To open his last verse, he pleads with black children to look to the distant past for inspiration: “ we came to this country / We were kings and queens, never porch monkeys.” Incomplete and romanticized readings of history have resulted in a fanatical, monolithic image of Africa, or worse, a dismissal of the rest of the continent as a backwards land that colonizers rightfully raided.
Consider Nas’s 2003 song “ I Can” (his highest-charting single to date), which was widely lauded for its uplifting message. A leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, she died in poverty in 1960, and was buried in a grave that was unmarked until the young Alice Walker, who had been inspired by Hurston’s writing, tracked it down in 1973.Precolonial black history is often reduced to a troubling binary: Africans as a uniformly subservient arm of the triangular trade and Africa through the lens of monarchies like ancient Egypt and Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia. Hurston would go on to publish the novel for which she is best known, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937. It gave me something to feel about,’ Hurston wrote.” That yearning for blood and cultural ties. ‘After 75 years, he still had that tragic sense of loss. Boyd wrote: “But what moved Hurston most about the old man – whom she always called by his African name, Kossola – was how much he continued to miss his people Nigeria. Lewis died aged 94, and “although he had always wanted to go back home, he was buried among his family in the Africans’ cemetery that opened in 1876”, the encyclopaedia says.Ī snippet from Hurston’s unpublished book, recorded in Valerie Boyd’s biography of the African American author, Wrapped in Rainbows, says that “tears welled” in Lewis’s eyes as he spoke about the voyage on the Clotilde. He married a woman who had also been on the Clotilde, Abile, and they had six children, but all died young. He had wanted to return home, but could not afford it, so he and his fellow former slaves established African Town, north of Mobile, Alabama. In the US, he was enslaved by ship captain James Meaher, until emancipation in 1865. He was taken prisoner in 1860 and held in a barracoon for three weeks in Ouidah on the coast, before spending 45 days crossing the Atlantic. According to the Encyclopaedia of Alabama, Cudjo Lewis was born Oluale Kossola in Benin in 1841.
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