Black history? African lives?
Woman's-eye View
If the author of today's column sees this article on the internet she will think I'm mad; after all, she sent the article to me nearly a year and a half ago. It was one of several I received from Guyanese and non-Guyanese women abroad, many of them looking at questions of "race" from a perspective formed wholly or partly outside Guyana. I didn't use any of those articles at the time because of where the race debate in Guyana was at that particular moment. Or perhaps it was because of what I was feeling at the time, which was, defensive about black people. What made me think of Centime Zeleke's article today was a conversation with an Afro-Guyanese woman half my age, who unselfconsciously used the word "Negro". And as I explained at too much length why the word "Negro" was unacceptable, I reflected that no people in history have ever had to spend as much time and thought and passion on the "simple" issue of their name and identity. At a forum last year, one Afro-Guyanese objected to the use of the word "Negro"; another objected to being called "African". The author of the column is African born in Africa, and from that angle, writes about the racism that impels someone like her to identify as "black". Truly, there are complex places from and in which black or African people learn to identify ourselves with or against each other. I am not sure where Centime Zeleke is now, but at the time she sent the article she was a Vancouver-based writer and media producer who wrote regularly for the feminist newspaper, Kinesis, and who had been published in various journals both in Canada and internationally. She chose the title of the article herself. Andaiye By Centime Zeleke What do Africans have in common with black people in the diaspora? What do black people in the diaspora have in common with Africans? Are African people black? Are all black people African? Does one naturally lead to the other? Does one even have a choice about how one identifies oneself? I was born in Ethiopia from Ethiopian parents, but I was raised primarily in the Caribbean and I now live in Canada. In the past, when I talked with Ethiopians in Ethiopia, most of them did not readily identify themselves as black. Yet when I talk to Ethiopians in North America, many of them, especially those who have been living here for some time, will identify themselves as black. Why is this? As a child growing up, my parents simply told me that I was Ethiopian. At various points in my upbringing I was shown books and pictures, but mostly my identity as an Ethiopian was reinforced with anecdotal stories. By eleven, I had an understanding of the history of my country and I also had an understanding of some of the political and social problems that led to the Ethiopian revolution that did away with Haile Selassie's regime in 1974. Mostly what I understood, although I certainly did not articulate it like this, was that wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few people and that this was unjust. I was also made to understand that people all over the world, from China to Latin America, faced similar problems and were struggling against this. I also knew that the revolution in Ethiopia had been corrupted, leading to the death, imprisonment and exile of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians by the early 1980s. This complex history that my parents, relatives and other Ethiopians taught me as a child was not reflected in the world that I began to experience as I grew up and moved away from the family and into the world. The messages that I received were contradictory. On the one hand, I was told both explicitly and by implication that Africans were backward, simple and even stupid; I was told this by black people in the diaspora who obviously did not see themselves as closely linked to those backward folk. Then there were those who said that black folks all looked a certain way and were a homogenous group rather than the heterogenous group that we are. I was told that there was a black history that I could be proud of -- but this black history had little to do with the Ethiopia I knew nor did it have much to do with the political and social issues Ethiopians seemed to be facing in their everyday lives. On the one hand, the history seemed to be more about juxtaposing one's black self against a white cultural hegemony -- but is this all black people's reality? And again -- when the history did include Africa more or less on its own terms, it had mostly to do with African kings and queens. But Ethiopians did not need to be reminded who their king was. They knew who he was and their relationship with him was problematic at best. At eighteen I left the Caribbean and started to attend university in Canada. Living in Canada was a quick lesson in how blackness and Africaness are intimately tied together, how one can quickly become the other. No longer was I facing bad jokes about Africans being backward; instead, I was dealing with people who had the power to deny me access to infrastructures that all should have access to. It is in Canada that I have learned that "black" is a political term. As I watched my body, my self, my identity become further and further racialised, I too chose to strongly identify as black. This is because I realised that there is a system of power that is social, political, economic and cultural that has had the power, and continues to have the power to create black people, that is, to racialise us from being, for example, Ethiopian, to being simply a black savage. There is nothing natural about being black. There is nothing that black people have or do not have that other people have or do not have. The only thing common to all black people is the experience with a system that is so pervasive, so all-powerful, that it determines one's identity and hence the particular barriers and circumstances one will face in the world out there. Before we became black we were all from somewhere that was a bit more detailed than just being from Africa: we were Zulu, Amhara, or what have you. On a recent trip to Ethiopia I attended a party with a younger cousin of mine. To my surprise, the young people were listening to Bob Marley and identified completely with the lyrics of the song. This is something that one would never have seen even ten years ago. These young people understood the need to identify as black. European colonialism in all its manifestations has, without a doubt, been a successful project. Today, with the help of the globalisation of capital, it is even more of a success, penetrating even the "darkest" corners of the world. Ethiopia, a country that until very recently had a rhythm of its own, has been transformed by cold war politics and now by the ravages of globalisation. It now exists in a world where those who have the power to determine a people's fate do not care for the pride Ethiopians may have in their history and culture. Ethiopians are the dark "other" meant to be the cheap labour that will keep globalisation running, as is the fate of so many black and brown people around the world. As Ethiopians become more and more self-conscious of how they are portrayed in the outside world, they are becoming increasingly aware of the politics that creates and makes one identify as black.
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