African Americans, American Africans, and the Idea of an African Homeland

The American image of Africa is at best vague, under-formed, simplified, and more often than not patronizing. White Americans in particular have perpetuated the mythology of Africa as the "Dark Continent," a place apart where wildness and chaos and danger lurk. Africa has allowed the racist American mindset to conjure its wildest images and to depict its deepest fantasies of repulsion and fascination.

The African American image of Africa has historically been no less warped but has been characterized by romanticism, fetishism, and nostalgia. Black Americans have often perpetuated an uncomplicated view of Africa as a vestigial homeland awaiting the return of its lost souls. While this view has tended to be more charitable toward Africa than the more generalized American view, it is not necessarily less problematic.

The two books under review address not only African American views of Africa, but also the physical act of black Americans traveling to the continent, often in hopes of seeing their romantic image up close, usually in conjunction with an attempt to escape the racial problems of the United States. Thus the African American quest to "return" to Africa has, over the course of more than two centuries, represented not only an escape to an Africa of their imagining, but also an escape from the very real racial problems in the United States. The idea of Africa thus came to embody hopes and dreams and opportunity that America had failed in fulfilling. If, then, for most white Americans Africa represented an exotic and savage other, for black Americans Africa represented an idealized other and increasingly for many the real land of opportunity.

James T. Campbell's Middle Passages explores these centuries of African American sojourns to Africa in one of the most remarkable works of historical scholarship and writing in the last decade. Campbell synthesizes a rich and varied history in order to convey the many ways in which black Americans have engaged with both the Africa of their minds and the real Africa on the ground. He successfully weaves a host of stories together to reveal the rich and complicated relationship black Americans have had with Africa.

Campbell approaches his subject matter both chronologically and biographically. He begins each chapter by sketching out an individual whose experiences will inform the themes of the era in which he or she (though usually he) took those journeys. Some of these individuals such as Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, Newport Gardner, Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, and Thomalind Martin Polite are obscure to all but perhaps some historians. Others, including Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes are well known, though through Campbell's eyes we are destined to see them differently from how we are accustomed. Each person's encounter with Africa inevitably changed them in ways they could never have imagined, made complicated their previously uncluttered view of Africa, and at times made them value their American lives in ways they never would have anticipated. Real Africa proved a lot more complex, and at times difficult, than the one that had existed in idealized form in their imaginations.

The impetus for traveling to Africa proved almost as varied as the number of travelers. In the early phases of Campbell's chronicle, the returnees took the form of "recaptives," slaves who either of their own volition, but more usually as part of a larger political process in which the slaves or recently freed slaves were props, became part of the political tug of war over the slave question. Recaptives served a redemptive role in the eyes of abolitionists while presenting Africa as the motherland that it would grow to be among the diasporic population. Thus from the...