American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (review)

African studies and African American studies used to be separate fields. Recently, however, a new stream of studies has emphasized their interconnections, as exemplified in such books as Rising Wind (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), Race Against Empire (Cornell University Press, 1997), Black Rice (Harvard University Press, 2001), Middle Passages (Penguin Press, 2006), and Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Kevin Gaines's American Africans in Ghana now counts itself as a distinguished part of this literature.

After a pair of broad chapters introducing the Ghanaian context and international Afro-diasporic thought from 1900 to 1950, Gaines's book focuses most intensely on the period from March 1957 (when independent Ghana under Nkrumah galvanized the entire African and Afro-diasporic world) to February 1966 (when Nkrumah, while visiting China, lost power in a coup). With these as bookend dates, Gaines offers rich accounts of the visits to or residencies in Ghana of many African American luminaries, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Pauli Murray, Malcolm X, St. Clair Drake, and Martin Luther King. Gaines works mightily to rescue Richard Wright's dyspeptic preindependence account of Ghana in Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (Harper, 1954), and valuably attends to less well-known African American expatriates such as Bill Sutherland and, at great and touching length, the nearly forgotten Julian Mayfield. From elsewhere in the diaspora, George Padmore receives deserved attention.

Dominating the entire text, however, is Nkrumah; even though increasingly isolated from Ghana's African American (as well as Ghanaian) community, he remains the sun around which all else orbits. After his expulsion (and indeed even after his death), Nkrumah's legacy continued to haunt the Americans connected to his era, as well as the book which chronicles their lives. The writing is extremely diffuse—a benefit or a demerit, depending on your perspective. To choose a small example, a sentence on Mayfield's post-Ghana difficulties breaking into film prompts a two-hundred-word excursion into Hollywood racism in general, from its preference for former professional athletes to the blaxploitation classic Blacula, with no discernible link to Ghana. Many much longer digressions abound, exploring entire worlds of thought.

Of perhaps greater concern for readers of the African Studies Review is the book's emphasis on the expatriates' intellectual history and intra-American interconnections, to the exclusion of their Ghanaian daily life and the perspectives of Ghanaians themselves. Though at times Gaines defends the expatriates against charges that they had little connection to Ghanaian society, his book offers little refutation of that charge. While African American writings and interviews are massively cited throughout the book, Ghanaian perspectives are rare, often limited to citations from the Accra press. Little or no information is given about the expatriates' neighborhoods, diet, clothing, neighbors, cultural life, travels within the country, or schooling for children. Mayfield's Ghanaian "romantic escapades" and "sexual exploitation of Ghanaian women" are twice mentioned by others (258, 265) but are never explored. Gaines astutely analyzes Pauli Murray's separatist view of African and African American identity, but he dismisses what he terms "the mundane details... of her daily existence" during her eighteen months in Ghana.

The thin Ghanaian perspective is seen in other ways as well. Almost nothing is said of Ghanaian geography or spaces outside of Accra, and the book is all but silent on Ghanaian ethnicity. The book's acknowledgments thank thirty-eight former Ghana-based expatriates for important information, and more than 230 U.S.-based academics for a broad range of contributions—yet just seven persons in Ghana receive such mention, and only for "helping me get my bearings at the start of the project," which extended over a decade. "Ghana," in short, is here less a living place than an abstraction; the...