Rethinking Home
Black Americans that left the country are now seeing America in a new light.
Kenneth Walker writes at The Root:
Ugh. I need to find a new title for my book.
I have been working on a book with a provisional title, Leaving America Behind. It seeks to chronicle the journeys of a growing number of African Americans who now call some part of Africa home. I am one of them.
When I moved to South Africa 10 years ago to become the Africa bureau chief for National Public Radio, I knew I was coming here to stay. This decision was ratified two years later when I became a permanent resident of South Africa.
I joined hundreds of others who were making the new South Africa the leading destination for black Americans moving to the continent—overtaking Ghana’s previous claim to the top spot.
As I ventured across African countries, I found many fellow travelers in places large and small—from Nigeria to Burundi, in Accra, Durban, Nairobi and Addis Ababa.
[...]
Most of us who moved to Africa were all taxed out and fairly convinced that the United States would never change in our lifetime. Then on Tuesday I started getting text messages from friends in the U.S.—a single phrase with a simple message: “Kenny, come home.”
I am certain that almost all these expatriates shared my longing to be in the U.S. to directly experience the electrical charge Obama’s election held for African Americans. But those of us living in Africa left the U.S. for many reasons beyond American racism. And the details of the lives we have constructed are not ones to be cast aside merely because of Barack Obama’s election, although almost certainly we will now regard our occasional trips to America with less dread.
On Wednesday morning in Johannesburg, I stood listening to Barack Obama’s victory speech with tears streaming down my face. The event was an election breakfast hosted by the U.S. Consul General Andy Jones at the Hyatt Hotel in Rosebank.
During that speech, I was transported to many places. It took me back to the slave stories I heard on the lap of my great-grandmother, who was born to emancipated slaves.
Mine was the last generation of the civil rights movement. As children, we saw the police dogs, the fire hoses, the bombings and the beatings. Some of us, like the four little girls at the church in Birmingham, were killed in the process. We participated, with our elders, in the seminal civil rights protests of those days.
I remember having a front row seat at the 1963 March on Washington, where I heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. share his dream of an America I never thought I’d see. Our generation manned the front lines of the continuing racial divide.
We were the first beneficiaries of an all-too-brief window of opportunity known as affirmative action that saw the desegregation of public schools, private news media and urban police and fire departments. But we also watch as legal challenges shut down those opportunities for those who would come after us.
Still, slowly but inexorably, we began to make our presence felt in government, business, media and civil society, and it was on this foundation that Barack Obama could launch his presidential campaign and win the election.
All of these memories came rushing back. We may not have reached “The New Jerusalem,” but a chapter has been closed in the racial history of the United States and of the world. Today is very different from yesterday, and tomorrow will be more different still—in ways we can only dimly imagine.
I responded to the messages from American family and friends: “South Africa is still my home.” But as sure as Obama’s election will change things in America, my old home, it will change things in my new home, too. And I am happy about the prospect. The tremendous grassroots reaction of Africans all over the continent offers a hint of the possibilities.
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