Can Arabs and whites be real Africans? (II)

“In Algeria, the northern part of Africa, a revolution took place,” he said in his famous October 10, 1963 speech called Message to the Grassroots. “The Algerians were revolutionists; they wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France: to hell with France. They wanted some land, not some France. […]

“In Algeria, the northern part of Africa, a revolution took place,” he said in his famous October 10, 1963 speech called Message to the Grassroots. “The Algerians were revolutionists; they wanted land. France offered to let them be integrated into France. They told France: to hell with France. They wanted some land, not some France. And they engaged in a bloody battle.”

So when he went to Ghana (his first visit to Africa), a year after this memorable speech, he sought and got audience with the Algerian ambassador to Ghana. The ambassador turned out to be what Malcolm recognized as a white man—he had blue eyes, blond hair and pale skin. But he was a Berber, a “white” African. And he was just as zealous about pan-African unity as Malcolm was. But in the course of their conversation the Algerian pointedly asked how a person with his kind of racial and geographic origins fitted into Malcolm’s exclusivist and racialist constructions of Black Nationalism. The formulations of Black Nationalism—and Africanness—that Malcolm had cherished crumbled.

How could someone who looked exactly like the people he called “white devils” in America be an African—and a “black nationalist” at that? This was particularly epiphanous for Malcolm because, not long before this encounter, he had repulsed a conscientious white American girl who’d told him she wanted to join his Black Nationalist movement to fight white racism. He later confessed that his brusque rebuff of the white girl’s sincere offer to join his movement for racial justice in America was one of the greatest regrets of his life.

So, if “whiteness” (or “non-blackness”) is, in fact, original to the conception of “Africanness” why is the idea of a “white African American” such an anomaly? Why would someone be suspended from a school simply because he identified himself as a “white African American”? Well, the converse can also be asked: if whiteness is original to the conception of Africanness, why is it now always necessary to modify “African” with “white” if a non-black African is being identified?

Well, first, what’s the story of the “white African American”? According to ABC News, one of America’s major news networks, a white Mozambican identified as Paulo Serodio said he was harassed and assaulted by his African American classmates at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in the state of New Jersey after he defined himself as a “white African American.” The racial tension that his newfangled self-description touched off subsequently led to his suspension.

Serodio, a 45-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, told ABC News that he is a third-generation African of Portuguese descent and therefore legitimately considers himself a “white African American.”

The truth is that the notion of a white African American strikes the mind as counter-intuitive precisely because over the last couple of decades, the term “Africa” has undergone tremendous notional transformations. In the popular imagination, Africa now evokes the image of “blackness.” The people to whom the name originally referred (whom we would call white by today’s racial typologies) have now been effectively marginalized from its contemporary ideational universe.

There is perhaps no greater proof of this reality than the fact that present-day North Africans themselves concede ownership of the name Africa to black people. In early May this year, for instance, I sat close to a Tunisian lady during a flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Malabo in Equatorial Guinea. In the course of our chit chat, she told me she was “going to Africa” for the first time. I was balled over. When I reminded her that her country, Tunisia, in fact, used to be the symbolic and administrative nucleus of “Africa” for several centuries, she agreed but insisted that black people have now rhetorically appropriated Africa. Perhaps she is right.

But the point of this musing is not to make a case for some romantic geographic African unity but to call attention to the arbitrariness—and power—of naming. As Ali Mazrui once reminded us, even our name was named for us by Europe. “Europe chose its own name, ‘Europe,’ and then chose names for the Americas, Australia, Antarctica, and even Asia and Africa,” he wrote in the book Collected Essays of Ali A. Mazrui. “The name ‘Africa,’ originating in North Africa as the name for a sub-region, was applied to Africa as a whole by European map-makers and cartographers.”

So next time you start arguing about who is a real African and who is not, be sure not to overlook the etymology and history of the term “Africa.” Perhaps it will minify your emotional investment in “Africanness.”