The New African Diaspora

1. Introduction: Can We “Go Home Again”?

1 INTRODUCTION: CAN WE “GO HOME AGAIN”? Isidore Okpewho Iam using, as my point of reference here, the forced migration of Africans to the Americas that took place—in Vincent Thompson’s reckoning (Making of the African Diaspora 78, 82)—from about the middle of the fifteenth century to about the middle of the nineteenth ad (though the Arab trade in Africans had started much earlier than this). One of the classic testimonies of this migration is Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative , which records the experiences of a young boy of about ten who, despite Vincent Carretta’s recent contestation, was captured from somewhere in southeastern Nigeria and sold into slavery first in the West Indies , then in North America, and finally in England. His experiences took him through a range of domestic and mercantile forms of servitude in these three regions, during which he was exposed to varying levels of kindness and abuse, until he was able ultimately to achieve considerable prominence, even respectability, within British society. Early enough in his sojourn in this society, he had the opportunity to be given some Christian education by two young ladies in whose service he had been placed. But by dint of his industry and resourcefulness he gradually supplemented this with wide reading in the humane letters of the time, much of which formed the basis of arguments subtending the agitation for the abolition of slavery by many enlightened men and women in Britain late in the eighteenth century. Along with several elements in British society—indigenous citizens and Africans who had, like himself, gained their freedom from slavery— Equiano put his literacy to the service of this agitation, which eventually led to the abolition of the infernal institution. Equiano never lived to see abolition, of course, and though he played a prominent role in preparations for the establishment of a settlement in Sierra Leone to which freed Africans and others were repatriated, differences with the organizers of the project denied him the opportunity of joining in the return to Africa. But to the end of his life Equiano seems to have clung to his African sensi3 4 Isidore Okpewho bility despite the passage of time and the intervention of a European outlook on life. His narrative periodically invokes images of his long-lost Igbo family, and despite a memory much frayed by time and misadventure his reminiscences of his native land and its ways of life are impressively close to the reality of things. To the end of his narrative he continues to refer to himself as an “African” though he was, at the material time, firmly British in terms of both residential and cultural identity. One can only imagine how far he would have gone, had he actually landed in Sierra Leone with the African mission, in reintegrating himself with the land of his origins if not exactly his native community. It is pertinent to raise such a question, because it does matter how much of one’s culture is lost when one has been forced to live far away from one’s native home for a considerable length of time: in other words, to what extent does diaspora, as the subject of reflection and study, represent a shift in orientation and outlook as against a change in zone of residence—or is the question irrelevant? Equiano’s experience does in fact come into play here, because it has been used by those who question the concept of a diaspora and urge—if I may borrow the title of a recent book by Clarence Walker, one of the most prominent anti-diasporists—that “we can’t go home again.” In a rather skewed reading of the Interesting Narrative, Walker argues that Equiano’s self-awareness suffered nothing short of a paradigm shift simply because “he received a new name, learned English, and became a Christian. His resistance to everything but the name change was minimal” (62). Yet, as I indicated above, it is significant that Equiano continued to stress his “African” identity long after he achieved integration into certain respectable cadres of British society. True, his adoption of Christian values influenced his denunciation of the slave system. But for him slavery was not simply an instance of man’s inhumanity to man; like Frederick Douglass in the generation after him, Equiano felt a deep racial empathy for the victims of the system, whom he often called “my African brethren” in his book. In other words, Africa continued to live...