In 1941, Melville Herskovits published The Myth of the Negro Past, a text that became a classic in discussions of African Americans and their relationships to Africa. The text helped dispel the prevailing popular belief that blacks had lost all their culture in the dreaded Middle Passage, that infamous second leg of the slave trade that brought free Africans into the New World to be enslaved. Due to the mixing of peoples of various African cultures and languages on slave ships as well as in the Americas, blacks lost all significant ties, it was believed, to their African cultures. While Herskovits was certainly a pioneer in attempting to re-establish African American cultural connections to Africa, his work can be viewed as the researched and scientific counterpart to a romantic and literary impulse that many African American authors followed during the Harlem Renaissance, that period of flowering of African American art and writing that took place primarily during the decade of the 1920s.
Scientific research supported a literary impulse to reconnect black Americans to their African roots.Unwitting heirs to prevailing white American mythology, many descendants of Africans who were enslaved in America believed that they had few complimentary ties to Africa. It was a dark land from which, as poet Phillis Wheatley asserted in the late eighteenth century, they had been mercifully rescued. Another strand of thought, however, the one that led colonization societies to consider parts of Africa as a place to which enslaved Africans should return and that led black missionaries on trips to the Continent,Â
These social and political factors, combined with the migrations of hundreds of thousands of black people from the rural South into the urban areas of America, set the stage for widespread focus on blackness. However, since blackness was still devalued by white Americans and indeed by many black Americans, how were those concerned about instilling such pride, such as writers and artists, to go about encouraging the masses of blacks to reject negative mythology and see themselves in new lights? The Harlem Renaissance placed Africa at the center of the African American cultural landscape, and there it remains today.They did so by invoking Africa as a source of history as well as a source of pride. This is not to suggest that Africa instantly became the universally acknowledged motherland to all African Americans, but it is to say that writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, in their evocations of Africa, whether those evocations were positive or ambivalent, made Africa a central space on the cultural landscape of African American people. As succeeding generations of African American writers and artists built upon those evocations, Africa, by the 1960s, was instated as an uncontested source of origin and pride for all Americans of African descent. And it has gained even more positive status with the election of President Barack Obama.
In the 1920s, however, writers and artists were a bit more tentative in their assertions. And they were certainly more romantic. While some writers, such as Langston Hughes, traveled to Africa The Harlem Renaissance embraced an Africa of myth and imagination.(Hughes did so in 1923 when he was 21), many others never made the trip. Their efforts to claim African identity, therefore, were rooted more in imagination and reading knowledge than in actual facts. Indeed, some white writers influenced African American conceptions of Africa. Vachel Lindsay is one such case. His poems in the vein of “The Congo” influenced Langston Hughes’s poetic imagination. Hughes’s poems about hearing African drums (“Danse Africaine,” for example) echo Lindsay’s work. African American writers were also not immune to notions of dark Africa that Joseph Conradpopularized in Heart of Darkness (1902). That conception is apparent in Countee Cullen’s“Heritage,” which is a classic poem about Africa from a Harlem Renaissance writer. In this long meditation that Cullen dedicated to his friend Harold Jackman, Africa emerges as a much read-about, problematic, and atavistic continent where wild animals roam and where the humans portrayed are only slightly more tame than the animals. There is a clash between “heathen” Africa and the “Christian” west that the speaker has tremendous difficulty reconciling. Though he has been born in the West, as a descendant of Africans he is nonetheless a child of nature, one who is led to “doff” his Christian, civilized ways and dance wildly whenever it rains. His heathen emotional inclinations, he maintains, make it hard for his “heart and head” to realize that “they and [he] are civilized.”
