Dreams of My Ancestors

Short personal blog post -- just a quick reflection on a difference (as it seems to me!) between aspects of the African American experience when compared with people from the African diaspora in Europe. Not sure how widely this will be of interest to people!

It's graduation time, and amidst the celebrations I saw a very talented young African American comrade of mine post a picture of herself in her graduation gown with  a quote from a Maya Angelou poem on her cap -- ``I am the dream and the hope of the slave.'' It was a touching image, and thought, and while I've seen debate about the sentiment, on the whole it's easy to see how one can think as much and take extra pride in one's achievements qua African American.

Such thoughts are, I think, just entirely cut off to descendants of the African diaspora in Europe. Or, at least, so it seems to me when reflecting on my own ancestry in Ghana. While I am somewhat embarrassingly unsure about this, my sense of my Ghanaian ancestry is: my ethnic group were subjects of Asanteman, while not themselves being Asante. My sense also is that their relative status was such that they probably largely participated in the political system as I described previously, and the British colonisation would thus have represented a loss of political freedoms, wealth, and opportunities for advancement for them. Finally, a relevant bit of historical background -- the British and Asanteman fought an alternately hot and cold war through the 19th century for control over `the Gold coast', with the British eventually emerging victorious in 1901. See here for some details: though a note of protest on that wikipedia article, which begins by saying that ``[t]he wars were mainly due to Ashanti attempts to establish strong control over the coastal areas of what is now Ghana'' -- as if it is just natural that the British should have a stake in who control the Ghanaian coastline, and the Ashanti are the only aggressors!

In any case, the point of all this is just -- presumably, it was a reasonable hope and dream for my ancestors that they simply wouldn't have anything to do with the British. Or, if they did (Asanteman was a trading empire after all), it would have been on very different terms from what in fact transpired. They were initially successful in those wars, after all, so had some reason for hope; and what they presumably dreamed of for their descendants would not involve participating as subjects in British society at all. In fact they may have very specifically wished for such participation not to occur, given the long running hostilities and the fact of colonisation going on around them making it very clear this was the consequence of defeat. As it stands, I am who I am, the reason my grandparents could meet each other in the capital of the Imperial metropolis, my achievements being such as they are, are all only made possible by the fact that Asanteman was conquered and absorbed into the British Empire. I am because what they hoped for is not.

Of course, there is an analogue thought in the case of African Americans. Most obviously -- presumably many simply hoped not to be in the Americas at all, and certainly not as slaves, and later on dreamed either of repatriation back to the Mother Africa, or as that dream faded of an independent black nation state. People with such hopes and dreams would also, I guess, not be so happy at the thought that their descendants would be awarded degrees by the white man's institutions or participation in his cultural life, etc. Quite so, I don't mean to deny those traditions their due place and significance in the African American tradition. I just mean to say -- one tradition of thought really did see integration into a transformed nation as a viable and desirable life option, and as one succeeds in American society and contributes to that transformation one can see oneself as in some very small way fulfilling the hopes of those who held onto such dreams. This may not have been the only tradition, but it was one of them, and qua African American descended from slaves, one can take some degree of pride in how one's achievements at least fulfill this strand of thought among the ancestors. Whereas I think it highly implausible that there was any analogue tradition for my ancestors: no significant number who hoped that being colonised by the British, losing one's ability to participate in the democratic parts of Asanteman's life and being subject to military rule by distant oppressors, losing one's traditional rights and economic status... etc.... would constitute an improvement on what was the status quo. Integration into a transformed nation, whatever else is true of it, beats chattel slavery, whereas `integration' into the British empire was just a straightforward loss.

Any such pride or happiness in my own achievements is cut off to me, and the African diaspora in Europe more generally. My participation in the institutional and cultural life of Europe represents only the frustration of my ancestor's hopes and the failure of their struggles.

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