African & American

West Africans in Post-Civil Rights America

Marilyn Halter, Violet Showers Johnson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780814770481
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios afroamericanos

African & American tells thestory of the much overlooked experience of first and second generation West Africanimmigrants and refugees in the United States during the last forty years. Interrogatingthe complex role of post-colonialism in the recent history of black America,Marilyn Halter and Violet Showers Johnson highlight the intricate patterns ofemigrant work and family adaptation, the evolving global ties with Africa andEurope, and the translocal connections among the West African enclaves in theUnited States. Drawing on a rich variety of sources,including original interviews, personal narratives, cultural and historicalanalysis, and documentary and demographic evidence, African & American explores issues of cultural identityformation and socioeconomic incorporation among this new West African diaspora.Bringing the experiences of those of recent African ancestry from the peripheryto the center of current debates in the fields of immigration, ethnic, andAfrican American studies, Halter and Johnson examine the impact this communityhas had on the changing meaning of “African Americanness” and address theprovocative question of whether West African immigrants are, indeed, becomingthe newest African Americans.

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West Africa and West Africans

Imagined Communities in Africa and the Diaspora

I cannot realize I have actually left West Africa. … What is its spell? I cannot tell you, nor wherein lies its strange and unfathomable charm. It lays its hand upon you, and, having once felt its compelling touch you never can forget it or be wholly free from it.

—Princess Marie Louise, daughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria, Letters from the Gold Coast

West Africa has laid its hand on the immigrants, refugees, naturalized Americans, and undocumented aliens of this study. Even their children, who migrated at an early age or were born in the United States, are not wholly free from it. As the premigration milieu, it was responsible for much of their formative experiences and continues to influence settlement and adaptation patterns in the United States. While European official languages, Western educational systems, religious denominations, and ethnic affiliations underscore significant differences among the nations, there has always been a West African regionalism that binds the inhabitants. In December 1944, the newly crafted pamphlet of the London-based West African National Secretariat declared, “WEST AFRICA IS ONE COUNTRY: PEOPLES OF WEST AFRICA UNITE!”¹ The authors—Kwame Nkrumah from the Gold Coast, Wallace Johnson from Sierra Leone, and Bankole Akpata from Nigeria—knew that technically West Africa was never “one country.” But they understood firsthand the potency of the historical and ongoing experiences that fostered a regional identity and destiny that then enabled them to mobilize abroad. This regional vibrancy continues to be salient after independence and offers a compelling objective for examining postcolonial immigrants from that region under the rubric of West Africans. Centuries of internal and external trade, European colonization, and postcolonial advancement and challenges provided common ground even as these factors proved to be divisive. Unending in- and outflows of people, commodities, ideas, and cultures shaped and reshaped ethnicities, religions, traditions, and relationships. To better grasp the trajectory of the West African immigrant experience in the United States, the complexities of this population’s premigration history also need to be understood.

Precolonial Beginnings of Regionalism

As far back as the seventh century, the Arabs of the Maghreb (region north of the Sahara) dubbed the region south of theirs bilad al sudan, land of the blacks. Ironically, then, one of the first collective identities imposed on West African inhabitants was a racial one, which centuries later they were to encounter in complex and perplexing ways in the United States. The racial implications aside, the term was used more for geographic demarcation. By 1500, West Africa was made up roughly of three main regions: western Sudan, central Sudan, and the forest region. The histories of the great Sudanic empires of Ghana (650/700–early 1200s), Mali (1220s–1490s), and Songhai (1420s–1591) clearly exemplify the interconnected existence of the peoples of the western Sudan even before the arrival of their Arab neighbors who came with the introduction of Islam and the beginning of the trans-Saharan trade.² Through complex and sophisticated networks of clans, villages, occupational specialization groupings, and ethnic affiliations, the inhabitants interacted with each other on various levels, from extended family units all the way to centralized political organizations. When the Soninke people founded the Ghana Empire, they had just become the dominant group among other ethnicities that included the Malinke (also known as Mandinka and Mandingo) and Mossi. The Malinke emerged victorious among other groups, including the Sosso, to establish the Mali Empire. And the Sosso dominated still other ethnic groups, including the Malinke and Tuareg Berbers, to form the Songhai Empire around the bend of the Niger River.

Similar developments shaped the central Sudan. The Kanuri people, who are now citizens of present-day Nigeria, Chad, and Niger, created the Kanem-Bornu Empire, which was influenced by many of the same factors that created and sustained the much older western Sudanic empires: the trans-Saharan trade, Islam, and friendly and hostile commercial and cultural exchanges between the diverse clans and ethnic groups. One major group they interacted with was the Hausa, also of the central Sudan. Although the Hausa city-states (Hausa Bakwai), which emerged around the late 900s, did not unite in a centralized polity like the empires to the west, they developed a vibrant history shaped by interactions among them and with other groups in the central Sudan and beyond. As participants in the trans-Saharan trade, they established long-lasting relationships with the Kanuri people of Bornu, the Berbers of the Sahel, and the Arabs of the Maghreb. By 1800, Hausa leather, a commodity in much demand, had found its way to Spain, where it was erroneously labeled “Moroccan leather,” a misnomer that acknowledged not the Hausa producers of the sub-Saharan region, but the lighter-skinned Arab middlemen of the Maghreb. This disservice belies the significance of the Hausa in the region prior to the nineteenth century. As producers and itinerant traders, they penetrated vast areas of the western and central Sudan and the forest region, exchanging not just commercial goods, but also language, music, and dress. As Mahdi Adamu concludes from his extensive research of the Hausa in a regional context, no cultural and economic history of precolonial West Africa can properly be written without consideration of the Hausa factor.³

The Islamic Revolution or jihads of the nineteenth century was one of the most influential developments that shaped and illustrated the interconnectedness of the peoples of West Africa. At the center of this history were the Fulbe/Fulani/Fula, an ethnic group ubiquitous in the entire region. The jihad in Hausa land, which started in 1804, was led by Fulani Muslim teacher Usman Dan Fodio, even though the Fulani were an ethnic minority among the indigenous Hausas. The other major jihad of the revolution was led by another Fulbe, Al-hajj Umar. His jihad brought many changes among the Mandingo, Wolof, Bambara, and other peoples of Futa Jallon and Futa Toro (present-day Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and Gambia) at a time when the French were beginning to penetrate the region. Umar’s jihad brought many of the clans and ethnicities together under the Tukolor Empire. Also of importance, Umar introduced the Tijaniyya Brotherhood and a stronger footing for Islam, which up to that point was largely a nominal religion, embraced more practically by only the Fula. This Islamic grounding was later to be an asset for the people in their encounter with the French, as demonstrated by the rise of Amadou Bamba and the Murid, a brotherhood that was to play an instrumental role in the lives of some of the immigrants of this study in both Senegal and the United States.⁴

Dan Fodio’s jihad had a profound impact on large parts of what came to be Nigeria: it established Islam as a formidable religion practiced by other groups besides the Fulani; elevated the Quadiriyya to prominence as the leading brotherhood; ensured the ascendancy of the Fulani, formerly a minority group persecuted by Hausa leaders; and created the Sokoto Caliphate, which not only succeeded in uniting the disparate Hausa states, but also incorporated other groups, including the Gwarri, Nupe, Tiv, and even small portions of the Yoruba, another large group of the region.⁵ Long before the jihad, the Hausa, famous for itinerant trading, had established commercial relations with the Yoruba, their neighbors in the southern savanna and the forest region. The Yoruba are united by a creation account that has them descending from a single ancestor, Oduduwa, who is believed to have been lowered from the heavens by Olorun (God). Ile Ife, in present-day Osun State in southwestern Nigeria, where Oduduwa landed, is still considered the spiritual home of the Yoruba. At the time of the jihads, Oyo, a Yoruba political entity, was one of the thriving kingdoms of the forest region. Through aggressive expansionist campaigns, it brought together various Yoruba entities and incorporated non-Yoruba peoples, including the Aja and Fon of Dahomey, the present-day Republic of Benin.⁶

Like the Yoruba, Hausa, and Fulani, the Akan people of the forest region registered a vibrant precolonial history that demonstrates the interconnectedness of the peoples of West Africa. Original inhabitants of present-day Ghana, Togo, Burkina Faso, and Côte d’Ivoire, the Akans carved centralized polities and thriving economies. By 1650 a group of Akan clans had developed a sophisticated political organization, the Asante Empire, with Kumasi as the seat of government. Spiritually united by the revered Golden Stool, they bulldozed their way through the region, garnering tributary states and controlling vital trade routes. Only the Fantes stood in their way. Under the Fante Confederation, this group of Akan clans put up a formidable resistance to the Asante from the early eighteenth century until the British conquest of the area in the nineteenth century. Incessant conflict did not prevent progress. The warring forest region societies developed sustainable economies (based on natural resources like gold and fish, and effective contacts with trading partners) and rich cultural systems that included diverse Akan dialects, religious and spiritual beliefs and traditions, and structured systems of chieftaincy and royal succession.⁷

The foregoing is a mere sample of the peoples who lived in the West African region before the colonial era and how they interacted with each other and began to carve the characteristics of the region. Their complex historical development through trade, politics, religion, and culture ensured that their identities and physical location would transcend the artificial boundaries that followed official European colonization. Although languages and other cultural features distinctly defined the many ethnic groupings, they coexisted in ways that led to the birth of a regionalism that would become even more complex with the arrival and interference of different groups of Europeans.

Transcolonial Ethnicity

“He [the white man] has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” These famous words, uttered by Obierika to Okonkwo, Chinua Achebe’s protagonist in Things Fall Apart,⁸ were perhaps the quote most remembered and recited by students studying for the West African School Certificate O-levels in the 1970s. Indeed, Obierika was partly right: European colonialism caused upheavals that resulted in disarray.⁹ However, as Africans and Europeans adapted and reacted to their complex encounters, new and modified political, economic, and cultural systems refashioned demography and ethnicity, making it impossible for things to completely fall apart.

Merely going by the official landmark of the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, which partitioned Africa, the colonial era would seem a mere episode in a long history: the period from the Berlin Conference to Ghana’s independence in 1957 is, after all, only seventy-plus years. Although practically speaking this is what is known as the official era of colonization, European imperialism in the region, which was to profoundly shape Africa and Africans, actually began centuries before Berlin—with the arrival of Portuguese merchant explorers in the mid-fifteenth century at the uninhabited archipelago of Cape Verde, located approximately 350 miles off the west coast of present-day Senegal. For over five hundred years, until 1975, when the islands became an independent nation, the inhabitants lived under Portuguese colonial rule. Almost from the very beginning of settlement, West African slaves were being brought to the islands initially to labor on sugar and cotton plantations, but the parched climate prevented truly successful commercial cultivation of the land. What soon became more important to the Portuguese than agricultural production was the strategic location of the archipelago as a crossroads in the expanding slave trade. Situated near the Guinea coast and on the trade winds route to Brazil, the islands served as an entrepôt for the distribution of goods, for supplying foreign vessels with needed supplies and salt, and for transporting slaves to the New World.¹⁰

No one studies European imperialism in Africa without considering the Atlantic slave trade, and no study fails to acknowledge the centrality of West Africa in this poignant historical saga. So prominent was this region in the trade that from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries the West African coast, known as the Guinea coast, was also often referred to as the Slave Coast. Europeans encountered, traded with, and sold members of the ethnic groups already established in this area: Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Wolof, Mandingo, Fulani, Bambara, Temne, Ga, and Akan. Along with some groups from central Africa (notably Angola), but still predominant in number, these West African groups contributed the most to the foundation of African America.¹¹ Given this place in African American history, it is not surprising that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the rise of ancestry tracing through DNA, African Americans, including celebrities like actor Isaiah Washington, are making connections and finding their way to West Africa.¹²

Simultaneously as Europeans devastated whole communities in pursuit of profit through the diabolical trade in humans, they forged entities that foreshadowed the modern nations. By the end of the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, and long before the Berlin Conference, European nations had begun to exert control in what were practically colonies but often referred to euphemistically as “spheres of influence.” The historic “scramble for Africa” in the 1870s and 1880s accelerated the quest for more definitive boundaries and resulted in official partition that was validated in Berlin. The consequences for West Africans were profound and continue to account for many of the fundamental characteristics still evident in the twenty-first century. The European appendages of British, French, and Portuguese began to be defined and applied in the colonial era. To illustrate with the case of the Mandingos—and there are many similar examples—by the nineteenth century not only were some inhabitants of the Futa Jallon region ethnically Mandingo, but also other mitigating factors such as the influence of language were now beginning to confer markers of French on them. Similarly, relatives of the Futa Jallon Mandingos, but who found themselves physically in the British sphere of influence in areas of present-day Sierra Leone, began to deal with British cultural markers. Thus, with European colonization West African ethnicities, though still firmly established, were being nuanced in significant ways that reflected where they were located within the Europeans’ spheres of influence.

Some of the foremost historians of African history have emphasized the vitality of the European heritage.¹³ As deep-rooted as ethnicity had become by the time of European intrusion, one’s ethnicity—Yorubaness, Hausaness, Akaness, and so on—was also affected by one’s exposure to and function within a specific “Europe-in-Africa” milieu. Ali Mazrui tackles the differing outcomes of European colonial construction of African political entities. He concludes that there is a potent distinction between British and French imperialism in the overriding consequence of the interplay between “imperial ethnicity” and “African ethnicity.” While the result for the French colonies was the construction of “nations,” for the British colonies “states” were the outcome.¹⁴ David Robinson offers a similar assessment in colonial comparative history showing French flexibility, in certain areas like religion, that contrasted with the British approach that led to a more rigid configuration, which, as noted above, Mazrui calls “state.” According to Robinson, the French were guided by a religious-cum-political ethnography that served as a road map: “At no time would one think of France as an Islamic Power. But by the early twentieth century, French authorities were actively discussing and evaluating their policies as puissance musulmane, by which they meant an imperial power with Muslim subjects.”¹⁵ Demarcation along European national lines/approaches went beyond European officials and policy makers. The Africans took sides too, showing their increasing affiliation with their specific European heritage. Whole groups of people with long ethnic, linguistic, religious, and other cultural ties clashed over what was the best modern system of government, education, culture, and overall influence.

On the threshold of decolonization, two eminent West African men vividly illustrated this division that stemmed from European affiliations. Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who led the Ivory Coast to independence, engaged in a heated debate with Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast. Houphouet-Boigny stood firm on his vision for a Franco-African community, as Nkrumah, shaped by his experiences in the Anglophone world—the Gold Coast colony, the United States, and Britain—refused to back down from his own idea of a post-European West Africa. Ultimately, on April 6, 1957, exactly one month after Ghana attained independence, the two leaders bet on their stands, agreeing that they would reassess the outcomes in exactly ten years time to see who was right.¹⁶ Perhaps the most intriguing fact about these two men, as they played out the trappings of their imperial nationality, was that in terms of their African ethnicity, they were both Akans. Houphouet-Boigny was a Baoule Akan and Nkrumah was an Nzima Akan, born in Nkroful, an Akan village in British territory but right on the border of the British Gold Coast and French Ivory Coast.

This interplay, and sometimes outright collision, between European imperial nationality and African ethnicity is a critical factor in the history of West Africa and West Africans and key to understanding some of the subsequent developments in the diaspora. While the Houphouet-Boigny-Nkrumah encounter became political legend and was well publicized, most of the equally illuminating exchanges and encounters that transcended ...