Juneteenth: The News That Arrived Late

African Americans and Africans share the most important origin story in the modern world. They also have a relationship that is complicated, sometimes warm, sometimes cold, and almost never spoken about honestly.

This Juneteenth, Learning Africa goes there. From Marcus Garvey's ships to Ghana's Year of Return. From the Door of No Return on Gorée Island to the word obroni (foreigner) that some African Americans hear when they arrive looking for home. The reunion is real, so is the estrangement. This episode holds both.

Transcript

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June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrive in Galveston, Texas. They carry an order, General Order No. 3. It announces that all enslaved people are free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued two and a half years earlier. For two and a half years, the freedom that had been declared on paper had not arrived. The people it was meant for did not know it existed. They kept working, they kept being bought and sold, they kept being owned. And then on a June morning in 1865, the news arrived. I want to hold that gap. Two and a half years, freedom declared, freedom delayed, and then finally the news reaching the people it was meant for. Because that gap between the announcement and the arrival between the world that was supposed to exist and the one people were actually living in, that gap is not just American history. It is a shape, a recurring shape on both sides of the Atlantic, and it is what this episode is about. There is another side to this story, a continent that watched its people taken, that lived through what came after, that has its own relationship to the diaspora those ships created, a relationship that is real and complicated and almost never spoken about honestly. My name is Amadou, this is Learning Africa, and today we are going into the reunion that never quite happened and asking what it would take for it to finally begin. Let me start with what was taken, not as a catalog, but as a way of understanding what the separation actually was. Approximately 12.5 million people were taken from the African continent during the transatlantic slave trade, taken from West Africa, from Central Africa, from the coasts that border the Atlantic, from Senegambia, from the Gold Coast, from the Bight of Benin, from the Congo River Basin, taken from communities, from families, from languages, from names. They arrived in the Americas without those things. That was not an accident. The slave system was designed to sever. Names were replaced, languages were beaten out of people, or simply starved of the community needed to keep them alive. The act of taking was also an act of erasure, a deliberate destruction of the connections that would have made return thinkable. The door of no return at the house of slaves on Gore Island off the coasts of Dakar, it faces the ocean. It is a small door. It opens unto nothing but water. Historians debate exactly how many enslaved people passed through Gore specifically, but the site has become something precise and irreplaceable, a place where the geography of loss can be touched. The door was not designed for return, it was designed for one direction only. When African American visitors come to Gore, and many do, some of them weep at the door, some of them stand in it and try to feel something that they cannot quite name, a connection that was severed so long ago that it lives in the body as absence rather than memory. And here is the thing that complicates the story from the start. The slave trade was not only done to Africa by Europe. African rulers, African merchants, African kingdoms participated in it. The Kingdom of Dahomey, in what is now Berlin, was one of the most active slave trading states on the continent. The trade required African intermediaries, and those intermediaries were compensated. And they in what they were doing. Benin's president, Mache Kereku, traveled to the United States in 1999 and knelt before the church leaders to ask for forgiveness for his country's role. Ghana has also made similar gestures, but the apologies sit awkwardly alongside the economic reality. The African states that participated were themselves coursed into a global system of extraction that they had not designed and could not escape. Complicity and victimhood are not always opposites. The separation that happened was total. It was designed to be total. And the fact that people on both sides of the Atlantic are still trying to find each other across that totality, that is not naive. What it is is extraordinary. From almost the moment that separation happened, people tried to undo it. Not always successfully, not always wisely, but persistently. Marcus Garvey Jamaican-born, Pan-African visionary, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the largest black mass movement in history at its peak in the early 1920s. Garvey's central idea was returned, not as a metaphor, but as a literal program. He wanted to build ships, the Black Star Line, and carry African Americans back to America. He wanted a state, a homeland, a place where the diaspora could be sovereign. The project, it failed. The ships were badly managed, the money ran out, Garvey himself was convicted of male fraud in a prosecution many historians believe was politically motivated, and he was deported to Jamaica. The return did not happen, but the idea did not die. It became Rastafari, it became the Ethiopia that Bob Marley sang about. It became the Pan-Africanism that Du Bois carried into old age, dying in Accra in 1963 at the age of 95. Having become a Ghanaian citizen, he died the day before the march on Washington. Here is where the conversation gets complicated in a way that does not often make it into the commemorations. When African Americans arrived in Ghana or Senegal or Nigeria or Benin looking for roots, they sometimes found warmth, and they sometimes found something more ambivalent. Africans and African Americans had been separated long enough to become in many ways different people. The African American experience, slavery, gin crow, the particular American formation of blackness, that was not the same as the experience of Ghanaians, Senegalese, Nigerians or Beninese. The shared ancestry was real. The shared culture, though, that had to be built. There is a word that African Americans in Ghana sometimes encounter. Obroni. It means foreigner, outsider. Imagine a people who expected to be welcomed as returning family, sometimes finding themselves called Obroni, an outsider, a foreigner, coming home and being called a stranger. Just imagine that. This is one of the defining experiences of the diaspora when they come to the continent. The tension runs in both directions though. Africans in America have not always been embraced by African Americans either. Competition, cultural friction, a resentment sometimes that people who arrived voluntarily advanced faster than those whose ancestors had been stripped of everything. The family, separated for centuries, had grown in different directions. Reunion was not and will not be simple. Ghana's year of return in 2019 was the most recent larger scale attempt at reconnection. The government marking the 400th anniversary for the first enslaved Africans arriving in the American colonies and inviting the diaspora home. Over 1 million people came, a record for Ghana's tourism. There were ceremonies at the slave castles, citizenship grants, tears at the door of no return at Elmina. It was real. And it was also in part a tourism campaign. The emotional infrastructure of homecoming was genuine. And it was also being used to attract capital. Both things were true at once. The reunion is in progress. It is unfinished. And the fact that it is unfinished does not mean it failed. Now I want to try to say honestly what the relationship is today. It is a relationship between people who share an origin and do not share a present. Between a people who share a wound and do not share a memory. The people who have been told that they belong to each other and have had to figure out individually and collectively what that means in practice. Where it works, and there is a growing community of people, African professionals in America, African American investors on the continent, artists who move between both worlds, who are building the connective tissue of a real relationship, not a symbolic one. The ongoing conversation between Afrobeats and hip-hop that neither side would describe as a policy initiative, it is just music that people love, crossing a divide faster than institutions are. Where it fails, the relationship is still too often mediated by sentiment rather than substance. African governments talk about the diaspora as a resource, remittances, investment, soft power, but rarely treat diaspora communities as partners with standing to shape the direction of a country they feel connected to. The African Union created a sixth region for the diaspora in 2012. In practice, the mechanism for participation remain weak, underfunded, and largely inaccessible. The preparations question sits at the center of all of this, unresolved and largely unspoken between Africans and African Americans. What does the continent owe the diaspora? What do African states that participated in the trade owe those whose ancestors they sold? What does the diaspora owe the continent? In investment, in advocacy, in the use of its political weight inside the world's most powerful countries? These are not comfortable questions. They are necessary ones. The relationship cannot become real until they are asked honestly. When the US makes decisions about Africa, about trade, debt, military, basing rights, which government recognizes African Americans have more direct access to that decision making than most African governments do. That access has not been organized, not deliberately, not at a scale. Building it would require the diaspora and the continent to develop a genuinely shared agenda, and that requires trust, it requires honesty, including about the parts of the history that are uncomfortable on both sides. I want to come back to Galveston, June 19, 1865. The soldiers arrive, they read the order, and people who did not know they were free discover that they have been free for two and a half years. The world had changed, the legal reality had changed, and none of it had reached the people it was supposed to reach. There is a version of this that is about America only, about the cruelty of a freedom declared and withheld, and the long shadow of everything that followed. But I have been thinking about a different version, about a continent that also did not receive the news it was old, the news that the people taken from its shores had survived, had built something extraordinary under conditions designed to destroy them, had held on to fragments of language and rhythm and spiritual practice across four centuries of everything meant to prevent it. That news that the children are alive and extraordinary did not travel back across the Atlantic the way it should have. The door was not built for return. And African Americans, for their part, did not always receive the news that the continent had not been passive in their absence, that it had resisted, fought for independence, produced its own crises and achievements, not waiting, not frozen in ember, not simply the place from which they were taken, but a living, complicated, sovereign world. What Juntin asks is what we do with the news that has finally arrived. The news that the separation was real, the loss was real, that what was destroyed cannot be fully rebuilt, and that the people on both sides of the water are still here, still related, still capable of choosing what to build from what remains. The door at Gore Island was built for one direction. People are trying to walk back through it. This is not nothing. It is in fact everything. The news arrived late, it is still arriving, and what we do with it on both sides of the water is still being decided. I am Amodu. This is Learning Africa.