On Caroline Lee Hentz's "The Planter's Northern Bride"

Throughout Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride, nothing is more misunderstood and grossly misrepresented than the history of Africa. “For thousands of years past,” writes Hentz, “the Africans have existed in their own country as a separate people, free, as they came from the hands of God; yet what one solitary step have they taken in the great march of civilisation, beneath whose majestic tramp the universe is resounding?” Here, and elsewhere, Hentz fails to communicate the single most important fact which the history of Africa holds dearest: human civilisation and human existence began there. Archaeological discoveries throughout the Sahara and other parts of Africa predate anywhere else on Earth by thousands of years.

In addition to this, the biggest change Africa ever witnessed was what we might call ‘the coming of the white man.’ True, the European trader did not bring the concept of slavery with him: it had been a common practice throughout Africa for thousands of years, as it had throughout the Arab world. The Arab slave traders were trading in African flesh before the white man had barely conceived of a world beyond the Mediterranean. Quite how Hentz can call Africa “separate” when they traded flesh and other goods with Arab peoples is frankly bewildering.

The earliest Portuguese missionaries and explorers took Christianity with them to what was then the Kingdom of the Kongo. This imperial federation of the fifteenth century had approximately two to three million people, and surprised the white evangelists by how similar its social structure was to social stratification back in Europe. There was a monarch; the monarch was chosen by an assembly of clan leaders; the king had in his possession symbols of royal authority; he reviewed his troops; he sat on a throne; away from the king, distances were measured by marching days; and for longer periods of time the lunar month was used. The Portuguese grudgingly recognised in the kingdom a sophisticated and well-developed state.[1] Since then, “the great march of civilisation” as Hentz uses it has left a scar from east to west and from north to south on the breast of Africa, carved there not by native African implements, but by European revolvers and pistols, and by the financial greed and material desire of ‘men’. If Hentz is unwilling to recognise the sophistication and progress of chiefdoms such as the Kingdom of the Kongo, then her blindness to historical fact renders her manuscript void.

1 Adam Hochschild. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. London: Macmillan, 1998.

On Kara Walker's "Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart"

The last part of Kara Walker’s installation Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart from 1994 shows a black silhouette literally flying away. Under such a title as the one above, this figure encapsulates the leaving of slavery from the South: it rises up and is banished. Apologies for the quality of the following image.


On another level, however, the figure encapsulates the African American myth / folklore of the slave who, without growing wings or feathers, took off and flew back to his spiritual homeland, and out of bondage. This myth acts as the crux of Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon, and in many ways this section of Walker’s installation acts as a depiction of the final scene from that novel.

The figure in the air represents the character of Milkman, leaping as Shalimar had, to ride the air. On top of the rock, there sits a round object with possibly a rose coming out of it, which can be understood as the bag Pilate had carried the bones in to bury them. The figure in the bottom left hand corner which looks like a head rising out of the water is Guitar, shrouded in mystery as he tries once again to kill Milkman. The large unorthodox protruding stomach of Milkman’s figure represents the weight of his family history, literally the burden of all he has learnt of his eccentric family history.

A Quick Lesson from Mr. Claude Brown

I was reading Claude Brown's semi-autobiographical Manchild in the Promised Land in bed last night when I read a short and rather important passage. It reads:

"Look, Mama, when people start ruling people and they rule 'em wrong, in a way that's harmful to them, they have to stop them. They've got to rebel; they've got to get out from under their rule. Sometimes it requires a fight, but it's always going to require a little bit of commotion, a little bit of anger, and sometimes violence.

You've got to stop them before they destroy you. That's all that's going on around here. Everybody is rebelling. You see all the young boys going around here using drugs. They're rebelling, that's all it is. They're rebelling against their parents. If they were any drugs around here when I was a little boy, I would've been using 'em too. I had to rebel. I had to get away from all that down-home nonsense you [have] been talking."

What is embodied in this short passage is the notion that any anti-racist stance cannot be a passive one. Any point of view which begins with something to the effect of 'well my [white] ancestors never held slaves..' or (more commonly here in the United Kingdom) 'I don't mean to be racist but...' -- any opinion which begins in such a way masquerades (at best) as passive anti-racism but in all honesty is just racism by another name. The need for any anti-racist opinion to be an active one is illustrated clearly by Brown.

The last sentence is important as well. In one single line Brown characterises the changing scenes in which the typical African American alpha-male appears. Whilst his parents grew up in and were more familiar with the Southern countryside, Brown and his brothers and sisters were only used to the urban sprawl of Harlem. They were the first generation to grow up in the urban ghettos of the Northern United States, and the first generation of African Americans not linked to the cotton fields and plantation life. Brown realises his mothers lack of understanding about what is happening out on the streets of Harlem is born out of her Southern attitudes and his inability to change.

One should not forget that Brown himself did not have to change because he was born in the ghetto and grew up there. What was foreign to his mother and his parents generation was second nature to him. He characterises this earlier on in the book through the linguistic differences: his parents generation spoke words that he and his brothers and sisters did not know the meaning of, and his generation had their own modern ghetto slang, culminating the use of the word 'baby'.