“I can relate to the sentiment on the buttons people are wearing inAmerica that read “January 20th 2009- The Days of the Whiteman areNumbered.”
by Al-Yasha Ilhaam
19 December 2008
If I told you a story about a Black woman from America who visitedAfrica and turned into a White man, you might think it was a work ofscience fiction, or some act of sorcery, or perhaps a combination ofboth.
But this has happened to me, more than once, and it has inspired meto think about race and gender in more complicated ways than I normallydo.I’ve learned that trying to look like a continental African womanbrings a range of responses, from amusement to mortal embarrassment.
One occasion was a decade ago in Tanzania, where one of the firstKiswahili words I learned was mzungu, literally meaning traveler butusually meaning White. When I wanted to wear my favorite kanga (casualdress) in Nairobi, my horrified urban friends called me “mzungumwafrica”, which I took to mean “white girl trying to look African butwho is failing pathetically” which is a compliment if you leave outseveral words.
It was not unlike the way Marceline Njio recently prevented me fromgoing out wearing the black lipstick, forehead dot and cheek lines Iadmired on village women in Nigerian films. I thought I looked great,but perhaps I was misinformed. Marceline said that people in Buea willstart asking “Where is that crazy white man going? Is someone shootinga Nigerian film around here?”
Granted, oyibo, mzungu and white man mean the same thing, but it’sharder to act as if I shouldn’t know what it means in English. Most ofthe people I meet here don’t seem to feel any sense of connectionbetween Africans in the Diaspora and here on the continent.
Perhaps that’s a sentiment about America which prevails worldwide these days.
The sentiment is more or less “Yankee Go Home” in many parts of theCaribbean, even those that are actually part of the United States, likethe Virgin Islands. In some African countries, like Ghana, Pan-Africanideology ranges from intellectual history to marketing strategy.
Slave castles tours are organised like a haunted house of theholocaust, starting with a tear-jerking libation to the unknownancestors and ending in a very expensive gift shop. Not that it isn’tsincere to a great extent; Nkrumah did have significant ties to theDiaspora and W.E.B. Du Bois, the great African-American intellectual,was exiled, died and buried in Accra.
Ghana also recruits African Americans for dual citizenship, whichhas led to the formation of several expatriate communities andorganisations in Ghana as well as a system of social and intellectualcollaboration between Ghanaian and African American universities.
Even with the potential for sentimental opportunism, I would like topromote a similar relationship between the US and Cameroon thatcurrently exists between the US and Ghana.
Certainly, the capacity is there for meaningful connections betweenAfrican-Americans and Cameroonians. Perhaps with the presence of moreDiasporic Africans in Cameroon the interest in Pan-African thinkingwill blossom. Or depending on who expatriates and how they act, itcould get worse.
A Cameroonian rap fan recently reminded me of the song by Nas, “If IRuled the World”, in which the rapper suggests opening “all the cellsin Attica [a huge prison] and sending them to Africa” [maybeBuea…wouldn’t that be nice?]