Following
the
Black Lives Matter international protests
during the Covid lockdowns of 2020, in
2021 it seemed appropriate that the Massey
Lectures were given by a black
Canadian author, Esi Edugyan. Her five
lectures gave us the book Out of the
Sun, On Race and Storytelling, Ahansi
Press, 2021. It is a gentle but
telling book. Portraits, history, stories and
travels touching 5 continents
give insights into black people in world
history. The first
chapter
is about Europe, about galleries and paintings
of blacks. At the beginning the
author describes being painted herself in the
context of her home on Vancouver
Island. She has benefitted from several
residencies for people in the
humanities in Europe and so has had a chance
to see many galleries. Paintings
of blacks are contentious, few, and have
Blacks in certain roles like footmen,
slaves, maids or magi. On one
residence
she found herself in Scone Palace, Scotland.
It contains a portrait from 1778
of Lady Elizabeth Murray, white, restrained
and dressed in pale colours. She looks
serious, is static and holding a book. Beside
her is Dido Elizabeth Bell, her
Black cousin. Dido looks mischievous, happy
and in motion. She is carrying a
plate of fruit. She wears a white turban with
a feather. She is oriental,
exotic and set in apposition to Europe’s
rationality. Orient meant linked to
Africa. Slavery was a feature of European
expansionism. Initially the slaves
were white but they became Blacks from the
1400s. Blacks
arrived in
port towns and entered works of art. English
plantations employed overseers to
run things so the English had an imagined idea
of black people and Blacks were
used symbolically. Slaves living in big houses
tended to be part of portraits
there 1700 – 1900, staring adoringly at their
masters in bright clothes and
turbans – symbols of wildness. The images were
far from the reality of
plantation life. Returning
to Dido
in Scone Palace, she was one of many children
of mixed relationships sent back
to England. Her father was related to Lord
Mansfield who had taken her in. Her
picture shows subordination. Yet she was loved
by her host and she moved,
though uneasily, through aristocratic England
in her day. Her capturing gaze
seems to say that we Blacks have always been
here. Travelling
with artist
friends the author visits an exhibition
involving one of those friends. There
she is drawn by a series of identical
paintings by a timid artist of a striking
image: a black man wearing 18th
century European dress and a white turban
carrying a cane capped by an emaciated lion.
It was based on the best copy of a
lost original portrait of Angelo Soliman, who
led a remarkable life and had a
bizarre death. Soliman was
taken
from what is now Nigeria and ended up at the
end of the slave route in Sicily
where he was bought and named by the local marchesa
who educated him. She
gifted him to the Austrian governor of Sicily
whom he accompanied as companion
and valet. On the death of his owner, he was
sent to Vienna to the house of the
prince of Liechtenstein. He was liked at the
court and, being well educated, moved
easily in aristocratic circles. He joined the
Masonic Lodge and took on a
leadership role. In the prince’s circles he
met Magdalena Christiani, a widowed
noblewoman. She became his wife. They had a
daughter Josephine who married a prominent
Viennese nobleman. A year
before Haid
painted that striking original portrait of
Soliman, Bellotto painted a very
different portrait of the prince and Soliman
in the Liechtenstein gardens. In it
Soliman is next to the prince at the height of
a five-year-old and holding a
tray of baked goods and a glass of water for
his master. What happened after
his death is even more striking. Despite
pleadings for his body by his daughter
there was no burial. He was skinned and the
skin was put on a frame the size of
a man and it was put on display in the
Austrian Royal Natural History Collection.
On his head was a crown of ostrich feathers. In 2015 the
author
enters the Brooklyn Museum where she is
confronted by a troubling portrait that
reminds her of Soliman. A Black man is lying
in a field of wildflowers on a mattress
in a ball cap and scruffy jeans with eyes full
of divine intensity. Tension arose
from the rapturous pose and the stark modern
clothes. Kehinde Wiley is part of
a disparate group of Black artists taking
charge of their own representation
and the historical representation of
Blackness. Harmonia Rosales created an uproar
with her The Creation of God 2017, a
re-think of Michelangelo’s The
Creation of Adam a fresco in the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Her
God is a Black woman! Wiley is
likely
the most famous of the group; best known for
his portrait of Napoleon and now Barak
Obama. In Wiley’s pictures each black and
brown face, and the grandeur of every
expression and every pose that evokes
Velasquez, Gaugin, Caravaggio issues a plea
to have an essential humanity recognized.
Wiley felt drawn to the beauty of paintings
from an alien world of European noblemen
portraits. The author understands the pull
of the beauty of those historic portraits, a
pull that contrasts with a sense
of alienation from the world they represent.
The power of Wiley’s portraits
stems from these two clashing elements. In 2020
galleries
in Florence planned lectures about Black
figures in Old Master paintings. This
provoked far-right protests. But the paintings
were already part of the
permanent collections. The lectures were to be
about pictures already there,
and not just the legacy of white Europeans.
For example, Duke Alessandro Medici
who ruled Florence 1532-1537 was dark skinned.
A 2019 exhibition at the Paris Musee
d’Orsay was similarly controversial. There the
paintings were to be renamed in
honour of the Black subjects reminding viewers
of the presence of Black people
in France for centuries. For example, Portrait
of a Negress became Madeleine.
But the author favours recalling the original
name as well as offering a contemporary
name. This
chapter ends
with the author reflecting on whether a casual
portrait of her mother and her
own formal portrait reflect what people feel
about themselves or are more true
to how others see them. She is amazed how
portraits from long ago can start one’s
mind imagining the sitter’s feelings and
thoughts. We reach back towards them with
the mysteries we all live out. Canada and
the Art
of Ghosts is her
second
chapter. It begins with the rural farm owned
by parents of her friends – a large
property with a lake in Alberta. They enjoyed
happy times there. The author was
surprised to learn the farm had been sold. It
seems strange things happened there,
small at first. The furniture was moved
slightly. Finally, the family arrived
to find the lights not working and all the
bulbs neatly piled in one room. This
introduces the notion of ghosts. We never
quite learn whether the author is a believer! Ghosts link
us to past
people on the land and give the people’s
passage there an importance. Ghost stories
are among the oldest in every culture.
Although Blacks have passed through that
part of Alberta, the author’s friend’s parents
only examined European groups
who had passed through. That’s how we think of
ghosts. They are like us,
speaking our language and using today’s
idioms. The lands
around
Edmonton and north of it contained vast lakes
and forests with plains running through
them that were known to Cree, Tsuut’ina,
Nakota Sioux, Niitsitapi, Saulteaux Peoples.
Feed slaves from Oklahoma and the South made
their way to this Alberta prairie.
The farm was close to an area that Western
Indigenous passed through and it was
also near to a Black township. Ghost stories
mostly feature unnatural death,
usually violent whether by accident, suicide,
execution or murder. If ghost
stories
reflect our history, what does it mean if they
are missing. Blacks made up 3.5%
of the settlers but ghost stories are rare and
black ghosts do not feature in ghost
tours. But in old Montreal a woman in white
roams rue St Paul with the sign “Arsonist”
around her neck – the ghost of Marie-Joseph
Angélique who has a square named
after her. Born a slave in Madeira 1705, sold
to a Flemish man, brought to
Montreal whose wife was particularly cruel.
Slaves in Canada did not work on
plantations. They did domestic work in
households. Angélique
had an
affair with an indentured servant. When left
together at a house, they set fire
to that house and tried to escape to New
England. The militia caught them and
took them back. Her lover was jailed.
Angélique was sold and scheduled to be
sent to Quebec City whence she feared being
sold in the West Indies. When her lover
was released, they planned to escape again. Then a huge
fire
broke out and Angélique was rumoured to have
started it. She denied that, but rumours
led to a warrant for her arrest. Her lover
disappeared. In Montreal she was
found guilty of arson. Her sentence included a
parade to the church with an “arsonist”
label around her neck and having both hands
cut off. Before this sentence was
carried out in Montreal, she was taken to
Quebec City. There an appeal court lessened
her sentence to being hanged then burnt, but
only if she confessed as well. Returned to
Montreal, a seasoned torturer, who was a Black
slave, obtained her confession. She
was hanged and burned. The author found a
student newspaper had a recent short
report of her being seen near St Paul Street.
By giving her this ghostly
afterlife, Angélique is remembered in the
community she was part of. We have
been slow
to make visible the failings of that era.
Slavery is not one of the ghost stories
of our history. It doesn’t haunt us, and
Canadians know little about it. When
slavery comes up we think of the Underground
Railroad for escaping slaves in the
US coming into Canada. But Canada itself was a
society with slaves, if not
exactly a slave society. People of African
descent were transported to Ontario,
PEI, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec, but
there is a dearth of source data
and so scholarship is lacking. We do know that
in Quebec there were 4,000
slaves including indigenous with about half
around Montreal and most of them house
slaves like Angélique. In 1830
Priceville
Ontario was founded by Black settlers claiming
lots promised by the Crown. Many
had fought in the war of 1812 and the town was
named after “Colonel” Price. They
cleared and tilled the land yet it never
formally became theirs. Later settlers
on adjacent properties moved to force them
out. They were deemed squatters and
their land was parcelled out except the
cemetery. In 1930 the
estate
with the cemetery was sold to a farmer who
planted potatoes on it. Black cemeteries
were not protected by the law and were subject
to desecration. Stones could be removed
- and were. Some Priceville citizens
remembered their past and lobbied for the
land to go into public domain. In 1989 a rock
heap on school grounds revealed
gravestones and “part of a world was recovered
from oblivion”. Then ground
scanning radar found 100 graves on the land.
Now the graves are in a small
fenced-in field under piles of rock. Ghost
stories allow the living to write onto
the past their concerns. Certain people are
excluded from the narrative.
Certain events go ignored. The author
reports
a visit to her mother at work in a seniors’
home where she encounters a strange
old woman who leads her around. Later, her
mother tells her it must be Mr. Gold
– there is no woman! There are stories of
ghosts that should be there, but are
not. Early Black settlers on Saltspring Island
where the author was raised were
murdered - shot in a pattern of reluctant
police, automatic suspicion of
indigenous, trials and hangings despite lack
of evidence or even in face of counter
evidence. Some have written that the Black
settlers found a better environment on
Saltspring than the California they left. But
those murders tell another story.
In the end there are no ghost stories written
to remember the murdered Backs or
to remember the indigenous hung. Finally,
the
author has a terrifying encounter with a man
on the dark top floor at a party
of a college friend in the strange house where
she lived. Others went to look
but saw and found nobody. Her friend later
admitted to taking photos in dark recesses
of buildings in the hope of catching a ghost -
so “he’d be seen”. The author
recalls
a sleep-over as a child with a new friend.
They watch a movie about sisters. At
a climax one sister yells you’re Black to the
other. There is emotion. The Black
girl blames her mother. The new friend looks
at the author who realizes that she
is Black and that she carries this for herself
and for her friend. The US has
the notion of “passing” – in one direction –
as a white. There is a history of
extent of Blackness in which one drop of Black
blood and you’re considered Black.
The author notes that the various heritages of
her sons get lost in the
overwhelming Black. Racial passing, then, is
about the privilege of moving around
freely and unremarked upon. After
Obama, the notion
of a post-racial world arose. But after the
Trump era that can’t be serious
suggestion. However it can be a yearning among
people like those who joined in
the protests about George Floyd’s murder. Such
a world would allow people to be
what they feel. There is
passing,
but what about the opposite “Blackfishing”.
The author gives the accounts of
two whites who passed as blacks and documented
the racism and indignities of
living as Blacks in the US South – Ray Sprigle
in 1948 and John Griffin in
1961. Both became powerful spokesmen for the
Black experience. Griffin was
forced to leave his Texas home and live in
Mexico on account of backlash. In
2021 it’s too easy to consider their
experiments as forays into blackface for white
sensibilities. But in 1948 and 1961 it was not
wrong to impersonate or speak to
another’s experience. Conveying the
marginalized circumstances of Blacks was
the more powerful coming from the centre. Yet
it remains that these were whites
writing for whites. The experiments may have
been condescending, but they
implied that since whites caused these
conditions whites should fix them. That
work fitted alongside Black activism in
pushing Civil Rights into the national
consciousness.
And the empathy of these men seems genuine.
Nonetheless, in 2021 people are
expected to speak for themselves so that lines
need to be marked between
empathy, activism and performance. In 2015
Rachael Dolezal
confessed she was not Afro-American. She was
NAACP president, chair of local
police oversight, professor of Africana
studies, founding organizer of Spokane’s
Black Lives Matter protests. She lost all
posts and her livelihood. Her
autobiography tells a more complex story. She
was born to a religious pro-life couple
who favoured adoption of Black children. These
children were then treated
differently from her and her brother. Dolezal
schooled her siblings in Black
history. As a teenager she cared for them and
learned the intricacies of Black
hair. She adopted one of them herself
alongside her own bi-racial son. She became
a “black adjacent”, living with and alongside
the Black community - more than
an ally. Then she
went
further, affecting black hairstyles and
darkening her skin. To her, race is
mutable, random and fluid – seen rather like
the modern view of sexuality. Indeed,
a Toronto professor wondered whether people
might be transracial like they are
transgendered. However, this thought led to
angry outbursts as the professor
was called racist and transphobic and ignorant
of the troubled histories of
marginalised groups. Identities are partly
formed by factors outside ourselves. The author
describes going to a job interview in Calgary
at age 19. A man and women stepped
into the hall where she and 5 others waited.
She could see they were surprised
to see her. There was one job they said. She
said she had applied. It was
filled yesterday the woman said awkwardly. She
left confused and upset not
knowing then that she had been constructed in
their minds, without her
knowledge or consent. “The person I was and
the person I seemed to be were not
the same”. The author describes others caught
out for pretending to be Blacks.
She ends musing over “transracial” as a useful
direction, but she cannot herself
feel comfortable with treating it in the same
way as “transexual”. “I live out
my race in a far more charged way than I do my
gender.” The last
story is
about Ada Copeland, a Black from Georgia who
moved North to be a nursemaid in Manhattan
after the Civil War. In 1888 she met James
Todd a fair skinned Black who worked
the railways as a Pullman porter. They had a
happy wedding. In 1901 she got a
letter from him telling her to sell the house
and move to Toronto. It seemed
plausible since there had been race riots. In
December she learned Todd lay
dying of tuberculosis and he confessed to her
that he was a white man called Clarence
King from a well-established family of English
origin, with a doctorate from
Yale and research at Harvard. To friends he
was known as a great adventurer.
King destroyed his letters and asked his wife
to destroy hers. We don’t know
how Copeland reacted, but she changed her name
to King. King did not change his
physical self. He set aside white privilege
for love. The decades of marriage
and 5 children is a commitment. King made his
strongest statements against
racism as a white man. Africa and
the Art
of the Future is Esi’s
fourth
chapter. It begins with a much-retold tale of
how her parents met at a Pan-African
get-together party for new comers to watch the
moon walk on TV. It was Sao
Paolo USA. Her father knew they were both
Ghanan, but from different tribes and
her mother spoke a clipped “g” like an
American. They had a lot in common.
Identities are fed by situations experienced,
stories told and passed down.
Their other story included that of teenagers
living through the transition from
a British Colony, Gold Coast, into a new
nation, Ghana. They had to feel the
parts of all that which they felt were theirs.
This moon landing was part of
their future. Five years
before
the moon landing, Edward Nkoloso, a science
teacher in Zambia, Africa’s newly
independent country, was director of the
National Academy of Science, Space
Research and Philosophy and training 12
astronauts to beat Russians and
Americans. It attracted attention in Time
magazine and the author captures the way
the program hovered as a kind of joke or
something else. There was pageantry –
green pants and yellow jackets doubling for
the rock band they played in during
off hours. To train for zero gravity they were
to swing on a rope which was cut
at the highest point. Of course, they never
went to Mars with the two cats, and
after media attention died down the
“astronauts’ began to disperse. But was the
joke on “us”? Nkoloso was
known affectionately
in Zambia for his role in the independence
movement and for his humour. Why and
how are we laughing? Is it that African
ingenuity might put mankind into space?
Western thinkers saw technological progress as
a future bound by race. Well, we
now know that black women scientists made
critical contributions in their role
as human computers at NASA. Or is it that
Africa should see itself as part of
the international race for space? Nkoloso
took
a missionary education, but with WWII, the
British drafted him into the
King’s African Rifles and thence into the
Signal Corps. After the war he was no
freer and he ended up moving in government
sanctioned schools teaching Latin,
math and science. He joined an advisory
council and pushed his progressive
views seeker better education for Africans. He
organized civil disobedience –
marches. He made weapons – bombs. His son
revealed a counter-narrative to his
Zambian space program – he was training people
as fighters for freedom. In an
infamous editorial he said the capital of his
visioned scientific Zambia must look
beautiful, people from afar must not see a
slum of a capital. Nkoloso and
the
author’s parents were born in colonies of an
Empire that changed suddenly into their
nations. That Empire taught achievements that
were uniquely British and a
history that was British to the exclusion of
all else. How can a community
whose history has been rubbed out imagine its
future? To have any sense of the
past is difficult for the heirs of slavery and
colonialism. The author perceives
the film Black Panther with its
fictional country of Wakanda as central
to examining Afrofuturism. She took her dad to
see it. He laughed. The capital
has impressive sky-scrapers with familiar
touches like African thatch roofing.
The countryside is gorgeous. And the plot
recalls the plundering of resources
by outsiders. Wakanda is a fantasia. “It is a
vision of a pan-African future in
which progress has been allowed to play out
without destructive meddling from
outside ...” It is a fleshing out of the
vision of Nkoloso. The author
describes the time of her mother’s death when
she lived in old university
student housing as a time of un-mooring. In
the months of mourning, she felt
like a lapsed African, cut off from her link.
She had never been African – she was
just of African heritage. Time had made the
way things once belonged, belong no
more – rather like Afrofuturism. A new life
must come from the ashes of the old
one. The story of dislocation is also a story
of finding new anchors. The author
introduces
us to a novel, Lagoon by Okorafor, an
American of Nigerian descent,
about an alien invasion centred on Nigeria.
The novel is in part a response to
the South African film by Neill Blomkamp
involving aliens. That movie has
metaphors that resonate with the apartheid
experiences and sought to link to
treatment of other Africans in South Africa.
But the depiction of Nigerians
attracted controversy – they are gang members,
weapons-dealers or prostitutes. There
were protests in Nigeria. Blomkamp sees Blacks
as much a part of the oppression
of the aliens in the film as whites. “Yes,
human behaviour is universal”. Lagoon puts Nigeria
at the centre of the story and is
uniquely itself. Okorafor has an ambassador
for the aliens, Ayodele, who can
change her form and is an incarnation of Mama
Wata, a water god known
throughout the African diaspora. Emerging as
she does from the Atlantic, she is
able to make a link between science fiction
and slave histories with an
emphasis on the body and what it means to have
agency over it. A charm of the
book for the author, is the humour around the
invisibility of “developing
nations”. The invasion by aliens in Nigeria
does not early attract any
attention of Westerners. “What will recorded
history look like if an event of
this magnitude in Africa is ignored by the
rest of the world?” Such sidelining
is the kind of thing that erased the past.
That allowed historians like
Trevor-Roper to call Africa “an area of
darkness”. Ten years
after
her mother’s death, the author describes
“going back” – which she explains is really
going for the first time to Ghana with her
brother and sister. There is
discussion of the fears and uncertainties of
meeting relatives which in the end
turns into something of great beauty. She
meets her father’s 101 year-old mother
and spends time with her two aunts – one whose
speech reminds the author of her
mother. The
final and
fifth chapter is on Asia and the art of
Story-Telling and it begins in
Beijing that she calls illuminated and full of
light as she evokes the bustling
of the streets. She finds an underground store
of pirated goods; she is moved
by the stalls around Tiananmen Square. The
author passes strangers from the
countryside. They eye each other as they pass.
The author senses a commonality with
the strangers. A Polish journalist has
suggested that meeting someone in a
foreign country is like meeting two people.
The first we recognize as a fellow
human. The second attracts and reflects our
pre-conceived ideas about their race.
Story telling is as old as humanity. Stories
fix people in a time and space and
attract histories. For
centuries
Africa and Asia had little contact. Then
contact came indirectly via Dutch
merchants who brought tales of black people
traded as slaves that were
mindlessly adopted by locals. Black contact
with China began with Tang dynasty (618-907AD)
traders dealing with city states of East
Africa. African slavery was present
but marginal in China. Arab traders sold them.
As in Europe the rich saw them
as an exotic way to display wealth. African
slaves were called “Kunlun”.
Initially feared, by the end of the Tang they
were romanticized in fables. That
changed in the Song dynasty (966-1279AD) when
numbers came from Madagascar to the
Canton region where they were deemed
inassimilable and primitive. The view that
developed and the racism in Europe and China
was largely influenced by the stories
of Arab and Muslim slave traders. Interestingly,
free
Africans were seen differently. East African
merchant Zhengjiani’s arrival
in 1079 was welcomed with celebrations,
respect, a meeting with the emperor,
and a grant of ambassadorial status. Trade
with East Africa was profitable and as
today attitudes were influenced by that
context. This trade continued into the
Ming dynasty, although it was tempered by the
growth of European trade. The
author
turns to her own short story about her visit
to the great wall in China. Her
elegant tale ends without conclusion. She has
lost her way back off the great wall
with dark moving in and snow falling. She
encounters two people who don’t
understand but offer her hot tea. They
disappear into the falling snow and she
is left on the wall … Her story ends. Accompanying
Jesuit
missionaries to Nagasaki in 1579 as a valet
and bodyguard was a tall heavy
set black skinned man – Yasuke - who attracted
attention. People gathering to
see him. The feudal ruler Nobunga had Yaske
brought to him – and tried to rub the
black off. Esi notes there are no accounts of
how Blacks felt about such treatment.
Yasuke had arrived in Japan fluent in
Japanese. Nobunga was impressed and
offered to train him as a samurai – a top
warrior. Yasuke agreed. Within a year
he achieved this and was made sword bearer in
the royal guard. Nobunga was the
strongest of three remaining feudal lords at
the time. His jurisdiction was central
and included the capital. Yosuke was fluent in
Swahili and this lead Esi to
muse about which present day African country
he had come from. Eventually,
Nobunga
and Yasake suffered defeat by a rival faction.
Nobunga saved his honour by
committing suicide. Yasake was spared and
became a samurai without master. The
story suggests that the Jesuit saw Yasake as
something to boost his status. Nobunga
saw past the surface to a fellow human and
indeed the two became friends. Even
so, Esi wonders whether Yasake ever got to
reveal his deeper self – the things
he had been forced to leave behind, what he
meant to himself, how he felt about
the worlds he had been dragged through that he
could never have imagined. Black
Africans
first made an appearance in Japan in the 16
th century via Dutch and
Portuguese sailing ships. The Blacks were or
had been slaves. They were met with
awe. Locals would travel to see them. Before
Africans and Europeans Japan had
been viewed as a homogeneous society. However,
there were always peoples from
nearby countries as well as Japan’s own ethnic
minorities. By colour, Blacks
were linked to India and they were judged by
their treatment by Europeans. They
were seen as objects of contempt. Until
the
late 16 th century when the practice was
banned, Europeans had some Japanese slaves.
After the ban, there were only African slaves.
Any Black in Japan was a slave
and the European perspective on Blacks was
reinforced. Ideas of Western superiority
came to shape ways Japanese saw themselves.
Once, derided as uncivilized,
Europeans and whiteness became symbols of high
civilization. Native Americans
and Africans became associated with low
people. While race is a genetic
inheritance of a colour, caste is the fiction
told about differences. In Japan,
the fiction arrived before the people. There
is the remarkable
story of the Chinese admiral Zheng He. Born a
Muslim, castrated for refusing to
disclose an enemy location to the Ming army,
he became houseboy for prince Zhu
Di. Brilliant, Zheng co-plotted successfully
for the prince to become emperor. The
emperor then put him in command of an enormous
fleet. Zheng made seven huge
expeditions 1405-1433 AD reaching East Africa.
Zheng’s Navy did not last. After
his benefactor died, politics swung away from
reaching outside China. The new
emperor banned building ships. The records of
Zeng’s expeditions were destroyed.
However, researchers found that one ship had
been destroyed at the island of
Pate off the Kenya coast where Chinese sailors
were stranded. Mixed race heirs
of those sailors are there to this day and
they seem an accepted part of the
population. A graveyard has tombs recalling
the Ming dynasty style. Sitting
in her
home the author can hear her children playing
as she recalls for us a different
horrific story of Japanese miners isolated in
all men camps to work a Japanese
mine in 1970s Zaire, now the Democratic
Republic of Congo. The men had left
whole lives behind. Some struck up friendships
to get out of the camp, some
struck up relationships with Congolese women
and some began families over the few
years. Then the work was finished and it was
time to return. Pressures of how
to negotiate a second family arose. For some
the shame was overwhelming. To
this day, Black-Asian sexual relationships are
in the zone of taboo. Miscegenation
carries a story of tainting blood, giving the
child a caste inheritance. For
some, abandoning children was worse than
that. But the mining company insisted they all
leave without new family ties. At
this point
the formal record diverges from local
testimony in which the infants and
children were murdered. The mothers would take
their children to the local
hospital run by the company for a simple
check-up or minor illness. The
Japanese doctor and assistant would only treat
them with mothers out of the
room. Returning home, the children would
become weak and lethargic and die
within hours. The assumption was that to spare
the miners shame, the children
were being poisoned. Mothers turned to giving
birth at home, not registering
children and even moving elsewhere with their
children. The number of survivors
is unknown, but a group of fifty is seeking an
investigation. The
author regrets
not visiting the “Little Africa” district in
Guangzhou on the Pearl River. West
Africans came in the 1990s. In a spirit of
trade, migrants would stay for
months gathering things that they could sell
for profit back home. (The author
herself had searched for a traditional fabric
known in the Ghana of her
childhood but could only find Chinese made
goods.) By 2005-2012 some 100,000
Africans were living there – a visible
“disquieting” community. Rumours of the deaths
of two Nigerians in 2009 caused demonstrations
that became riots. In 2012, a
death in custody led to demonstrations, but
this time there were mass
immigration sweeps and the closing of African
shops and churches. By 2014 there
was a gentrification program and Africans were
clearly not welcome. Covid-19
added to that. Black populations had more
prolonged quarantines; “race became a
vector of contagion”. Meanwhile,
in
North America it was people of Asian descent
who were attacked as a result of
Covid-19. Benign physical differences became
stand ins for an enemy virus we
cannot see. The author adds “The story of
belonging is not theirs to inhabit”.
Yet like the sailors left on Pate, the world
where they are is their only world. The
author
had gone to China for a book festival. The day
before leaving she went to see the
Forbidden City. It was off season so that most
people were from other parts of
China. She was aware that for some she was a
spectacle. Then at one point she
saw a face of hate – extreme contempt- and
grunts like a gorilla. She was aware
she had no place in their country. Yes, this
experience is real in China, but there
is another side. Exhausted
and
hot from her day, she sat down in a restaurant
and ordered tea. It came hot. A
helpful man spoke Mandarin to the waitress who
returned with ice cubes. She
thanked the man who was holding a book. She
pointed out that she had been on the
podium with the author of the book he was
holding. They had an exchange about
the book festival. Then something occurred to
the man. “Wait, are you hungry? Come
with me.” She hesitated, but he only meant to
take her to a restaurant across
the street where he was about to hold a party
introducing his wife’s new baby
to friends. This was an unusual invitation for
Chinese to make. Introduced, the
author chatted with those present and answered
questions. The tired man’s wife arrived
and the author’s presence was explained. The
two of them talked about motherhood.
Then the man said “Wait, let Esi hold the
baby”. And with a flourish of
descriptive words I cannot emulated, Esi did.