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93 The Home­ ward Ship An­ a­ lytic ­ Tropes as Maps of and for ­ African-Diaspora Cul­ tural His­ tory j. lo­ rand ma­ tory Ihave been in love with Af­ rica since I was five years old, ­ partly owing to a book. Phys­ i­ cally, all that is left of my Il­ lus­ trated Book about Af­ rica by Felix Sut­ ton and H. B. Ves­ tal (1959) is the front cover and the first ­ thirty pages of text and vivid lith­ o­ graphs, along with the ­ strips of mask­ ing tape with which my ­ mother had, on multi­ ple oc­ ca­ sions, re­ paired it. ­ Through these pages, I ­ learned of the ­ desert aou­ dad, the Egyp­ tian cobra, the rock hyrax, the fen­ nec, and the bus­ tard, as well as the “jun­ gle” okapi, few of which I had ever seen in the zoo. I then spent years search­ ing for these crea­ tures in ­ American zoos, game parks, pet shops, and books. Noth­ ing in the book, how­ ever, fas­ ci­ nated me as much as the “plate-lipped Sara women,” the ­ kente-draped ­ Ashanti, the “blueveiled Tu­ a­ regs,” the Bed­ ouin fal­ coner, the ­ leg-o-mutton-sleeved ­ Herero woman, and the “Wa­ tusi” ­ dancer with his red skirt, dance wands, and ­ colobus-fringed head­ dress. I have since come to re­ gard this in­ dis­ crim­ i­ nate merg­ ing of ­ African ethol­ ogy and eth­ nol­ ogy as ra­ cist, but this book be­ came the seed, or the roots, of my ­ equally in­ dis­ crim­ i­ nate love for Af­ rica and long­ ing to em­ brace her. Trips ­ through ­ Tropes Yet that em­ brace came by the grace of multi­ ple match­ mak­ ers. Be­ fore I ever flew to Af­ rica, I met her ­ through a Cuban san­ tera—as the prac­ ti­ tion­ ers of the ­ African-inspired ­ Santería, or Ocha, re­ li­ gion are ­ called—who ­ taught Span­ ish at Ho­ ward Uni­ ver­ sity, in Wash­ ing­ ton, D.C. Five gold ban­ gles on her arm ­ quietly an­ nounced Dr. ­ Contreras’s de­ vo­ tion to and pro­ tec­ tion by the ­ Yoruba-Atlantic 94 j. lorand matory god­ dess Ochún. I sus­ pected mys­ tery in their mean­ ing be­ fore I knew what they were, and so I ­ reached out with an in­ qui­ si­ tive touch. With ser­ pen­ tine speed and bal­ letic grace, Con­ tre­ ras with­ drew them just be­ yond my reach. Fol­ low­ ing the map laid out by Roger ­ Bastide’s ­ African Re­ li­ gions of Bra­ zil ([1960] 1978), I also ­ stopped over in Bra­ zil, re­ trac­ ing what he and ­ William Bas­ com (1972) iden­ tified as the great arc of ­ Yoruba in­ flu­ ence in the Amer­ i­ cas. Con­ se­ quently, Yoru­ ba­ land was the cap­ i­ tal of the Af­ rica that I ­ sought. My late sis­ ter and role model Yvedt also loved Af­ rica. She fol­ lowed her pas­ sion for ­ African art—a pas­ sion ­ stoked by the books and ­ danced lec­ tures of Yale Uni­ ver­ sity art his­ tory pro­ fes­ sor Rob­ ert Far­ ris Thomp­ son—and con­ nected our fam­ ily to a great black pil­ grim­ age cycle, which, from the 1960s until the ­ present, has made the jour­ ney to Af­ rica al­ most as im­ por­ tant a rite of pas­ sage for bour­ geois­ African ­ Americans as the tour of Eu­ rope has been for our bour­ geois ­ Euro-American­ friends. Be­ fore her time, in the early 1950s, my ma­ ter­ nal aunt and her fam­ ily had lived in Li­ be­ ria. In the 1970s and 1980s, their ­ ultra-modern New Jer­ sey ­ split-level was dec­ o­ rated with ­ African sculp­ tures, masks, and ­ spears, some of it ­ brought back from Li­ be­ ria and much of it pur­ chased at a Man­ hat­ tan gal­ lery ­ called Mer­ chants of Oyo. My ­ Liberian-born cou­ sin ul­ ti­ mately mar­ ried a Ni­ ger­ ian, as I did, and now both lives and works ­ bi-continentally. A pa­ ter­ nal first cou­ sin be­ came Mus­ lim and mar­ ried a Se­ ne­ gal­ ese man. And long be­ fore any of these ­ events, my par­ ents were intro­ duced to each other by their Ni­ ger­ ian class­ mate...

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