Wonders of the African World

So, Daddy, what in the world am I supposed to have in common withthem?" my younger daughter, Liza, shouted at me within the confines of our suffocating train cabin, furnished by the BBC and Zambia National Railways. It was more a cry of frustration than anger. In 1994, we were on a 3,000-mile train trip, filming an episode ofGreat Railway Journeysfor the BBC and PBS. "Nothing!"her older sister, Maggie, responded on my behalf, hoping to preempt any possible response premised on our commonality of ancestors, of black skin, thick lips, or kinky hair. "They live in mud huts," she continued, "they are covered with dust, their clothes are ragged . . . they don't even wear shoes!" Whatdowe have in common? I allowed myself to wonder in silence, seeking to avoid the smug intensity of my daughters' gaze as they dared me to try to think of a convincing response, even while some part of them might have been desperately hoping that I could. As I sat there, amused at my daughters' honesty, despairing to think of a clever one-liner that would deflect the enormous challenge of their question, these couplets from Countee Cullen's "Heritage," standard in black literary anthologies, kept dancing through my mind: What is Africa to me? Copper sun or scarlet sea, . . . Africa? A book one thumbs Listlessly, till slumber comes. And then that curiously ridiculous refrain: Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me? I had never really appreciated Countee Cullen's poem before. I had never actually liked the sentiments it expresses about our African heritage -- the emotions ranging from ambivalence, at best, to revulsion, at worst -- shared all too frequently by my American Negro ancestors and my contemporaries, their African American descendants, in the privacy of their families and in ritual settings like the church, beauty parlors or barber shops, sororities or fraternal orders. The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa. Inexplicably, I suddenly thought of my father, who proudly received the "I ain't left nuthin' in Africa" award every year at my mother's family reunion, and I burst into laughter. "It'snotfunny," one of my unrepentantly American daughters, now exasperated, shouted at me as I reflected on our standing family joke about my father's aversion to Afros, dashikis, and most things "African." "I know, I know," I halfheartedly pretended to apologize through tears of laughter and sadness. Truth be told, I wasn't sure that I could answer that question honestly without resorting to platitudes or appeals to sentimentality. Four years later, I found myself in the Sudan, in the village of Q'ab, an oasis in the heart of the Nubian Desert long believed to hold the key to a miracle cure for rheumatism. In a run-down schoolroom, the elderly headmaster, Mohammed Ali Hammeto, carefully explained in Arabic that the cure had proven to come from the village sand dune and that each year hundreds of people flock to receive it. They are buried up to their necks in the scorching sand for twenty minutes a day over the course of a week, covered by a little awning to keep the sun off their heads. As their bodies sweat, the mineral deposits in the sand are believed to work miracles. The headmaster said he has seen crippled men walk strong from the village. Throughout the Sudan, this dune at Q'ab is renowned; many have sought its curative powers at other dunes, but to no avail. Q'ab alone holds the secret. As I prepared to be buried, I addressed the assembled sGates, Henry Louis, Jr. is the author of 'Wonders of the African World' with ISBN 9780375402357 and ISBN 0375402357.