South Africa – Day 18, Going Home-Leaving Home

Well, what do you say after spending nearly three weeks doing something you have dreamed about all of your life? I remember watching the movie Roots as a child, and being fascinated with the prospect of finding my own ancestors in Africa one day. I remember the black consciousness movement during the late 80’s when we were all listening to Public Enemy, X-Clan, The Jungle Brothers, and other conscious hip-hoppers. We all wore our “Africa Pieces.” “I wear no gold around my neck, juuuussst black medallions… (Jungle Brothers—Straight Out the Jungle)” These were leather, metal, and stone medallions bearing images of Africa—hanging from leather strings or wooden beads—in colors like green, black, red, and gold—“The red’s for the blood, and the blacks for the man, the green is the color that stands for the land… Africa! Talkin’ ‘bout Mother Africa…” I finally got to experience it for myself, and I was able to come during a time of personal growth that allowed me to look below the surface, beyond my fascination with Africa to see the struggles of a people, a nation, a continent. The struggles made even more telling, more complex, and more indelible as viewed through the lens of a country still emerging from Apartheid.



As we disembarked our first flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg en route home, Heather overheard a coloured fight attendant say, “All these Americans look coloured.” If I had heard her make this statement, I would have told her, “We are.” We haven’t gone so far as to create a separate classification in order to define ourselves as separate from other blacks. If we did, we would likely all be categorized as coloured. I recently began work on my family tree and found out that my paternal great grandfather was Cuban; my maternal great grandfather was a mulatto (white and black parents); my paternal great-great grandmother was a Cuban immigrant; another paternal great-great grandfather was a Seminole Indian; my great-great-great grandfather was a slave whose mother was African and whose father was a white slave master. So yes, “I am coloured” according to Apartheid. I would be quite amazed to find any descendants of African slaves in the U.S. whose blood remained purely African, let alone of a single tribe. As I told the students at Bergendal, African slaves in America were separated into groups who didn’t speak the same language, were not from the same tribe, didn’t practice the same traditions; families were separated; slaves were raped, escaped and married Native Americans, etc. This explains our many hues, and it explains our deep desire to find out who we are and where we come from. It explains why Africa beckons us to “come home.” The question now is, “How do I just go back home, when a big piece of my heart was left in Africa?”

Written by Frederick A Hanna