Are African-Americans ignorant about Africa?

Are African-Americans ignorant about Africa?

Identity Problems

“If you believed that slavery was a relatively benign institution in Africa, then you certainly would not expect to hear such things, but in fact, masters and traders spoke about their slaves in exactly these terms and people continue to do so today. In my company, the polite refrained from such remarks and instead made jokes about how I had found my way back home or teased me about searching for my roots. They were used to Americans with identity problems.

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother pg 144

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The fourth film is about Geronimo, the last of the Native American resistance fighters, who was considered a counterproductive hothead by some of his own tribe. (His father-in-law Cochise got higher marks in wisdom.) “Geronimo” is livelier than its predecessors, not just because of the subject matter — talented rebel warrior plays cat and mouse with the authorities — but also for the abundant photographic material, which brings the past alive more vividly than the most carefully costumed 21st-century actors ever could.

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/13/entertainment/et-we-shall-remain13

[Renée Cox, “Motherland” (1998), image from the artist’s website.]

The émigrés had wanted to belong to a country of the future. Who wouldn’t yearn for a place where the color line didn’t exist and black bodies were never broken on the rack or found hanging from the trees or expiring at the end of a police officer’s gun or wasting away in a cell on death row? What orphan had not yearned for a mother country or a free territory? What bastard had not desired the family name or, better yet, longed for a new naming of things? Why not dream of a country that might love you in return and in which your skin wasn’t a prison? Desire was as reliable as any map when you were searching for the Promised Land or trying to find the path to Utopia or imagining the United States of Africa.

-Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), p. 39.