CONTEXTUALIZING PAN-AFRICAN IDENTITIES

In his quest to understand the intellectual and cultural content of “black modernity,” Paul Gilroy famously addressed themes like “home,” identity, and belonging, in an effort to undermine racial and cultural essentialisms in the black Atlantic. He did so by questioning the literary use of Africa as a temporal site for “absolutist conceptions of cultural difference allied to a culturalist understanding of ‘race’ and ethnicity.”Footnote ⁶ As we have noted, Gilroy provocatively proposed a broader, transnational framework. Rather than a singular black Atlantic identity that is structured by concepts of biological stasis, Gilroy championed a dynamic and culturally contingent understanding of what it meant (and means) to be black in a diasporic context.

Gilroy presented a serious challenge to the literary use of cultural and racial essentialisms in the articulation of identity. He framed this conceptual challenge geographically, anchoring his analysis in the Atlantic basin, and began his historical exploration of “black modernity” with the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery. Gilroy urged scholars to “take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and [to] use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective.”Footnote ⁷ Gilroy's framework, his cosmopolitanism and antiracism, built on what had become scholarly common sense by the 1990s: race and racial identities are, and always have been, historically and culturally constructed.Footnote ⁸ Gilroy thus emphasized how the “fractal patterns of cultural and political exchange and transformation” meant, and continue to mean, that African and black diasporic identities were (and are) constantly being made and remade. Historically, the mirage of “a coherent and stable racial culture” – the basis, Gilroy argued, for a supposedly legitimate black nationalism and politics since the eighteenth century – reifies racial categories of difference and obscures the complexity of identity formation throughout the African diaspora.Footnote ⁹ Afrocentric writers, the late twentieth-century inheritors of an extreme form of black nationalism – who would contest the perceptions of Africa proffered by Angelou, Obama, and Phillips – invoke Africa and African “tradition,” be it through a racial/biological connection to Africa and/or the inheritance of culturally unchanging and essentialist African traditions. Unlike Angelou, Obama, and Phillips, whose autobiographical writings reflect the continued importance of the nation-state to identity formation, Afrocentrists reject suggestions that transnational and intercultural efforts to move beyond essentialized concepts of human difference can be achieved from a perspective centered on a Western nation-state (especially the United States and Britain).Footnote ¹⁰

African and African American autobiographical travel writers have long struggled to craft, and to make sense of, the “transnational and intercultural perspective” that Gilroy sketched for us in The Black Atlantic. Traversing borders that are geographical, political, and cultural, African and African American travel writing in the black diaspora dates back to at least the eighteenth century. Initially inflected with the abolitionist politics that made the publication of this literature possible, blacks throughout the diaspora – from Olaudah Equiano in the eighteenth century, to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs in the nineteenth, and Richard Wright and Eslanda Goode Robeson in the twentieth – have used autobiography to chronicle their global journeys and to contextualize and craft Afro-British and African American identities.Footnote ¹¹ In the nineteenth century, African and African American authors achieved this by vividly describing the horrors of the Middle Passage (the historical starting point for Gilroy's black Atlantic framework), reflecting on the brutalities of New World slavery, and narrating heart-pounding escapes from enslavement to freedom.Footnote ¹² Within this vast literary corpus, the image of Africa has been remembered, discovered, and invented. As a result, the meaning of Africa to the construction of identity in the African diaspora – whether in the Atlantic basin or the vastness of the Pacific world – has changed over time. From the peaceful life and loving family environment that is described in Equiano's romanticized recollections of childhood in Africa, to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century images of a dark and uncivilized African continent that Christian black Americans saw in need of redemption, the image of Africa has evoked both longing and loathing in the imaginations of diaspora blacks.Footnote ¹³

This essay focusses on the image of Africa, and its importance to the literary and historical construction of a diasporic black identity. It does this by drawing on the perspectives of three of the most influential black writers from the last thirty years. In analyzing the autobiographical accounts of Angelou, Obama, and Phillips, questions about the sociohistorical utility and geographical reach of Gilroy's framework come into focus. These questions arise in the course of considering the discursive significance of Africa's historical, geographical, and political place in Angelou's, Obama's, and Phillips's articulation of identity and sense of belonging.Footnote ¹⁴ Although framed by the works of Angelou, Phillips, and Obama, this essay suggests a diasporic framework that is geographically flexible; to confine the African diaspora to the Atlantic basin is too narrow, too much a contrivance of professional historical convention, and far too neglectful of the impact that twentieth-century African migrations throughout the Atlantic and Pacific worlds had on perceptions of Africa, and a diasporic sense of identity. After all, the various manifestations of colonial power that contributed to the remaking of the early modern and modern world transcended the Atlantic and included lands in the Pacific and Indian Ocean worlds from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.Footnote ¹⁵ With the global extension of colonial regimes of power and knowledge, people of African descent found themselves not only in the Americas, but in the metropoles of colonial power – such as London – as well as in India, Australia, and the Hawaiian Islands. And due to advances in transportation technology and the politics of decolonization, Africans like Barack Obama's father could migrate almost anywhere in the world and seek out a university education and employment opportunities in the twentieth century.

The narratives of Angelou, Obama, and Phillips force us to extend Gilroy's black Atlantic framework, but they also punctuate Afrocentric attempts to center a transhistorical, culturally essentialist vision of Africa in black diaspora identities. Afrocentric writers posit an extreme form of black nationalism. Afrocentrists, such as Molefi Asante and Maulana Karenga, invert Eurocentric history by presenting Africa as the birthplace of civilization and construct a timeless, unchanging, and romanticized image of Africa as “home” for all diaspora blacks.Footnote ¹⁶ Molefi Asante, for example, instructs us that “Afrocentricity traces its theoretical heritage to African ideas and African authors.”Footnote ¹⁷ African ideas – and, we might add, the idea of Africa – constitute a fixed and unchanging site of identity formation for the Afrocentrist. As Maulana Karenga argues, without “cultural integrity” “no identity or possibility of existence” is achievable.Footnote ¹⁸ The writings of Angelou, Obama, and Phillips complicate simplistic Afrocentric constructions of Africa and highlight how traveling to Africa was less a homecoming and more a reminder of the deeper and more immediate connection that these authors felt for their diasporic homes in the United States and Britain.

MAYA ANGELOU'S TRAVELING SHOES

Maya Angelou joined an expatriate African American population of roughly two hundred in Ghana in 1962. Her arrival in the “jewel of Africa” was, by her own admission, an “accident.”Footnote ¹⁹ With the exception of her son's hospitalization, Angelou's Ghanaian sojourn was a happy detour in her global travels. For example, Angelou recalls being “captured by the Ghanaian people.” She explains that their skins “were the colors of my childhood cravings: peanut butter, licorice, chocolate and caramel. Theirs was the laughter of home, quick and without artifice.” These romantic reflections represent the initial observations of a young African American woman desperately searching for her cultural roots.Footnote ²⁰

All travelers make reflexive, superficial judgments when they arrive at a new place. Angelou, though, is no ordinary traveler, and is in no ordinary place. She has taken a circuitous route to Africa, the home and motherland to a global diaspora of black people. Conscious of this, and being deeply reflective, Angelou uses her mastery of metaphor to thicken her descriptions and explore the deeper meaning of concepts like “family,” “home,” and identity to blacks of the diaspora. Can Africa, specifically Ghana, provide the balanced sense of identity and belonging that Angelou imagined was missing from her life in the early 1960s? At first, she thought it could. She remembers how important it seemed to her to break with the American family history that occupied the shallow waters of her memory and to excavate a deeper vein of history and meaning in Ghana.Footnote ²¹ Angelou remembers that her initial quest was shaped by the profound social and political changes unfolding in 1960s America, historical changes that informed her sociohistorical consciousness as she recalls lambasting the United States for its history of slavery and racism. This history, she reflected at the time, transformed people of African descent into an “unrecognizable tribe.” Angelou imagines, like her fellow expatriates, that she has found a “home” in Ghana. She remembers thinking that “heaven and Africa were inextricably combined” in her diasporic attempts to locate an African identity.Footnote ²²

Angelou narrates how she gradually immersed herself in Ghanaian life. In Accra, Ghana's capital, she found employment, established a commercial relationship with a local beautician (who provided Angelou with lessons on “going native”),Footnote ²³ and forged friendships with locals like T. D. Bafoo, the editor of the Ghanaian Times newspaper, and Bafoo's wife. Angelou explains that she hoped her relationship with TD, as she called him, and his wife, would “lead me behind the modern face of Ghana.” And perhaps, Angelou remembers thinking, this “modern face” will eventually reveal “a glimpse of Africa's ancient tribal soul.” At the same time, Angelou acknowledged that the “eternal melodrama” of slavery's memory (and forgetting) threatened her personal quest for a deeper understanding of the African content of her identity. For diaspora blacks, the memory of “floating kennels” that were the slave ships, and New World enslavement, loomed large.Footnote ²⁴ Angelou explained that slavery colored all of her interactions with Ghanaians and appeared to give credence to the “ugly suspicion that my ancestors had been weak and gullible and were sold into bondage by a stronger and more clever tribe.”Footnote ²⁵

There are two levels of literary memory at play here in Angelou's narrative. First, there is the memory derived from the act of remembering and writing about her 1960s travels in the 1980s. Second, there is the memory that writers derive from their connection to a collective historical imaginary. In Angelou's case, her historical imaginary is fired by the specter of the Middle Passage and New World slavery. Angelou filters her autobiographical recollections through these two layers of literary memory. She thus recalls how her early 1960s encounter with the place of slavery in Ghanaian historical consciousness was unsettling. Angelou's initially romantic images of Africa and the belief that Ghana possessed a spiritual quality powerful enough to transform her soul were assaulted by the memory of the transatlantic slave trade. The existential anguish that this caused Angelou was magnified by her everyday experiences among postcolonial Ghanaians. Angelou's time in Ghana forced her beyond superficial stereotypes about the African “soul” and American bigotry. There may well be some ontological truth to such binaries, but Angelou discovered that the lived reality was far more complex, far more a subjective product of her relationship with the history of enslavement and colonialism and, as she quickly learned, of her relationship, as a black American, with postcolonial Ghanaians.

Filtered through two decades of personal reflection, Angelou's memories highlight the complexity of her relationship with Ghana, and Ghanaians, and provide an example of how Gilroy's conception of a “transnational, diasporic” black identity grounded in a timeless portrayal of the Middle Passage and New World slavery was so abruptly fractured.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, in penning her recollections in the 1980s, Angelou acknowledges that identity formation is both relational and subjective, in addition to being ever in process. This realization resulted in an uncomfortable historical awakening. She recalls of her experiences in Ghana, “I doubted if I or any black from the diaspora, could really return to Africa. We wore skeletons of old despair like necklaces, heralding our arrival, and we were branded with cynicism.”Footnote ²⁷ The Africa that Angelou had imagined that she would discover prior to her arrival in Ghana did not exist, if, indeed, it had ever existed. Instead, the image of Africa that Angelou and her expatriate friends carried to Africa was inevitably tinctured by the history of slavery and shaped by the racism and oppression specific to the twentieth-century United States.

And so Angelou began to question not only her romantic image of Africa, but the Africanness of her identity. She questioned the notion that there existed a unity in blackness, and wondered whether, for blacks in the diaspora, there truly is such a thing as the “African personality.” Surely such ideas reified racial stereotypes and reawakened the racial paternalism that was popular among nineteenth-century abolitionists and twentieth-century Afrocentrists?Footnote ²⁸ The journey to a deeper understanding of identity is perilous, indeed, and in traveling to Ghana in the early 1960s, Angelou was confronted with the possibility that Africa was not home after all. The images of Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington, combined with a visit from Malcolm X and his exhortation for Angelou to “come home” because “Our people need you,” sparked a reassessment of who she was as a black woman in the diaspora, and in relation to Africa.Footnote ²⁹

Angelou remembers struggling with the realization that the African identity she projected prior to her arrival in Ghana was not real. Unlike the Ghanaians she worked and socialized with, she was not truly African. “I had put on just learned airs,” she recalls, “along with my African cloth, and paraded, pretending to an exotic foreign pose I had not earned or directly inherited.”Footnote ³⁰ Angelou reflects that her identity was that of an American, a black American woman whose emotional energy was drawn back to the civil rights struggles of African American people in the United States. True, blacks in different parts of the diaspora suffered – and continued to suffer – traumas of unspeakable cruelty and injustice, but if these traumas proved anything it was that while blacks of the Diaspora share a common humanity, the geographical and historical specificity of that trauma produces culturally specific images of Africa. Angelou's traveling shoes did not persuade her to completely discard the African component of her African American identity; rather, she learned that her connection to Africa was a product of many generations of historical experiences in a land far removed from Africa. “The Middle Passage and the auction block had not erased us,” Angelou concludes. “Not humiliations nor lynchings, individual cruelties nor collective oppression had been able to eradicate us from the earth.” Angelou's conclusion is thus built on the humanist ideal of individuals triumphing over great odds, an ethos rooted in American experiences and an American intellectual consciousness.Footnote ³¹

A VIEW OF AFRICA FROM THE PACIFIC

Angelou's image of Africa became decentered after experiencing Africa for herself. As a black American woman and single mother in the 1960s, remembering this decentering some two decades later must surely have been painful, but necessary to the continued evolution of a meaningful sense of self. Thus, in the wake of her travels to 1960s Ghana, Africa is transformed in Angelou's imagination from a timeless home with transformative spiritual qualities to a site that helps blacks in the diaspora – particularly those from the United States – to focus their historical imagination on the history of racial injustice in North America that began with transatlantic enslavement. For Angelou, such a focus resulted in a shift in her attention, moving away from romantic and transhistorical images of Africa, and focussing instead on the search for political solutions to racial oppression in the hope that all Americans might come to terms with the legacy of America's racial past.

In the decades since the civil rights movement in the United States and decolonization throughout Africa, other black diaspora authors have joined Angelou in traveling to Africa as a means of grappling with the complexities of their own identity. This was the case for Barack Obama who, before he became the forty-fourth President of the United States, penned one of the great autobiographies in modern African American literature. Originally published in 1995, Obama's Dreams from My Father is a rich and complex life history, filled with the drama and emotional turmoil that comes with international travel, and a growing awareness that the post-civil rights movement mantras of equality, multiracialism, color blindness, and most recently, postracialism, have little practical meaning to millions of black Americans. If Obama's work as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago taught him anything during the years when Ronald Reagan was President, it was, in his words, that “the past was the present” for thousands of black families in inner-city America.Footnote ³² As such, Obama felt that Africa played little practical role in the formation of a meaningful late twentieth-century African American identity.

Obama's racial consciousness and image of Africa developed over the course of his childhood, adolescence, and early adult life. Born in Hawaii, Obama describes his family tree in a way that is reflective of Hawaii's demographic cosmopolitanism.Footnote ³³ His mother, a white woman, had a father who looked like a “wop,” and a mother who claimed “Cherokee blood.”Footnote ³⁴ And Obama's father, a Kenyan by birth and nationality, was as dark-skinned as he was opaque in Obama's childhood imagination. Indeed, Barack Obama Sr. was something of a metaphor for the way in which his son imagined Africa. For example, after leaving his American wife and young child, Obama Sr. returned after several years to visit his son. Of this visit Obama recalls thinking that “my father … remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening.”Footnote ³⁵

This image of an African father as “vaguely threatening” is revealing of Obama's developing racial consciousness and his image of Africa. For all of his exposure to the multiracialism of Hawaiian society, and his childhood travels to Indonesia, it is Obama's black father who remains “unknown” and “threatening” in his literary memory. To some readers of Dreams from My Father this may not be so surprising; after all, Obama's racial education was for the most part received from his white mother and grandparents. Despite having the best of intentions – racists are “ignorant,” Obama's mother taught her son – Obama's white family members had never experienced the sharp edge of racial prejudice, much less given any thought to Africa. And so, by the time Obama entered college he is drawn toward black leaders like Malcolm X, less for their black nationalism, and more for their chameleon capacity for self-creation.Footnote ³⁶

It is telling, then, that Obama's existential struggle with his identity and the significance of Africa in his racial imagination is torn between America's multiracial promise of equality and the “fact” of his blackness. “My identity might begin with the fact of my race,” he writes, “but it didn't, couldn't, end there.”Footnote ³⁷ Grudgingly, and against the liberal progressive ethos that is giving shape to his budding political consciousness, Obama acknowledges that the power to define his identity is not in his hands alone. However, embracing Afrocentric or black nationalist dogmas did not appeal to Obama because his experiences on the South Side of Chicago taught him that faith in such ideas had no practical value in the post-civil rights movement era. “I doubted,” Obama explains, “that all the talk of self-esteem could serve as a centerpiece for an effective black politics.”Footnote ³⁸ From an early stage in his adult life, then, Obama wanted to find practical political solutions to the socioeconomic and cultural problems that he saw plaguing black Americans. Building on the civil rights struggles of Angelou's generation, Obama viewed political action, not black nationalism or Afrocentrism, as the path black Americans must take to a meaningful sense of self. Tellingly, he writes that for black nationalists and Afrocentrists “Africa has become an idea more than an actual place, a new promised land, full of ancient traditions and sweeping vistas, noble struggles and talking drums.”Footnote ³⁹ Obama believes that nowhere in this imagining of Africa does there exist any practical political program for addressing the historical ills and racial injustices that continue to afflict millions of black Americans in their corner of the diaspora.

Having said that, Obama acknowledges the cultural seductiveness of Africa. Reflecting on his travels to Kenya, he writes of being able, for a “fleeting moment,” to close his eyes and melt into the sea of black faces walking along Kenya's bustling streets and busy markets. This emancipatory feeling is fleeting, however, as a Kenyan vendor offers to sell Obama a necklace at “the white man's price,” an encounter that leads Obama to the realization that at the end of the day he is not African.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, Obama's sense of self is somewhat unbalanced in Kenya because, as he explains, “family seemed to be everywhere,” and his political ideals had little practical value or meaning in Africa.Footnote ⁴¹ In other words, Obama felt his outsider status in Africa, a detachment that was reinforced when an elderly woman quipped that he looks “like an American.”Footnote ⁴²

In his own way, Obama was as troubled as Angelou by the problematic relationship between race and the significance of Africa in the consciousness of diaspora blacks. But Obama is of a later generation, a product of his times and his upbringing in multiracial Hawaii, and his social activism in Reagan's America. The civil rights struggles of Angelou's generation made Obama's political rise possible, and with it, his vision of practical political reform on race matters. That said, Obama is not insensitive to the importance of culture and cultural representations of Africa in black American culture. However, Obama is a functionalist in his thinking, explaining in The Audacity of Hope that “African Americans understand that culture matters but that culture is shaped by circumstance.”Footnote ⁴³ Romantic visions of Africa might make black nationalists and Afrocentrists feel good about themselves but they cannot, in Obama's view, make any practical difference to the social and economic lives of diaspora blacks in the United States. Indeed, Obama believes that the national, rather than the transnational and diasporic, contours of the “black Atlantic” are what truly frames the racial consciousness of blacks in the United States. The analytical space created by the United States' national boundaries, not Gilroy's borderless “black Atlantic,” therefore dominates Obama's sense of racial identity and shapes his image of Africa.

WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

While the memories of Maya Angelou and Barack Obama focus on very different epochs in American and African history, their recollections were filtered through a time when, during the 1980s and early 1990s, the rightward drift in American politics and white backlash to the civil rights and black power movements peaked.Footnote ⁴⁴ Neither Angelou nor Obama responded to this reactionary age in American politics and culture by embracing the equally reactionary ideals of Afrocentrism. If anything, Angelou and Obama critically reevaluated the images they had constructed of Africa and refocussed their quest for a meaningful sense of home and identity in the country of their birth: the United States. If we move forward in time, and into the twenty-first century, and across the Atlantic, to England, we find black diaspora literary constructions of Africa coming under equally intense scrutiny. Caryl Phillips, one of the most important black literary voices to emerge out of modern Britain, gives vent to his suspicions about the utility of an African “home” in the construction of Afro-British identity.

In The Atlantic Sound (2000), Phillips transports us through time and space, excavating the details of free and unfree African migrations across the Atlantic Ocean through narrative re-creations of African diasporic travels, and detailing his own journeys through modern Britain, the American South, and Africa. Phillips is interested in the meaning of “home” to one's identity, an interest that we first saw in his The European Tribe (1987), in which he catalogs his travels through Europe. In this earlier work, Phillips was inspired to travel through Europe because he felt “both of and not of Europe.”Footnote ⁴⁵ It is therefore his search for “home,” and an answer to the question “where are you from?” that once again sends Phillips in search of a geographically grounded sense of identity in The Atlantic Sound.

Phillips, the son of Caribbean parents who migrated to Britain in the 1950s, expresses views about Africa and different forms of black nationalism in uncompromising terms. His often biting critiques have prompted one reviewer to refer to his descriptions of Africa as skeptical and confirming “the author's views prior to his journey.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Phillips, according to this reading, is something of a sellout, utterly Europeanized to the point where he cannot resist constructing Africa as a rhetorical straw man to be mocked and demolished by his twenty-first-century cynicism. Such analysis, however, simplifies Phillips's complex views on Africa, identity, and “home.” Phillips is a perceptive observer, carefully studying human interactions and having the unique ability to deconstruct the layers of meaning associated with these human encounters. Not surprisingly, then, the existential questions of home and identity are constantly in flux for Phillips as he grapples with the discursive tension between the ideal and reality of Africa, and its utility as a signifier of his identity as an Afro-Briton.

Phillips's search for a deeper personal understanding of his identity sees him crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean. Like Angelou several decades before him, Phillips's travels reinforce in him the importance of transatlantic slavery to black diaspora identity. Traveling to Liverpool, once a vital hub for slave-trading vessels, Phillips observes the “uninspiring” River Mersey, takes in some local architecture (the product of slave-trading profits), and meets a local guide, Stephen.Footnote ⁴⁷ Stephen is an LBB – a Liverpool-born black – and feels strongly that a conspiracy of silence hangs over the city of Liverpool. The significance of African slavery to Liverpool's history has been deliberately forgotten, Stephen instructs Phillips. This historical amnesia angers Stephen and, Phillips reports, prompts Stephen to vent his frustration by launching into an anti-Semitic rant and to rail against recent black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. Despite Stephen's accusations that Liverpudlians suffer from historical amnesia, Phillips leaves Liverpool convinced that Stephen's vision of the past is simplistic (and an analog to Gilroy's freeze-frame of the transatlantic slave trade), and that in this city, “the past casts a deep shadow, yet the present seems grubby and inadequate.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Perhaps Africa holds the key to a deeper, cleaner, and clearer understanding of black identity in the diaspora.

In 1986, Maya Angelou was prosaic in recalling her romantic perceptions of Africa. In 1995, Barack Obama also expressed an understanding of the romance and appeal that Africa holds for diaspora blacks, even if he felt out of place in Africa. In 2000, Phillips remembers sharing Obama's sense of outsider status – describing the “otherworldliness” of Accra – but he fails to see the romance of Africa that so captured Angelou on her arrival in Ghana.Footnote ⁴⁹ Phillips's soul is not transported to existential exaltations as he observes “clusters of gun-toting policemen” on the streets of Accra. These officer are, he adds, “Young policemen. Boys really.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Phillips's impression of Accra does not improve as his visit unfolds. On the city streets, his gaze is drawn to “the beggars, most with children, all with palms outstretched. Some will touch, others will rely upon a well-cultivated expression of pathos.”Footnote ⁵¹ According to Phillips's rendering, the soul of Africa, the diaspora's homeland, is in trouble.

Phillips's image of Africa fails to improve as he continues his journey through Ghana and encounters blacks from throughout the diaspora. He meets, for example, locals like Dr. Ben Abdullah. Dr. Abdullah, Phillips tells us, takes comfort in romantic essentialisms about the African world. For example, Dr. Abdullah informs Phillips that those Africans who had been sold into slavery deserved their fate because they “were not good people.”Footnote ⁵² Maya Angelou lived in dread of being confronted with such sentiments when she lived in Ghana in the early 1960s, and it was to a former friend of Angelou's, Dr. Robert Lee, that Phillips pays his next visit. Lee moved to Ghana from the United States in the 1950s, joining a small expatriate community of American blacks.Footnote ⁵³ On first acquaintance Phillips expects Dr. Lee to be an “African American fossil.” However, Lee's knowledge of contemporary affairs and his understanding of the social and cultural differences that divide Africans from African Americans prompt Phillips to conclude that he has never “met anyone less ‘fossilized’ than Dr. Lee.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The same cannot be said for the participants of Panafest, a celebration of pan-African identity and culture that coincides with Phillips's visit to Ghana.Footnote ⁵⁵ Phillips finds it difficult to relate to the participants of Panafest and is at times unable to contain his suspicions about the cultural utility of the event. He comments, for instance, on the American man who “wears a bright yellow costume which is decorated with a drawing of human cargo that is laid out in the hold of a slave ship. Above it are written the words ‘Never forgive, Never forget.’”Footnote ⁵⁶ Is this a shared African historical consciousness, Phillips wonders, or the politics of American blacks that was met with cynicism from locals when Angelou visited Ghana in the 1960s? Whatever it is, Phillips is struck by the scores of “pilgrims” from the diaspora who have descended on Accra to celebrate their African roots. One group, a contingent of thirty-two Jamaicans, are particularly conspicuous. To the frustration of Kate, an employee of the hotel at which Phillips is staying while in Ghana, the Jamaican pilgrims insist on getting in touch with their African heritage by starting a fire in their hotel room.Footnote ⁵⁷ Exasperated, Kate tells Phillips, “They think that if they dress down and filthy they are being African.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Phillips's journey to Ghana convinces him that a critical and nuanced understanding of history is important to the construction of meaningful identities in the black diaspora. All of us – even professional historians – only ever re-create approximations of what the past was like, its significance, and how it continues to shape a sense of self, home, and belonging. For Phillips, home is not Africa, a feeling he reveals when he writes about traveling toward Britain “with a sense of knowledge and propriety.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In Ghana, Phillips lacked this “knowledge and propriety,” feeling instead the “otherwordliness” of Africa. Indeed, Kate, the Ghanaian hotel employee, clearly felt the Jamaican Panafesters were otherworldly when they insisted on starting a fire in their hotel room. Such displays are contrivances, detached from the reality of what it means to be African in the modern world. Moreover, the production of a past that may never have existed will not provide a soothing cultural balm for the social, economic, and cultural marginality that continues to afflict scores of black diaspora families in London, or New York, or Honolulu. Phillips said it best when he wrote, “Africa cannot cure. Africa cannot make anybody feel whole. Africa is not a psychiatrist.”Footnote ⁶⁰