Pensees: African American? Really? Get Real.

African American? Really? Get Real.

La Shawn Barber touched on a subject that hits a nerve with me when she commented on the American Black’s fascination with Africa. My daughter, wife, and I enjoy watching re-runs of the Cosby Show, but I always get a chuckle out of the OB-GYN/lawyer couple with their five well-fed children in their posh, New York home speaking of Africa as if it is paradise. I grew up there. I know better. When La Shawn (a Black American) stated what should be obvious to any thinking person, I couldn’t help but add a comment to the thread. She liked it so much she fused it into her original article. Front page exposure, if you will. (I should have double-checked the grammar. Gulp!)

La Shawn gets about 4000 unique visitors a day, so I’m thinking that I might have made new friends because of her approving placement of my comment within her article. I haven’t checked. It doesn’t matter, I suppose, but I do want to share with my non-La Shawn Barber readers my thoughts on the Black American fantasy with Africa. (And take the time to read La Shawn and her many links on this interesting conversation in the Black community.)

My Comment

I spent the first 14 years of my life in Central African Republic. I ate “bobos” (flying ants), traveled with my father into the “bush,” and squatted on the floor in mud huts with thatched roofs so often that it was a part of normal life for me. I know from experience what it is like to have grown African men talk to a mere boy only ten years old (me) as if I were a seasoned economist about the inconceivable (to them) world where one could work for a living, be compensated, and feel no tribal pressure to distribute his hard-earned pay around the village per the whim of the tribal powers.

I remember one valiant soul that worked for my father who literally pleaded with my Dad to keep his pay in our family safe. Week after week Dad would put the worker’s money in our safe and whenever the man wanted to purchase something he would come to our home and request whatever amount he needed. This was not because he could not save. It was because he lived in a culture that did not respect the entrepreneurial spirit and private property of the individual worker. They were aghast at the possibility that anyone should have more money than his superiors in age or tribal authority. Thus, parents and tribal leaders bilked the free spirits who wanted to work of a living and squelched their hope for release from the grip of poverty that has enslaved that region for centuries.

Men, grown men, dreamed of the real paradise, the US of A, and respectfully listened to an ignorant white kid from America as he told about all that he had seen and heard on his trips to that wonderful place. Even the ignorant ten-year-old knew that at the root of American possibilities was a culture of freedom and an old-fashioned work ethic innate with those who take responsibility for their own lives. The ten-year-old knew it. And the grown toothless men in ragged clothes that had been discarded from someplace in the West knew it as well. With as little education as they had, the ten-year-old and the poor villagers who had never seen carpet or running water would have laughed the “African-American” fantasy to scorn.