“For years and
years, I used to have two nightmares – you know, a bad dream,” Runoko
Rashidi says at the beginning of my conversation with him. We are at
the International Colloquium on Slavery, Slave Trade and Their
Consequences. I first heard Rashidi speak at the Global Conference of
Black Nationalities in Osogbo on August 23. The African American – the
world’s leading authority on the African Presence in Early Asia – had
declared on the podium, “You are not African because you are born in
Africa, you are African because Africa is born in you.”
Now Rashidi
discusses with me his Africa awakening, and it begins with a retelling
of “disturbing” dreams. “One of the dreams was: I would be somewhere
near my home, but I could never find my home. I would go down this
street, around this block, but I could never find my home. The other
dream was: I would go visit my family and they wouldn’t want me to be
there. They would laugh at me; they wouldn’t eat with me; they would
make me sleep on the floor when they had these nice beds. So, I started
travelling to Africa – first to Egypt – and then I started going to
so-called Sub-Saharan Africa, Black Africa.”
The first Black
African country he visited, was Namibia, followed by Zimbabwe, where he
did “a bunch of lectures, big lectures in front of a lot of people.”
Rashidi’s voice is breaking seriously and he is fighting back tears as
he recounts: “I would tell about those dreams in the middle of the
lecture. I would get emotional; I would almost start crying and I
realised those dreams had a much greater significance.
“Because we were
taken away from ‘home’, a lot of African Americans have a sense of
homelessness. We really don’t know where home is, because we were
separated from our families, there is a sense of rejection and
alienation. And [the African lecture audience] would say: ‘This is your
home, and we are your family!’ And I never had those dreams anymore.”
By the time
Rashidi, now a veteran of trips to “53 or 54” African countries has
finished narrating the dreams and the epiphany they inspired, a lady on
our table is in a flood of tears. “This is what slavery did to us: it
gave us a sense of homelessness and an absence of family,” he
reiterates. “So, coming back to Africa is very important to a lot of
us. Because when you come back, you feel connected again. You feel
like: I do have a home, I do have a family, and it makes a big
difference.” His voice is recovering its usual verve when as he
declares, “That’s the greatest thing about coming back to anywhere in
Africa; to know this is where your ancestors came from. And the moment
you set (your feet) down, aw, it makes a big difference.”
A concern for women
He describes the
process in terms of healing. “We are trying to heal again, we’re trying
to become whole again. And our ability to become whole, our ability to
heal, will directly affect the ultimate liberation of Africa,” says the
historian, who worries that Africa is not liberated. The colonisation
of the mind, external control of African economies and uncaring
leaders, are some of the problems he says bedevils the continent. He is
also concerned about the condition of the Nigerian woman. “Gentlemen of
the Press” – is one of the regular conference-speak that bother him
(“Men of the press – and yet, you are a journalist!, he tells me);
although he is conscious not to impose his African American values on
others.
But is the
condition of the African American woman as it should be? I ask. “No,
it’s not as it should be,” he concedes. “Much too often, the African
American woman is viewed as a sexual object; she is viewed as lesser
than a man. But at the same time in the United States, the Black man
has been castrated, his masculinity has been denied. And so the African
American woman has had to take on a greater burden, a greater role and
a greater responsibility.”
We talk about the
trend of African American men denigrating Black women, increasingly
shunning them for white females. Rashidi points to Tiger Woods, all of
whose women, from the wife to the countless mistresses, are white. He
says categorically, “I can only be with a Black woman, and the reason
for that is: I think of all those sisters who went through the
Transatlantic Slave Trade, all of my ancestors who were raped and who
were assaulted. And for me to be with anything other than a Black
woman, I think, would be disrespectful to my African ancestors. I have
a great respect for Black women… I view them as my equal at every
level.”
On naming
We talk about his
name, and he informs that, “Actually, my name is Runoko Rashidi Okello.
I got ‘Runoko Rashidi’ when I was a university student and I wanted to
reconnect with Africa and I wanted an African name. But I was told that
it would not be proper for me to name myself, that somebody had to give
me a name.” And so someone named him Runoko Rashidi; the first, a Shona
name from Zimbabwe and the second from Swahili. Okello was added about
three years ago. “I was in a war zone in Northern Uganda. I brought
some school supplies – just papers, pens and things – and gave them to
the school. They were so happy that they called me ‘Okello’: he who
brings [gifts].”
The name, he says,
is one way of reconnecting with his African roots. “I love Africa and I
don’t think of myself as an African American. I think of myself as an
African Living in America. What we want – I can speak for many brothers
and sisters – we just want to be embraced and loved by our brothers and sisters in
Africa (voice wavers with emotion again). We feel like Africans don’t
care about us,” he says. The “poor” relationship between African
Americans and their brethren on the mother continent may be due to
“some degree of resentment” that Africans sold them into slavery, he
suggests.
“And then we are
taught that Africa is the worst place in the world.” He asks his
American lecture audiences what they think of when they think of
Africa, and the answer, invariably, is: Wild Animals, Poverty and
Disease. “So, we have a very, very negative impression of Africa,
because that’s all of Africa that we see on television.” He suggests
that Africans who come to the United States don’t interact with African
Americans and so there is no sharing of stories. “And so, it’s very
important to me that African Americans or Africans Living in America
have a better impression of Africa. I think of myself as an ambassador.
I try to give a good impression of African Americans when I come [to
Africa] and I try to go back to the United States with a good
impression of people from the continent of Africa, because the
relationship is not a good one.”
It’s not an easy
task. He reels out some of the terribly ignorant questions he gets
asked about Africa when he returns to the US. “We have a very negative
image of Africa and that is deliberate. That is just designed by
Europeans to keep us separate from Africa because they know that when
Africans in the Africa and [those] across the water unite, we’d be
unstoppable. And so there is a deliberate effort to keep us ignorant of
our African heritage, and I’m trying to help change that.”
An ambassador
On how he became
this ‘ambassador’ between Africans in America and the continent, the
56-year-old says, “What started me was, I wanted to find out what
happened to those Africans who left Africa a long time ago.” His paper
at the Slavery Colloquium centred on Africa before Colonisation and
Enslavement, what Rashidi calls “The First Diaspora – Africans who left
Africa 100,000 years ago. I wanted to know what happened to them, where
they went. And so, that led me to begin to search for Africa… I’ve been
doing this since I was 18 years old and it’s been my mission in life.”
Yet he has not
always been this comfortable with his Africanness. “When I was a kid,
if you had called me ‘African’, we would have had a fight: that was an
insult! But now, if you call me an African, ohhhh, I’d do anything for
you.” The change started when the young Runoko began to learn about
Africa. “I began to read books and eventually I went to Africa itself.
I’m a lover of Africa. I cannot say enough good things about Africa. I
love Africa. I love Africa more than I love America,” he declares.
He has talked about
African Americans not feeling loved by Africans. But now I raise the
flipside: that of Africans not feeling loved by African Americans, who
racially denigrate those on the continent. “It is self hate. It works
both ways,” Rashidi says. “The problem is ignorance; and I think that
the major problem we’re fighting as a people is ignorance – a lack of
knowledge about our past.” He expresses the wish that every African
American would come to Africa at least once in their lifetimes,
especially the young generation. “Come and see it for yourself. See it
and touch it and smell it and eat the food; you’ll never be the same.
[It will] change everything.”
But is there a need
for African Americans to identify with an ancestral homeland in a world
that has seen the ascent of Obama? Rashidi says: yes. “We were talking
about a Post-racial America over a year ago: that now that we have a
Black President, everything was going to be different… But what we are
finding is that racism in America is uglier than it’s been in a long
time,” says the author and editor of more than 11 books. He loves
Barack and Michelle Obama but expresses disappointment that America’s
First Couple has not reached out to Africa more.
Long live Africa
Runoko Rashidi says
West Africa holds a special significance as a major departure point for
enslaved Africans who were taken to the New World. Visiting the
Ghanaian slave forts of Elmina and Cape Coast was a numbing experience
for him. “Then I went to the beach and had a libation ceremony and I
cried a little bit. And after that, I just fell in love with West
Africa. And as much as I like Ghana, I think I like Nigeria more. And
it’s important for me to like Nigeria, because Nigeria is the
powerhouse,” he says. Visiting the slave dungeons on Goree Island in
Senegal, was also harrowing. “It’s difficult but every African American
should go and see that, because it gives you a better appreciation of
what your ancestors went through.”
He longs for a bond
of kinship between African Americans and Africans. “In the US, you are
not allowed to say anything against the state of Israel, [no matter]
how badly the Israelis treat the Palestinians. If you’re a public
figure and you say something regarded as anti-Semitic, you lose
everything. My point is: you can say anything about Africa and nobody
will object.” African Americans are key to the desired change, he
suggests. “If African Americans felt a sense of bond or kinship with
Africa, we would be just like the Jews. We would be ferocious defenders
of Africa. And that’s what I want us to be. I want us to love Africa
with our dying breath. As God is my witness, I hope my last words on
earth are: Long Live Africa.”
Runoko Rashidi is
one of the speakers at the Conference on ‘Global Africans,
Pan-Africanism, Decolonisation and Integration of Africa – Past,
Present and Future’ – holding at the International Conference Centre,
Abuja, from September 21 to 24.
