Blacks in America hit the peak of their civil rights activism in the 1960s, at the very time that African nations were winning their independence from British, French, and other European colonial powers. It was no accident of history. For many, independence in Africa rode the same wavelength as the civil rights movement in the United States. “The similarities in the political and psychological urgings of Black America and pre-independence Africa were real and profound,” Howard Jeter, a former US ambassador to Nigeria, has noted. “Africans and Black Americans, knowing that they were equal to any other human being, sought to be treated as human beings.”
In 1974, when Muhammad Ali took his heavyweight boxing championship fight with George Foreman to Zaire, he electrified blacks around the world. Two years later, the African-American author Alex Haley published Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a multi-generational novel reaching back to the birth in 1750 of an African named Kunta Kinte and to his kidnapping and subsequent enslavement in America. The book was translated into twenty-six languages, sold millions of copies, and was made into a major television miniseries, and African-Americans responded enthusiastically to the fictionalized genealogy. Roots met with such commercial success because it offered a personal link between a black American family and their African ancestors—a connection now so theoretical and tenuous that it has become almost mythical for most blacks.
These days, the members of the diaspora resemble the detached and cooling embers of a dying fire. A few artists and academics celebrate Africa, but for the most part the rest of us look away. Africans survived the Atlantic slave trade, the carving up and colonization of their continent, and the transition to political independence, but now face cataclysmic threats to which we, in North America, remain indifferent.
Collectively, blacks failed to exert the political pressure necessary to force the global powers to intervene and prevent the devastating civil wars in the West African countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia. We also looked away from the murderous civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (drc). We have remained largely mute about the current genocide in Sudan.
Blacks and others in North America did rally in defence of the black majority of South Africa under apartheid rule. Somehow, it was easier to generate widespread opposition to the South African regime because the targets of our ire were the minority white rulers of the country. In that clear-cut moral issue, we pinpointed the enemy efficiently. But why hasn’t the greatest ongoing crisis Africa has ever faced—the hiv/aids pandemic—drawn the same support? And why no action against the murderers in Rwanda, the drc, or Sudan? Do these examples of black-on-black violence cut too close to the bone?
Few North American blacks now relate to the homeland. Presented with a map of Africa, most could not even point out Lagos, Ougadougou, Khartoum, or Cape Town. Geographic ignorance is like the tip of an iceberg, hinting at a much deeper void in our collective psyche about Africa and its peoples. For some of us, it hurts too much to think about Africa. The irony of this becomes almost unbearable when you travel in Africa and meet schoolchildren who recite all sorts of information about Canada and America. Once, while travelling in Cameroon, I met a young man who waxed enthusiastic about the various Canadian cities he had heard about: “How I long to visit the wonderful metropolitan centres of Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, and Joliette,” he said, clapping his hands together. Joliette?
This embrace of a far-off continent and all its promises is not reciprocated by North American blacks. Indeed, we identify less and less with Africa, and our battles here at home take our attention away from a threatened people whom we don’t even know. Africa is too distant, too big, too confusing, too much. Second only to Asia in size, Africa has fifty-three countries, nearly one billion people, over a thousand languages, and a diversity of cultures and religions. How to connect with that when there is no firm point of connection, save the knowledge that one or more of your ancestors was stolen from some unknown village in an unknown and unfamiliar land?
The world’s worst humanitarian crisis is unfolding before our eyes, and its crucible lies in Africa. The United Nations estimates that 25 million Africans are living with hiv/aids; 1.9 million of them are under the age of fifteen—ninety percent of the infected children in the world. The outlook for them is grim. In 2003, 2.2 million people died of aids-related illness in sub-Saharan Africa, representing over three-quarters of the world total and sixteen percent more than the year before. North American blacks are reacting to this catastrophe like tense drivers in rush hour, refusing to make eye contact with the desperate person five metres away who wants to slip into their lane. I’m not letting you in. I’m not even going to recognize your existence.
Stephen Lewis, the UN special envoy on hiv/aids in Africa, has often sounded the alarm bell. “The pandemic is overshadowing anything we know in human history,” he told members of the Canadian parliamentary committee on foreign affairs and international trade. “People now talk about a hundred million deaths down the road. I don’t doubt that for a moment.”
I asked Lewis to comment on African-American leadership in addressing the aids pandemic in Africa. He tiptoed, noting that through their churches and their wallets, many African-Americans have funnelled assistance to Africa in its time of crisis. And he acknowledged that groups such as the Congressional Black Caucus—an advocacy group comprising African-Americans in both parties in the US House of Representatives—have consistently lobbied for greater government funding to address aids internationally. Nonetheless, he noted, “In terms of the pandemic, it is somewhat curious that the African-American leadership in the United States has been so slow to rally.”
Curious indeed. Some might call it shameful. Where are the marches? The demonstrations? Where is the unstoppable will that desegregated America, demanded that US troops withdraw from Vietnam, and defied the apartheid regime of South Africa?
aids, even more than genocide and famine, involves a devastating destruction of humanity, and features an elusive enemy—a virus emboldened by poverty. It’s the ultimate litmus test for a diaspora, and blacks are failing. Badly. I wanted to know why, so I started an inquiry within my family, interviewing black American relatives who had been reared on the same values of social obligation that my parents espoused. My cousin, Marie Metoyer, a retired psychiatrist living in Manchester, New Hampshire, seemed like a good pick because she and her mother, Dr. Lena Edwards Madison, spent their best years providing medical services in their own communities. “You were to achieve, excel, integrate into the white community, and that, with education, was to be your salvation,” she said. And Africa? “Ideally,” Metoyer said, “there is an onus on African-Americans to take an active role for humanitarian reasons in Africa. Unfortunately, some of us are so involved in our own spheres and interests that we don’t see Africa as a priority.”
Another relative—Adele Flateau, fifty-three, of Brooklyn, who has spent twenty-five years in community service and now works at a clinic for hiv/aids patients in Brooklyn—had a similar message when I asked her what had happened to the activism of the sixties.
“I think we didn’t pass on the torch to our next generation, and those of us that were in the forefront back twenty or thirty years have kind of fizzled out. We have a lot more black elected officials now, but they just don’t seem to be very outspoken. In fact, they’ve been very silent. There is an eerie kind of silence among most of the black leadership now.”
Outside the clinic where Adele works, a taxi driver—a thin, middle-aged, black man who gave his name as Jacob—wanted to know all about the article I was writing. He showed a lively knowledge of Africa and was quick to offer an opinion: “Sure, you will meet some black community leaders who care about the aids crisis in Africa. But most of us? Forget it. It’s like, I’ve got my rent to pay and The Man is leaning on me left, right, and centre, and I’m trying to get my kids through school without being shot at, so don’t talk to me about Africa. I’m American. Talk to me about America, and about the damn leak in my roof.”
