Eslanda Goode Robeson’S African Journey

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“I WANTED TO GO TO AFRICA.” This sentence opens Eslanda Goode Robeson’s 1945 travel narrative African Journey, an account of her summer excursion to sub-Saharan Africa.1 A simple statement, it reflects the belief in historical, material, and spiritual connections between people of African descent that motivated Robeson to study, visit, and write about Africa. Although best known as the wife of world-renowned singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson (1898–1976), Eslanda Goode Robeson (1896–1965) was a scholar, writer, and activist in her own right. In 1934, Robeson began graduate study in anthropology at the London School of Economics and University College, London. Her goal was to learn more about African history and culture.2 During the 1940s, she emerged as a critic of U.S. racial policy and a proponent of African nations’ independence from European colonial powers. She drew on the concepts she learned in anthropology seminars, her experiences traveling in sub-Saharan Africa, and her concerns as a U.S.-born African American woman to argue for the liberation of people of color around the world. Like many Pan-Africanists in her cohort, she viewed European colonialism in Africa and Asia and segregation and racism in the United States as linked forms of oppression. Using her visibility as the wife of one of the most recognized black Americans in the world, Robeson carved out a role as a progressive public intelectual that lasted until her death in 1953.3