Ghana's first lady has thrown herself fully into the organizing of women, particularly in the rural areas, through initiatives such as the December 31st Women's Movement.

            The PANAFEST Women's Day program was designed to address these and other issues. I didn't see Chinweizu at the program, and assume that he, as were most of the other delegates, was in Kumasi. Because of this scheduling conflict, the importance of the Women's Day program was severely undermined.

            There has been a political revolution in Africa. That revolution gained nominal control of what we know today as the independent states of Africa. But in a world of multinational corporations and Euro/American/Asian concentrations of wealth in specific national economies, there is no real Africa independence in the sense of total self-reliance. Africa remains subservient to and aid-dependent on not only the former colonial master states, but also to and on newly emerged Arab and Asian powers. Everywhere in Africa efforts are underway to figure out a winning strategy for an economic revolution.

            Africa will not have the luxury of uninterrupted linear development: first in politics, then in internal social affairs, and third in economic affairs. The nations and people of Africa will not have the opportunity to establish nations whose boundaries are drawn up by and in the interest of Africans. The internal affairs of African nations will constantly be influenced by political and economic forces foreign to Africa. Economic development moving from dependency and subservience to self-reliance and independence cannot happen as long as the former colonial powers remain overwhelmingly influential. That's the downside.

            The upside is that although we face tremendous odds, at wildly uneven levels, social and economic development is happening in Africa, sometimes sequentially, sometimes in parallel, but happening nonetheless.

            The first revolution was political and the ultimate revolution will be for economic self-sufficiency, but between these two is the third revolution, the necessary internal social revolution required for the third step of economic revolution to be successful. African women moving from being the objects of the national productive forces to political and economic decision makers is a prerequisite of national economic independence.

            Women are strong in Ghana and elsewhere in the African world but they are neither respected nor in control. Women will have to demand and struggle for both respect and control. Indeed, that is the essence of power, the ability to self-defend, self-respect and self-control one's life.

            As contradictory as it may seem, in the long run, I think Africa will see a more genuine empowerment of women than in the West, precisely because African women are already 1.) strong in and central to the daily life of their countries, 2.) integrally involved in the internal economy, 3.) absolutely vital to the national well-being, and, most important of all, 4.) because African women are now beginning to demand respect and control.

             The revolution is coming, it's coming. Which is why mother Aidoo had a room at Marnico Guest House.

-H-

         ONE STEP BACKWARD, A GREAT LEAP FORWARD.

            When I get back people will want to know "what is Africa like." But I am not in Africa, I am in Ghana. Here I have to deal with specifics, "Africa" is a generality.

            GHANA The Land, The People And The Culture, A Tourist Guide published by Ghana Tourist Development Limited offers this succinct history of independent Ghana.

Political History

Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast, gained her independence within the Commonwealth on 6th March, 1957 under the leadership of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. On 1st July, 1960, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah proclaimed Ghana a republic and combined the roles of President and Prime Minister. Dr. Nkrumah's Convention People's Party (CPP) government was ousted on 24th February, 1966 through a military coup; and the National Liberation Council (NLC) with General Joseph A. Ankrah as Chairman, took over the administration of the state.

On 30th September, 1969, Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia and his Progress Party (PP) after gaining majority vote in a parliamentary election, took over the leadership of the state.

On 13th January, 1972 Ghana experienced its second military coup which brought General Kutu Acheampong and the Supreme Military Council (SMC) into power.

There was an uprising on 4th June, 1979 and Flight Lieutenant Jerry John  Rawlings emerged as leader of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) which took over power for 3 months.

Parliamentary elections were held in the same year; and on 24th September, 1979, power was handed over to Dr. Hilla Limann and the People's National Party (PNP) Government.

Two years later, on 31st December, 1981, there was a revolution which brought back Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings to power.

Since then, government functions have been carried out by the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) led by Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings. (P.  17 - 18)

            I know as much factual details about the internal politics of Ghana as I do about the internal politics of Washington, D.C., which is to say, in the real world of movers and shakers, I know less than nothing. "Less than nothing" because everything I do know has been carefully filtered by some agency or individual before the information reached my brain.

            I am perpetually aware and wary of the high degree of media manipulation and political sleigh of hand that accompanies every government. I have never forgotten an interview with Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the founding and former president of Tanzania. Mwalimu (teacher) is a Swahili honorific bestowed on Nyerere. He said, referring to the tendency of those in power to do whatever is necessary to remain in power: "all government are conservative. All." Someone asked him what about his revolutionary government. He simply repeated himself and smiled a cryptic, ironic smile that was chilling in its comradely candor.

            In the political arena it is dangerous to believe in absolutes. Every event, every experience, every action, every individual, every group can only be appreciated -- if, indeed, appreciation is possible -- in their own relative context.

            A military man runs Ghana.

             On the ground, at the street level, how is Ghana?

            Outside of Accra, modern housing is rare in the south central area through which we traveled. Traditional villages and crumbling vestiges of colonial era buildings are occasionally interrupted by new housing developments. Fortunately, the weather is relatively benign and people can comfortably sleep on the street at night: in door ways, on carts, on benches, tables, everywhere without fear of disturbance or of being robbed blind.

            Chickens and goats range freely on roadsides. That certainly would not be possible if people were literally starving. Young coconuts -- their water is a refreshing drink -- are sold for forty cedis (that's roughly four cents). Oranges, apples, bananas, papaya, watermelon, mango and pineapples abound.

            Ironically, the vast majority of Ghanaians eat a higher nutritional quality food than we do in the United States. I was startled into this realization by the epiphanous appearance of an ordinary Ghanaian woman walking toward me with a huge tray of colorful, fresh vegetables balanced serenely and securely on her head: bright orange carrots stuck out the front of the tray, an angular array of tender tubers. Were carrots native to Ghana? I just never imagined carrots in Ghana, yet there they were, not as a specialty item for the superrich but an average, everyday, cheap, and ubiquitous, healthy vegetable. My eyes were opened at that moment. Everywhere I looked, there was fresh food.

            Corn roasted on the roadside. Peeled oranges piled in small pyramids. Shaved coconuts bunched on a cart -- the empty shells used for fuel to fire the mud ovens where fish is smoked. Freshly harvested pineapples, carved into fragrant slices and wrapped a small handful to a plastic package. On and on.

            Fresh fruit and vegetables everyday. Freshly caught fish, free ranging fowl, and small amounts of red meat, supplemented by beans are the staples of the Ghanaian diet. Compare that to the chemical filled, canned, fast food, salt and sugar drenched food that most Americans eat daily. Plus most Ghanaians walk constantly, another health boon.

            Sanitation is rudimentary; brackish green sewerage sinks and stagnates as it trickles down narrow, open concrete gutters. The sharp aroma of open air latrines,  and the ubiquitous sight of men relieving themselves at the sewer's edge repulses industrially acclimated sensibilities, but you get used to it. That is, you get used to it after you get sick. Usually either malaria or some bug attacking either your digestive or respiratory system knocks you on your backside for a couple of days.

            I weathered the toughest cold I have had in years. For half a day I lost my voice. The onset of the illness was sharp pangs across my abdomen, followed by a cold. Strangely, there was no diarrhea. But then a cold in full force, which at its height included a painful tightness in my lungs that made deep inhalations a trial. Because my immune system is very strong, I was able to keep pushing and went about my work just as though nothing was wrong.

            One night the mosquitoes drove us inside. I think back to my childhood days in New Orleans when the mosquitoes there would drive us inside. I can remember the fog trucks going around to spray. I can remember the mosquitoes being so bad that the weatherman would warn us when they were spawning in the swamps. I can remember that in my lifetime, New Orleans was not much more advanced in terms of fighting mosquitoes than is Cape Coast, Ghana today. I remember.

            How is Ghana?

            Other than the sewerage situation, one of the most glaring failures in development is the paucity of mass transportation. Accra is clogged with cars, some of which appeared to be held together by Third World juju -- "Third World" because anywhere in the developing world you go, you see museum-ready automobiles puttering along, sustained by the ingenuity of shadetree mechanics who literally manufacture spare parts and improvise riggings to keep these vehicles in service. For example, the private taxis we rode in were ageless wonders whose parts probably spanned at least three decades. Moreover, the rule of the road seemed to be, if it will roll, let it ride.

            The police who were out in force were inspecting licensees for tax purposes rather than inspecting the cars for road worthiness and safety. Road blocks along the highway, and at critical junctures were the rule. 

            Even though Accra is very large, there seems to be four or five avenues that the vast majority of cars travel, and, during the day these routes are always crowded. As a testimony to African humanness, the traffic jams aren't accompanied by the cursing, and sometimes physical violence, that routinely occurs in the United States.

            The people's maintenance genius and civil patience with the traffic clogs notwithstanding, the private automobile remains a symbol of having arrived. A late model, shiny car, whether a luxury sedan or a modest two door economy car, marks the owner as being a cut above the working class. The black or dark maroon, brand new PANAFEST cars, with their distinct license plates, stood out everywhere we went. Needless to say, there was some fierce behind the scenes jockeying to determine who was assigned a car, and how one could get a car if not originally assigned a car.

            Stephanie had been assigned a car and we rode with her to Cape Coast. She returned to the States before we did, and we "inherited" her vehicle. The car question was really a question of mass transportation. PANAFEST was a special event, but what did the ordinary people do? They either crowded into private taxis and buses, or onto one of the handful of public service vehicles, or, more likely, they walked.

            Perhaps, its my own Western bias, but I think a light rail system connecting the various towns and villages, combined with a major bus system would tremendously facilitate development. But then again, maybe not. Maybe mass transit would only mean people ended up waiting longer for other things. I'm sure there is a reason that the government has not pursued that option -- even if the reason is only that ranking government bureaucrats tend to measure their status by whether they have a private car. Maybe, mass transit is a secondary or tertiary concern in the overall scheme of social needs. Maybe, it's only because I come from America that the whole transportation issue is even important to me. Maybe, but I don't think so. Even America is deficient when it comes to mass transit, particularly between cities.

            I remember reading an article about concrete. Yes, concrete; the history and uses of it. In the fifties, succumbing to the construction and automobile lobbies, the federal government decided to institute the interstate highway system. The option, of course, was to develop the rail system for interstate travel. We don't often think of it as a government policy, but the truth is a decision was made favoring the private automobile rather than a government supported rail system. That decision is one reason that Amtrak is such a total embarrassment as mass transit. In any case, while some argue that the government should not subsidize mass transit, the building of the interstate system is the most massive subsidizing of private transportation imaginable.

            My point, vis-a-vis Ghana, and the rest of Africa, is that less should be put into private automobiles (including the construction of concrete and asphalt highways) and more into rail based mass transit. Fortunately, it is not too late to make rational developmental choices.   

            Overall, how is Ghana? Ghana is poor but far from impoverished. People are proud of their traditions and exhibit concern for the well-being of their family, friends and neighbors.

            Ghana has dust everywhere. Nevertheless, people are clean, even dirt floors and spaces in front of houses, huts, stands and work sites are neatly swept.

            Ghana is underdeveloped. But there is electricity and the phones, though scarce and constantly clogged, do work.

            The deficiencies notwithstanding, everywhere one looks, social progress is budding. Though it's too soon to pick flowers and wave bouquets, people are patiently pushing forward. Women's associations. Clubs of young people. In ten years Ghana will be a different place.

            Right now, Ghana is a bright smile on the face of a two year old, who is being watched by an eighty year old woman beaming a great grandmother's smile.

            Ghana is the promise of young people working computers as well as young people  hawking dry goods in the street.

            Ghana. The promise of pride in traditions and a thirst for the future.

            Independent Ghana is less than fifty years old, full of adolescent vigor and aggressive optimism. Ghana, like all of Africa, for all of its problems, is relatively new in terms of national development even though ancient in terms of social development. Though it lacks capital and technology, what Ghana has is humanity, a veritable sea of patient and optimistic bright Black faces proudly extending their social traditions into the developing future.

***

            I have not seen one lion or elephant.

            Come to think of it, not one spear nor alligator yet either.

            I saw a queen mother who looked like my grandmother.

            I saw pinto beans and rice. CNN on cable and scandalous tabloids whose "shocking" revelations are so tame by U.S. standards that one wonders does Ghana realize the state the Western world is in.

            By any measure, Ghana has a relatively free press. By comparison to most African states, Ghana's press freedom is almost absolute. In fact, one of the papers is even called Free Press and offers a critical voice on national concerns.

            How free is the press? Consider this excerpt from the "MY CONCERN" column by Frank Abu Addo published in the 19th-20th Dec., 1994 edition of the The Ghanaian Voice, Ghana's Best Independent Newpaper.

            In his address during the Thanksgiving Service in commemoration of the Silver Jubilee celebration of Ghana Pentecostal Council, President Rawlings talked at length about love for one another.

            I was especially touched when he confessed that he had forgiven all those who  have trespassed against him (What about the future?)

            His second point which I found touching was the fact that the Jews have made a lot of films and documentaries about the Holocaust which serve as library materials and reminders to all living that this is what happened to the Jews on other lands especially Germany. He lamented that nothing of that sort is found here in West Africa on how slaves were taken from the hinterland, their ordeal at the castles and their "triumphant' entry into the voyage ships through the small holes which serve as the exits of the dark dungeons.

            Perhaps the President would love to see how the Europeans at the Elmina Castle used to stand on top there, looked into the female area of the dungeons and beckoned any woman they would want to sleep with into their bedrooms upstairs in a local film. Maybe that will explain how half castes and mulattos like himself came into being.

            Is that free enough for you?

            The Voice's sensationalistic cousin is P & P -- People and Places. Its masthead proclaims "We Report Nothing But The Truth."

            Headlines in the December 15th edition of P & P shout "GIRL MURDERS BABY She Throws One and A Half-Year-Old Baby Into Salty Well". Though this paper obviously aspires to attain the wide readership in Ghana comparable to the readership that the National Inquirer has in the USA, the most interesting aspect about its reporting of the incident was the editorial they ran.

Tragic Murder

            Christmas is normally described as an occasion for children. Parents are therefore expected to give their children the choicest meals, the best of clothes and toys if only they can afford it.

TRAVEL WRITING: TARZAN CAN NOT RETURN TO AFRICA / BUT I CAN (parts "E" and "F")

-E-

         HOW THE WEST WAS WON

            Tarzan's voice startles me. It was late, very late. Nearby some star crossed rooster was crowing even though it was 3:00 a.m. in the morning.

            I was supposed to be sleeping. I had been writing. Now I was lying in bed. Thinking. Thinking. Unable to sleep. Lying quietly. Lying still. Thinking.

            "Can't sleep, can you?"

            I don't bother looking for him in dark. In fact, I raise my arm and cover my eyes.

            "You know old chap, it seems to me your people have forgotten how the west was won. I'm talking about you Black Americans, is that what you're called this year? I do so want to be correct."

            In the dark I hear pages rustling.

            "Oh, it's changed. It's African Americans now. Well, that's romantic. Af - free - can? Really! You guys are afraid of Africa. You're like lions who were born in a zoo and have never been let loose in the wild. I don't mean to offend you, old boy, but you can't drink the water, find the food distasteful, and would always prefer to ride in a private car rather than walk or crowd into a bus. So what's African about you?"

            I'm tired. Tired of thinking. Tired of looking through the wall of my eyeballs at people in the dust and knowing that those people are me, yet I am not fully comfortable with them. Tarzan is trying to rile me. I answer his question with a question.

            "And what does any of that have to do with how the west was won?"

            Tarzan smiles.

            "Oh, it's fifty questions time is it? Well, I shall answer your questions one for one as you answer mine. Goose and gander. Fair enough?"

            The rooster crows again. Tarzan smirks.

            "I'll start with an easy riddle for you. Why does an African rooster crow at night?"

            "Because day's work is never done. We can't stay up too late nor rise too early."

            "That's plausible, but the real answer is simple: because he wants to. You fellows are always looking for some big picture answer. Sometimes the answer is very simple. You know what people do? They do exactly what they want to do."

            I respond quickly, - And likewise, people don't do whatever it is they don't want to do, unless, of course they are forced. -

            Our eyes engage each other. Neither of us blink. Finally, Tarzan raises his brandy sniffer.

            "Cheers."

            He throws back the entire shot.

            "Shall we walk some, old chap?"

            "Tarzan, I don't want to walk with you."

            "Why, afraid you might learn something?"

            "The only thing I want to learn from you is how to kill you."

            Tarzan takes a seat, crosses his legs, looks toward the ceiling, and, after a few moments, begins speaking in a contemplative manner. "You know I sometimes stayed in the bush for years without seeing a White man and it didn't bother me."

            "It wouldn't bother me if I went for the rest of my life without seeing a White man."

            "I'm glad to hear you are feeling a bit better. You know you can't reduce everything to race."

            "You should talk. Isn't that a little like the pot calling the kettle..."

            "All I meant old chap is that can you be yourself when you're living among people who are different from you?"

            "You're assuming that Africa is different from me?"

            "I'm not assuming anything. I was merely commenting on what the bush was like for me and wondering whether you're up to the challenge."

            "Tarzan, why do you visit me and carry on these conversations, especially since you know I intend to kill you?"

            Tarzan ignores me at first, then he crosses close to me, stands close enough that I can smell the peach brandy on his breath and looks me in the eye.

            "The only reason I come is because you call."

            Pause.

            Someone knocks at the door. "Yes," I call out through the door. It's one of the workers awaiting breakfast instructions. Have Tarzan and I been talking that long? I open my eyes and there's light in the room. I must have fallen asleep. I tell the man what Nia and I want for breakfast and inform him that we will be down in forty-five minutes.

             I begin thinking again about how the west was won and suddenly realize what Tarzan was saying. In order to win the west you have to leave where you were born and settle somewhere in the west. In order to win we will have to go to the battleground, live in the bush. Walk deep into Africa's night. Alone and go for years without...

            "Now, you're getting the hang of it. You just might catch on yet. See you in your dreams."

            I look up. I thought Tarzan was gone. Tarzan winks at me and nonchalantly walks through the wall.

***

            No man can return to anything he has destroyed. That is why Tarzan can not return to Africa. The people Tarzan encountered when he first arrived no longer exist. Tarzan destroyed them.

            Tarzan the ruler can not return to Africa.

            But of course, Tarzan can and will continue to frequent Africa as an  investor such as a hotel owner, or as a physician and industrial engineer, as a missionary caring for the bodies and souls of the poor and/or an educator working to insure future skills, as a mandated economic consultant turning the screws on the economy, and certainly as a technical advisor teaching everything from computers to catering, tourist services to office administration. Nevertheless, it will not be like before.

            The innocence Tarzan first encountered is finished. First, some of us met the Europeans man to man, warrior facing explorer. Then king to ambassador and merchant. And, as slavery progressed, eventually, we all -- woman and child, as well as man -- had to face them. Slave to master. Conquest to conqueror. Raped to rapist. It was then that we submitted, physically overpowered and, eventually, also psychologically overpowered. Then the Whites graduated from men, from conquerors, to gods; their far off countries became "heaven" in comparison to the colonial hell we suffered in our homelands. Then the crulest cut of all, the colonialists handpicked and educated our leaders. Everything has been shit since then.

            But even though we still suffer from that scenario, nevertheless, at least we know that the Whites are not gods and that we are not animals. The old myths Tarzan perpetuated are ruptured. Though a certain gullibility remains exploitable and though the effects of the myths linger, naive acceptance of the god=White myth is done. The magic of the myths is no more.

             We Africans have a better understanding of ourselves as a whole because Tarzan forced us to recognize that we had a commonness that was not so apparent to us before Tarzan's arrival. We never conceived of all of us being Africans until after Tarzan made it impossible for us to ignore both the problems and the potential of embracing ourselves. Before Tarzan we were Ashanti or Ibo, Mandingo or Fulani, but not Africans. Zulu and Ndebele, Tutsi and Hutu. But not Africans as a common denominator.

            Indeed, the sad truth is that we often considered each other the enemy. Some of us even mistook Tarzan for an ally against our neighbors whom we had known for ages, our neighbors whom we regarded as age old enemies. How naive we were. Thank you Tarzan. You cured some of us forever of our innocence with respect to our alienation from each other.

            Of course old myths die hard. Even after the spell is broken the effects linger on. We are still struggling with being our own worse enemy. Still clawing through the cocoon of colonized thinking that wrapped around and continues to smother the very African identity which emerges from it. Like the worm called a caterpillar, after a gestation period of confinement within the shell of colonialism, in order to be the beautiful butterfly we are destined to become, we must break through the cocoon or else the cocoon will become our coffin. We will literally abort unless we break free.

            Even after all we have suffered (or is it because of all we have suffered), there is a pretty steep price to pay for our freedom. After many, many years of struggle, we still ain't free. Most of the original freedom fighters have been discarded, the original leaders discredited or forgotten. Toppled in coups. Replaced in elections. Brought down by economic conundrums. Or something.

            Its almost like the whole African world is caught captive on a slave ship and fated to toss and twist forever on the churning seas of the Atlantic. The bulk of us enchained below. A thin professional crust entertained on deck. And Tarzan's kin at the wheel.

            So now I am returning to Africa with a bundle of questions for it, for myself, for my survivors on the Black side of the water. Chief among these questions is what does it mean to break free?

            Freedom, I believe, is not a thing to possess but a process we must struggle through each and every day if the sacrifices of slavery are to ever bear fruit. Is sankofa (the Akan bird faced backward but moving forward) our destiny?

             We Pan Africanists in the diaspora are guinea fowl searching yard. We peck the corn but not every kernel is eaten. Sankofa. We must retrieve but not every tradition should be carried into the future.

            I have come both to embrace Africa and to criticize Africa. To embrace myself and criticize myself.

            To embrace, to hold, to touch.

            To critique, to question, to make choices.

            We will inspect and peck, but not all the food of this ancient ground will be eaten.

            It is such a funny thought: I am not returning to Africa, I am going forward into Africa. Going forward. Steady. Forward. Forward. For what?

***

            (Excerpt form the PANAFEST Opening Address by Ghana's President, Flt-Lt. J. J. Rawlings at Cape Coast, Ghana on Saturday, December 10, 1994.)

            However long you may have been away, we know that many of you yearn to be reunited with your ancestral home. I assure you on this happy occasion that a warm welcome awaits you here. Our traditional extended family has ample room for all its members.

            In bringing this family together again, I hope that we will experience more than just an exercise in nostalgia for the lost years. It should strengthen our determination to work together for the development of Africa and raise the dignity of people of African descent.

            The integrity of the family permeates every level of social, political and economic institutions as also does family disintegration. At this festival we are  laying emphasis on strengthening the family because it is the building block of our societies.

            Membership of a family implies more than a shared past. A family also looks to the future, and I trust that before PANAFEST '94 is over, links will have been forged which will lead to positive and practical action in uniting the extended African family in a purposeful drive into the future.

            But we may also look at the African family in its narrower and generic context. For those of you in the diaspora, the separation and break-up of the family suffered by your ancestors centuries ago might have influenced your concept of the family.

            More recently, the experiences of the slums, of inner city crime, the drug culture, the loss of parental control, the emphasis on material things, have also struck at the foundations of the family. The declaration of the International Year of the Family is an attempt by the world community to restore the dignity and integrity of the family.

            Whilst in some of you, this has been a source of strength, self-discipline and motivation with which to confront the scourges of the modern world, in others it has led to cynicism, apathy and a penchant for finding scapegoats to blame our troubles on, instead of bravely facing up to our difficult circumstances and striving to improve our lot.

            One of the most troubling aspects of this last reaction is the loss of respect for each other.

            The African family here in Africa is also under serious threat. Some of the factors could be traced to the colonial period, when policies were introduced which laid siege on our traditional values.

            The current urban drift also adds a further strain by destabilizing relationships in the rural areas through the easy association that pressures of city life impose on vulnerable new comers.

            But much more disturbing is the bombardment of our young people by the international media, through TV, films, video, magazines, etc. with what can only  be described as the lowest common denominator of international pseudo-culture.

            The powerful international media message is about individualism, self-gratification, material values and a cynical lack of respect for any moral authority which stands in the way of the instant attainment of perceived wants.

            Our traditional African values which define the responsibilities, duties and respect owed by the individual to the family and to the community, to the ancestors and to the land, are threatened by this flood of empty media hype served as the latest international trend, fashion or personal ideology.

            My Brothers and Sisters, Nowadays there is so much talk about the world becoming a global village. Modern communication technology especially television is 'shrinking' the world and homogenizing its cultures. However that process has tended to either exclude or subjugate the cultures of our peoples.

            We have to be honest to admit that distressing though this is, a good deal of these unproductive and sterile material which undermine the values and ideals of our youth originate from Western and Christian sources.

            It is part of the purpose of PANAFEST '94 to challenge this picture of media imperialism and offer to the world the true African identity.

***

            Our first evening in Ghana is spent at the DuBois Center. A friend of Stephanie Hughley told her she should check out a performance by the Pan African Orchestra. I first met Stephanie when she joined the National Black Arts Festival staff as artistic director in 1990 -- she's now on staff with the 1996 Cultural Olympiad. We are hanging together in Ghana.

            The opening performance is by a traditional, predominately percussion music ensemble. They are good. In honor of the holiday season, they even do a rhythmically rich and melodically inventive version of Handel's "The Messiah."

            The Pan African Orchestra follows. The instruments are all traditional African instruments, including a one string fiddle-like instrument which is bowed. There are twenty-some musicians. One row of musicians on wood flutes also double on traditional "horns" (the mmenson) and percussion, two string players, and a brace of percussionists. They file in like a European orchestra and remain standing until the conductor seats them. Instead of a baton the conductor wields an enchanting instrument.

            "Televi" is a percussion instrument of the Ewe people of Ghana. It's basically two small balls, probably gourds, which have something inside so that they rattle when you shake them. The two balls are connected with twine. One ball is held in the palm of the hand and the other swings around the outside of the hand. As the free swinging ball wraps around the hand it clacks sharply as it makes contact with the ball that is held in  the palm. At the same time the player shakes the ball that is held. So you have a shaking sound on the regular beats and the clacking on the down beats or the syncopated off beats, depending on how the televi is played. The conductor is ambidextrous and plays one in each hand as he directs the orchestra, his hands held shoulder high, shaking this swinging, percussive metronome.

            The Pan African Orchestra reminds me of Wynton Marsalis' efforts at developing jazz as a classical music. The repertoire and styles unavoidably look backward in an effort to identify and preserve the high points of the historical musical development. In a similar manner, this ensemble uses traditional instruments, traditional themes, and attempts to perform them in a traditional manner faithful to the origins but also reflective of "high art" standards. The string instruments, for example, are tuned each time before playing. The overall sound is quiet swinging, even when full out percussive, they are never riotous. The overall effect is sonorous and contemplative.

            Part of me admires and loves these and similar efforts to quantify and preserve the classical aspects of our traditional cultures. But unfortunately, the very process removes the communal dynamic. We sat and listened to a performance rather than participated in a ritualistic outpouring. Some of the flute players read from scores and all of the musicians were directed by a conductor who controlled the whole performance. No one danced, although I'm sure we could have (or, perhaps, should have) if we really wanted to.  This aural archiving of the traditions is important, however, it is not the future of African music.

            Over the two week period, I will hear the Pan African Orchestra three more times: between addresses at the opening of the colloquium, as a feature at one of the Cape Coast Castle performances, and at the closing program. Each time I enjoy them. But the question remains, this is past, what is the future? What are we headed forward toward?

            Ironically, even though a major part of PANAFEST is a presentation of music and dance, most of the performances are either weak or incomplete -- incomplete because in far too many cases, the main headliners either don't show up or, when in the country, don't perform as scheduled. Based on my experience as a festival producer, I'm sure a  great deal of the no shows are due to the fact that deposit moneys were not put in place early enough to guarantee the presence of headliners. I had looked forward to hearing artists such as Youssou N'Dour and Angelique Kidjo in an African setting.

            One of "THE" headliners, Stevie Wonder underscores another weakness of the program. He actually arrives but does not perform at the major concert. (I learn later that he did perform on an untuned piano -- a piano tuner could not be found in time.) One unconfirmed report is that he did not finish the preparation of his music and equipment. I don't know what the real story is. but I do know that the majority of the performers are entertainers in the Western sense and project only a limited Pan African consciousness. I saw or heard no contemporary performances that were worth writing home about as exemplary of cutting edge new directions in African music.

            The closing program featured a line up of musicians, most of whom were scheduled to perform at the gigantic 18-hour show but, for one reason or another, didn't get to perform. The personal highlight for me was a performance by a legendary Ghanaian highlife vocalist who seemed to be in his fifties or sixties. His set got people up and dancing to his topical songs, one of which welcomed us to Ghana and spoke about pulling the African family back together. His warmth and sincerity were matched by his musicianship and professionalism as a performer. Unfortunately, because there was no printed program and because my ear was unattuned to the emcee, I didn't catch this performer's name.

            The two final performances were the negative highlights of the well intended but mismanaged closing program, which was in itself, already too long and meandering. The first climax was Kanda Bongo Man of Zaire with an exuberant display of soukous. His band, including a European keyboardist, was in top form. The drummer in particular was awesome as a percussionist and expert as a second vocalist.

            Dressed in a red suit with a black sash and red Zorro hat, Kanda sang and dance with the fervor of a true "soul man." He sweated and gyrated. He funked it up and dropped some pelvis swivels on us that left no doubt about his prowess as a love man. He also had a female backup vocalist whom he did not feature and dancers whom he did.

            Two African female dancers came out and proceeded to put their backfields in furious motion. A follow-up number featured the larger of the duo and she had muscles  controlling her muscles, able to ripple her bared stomach and micro move her ample buttocks. Later they did a comic routine dressed as White women with bustles. Then, out came a "real" White woman as a third dancer and this combination of pelvis thrusting feminity proceed to do an even more "exotic" floor show. All this time Kanda Bongo Man is whooping with delight and directing the female traffic, occasionally joining them in a chorus of twists and shouts. Needless to say, the whole dance floor is filled. Each song is met with rapturous applause. A thunderous ovation demands an encore. Out come the dancers and there is now a second White woman completely the female zebra in heat routine. They put Raquel Welch and Paula Abdul to shame.

            Oh what a show!

            What it all had to do with Pan Africanism I'm not sure. But, that's entertainment!

            The anticlimax was provided by Princess, a contemporary urban music vocalist from the USA. She can sing, but coming on just before midnight, after five hours of a wide range of performances and presentations (the obligatory thanks and awards to sponsors and short speeches from dignitaries) and immediately behind Kanda Bongo Man was the worse possible slot. Moreover, she didn't have her own band. A male cohort served as bandleader directing a Ghanaian contemporary music ensemble which did a competent job of serving up slinky, funky backbeats and melodies. Princess, dressed in a tight, hip-hugging, semi-sexy, Black outfit, did the in vogue, gospel-voiced, apolitical, ingenue routine currently popular in the States -- a routine which Diana Ross propelled to both its apogee and nadir. It was embarrassingly inappropriate as the closing performance at PANAFEST.

            Princess, in all fairness to her, probably really wanted to sing at PANAFEST, and undoubtedly has genuine feelings for the goals and aspirations of PANAFEST and African people in general. The rub is that, politically, African Americans are underdeveloped. At this moment, abetted by the willing compliance of young African American entertainers desperate to develop their fledgling careers, the state of Black music in the States has sunk to an abysmal level of apolitical non-relevance and mindless sexual hedonism. Princess is far from the worse of the lot. She has talent and, in time, may even become a major artist. But, the question is direction.

            In the United States, and elsewhere in the diaspora, there are literally thousands of  socially relevant and aesthetically exciting artists who would have loved to perform at PANAFEST. Clearly artists such as Sweet Honey In The Rock should have headed the U.S. delegation of artists. But the problem is not just the state of the entertainment industry but also the orientation of those of us in charge of programs such as this. We go for the "big names" and for people who work in the vein of the big name performers. We are invariably disappointed, but we have no one to blame but ourselves for not closely examining our criterion for including artists.

            On the other hand, PANAFEST was able to put itself financially into the black by selling television and video rights, and, no doubt, a lucrative deal could not have been closed without the presence of "big name" entertainers.

***

            African Americans are a dangerous fire. Africa needs our light but the burning must be controlled, otherwise, as the examples of Stevie Wonder and Princess illustrate, instead of being illuminated, our hosts will be burnt.

            I pay very little attention to most Black pop videos, the flaunting of light skinned, barely clothed, women. The macho posturing. The gaudy and glitzy ostentatiousness. The fantasy settings: sleek cars, fabulously laid out homes and apartments. The fancy, hi-tech accouterments and personal accessories. The drinking, dancing, drugging. The modern day minstrel shows.

            When I see these same videos in Ghana I am forced to pay attention.

            When you see these videos in Ghana, what you see is cultural imperialism in Black face. You see shamelessly misleading adverts of fantasy masquerading as reality. And all brought to you with a beat. The baddest beats in the world. Beats so bad even the drums of Africa are incorporating the African American backbeat.

            Traditional African drumming eschews the thumping backbeat. The rhythms are both more complex and more varied. But there's still nothing like basic African American  funk whether watered down into Western pop or dropped full force, uncut in the various manifestations ranging from the jumping jive of Louis Jordan to the digitized rumble of phat rap samples and beat loops.

            There is a battle going on for the souls of Black folk, and unfortunately albeit not inconsistently with our history, people of African descent are on both sides of the battleline.

            When you get to Africa, turn on a television and see one of these 90s videos, you see a lot more than you do sitting home on the urban plantations of America.

            Imagine yourself explaining the cultural significance of any random half hour of BET soul videos. Explaining the meaning of this madness to people for whom this is their main contact with African Americans. Fellow Africans who want to claim us as sisters and brothers. What do you say?

-F-

         ONCE YOU'VE BEEN THERE.

            I used to wonder how could one ship load of Portuguese or English be enough to conquer mighty, mighty nations. I don't wonder any longer. The answer is obvious once you have been there.

            But you must be in Ghana, on the coast where the English were, pass through the five walls, the triple gates, walk through the stark, hard stone courtyard of the 15th century Portuguese fort which served as a slave castle -- a holding place for the exportation of enslaved Africans. Be there and feel the weight of walls, the thickness of canon, the cold iron of twenty pound (or heavier) shot, descend those steps and shiver listening to the echo of your footsteps in the clammy cavern, hear the waves splintering on the rocks with a poltergeist roar that pounded the last sound of Africa into your ancestors' woolly heads.

            After you have experienced the soft tones of the gentle Ghanaian people, eyes wide, men holding hands, women leaning against each other, everyone touched. After being there, you know.

            Once you have been there you will know why, after he secured a toe hold on the coast, we never stood a chance against Tarzan. A thousand spears could never have destroyed a single fort door. And we were just too humane to ever assume that someone would destroy our world. Even today, without airplanes it would be hard to take the fort, especially if the soldiers inside were better armed, ruthless and under the illusion that you were not even human.

            And especially if Lord Greystone's predecessors had collaborators: kings who sold. Merchants, mercenaries, and middle men who directly profiteered off the slave trade. Guides and translators who traitored.

             Our PANAFEST guide now is a young Ghanaian woman named Ivana -- yes, a Soviet name. Someone said to her "that's Russian?" And she said "yes"; but she should have said "Soviet" from when the communists worked in solidarity with the liberation movements. Sure they had their own agenda and were pushing their own philosophy, but they helped when the West refused. Refused even medicine and clothing to the liberation movements. Or worse yet, the West sent aid to emerging states, aid which was a Trojan bomb wrapped in IMF (International Monetary Fund) total tinkering with a country's economy. Tinkering at the level of a stern pa-pa parceling out fifteen cents daily allowance with a solemn lecture that if you buy any candy, even a penny's worth, all of the dole will be cut off immediately. And you better not get caught hanging with the wrong crowd.

            Structural readjustment is what they call this tinkering. Young college trained economists from the West are the de facto regulators of large sectors of the economy -- including the national airline company.

            We flew in on a leased, Ghana Airlines jumbo jet. Even though native Ghanaian pilots are available, the terms of the lease dictate that certain experienced ("certain experienced" is a euphemism for "White" or White acculturated) pilots and crew members be used. In the international leagues you don't even get to choose your own team players -- that's the essence of structural adjustment.

            In Cape Coast a young vendor explains that Western clothing is dumped on Ghana as part of IMF trade regulations. African clothing is more expensive than the Western commodities. So generally, the people acquire the cheapest apparel available. Even so you still see a lot of Ghanaians in traditional garb. IMF makes it difficult for Africans to dress in African styles.

            Ivana may or may not know about the terms of foreign aid, about the IMF and about the Soviets. Right now she and a fellow guide, also a young woman from Accra, want to see the slave castle. Ivana had tasks to complete and by the time she got to the castle, the dungeon doors were locked. I will ask Ivana later why she has that name.

            Ivana was born into a family of priestesses of traditional religion. She does not plan to become a priestess but she explained the whole ritual to Stephanie as we stood in an open square near the fort in downtown Accra. The kings of the area were there enthroned beneath gold encrusted umbrellas. Linguists whom you must speak through to talk to the king -- assuming that you can even get that close --  sit holding wooden staffs which are topped with solid gold emblems. I spot the sanfoka symbol atop one of the staffs and know that is the symbol for "return and fetch it." From a distance of twenty feet or so, even I can see that real gold has a shine that is deeper than glitter. Real gold is impressive, especially when thick and intricately carved. Or so it seems to my untutored eye. Immediately, I reflect on the African American penchant for wearing gold rings, necklaces, bracelets and earrings.

            This is the night before we visit the slave castle on Cape Coast which is a long drive outside of Accra. This is our second night in Accra. The first night we went to the DuBois center for a concert. Actually this is the beginning of the third day because it is shortly after midnight and we have been told that there will be a special ceremony, an atonement ritual in which the chiefs will beg the ancestors for forgiveness because of what some of them did in collaborating with the slavers.

            Even though it is video taped, this is not simply a staged event. It is in a poor part of town. There are no politicians around making speeches. There is no Christian preacher beginning with a prayer to "our lord".

            What is here are hundreds of poor Ghanaians watching as their chiefs announce the purpose of this gathering. A bull is led out, later a goat. They will be sacrificed. Three different sets of drummers.

            Other than the chiefs and the priestesses, no one is dressed up. People wear whatever they wore yesterday, whatever they will wear later today. Whatever they will wear tomorrow.

            They stand in the dirt. Some laugh in the background. Some are somber as they watch the ceremony. And as they watch us, their American brothers and sisters.

            Although the event was impressive, it really was not for the benefit of the diaspora. This was a necessary step toward facing up to the painful negative realities of our history. No concerted effort was made to make sure that all of the diaspora attendees to PANAFEST were brought to the ceremony. It was not held in the national stadium or the national theatre. In fact there was not even a bus to bring us to this field in the poor part of town.

             This was a step that the continent needed to take. I watched from a distance and understood that although it was specifically about the slave trade, this purification ritual was not about me as a "diaspora survivor/descendent" of that trade. This was about those who had collaborated in sending me away.

            What was most interesting to me is that this was the traditional chiefs speaking to the masses and not the contemporary elected officials speaking to the educated. I knew that the traditional chiefs needed to atone, but I question why weren't the "contemporary chiefs" also present to assure the people and themselves that they would not fall victim to a reoccurence of this historic collaboration.

            Until repatriation of the diaspora is the law of every African state, and especially of West African countries, the betrayal will not have been fully reversed. Just as they sent us away, they must bring us back, otherwise our return will be seen as a threat and resentments will abound. The reintegration of the family that was torn asunder is no simple task. In fact it is emotionally taxing. Sometimes, like when I am standing there, one a.m. in the morning watching "them" slit the throat of a sacrificial bull, I find pause and wonder just how much I want to return if this is what I am returning to.

            Part of me is in the crowd of simple people, looking at the chiefs, listening to the words, looking at us, watching the ritual and trying to sort it all out. At least five or six people say to me in broken English, welcome home brother. Unlike the chiefs, the poor people intuitively know that our positions are interchangeable. It could have been them in the dungeon, and now returning centuries later ignorant of the mother tongue, a stranger in my motherland.

            Part of me is with the dispassionate observation of the media cameras angling for a better or more dramatic shot, taking it all in indiscriminately without any filter other than the consciousness of Tarzan the video director dictating what should be observed and remembered and what did not matter. Stephanie and Nia did not bring their cameras because they thought this was going to be a sacred ceremony. They were very disappointed when they saw the media video equipment. The world has changed so rapidly, Africa's growing pains are illuminated, and everything takes place within the public glare. Africa has no privacy.

            Tarzan spends most of his time looking at the chiefs, observing the rituals, talking  to an interpreter who explains what's going on. Very little of Tarzan's footage is of the people. Nobody translates what they are saying to each other.

            And there is another tortured part of me on that killing ground, my throat slit. Even though I do not want to think it, I have had enough experience with Black political leaders to know that not only would they sell us out, but they will even fake elaborate rituals of seeming sincerity if they think that is what it will take to maintain their power. I try not to make a judgment about these men whom I never met.

            At one point there is a delay. I find out later that Ivana told Stephanie the purification ritual required the participation of the women but the chiefs had not involved the women from the beginning of the program, even though the priestesses were there dressed in white.

             When the men finally got around to asking the women to participate, the women first said "no." After giving them a piece of their mind, the elder sisters relented and the ritual went on.

            Like, I said, even when they are sincere, sometimes politicians are still only thinking about themselves. Perhaps, like that bull kicking in the dust long after its throat had been slit and its blood had been gathered in a pan, and used in the ceremony; maybe, like that bull whose carcass was carted off on a flatbed wagon drawn to the field by two young boys, a cart whose two wheel flaps had pictures of a brown Jesus on them; perhaps like that bull, like that goat, perhaps I was simply being used as a sacrificial vehicle to assuage the guilt of these traditional politicians.

            It may sound totally cynical to view myself in this way, but the truth is, at some point it crossed my mind.

            The truth is that Black politicians have a history of selling us out.

            The truth is that I was in the dungeon, thanks in part to the chiefs.

             The truth is it will take more than the slaughter of one bull and one goat to account for that.

—kalamu ya salaam