African Americans, American Africans, and the Idea of an African Homeland

Abstract

The American image of Africa is at best vague, under-formed, simplified, and more often than not patronizing. White Americans in particular have perpetuated the mythology of Africa as the Dark Continent, a place apart where wildness and chaos and danger lurk. Africa has allowed the racist American mindset to conjure its wildest images and to depict its deepest fantasies of repulsion and fascination. The African American image of Africa has historically been no less warped but has been characterized by romanticism, fetishism, and nostalgia. Black Americans have often perpetuated an uncomplicated view of Africa as a vestigial homeland awaiting the of its lost souls. While this view has tended to be more charitable toward Africa than the more generalized American view, it is not necessarily less problematic. The two books under review address not only African American views of Africa, but also the physical act of black Americans traveling to the continent, often in hopes of seeing their romantic image up close, usually in conjunction with an attempt to escape the racial problems of the United States. Thus the African American quest to return to Africa has, over the course of more than two centuries, represented not only an escape to an Africa of their imagining, but also an escape from the very real racial problems in the United States. The idea of Africa thus came to embody hopes and dreams and opportunity that America had failed in fulfilling. If, then, for most white Americans Africa represented an exotic and savage other, for black Americans Africa represented an idealized other and increasingly for many the real land of opportunity.