Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery

Sites of Slavery has a fascinating chapter on how West Africa's "slave castles" have been depicted by African American visual artists.  There is in fact a growing and rich scholarship on how places like Cape Coast Castle in Ghana or Goree Island in Senegal have assumed a large role in diaspora tourism.




I am particularly impressed by how Tillet identifies such sites as key points in how post-Civil Rights black Americans have established a sort of alternative American identity.  Tillet argues that the black experience of slavery and alienation is so threatening to white American mythology that black Americans must look outside that mythology to recapture a sense of their own history and heritage and to incorporate that history into the American experience.  Unlike black Americans such as W. E. B. and Shirley DuBois, Maya Angelou, Kwame Toure who moved to West Africa in the late 1950s and the 1960s hoping to stay, the great majority of modern arrivals are coming to capture a sense of their heritage and then return home, to the U.S.




The risk in using places like Cape Coast for this purpose, though, is that it can erase other, especially West African, histories.  Photographs such as Chester Higgins's stark, iconic image of a young black woman silhouetted against the "Door of No Return," with the Atlantic Ocean on the horizon, seeks to "recover the traumatic experiences of enslaved Africans . . . by removing any signs of life or contemporaneity," as Tillet puts it.  West Africa is commonly reduced to its role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. 




But this desire to claim slavery as at the heart of the American and African-American experience must occur overseas in part because American historical sites and mythology exclude it.

A Panther in Africa

What a wonderful video! Over the past couple of years I have been reading more and more accounts of black Americans in Africa--as well as watching my own son's reaction two years ago.  For many,
Africa has been imagined to be home.  It seldom turns out to be that simple, though many have made themselves at home there, sometimes for most of their lives.




That would seem to describe Pete O'Neal, who in 1970 left the U.S. for Africa to avoid arrest on "trumped up charges."  Members of the Black Panthers were in fact jailed and killed by U.S. authorities in startling and troubling numbers.  Tanzania offered something of a haven.




Yet O'Neal and the film about him are both decidedly unromantic.   He admits that he felt uneasy getting off the plane in Tanzania with his young wife: "we are in for a different kind of life."  Even as he moves farther from his African-American roots, he never feels that Tanzania is really home.  The culture is similar but different.  Malaria  takes "too much of a toll on our bodies."  He lacks the sort of friendships he used to have until a former Panther, finally released from prison, moves there.




O'Neal's secret seems to be his determination to care for others, the devotion that he and Mama Charlotte, his more easy-going spouse, have for people near and far.  The most moving section of the film comes when O'Neal reflects on the lives of people he destroyed as a young hustler in Kansas City, in his pre-Panther years.  Helping others in his middle and old age "is for my salvation."




Film Website

Why I Like to Tutor

Most every Thursday during the school year I spend two hours at St. Andrew Nativity School tutoring middle school students.  I always go thinking that I could get a lot of "my own" writing and reading done with that time.  I always leave happy that I came.


I like tutoring at St. Andrew for two reasons.


First, it is an amazing school.  The teachers are very committed to the students and have very high standards (in every respect) for them.  The students are from relatively low-income families and seem uniformly pleased to be at such a fine school.  They tend to work very hard and to take their studies very seriously.  It is a good place to be.


Second, I can tell that the students value my presence.  I am not a great tutor, and some days I do not even approach average.  Despite having written six books,  am often confused by rules of grammar and terms like "subordinate clause."  I do not always understand the steps that the students are expected to take in math.  Many of them know Catholic theology better than I do.  Sometimes the students have to explain the assignments to me.  But I can tell that my being there means something to them, in part because I insist on telling them the same thing that I try to tell my university students and my son: this is hard, but you can do it.  I think that they can tell that I respect them and care about them.


Much of life is complicated.  It is not always clear what the best, the ethical, the loving and wise thing to do is.  But it is very seldom a bad idea to spend time trying to help a child.  I strongly believe that this is one of our main reasons for existing.

Absent-Minded or Engaged Professors?

I recently put together, with the help of families and friends, a video designed to humanize the image I project to students: See the video.  The video opens with my explaining that I was about to give a long-winded speech on the usefulness of history but realized that I could instead just interview family and friends who could speak at great length and eloquence about how blessed they have been to know someone with a Ph.D. in history.


Of course the interviews don't go exactly as planned.  My wife defers to our dog, who chases his tail.  My son stares off into space or at his computer or cell phone for a couple of minutes, then says, "I can't think of anything."  The manager of the soccer team I play keeper for says he had hoped that someone with a Ph.D. in history would learn from his mistakes, but it hasn't really worked out that way--though perhaps the three decades of academic study "keeps him calm."  And so forth.  Then I come back on screen and pontificate for awhile about how history is useful.


I like the humorous and earnest mix because too many students (if not my family and friends) take professors too seriously.  It's often assumed that we spend all of our time pondering imponderables, not dealing with spouses and offspring who think we are full of baloney.  It's the interaction of academic or intellectual study with real-life relationships, I think, that offers all of us our best chance at wisdom and insight.  Knowledge entails going into the world, not retiring from it.

"What is Africa to Me?" or "What is Africa?"

One of the most quoted lines about Africa comes from Countee Cullen's lyrical and classic Harlem Renaissance poem, "Heritage," in which he asks: "What is Africa to me?"  This has been an especially poignant question for black Americans, of course, but it's also one that many white Americans have pondered.

After turning over this question myself for some time, from both personal and academic angles, it has occurred to me that a much better question is simply: What is Africa?

Let me explain.  When Americans approach Africa, we almost always do so not only with a lot of preconceptions and stereotypes, but also with deeply felt and highly personal needs.  We travel to Africa looking to fill some sort of hole in our own lives.  We go looking for authenticity or culture or an exotic experience or roots or home or Eden or to be a hero.  Very seldom are we happy with what we find, because very seldom do we find precisely what we wanted to find.

If we instead approached Africa--and the rest of our travels, actual and imaginary--with a sense of openness, with respectful curiosity, we would likely be less disappointed, more delighted.