In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 the uprooting “The invisible world presses hard upon the visible.” John S. Mbiti, African theologian, 1969 John Kizell was born into a watery world. His people may have been Sherbro or Bom. More likely they were Kim, whose language was mutually intelligible and who inhabited the same waterlogged West African coast. Theirs was a domain of mangroves and alluvial mud, innumerable creeks and languid rivers, which merged in brackish union with the nearby Atlantic. There were (mostly small) islands, swamps, and lagoons. People communicated and traveled largely by canoe. They lived by the cycle of tropical rains, which deluged them from April to September. They fished and farmed— mainly cassava, and also rice, which like everything else in their world depended on water.1 Strangers from the Sea Water had also brought them strangers from the sea. These were the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and other white-skinned peoples who began to visit the coast in the 1400s, three centuries before John Kizell fed at his mother’s breast and slept securely wrapped against her strong back. First they came as explorers, looking for a route to the spice-producing regions of Asia, but soon enough it was the quest for trade, resources, and wealth that drew them to Africa. Now their primary desires were gold, ivory, and camwood, a source of red dye. The quest for slaves came later. A Portuguese expedition led by Álvaro Fernandes in 1446 provided Europeans with their first glimpse of the forested mountains guarding a magnificent river mouth. To the Portuguese the hills may have resembled a lion reclining by the sea. The inhabitants had their own names and traditions for this place, but for Portuguese cartographers it was now Serra Lyoa, or “leonine mountain.” It was another sixteen years before Pedro da Sintra, a former page to Henry the Navigator, returned in two armed ships to map the area. Presaging European rivalries along the coast, which would endure almost to the twentieth century, the Portuguese regarded their maps as state secrets. So would every nation and most ship captains 26 The African American Odyssey of John Kizell who followed in their wake.2 The expansion of the known world—known, that is, among Europeans—was becoming a driving economic and political force. “Somewhere in the heart of Africa,” writes the historian A. P. Kup, “were supposed to lie huge quantities of gold; the king of the ancient state of Ghana was said to own a nugget so vast that he used it to tether his horse. Mansa Musa, king of the Mali, added to this legend when, setting out for Mecca in 1324, with the accumulated wealth of years, he arrived in Cairo with one-hundred camel-loads of gold which he proceeded lightheartedly to spend.”3 Among the Africans who greeted the increasing visitation of white-skinned strangers, the known world stretched in the opposite direction—inland toward the forest belt; the hills and mountains of the Futa Jallon; the vast savannah extending beyond one’s imagination; the legendary centers of learning and trade such as Timbuktu; great rivers and the enormous camel caravans that had long before brought tales of the white tribes to the north. The Temne, Bullom, and other peoples encountered by these questing, curious, itinerant Europeans were at least vaguely aware that they existed in a larger physical universe. But it was only their immediate surroundings —and their metaphysical world—that were tangibly real. Their history, encoded in oral tradition and dense lineages, does not begin with the arrival of Fernandes, Sintra, or the many freebooters and European traders to follow . To comprehend the bare outlines of the cultural microcosm into which John Kizell was born, it is important to recognize that his world was not an unchanging backwater suspended in time. African society was constantly attuned and adaptive to new circumstances: declining soil fertility, climatic changes, the encroachment of people speaking a different language, the rise and fall of regional political alliances, and the dynamics of trade controlled by distant groups. African history is no less complex than Europe’s. As early as the thirteenth century, the Soso in present-day Guinea were displacing the Temne, Limba, and others living in the fertile inland valleys of the Futa Jallon. The latter, driven toward the coast, established the Sapi confederation, a loose alliance of several linguistic groups. In the sixteenth century, the Sapi would have to cope with Mane warriors sweeping northward up the coast, intermarrying with...

Share