Memories of Africa: Home and Abroad in the United States

By Toyin Falola

2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Memories of Africa: Home and Abroad in the United States suggests a new lens for viewing African Diaspora studies: the experiences of African memoirists who live in the United States. The book shows how African Diaspora memoirs beautifully and grippingly depict the experiences of African migrants over time through political, social, and cultural spheres. In reading African Diaspora memoirs from the transatlantic slave trade period to the present, a reader can understand the complexity of the African migrant legacy and evolution.

Author Toyin Falola argues that memoirs are significant not only in their interpretation of events conveyed by the memoirists but also in demonstrating how interpersonal and human the stories told can be. Memoirs are powerful because they are emotionally captivating and because important themes and events circulate around a particular person (in this case, the memoirist). Undoubtedly, a memoir is significant because it can teach anyone about a part of the human experience, even if the “facts” are not described without bias. Through this sort of narrative, the reader cannot help but enter into the memoirist’s mind and, therefore, feel more empathy for them. In doing so, the reader can “feel” what the memoirist feels and “see” what the memoirist sees as clearly as is humanly possible. In this way, the historical events and life lessons become tangible and poignantly real to the reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781496843470

Toyin Falola

Toyin Falola is professor of history, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He has received over thirty lifetime career awards and fourteen honorary doctorates. He has written extensively on the African Diaspora, including The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity, and Globalization.

Book preview

PREFACE

A memoir is a literary piece of an individual’s personal history, enveloped within certain themes and relevant people, places, and events. It is not synonymous with its sister work, autobiography, because it does not merely detail a timeline of a person’s life. Rather, it provides the reader with a commentary on life lessons, societal philosophy, and interpersonal relationships with others. It also does not have to be entirely fact-based. For instance, a memoirist can sprinkle in fictional characters that represent certain individuals or circumstances to better demonstrate a particular message to the reader. Even with some possible fiction engrained in the story, the focus of the memoir is essentially on the memoirists’ personal truth. This personal truth can teach a reader about him- or herself and about a piece of the human condition. Consequently, memoirs are important because they contain emotional and psychological accounts of history and humanity that others can relate to or learn from.

The book aims to expand African Diaspora studies to include African migrant memoirs and African migrant memoirists because such works and people can capture important themes and events of the early and modern African Diaspora. Reading African Diaspora memoirs written since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade through the twenty-first century can show a reader how African migrant experiences and identities have changed over time and how African migrant experiences can teach much about African resilience and identity. Memoir accounts are significant sources of knowledge because they are not meant to be objective, as no historical account can ever be. Memoirists do not try to write as though they are unbiased figures; they describe their life and surrounding events with emotion and reflection. It is their emotion and reflection that make their storytelling and history-telling more natural, real, and human. Their emotion and reflection also make for a compelling historical source, for these memoirists personally experienced a moment that would eventually become history.

While many compelling African migrant memoirs have been written and noteworthy research has been done on African American memoirs and memoirists, there remains a gap in the literature on the studies of African migrant memoirs and memoirists. There is also a gap in the literature on a direct comparison of old and new African migrant memoirs and the connections between the two. Indeed, it is thought-provoking to observe that most African slaves coming to the United States came from Western Africa and that many modern African memoirists also come from Western Africa. Therefore, scholars can use Western African memoirs over time, as well as other secondary sources, to propose theories on how the African migrant experience has changed or even, in some ways, remained the same. These same scholars can also use African migrants’ own accounts to give a testament to the African migrant work ethic, determination, and resilience. Ultimately, this book, in its studies of various African migrant memoirs and memoirists, seeks to fill the gap in the literature and to honor African migrants over the centuries.

It is also worth noting that this book has been produced in a unique political climate. Today, many African migrants coming into the United States have been incredibly successful in their respective fields. Many have brought knowledge from advanced degrees or applied their talents and intellect to American universities. They have also contributed to the diversity of the country. However, at the same time, President Trump’s America First rhetoric—as racial, dangerous, and offensive as it is—threatens African immigrants’ and all immigrants’ way of life. Consequently, this book allows for a humanization of African migrants and the assurance that African migrant voices will not be erased despite the prevailing political uncertainty and fear.

In this book, I have crafted literary analyses of various African migrant memoirs and used secondary scholarly sources to testify to migration phenomena and the usefulness of memoir as an artistic medium. In doing so, I illustrate how African migrants’ experiences can inform scholars about many aspects of the African Diaspora. For instance, African migrants’ stories can reveal how African migrants have to navigate between physical and psychological spaces. African migrants leave their homes (often without choice) and maneuver between their home country and host country identities, adapt to their new environment and decide which home traditions should be kept and which should be disposed of. This opens up further theories about the connection between diaspora and space that the literary analyses of the various memoirs eked out. The impact and challenges of the construction of diasporas by these African migrants are revisited, which helps to vividly understand the anxieties and coping strategies they develop to navigate the physical and psychological spaces in new landscapes.

I have attempted to open up further theoretical axes and connections between the concept of diaspora and the notion of spatiality, which is not only about dispersion and migration, but of necessary entanglements and inclusion of indigenous people to address the dynamics of contesting identities in contemporary societies. Additionally, African migrants’ stories can depict many poignant details about cultural, political, religious, and societal differences between African regions. They can also say much about Africans’ perceptions of colonial and postcolonial power structures and how these structures have necessarily impacted their worldviews over time.

Indeed, the stories told by African migrants themselves provide scholars with a unique opportunity to see the world of the African Diaspora from the inside. African migrant memoirs are significant because they provide a history for non-African readers and a mirror for African readers. This book can also be useful for history students studying the impact of the African Diaspora and for literature students who study how fiction and fact can be blended to form a work full of rich metaphors, themes, and lessons. I hope that this book will create a catalyst for scholars to dig and delve deeper into African migrant memoirs when studying the African Diaspora and migration patterns more generally.

I offer this book as a tribute to the African migrant memoirists who so masterfully crafted their stories. This book also serves as a portal for readers to see and feel the complex, painful, beautiful, and triumphant experiences of African migrants. Let us celebrate and revere the wisdom of these voices and all that they have to teach us.

Chapter 1

(SHIFTING) SPACE AND (FIXED) CROSSROADS

The African Diaspora and the Imaginations of Africa

INTRODUCTION

The diaspora is a midpoint between two places for African migrants and their ability to imagine and reimagine Africa. This relationship can be examined through specific ideas, such as Du Bois’s double consciousness, Homi Bhabha’s Third Space, and Victor Turner’s liminal space. By addressing the idea of the diaspora, one can explore the context-sensitive relationship between the African Diaspora and the Black Diaspora. The diaspora is a configurable space that can be conceptually framed as a Third Space, drawing on Bhabha and Turner’s ideas, which makes it possible to centralize the lives of migrants and recognize their identity and experiences as shifting, persistently contested by dominant forces, and the product of persons who are trapped between two spaces: ideal and lived. In this context, the idea of home is sedentary and mobile, grounded and ungrounded, and simultaneously physical and amorphous. This foregrounds how the imaginations of Africa in the African Diaspora are dependent on the experiences that define the diaspora as the space of constant instability, liminality, struggle, shifts, and negotiations.

THE DIASPORA

Diaspora, as a term, has a taxonomic function: it is often used to label migrant settlers in new destinations who raise new generations while maintaining ties with their homeland. Reflecting on Africa and its image and ambassadors outside Africa—especially in connection to diasporic discourses—requires touching on monumental historical phases. These include slavery and its impact on the formation of Black¹ spaces² within and outside of the African continent. Transatlantic slavery was a hideous, shameful, devastating force that is mostly in Africa’s past, but it continues to wreak havoc on the spirits, souls, and bodies of Blacks at home and abroad. It is like a vengeful spirit that reaches across temporal and spatial boundaries to torment Black lives. The events that shipped millions of Africans across the Atlantic involuntarily, dehumanizing them in unimaginable ways, left indelible patterns rippling across the sociocultural, political, and ontological formations emerging from these major demographic and geographic shifts. About 12.8 million Africans are estimated to have been shipped across the Atlantic, although the number is higher when including the individuals who died during the journey. This demographic shift was a massive subtraction from Africa and a substantial addition to the Americas, and it induced long-lasting cultural alterations and wide-ranging societal changes.

On a very basic level, slavery changed the demographic and cultural diversity of Blacks at home and abroad.³ Enslaved Africans had their expressive cultures and knowledge systems transferred with them from Africa, arriving in America with an assortment of cultural ideologies that shaped the fabric of the diaspora. It became a place of cultural synthesis, hybridism, and miscellany.⁴ These plastic expressions and their guiding philosophies became modes of survival and resistance, continually reworked to fit the spatial and experiential demands of the new inhabited regions that would eventually become the Black Diaspora. These transported cultural expressions, often coded as channels of resistance and hidden from the exploitative scrutiny and reproach of slave masters, became significantly different from their original forms—they were inadvertently diasporically re-worlded.⁵

The Black Diaspora was created through this process of forceful removals, abrupt emplacements, and radical alienation. It harbored tensions between ideas of the past and ideals of the present, as conflicts between the past and the future required practical ways to navigate the resulting ideological distance. The demographic constitution of continental Africa and the diaspora bore the burden of slavery’s intrusion, and both spaces calcified around the fissures that it created. These fissures are more than ideological—they manifest physically and define what it means to be Black, African, and at home, as well as what those mean for those in the diaspora or migrants located within either or both spaces. Going by popular figures and knowledge of transatlantic slavery, the forced Black Diaspora represents the first major African migratory concentration outside the continent. The formation of this Black Diaspora had rippling effects on the construction of other diasporas like the African Diaspora. For context, migration in present-day Africa dates back to the fourth century in Mali.⁶

The relations that shape the spaces of home and diaspora—as sites of European injustices/encroachment and as sites inhabited by the descendants of enslaved Africans—mimicked, revised, and reproduced in varying degrees the tensions and estrangements that created the diaspora. Years after the transatlantic slave experience, its ghost still torments the present and threatens its configuration. This is partly due to the continuing survival of the subtle, potent structures that induced and supported colonialism and the slave trade. It is also due to the persistent inequalities that shaped the circumstances of the past and continue to exert their influence over the present. The diaspora is a site of struggle shaped by decades of history involving intrusion, removals, and displacements visited on the Black body from within and without. The enslavement of Africans had guilty parties on both sides of the Atlantic, meaning that inter-racial tensions, borne of misunderstanding and mistrust, also added to the character of the diaspora.

To speak in the terms of Du Bois, the souls of Black folk are subjected to repressive forces from within and without. Attacked by seemingly unstoppable forces from both sides of the continental divide, these souls can only be assuaged by the fickle promise that lies in protean and quixotic assurances of racial ties, Blackness, and connections to home, otherwise known as roots. These are unstable cleavages, subjected to continual revision by cultural elites exploiting profitable and self-serving formations. The meaning of Blackness is highly sociocultural, contestable, and depends on the context within which it is deployed. However, Africa as motherland has been rejected by advocates who oppose the idea of returning diasporic Blacks to Africa. These malleable identity structures owe much of their definition to the forces that created, engineered, and facilitated the transatlantic incident, or they owe their essence to the consequences of such cataclysmic events.

The factors directly responsible for colonialism and slavery in Africa can be traced to Europe, fueled by ideologies that glamorized European modernism. Once Europe was accepted as the benchmark against which all cultural standards are measured, the evil enterprise was supported as a civilizing mission. Capitalism and the control and mobilization of resources, while not tied to any single period in history, are principal features of the modern-day state. They have become political staples due to their particularly emphatic stress on competition and the formation of group identities related to resource acquisition. After the ideological machineries of Western Europe were at full throttle, all the frauds of state practices and the shortcomings of capitalism as an economic philosophy were embraced as stable modern phenomena. The creation of the diaspora followed the competition for resources, which was the impulse behind slavery. This ideology is ingrained into the fabric of the diaspora as a space of identity contest and construction; it is the foundation upon which it was set, evident in the lives of its inhabitants.

When tensions peak—especially when those tensions were created by a history of forced migration, estrangement, ideological disparity, longing, and competition for resources—the outcome manifests as space-specific experiential conditions. These conditions shape the imagined ideas of belonging and nonbelonging as well as the conceptions of home and abroad. Group ideologies are developed that characterize spaces as alien, hostile, or welcoming.

The African Diaspora is a space where negotiations of identity and belonging take place in front of a backdrop of ideas viewing Africa as home. African migration and resettlement can be examined within a frame composed of the rich history of mobility, physical shifts, and epistemological reconfiguration supporting the idea of the diaspora as home away from home, considering how this weighs on African migrants and their relationship with Africa as the motherland. Migrants exist within a bifurcated reality that affects their construction of home and the localization of reminiscent homemaking practices.

This chapter explores how the realities of host spaces—as either hostile or hospitable spaces—and the lived experiences of migrants instigate reconsideration of images where Africa is dominant. To achieve this, it approaches the diaspora as a midpoint between lived spaces and ideal spaces, a Third Space, where African migrants tactically renegotiate their identities. By experiencing the diaspora as a liminal space between lived and ideal spaces, African migrants shape and reshape their imagination and available narratives of Africa. These actions determine how they conceive of Africa. How does the diaspora affect and effectuate African migrants’ (re)thinking of Africa? This dynamic interaction demands a great deal of contextualization to unpack the intricate situation of being trapped between spaces, the reality of the diaspora as crossroads, and the dual mindset attuned to host spaces and places of origin in order to reveal the intricacy of the relation. To set these premises in sharp focus, the idea of space can assist with comprehending and emphasizing how homemaking and identity building are bound up in spatial dynamics and how such dynamics affect migrant imaginations.

This book provides a multidimensional view of African memoirs written in the diaspora: epistemological, political, and even sociocultural. The book situates the realities of the African Diaspora in the United States in relation to their African homelands and their new homes. The memoirs examined focus on human dilemmas such as wars, political instability, and slavery. Furthermore, this book is a critical evaluation of immigrant stories, examining new intersections of texts and spaces that open up theoretical and practical possibilities in the areas of memory and memoir studies. Memoirs are more than just random stories; they are composites of experiences not just from the author but also from a community of people. The authors of these haunting, compelling memoirs are mirrored representations of the realities of individuals who had not been able to record their thoughts and experiences. The book elevates the essence of orality and language, which are at the forefront of African and Afrocentric epistemologies.

This work highlights the philosophical, historical, and cultural insights of memoirs, making contributions to several relevant debates in diaspora studies. The goal is to understand the factors that contribute to each memoir’s experiences and capture aspects of lives that are unique. Historical and cultural factors make immense contributions to the experiences of the selected authors, and the book provides new ways to understand memoirs in relation to their authors’ regions of origin.

This is a contribution to existing literature and dialogues on diaspora studies, African American studies, and Africana studies. The book analyzes common grounds in freedom narratives, the place of Africans in Africa and in the diaspora, the efforts made by Africans in the diaspora seeking to influence politics back home, and the influence that current Africans in the diaspora have on the next generation of Africans in the diaspora. The full agenda of this book is to examine themes such as home, culture, new home, Afropolitanism, Afrocentrism, multiculturalism, universalism, and multiple identities, which can offer new insights into the philosophical, historical, sociocultural, and political content of African memoirs written in the United States.

There is an existential interconnectedness between Africans in the diaspora, their native homelands, and the United States; the realities of all three have become interwoven and inseparable. This connection underlines all of the topics addressed and evaluated in the book. It is important to examine the connection of the context of the diaspora and how they connect to the stories to be analyzed in the book to emphasize how the African Diaspora interacts with the elements of their environment, home and abroad. Particularly, Njie highlights typical concerns of Africans in the diaspora; how they navigate new worlds while maintaining strong attachments to Africa and strong affinities with their African roots and identities. Njie’s memoir shows that Africans in the diaspora become actively involved in the politics of their home countries. Ever since the slave era, the attachment of Africans in the diaspora has had a sense of nostalgia—they never abandon their fascination with the countries they leave behind.

As a major concept too, transnationalism is a social phenomenon that has shaped the memoirs examined in this book. The central idea of this work is to focus on the link between the original countries of Africans in the diaspora and their new countries of residence. According to Thomas Faist,

Over the past decades, the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism have served as prominent research lenses through which to view the aftermath of international migration and the shifting of state borders across populations. The research has focused on delineating the genesis and reproduction of transnational social formations, as well as the particular macro-societal contexts in which these cross-border social formations have operated, such as globalisation and multiculturalism. Although both terms refer to cross-border processes, diaspora has been often used to denote religious or national groups living outside an (imagined) homeland, whereas transnationalism is often used both more narrowly—to refer to migrants’ durable ties across countries—and, more widely, to capture not only communities, but all sorts of social formations, such as transnationally active networks, groups and organisations.⁷

Diaspora studies intertwine with a transnational agenda to crush boundaries, synthesizing localism and globalism, as well as maintain the specific details of individual cultures in a broader, transforming global landscape. These forces are evident in Assensoh’s and Njie’s memoirs. They show how individuals in the diaspora reminisce and how countries have sought help from their people in the diaspora. Africans in the diaspora have learned from their new homes, and they want to share that knowledge with their native homes. Maria Koinova discusses Africans in the diaspora in the following relevant manner:

Socialised with liberal values in Western societies, Diasporas might be expected to be interested in promoting such values in their homelands. Indeed, this often occurs in the transnational space. Diasporas teach their extended families and friends about democratic practices, such as how to vote for local government and to develop gender equality norms—a process termed a transfer of social remittances … Diasporas do not only use democratisation discourses, they also promote minimal democratic procedures in their homeland. These practices are mostly related to electoral pluralism and rotation of power of local elites rather than to liberal aspects of democratisation associated with human, minority or gender rights. Diasporas advocate these democratic procedures for nationalist and other particularistic purposes.⁸

Individuals in the diaspora participate in the growth and development of their homelands. Members of the African Diaspora pay diasporic taxes and contribute to the development of their countries—intellectually, politically, socially, and economically.

Through the years, the African Diaspora has had affinities with Africa in many ways. The new African Diaspora can help younger generations of Africans in the diaspora to maintain those affinities. To address the concerns of Du Bois’s double consciousness, there must be intentional efforts to create structures and communities to transmit the customs, values, and traditions of their African ancestry. Babatunde understands the task at hand, and acknowledging the duty of parents raising Black children, he writes:

Kelebogile and Ayinla set out the crucial steps for their family’s corporate venture as total commitment to the goal expressed, complete and total respect of each other, loyalty to every member of the family, discipline expressed in informing action with a sense of morality and accepting responsibility, inculcating the sense of decency based on mutual respect and doing to others what they would like done to them, and working hard to make their dreams for the family come through. The most basic infrastructure needed to make these desires materialize was to be fully committed to inculcating the key elements of success in America mixed with the key elements of their African culture.⁹

He also states:

Kelebogile and Ayinla discovered a lot of recent African Immigrants who have done very well in America seemed to prefer the American white upper middle class ways of raising children as the ideal to successful existence in America. However, in this family, they chose to be selective in bringing up their children who were born in America. Since these children would go to school, university, and pick up their professions as American citizens in America, it was important they would also bring to bear the unique aspects of the culture of their parents from their lands of origin. Their children would also learn what the key elements for success in America are. Their parents would select the best elements of American and African cultures that they would be schooled in.¹⁰

Babatunde has outlined the task at hand for the new diaspora. The positive values of American life and its constructive lessons must be syncretized to develop the next generation of the African Diaspora. These people can be transnational, recognizing that they should not be limited by the boundaries of a single nationality. The idea of being transnational is to have more than one identity. The task of the new diaspora is enormous. Its members must maintain affinities with their homelands while finding ways to survive in the realities of their new homes. In many ways, this situation has been constant through time.

SPACE (AFRICAN DIASPORA) AND MIGRATION

Space is integral to the construction and forging of identities, as well as the sustenance of imaginations, touching on interconnections between ideals and notions of home—it encompasses the manifest realities invalidating or ensconcing those ideals. The exploration of space can open up avenues to consider connections between spatial politics or the politics of space, understanding the ways that dominant and subaltern imagined images are created and maintained. This ties to the relation between African visions of home, the migration of Africans into diasporic spaces, and the effects of the latter on the former.

It is critical to differentiate between the terms space and place. The concept of space frequently involves a shifting, time-bound, and impermanent thing, often attributed to something that is located and opened up within or without a more grounded material and specified place.¹¹ The pivotal distinctions between space and place are that of temporary versus permanent, malleable versus fixed, and time-constrained versus unbounded. De Certeau’s conceptualization of both terms attributes a political quality to place, viewing it as a physical sign or material symbol of those who have the power to possess, control, and secure space.¹² For de Certeau, space is the realm of the subaltern, the Other, who deploys tactics that counteract the possessive and administrative tendencies of those who are gatekeepers for places. These tactics, which are a result of the absence of power that comes from control, are calculated attempts to counterbalance the power of those who own places. He considers space to be a specific politicized locale within a place.

Putting it succinctly, the space of a tactic is the space of the other.¹³ Tactics are located in places controlled by others through strategies, which signifies places as self-constitutive and self-sustaining base forms. Spaces, as ensconced within places, are driven by tactical choices and sustained as a home for the disposed, powerless, and marginalized. Places are managed by strategies of control that can be political, economic, or religious. Dudgeon and Fielder, corroborating this strand of use, assert that strategies are deployed imperialistically to take and maintain control of places by higher colonialist or state powers. In contrast, the tactics of the relatively powerless are oppositional, agentive, opportunistic, momentary, and isolated—they are not state-centric and they do not translate beyond measures of resistance to create modes for visibility and survival. As such, Relatively powerless groups have to operate tactically or simply survive and make do … which occurs at both an individual and collective level.¹⁴

Although de Certeau’s postulation tends toward the highly specialized, it coincides with the more popular conception of subaltern spaces as micro- and mini-publics within larger, more policed social spaces. This echoes some of the assumptions ascribable to counter-publics, or spaces of dissent within state-owned and state-controlled spaces.¹⁵ On another level of signification, de Certeau’s position reflects Bhabha’s Third Place to a substantial extent; also, it echoes Henri Lefebvre’s and Relph Edwards’s position on real (physical) and ideal (socio-mental) spaces. The former signifies a concrete place of social practice, and the other is an abstract socio-scape.

Ideal spaces are homes of dissent, providing the tactics necessary to subvert the strategies of control native to the real space (de Certeau’s place). Although the terms they use have different implications, they do meet at crucial intersections to delineate types of spaces and their political implications for sociocultural life. All places are spaces constructed and guided by processes and products of sociopolitical maneuverings; de Certeau classifies these as tactics and strategies. His delineation is useful, providing general information about the politics of inhabited places and spaces, but this study must conceive of both place and space as spaces. Ideas behind delineation, such as lived spaces that contrast with the imagined or the ideal, as opposed to the real, provide more relevant distinctions. This discussion will mostly refer to spaces, providing appropriate clarification where special distinction needs to be made.

Like any space populated by people, the African Diaspora is subject to codes of conduct and rules of engagement that allow individuals to negotiate identities, forge collective bonds, and operate within the boundaries set by accepted patterns of behavior. For this reason, space is often pivotal in conditioning citizens or members of society. It is the vantage point from where individuals assess and access their portion of the universe. It also provides a frame of reference for exploring, navigating, and negotiating the differences that constitute the universe. Space, as a physical manifestation of the rules and codes governing identity and conduct, bears lasting implications on the processes of being. This reflects on space as a conditioner.

Space provides the stimuli that shape orientation and action, acting as a framework shaping inhabitants and their responses to life’s demands. From this frame, collective identities can be forged and nationalist sentiments can be pushed and pursued. This is especially true when space is in its active capacity, conceived in form of spatial ties or ancestral bonds, to provide or serve as a necessary cohesive factor. Space can act or be made into a resource for mobilization, which is possible when space is seen as more than a physical property (place), constituted of malleable and fixed social features.

The institutions, practices, and cultural codes that make up space are some of these conditioning features. They demonstrate one