Michael O. West

Like a River: The Million Man March and the Black Nationalist Tradition in the United States

This article examines the Million Man March in the wider context of black nationalism, a persistent, though inconsistent, factor in African American life, enjoying wider currency at some historical junctures than others. Those periods when black nationalism resonated strongly among African Americans are called black nationalist moments, four of which are identified here. The Million Man March, with its heavy inflection of patriarchy and black capitalism, is seen as the iconic event of the fourth moment. The subsequent Million Woman March is pivoted as a more radical and activist rejoinder to the Million Man March, a response continued by the even more recent Black Radical Congress.

Ndabaningi Sithole, Garfield Todd and the Dadaya School Strike of 1947

Like the more well‐known railway workers’ strike of 1945 and the general strike of 1948, a strike by students at the Dadaya mission school in 1947 was an important background episode to the rise of African nationalism in Southern Rhodesia. The two main antagonists in this strike were Ndabaningi Sithole and Garfield Todd, both of whom went on to play important political roles in the colony, the one as African nationalist theoretician and practitioner and the other as Prime Minister from 1953 to 1958 and later as a leading white critic of Ian Smiths break‐away Rhodesia. Todd, the principal of Dadaya at the time of the strike, fired Sithole (along with three other African teachers) for his alleged role in ‘instigating’ it. Considerable political turmoil subsequently ensued. Todd, who had been elected to the Legislative Assembly on the ruling partys ticket the previous year, demanded that the government bar Sithole from teaching, while various African political and professional associations rallied to Sitho...

Seeing Darkly: Guyana, Black Power, and Walter Rodney's Expulsion from Jamaica

Walter Rodneys expulsion from Jamaica in October 1968, and its consequences, had important implications elsewhere in the Caribbean, especially in Rodneys native Guyana. Recently discovered documents shed much light on the Guyanese reaction to those events, and more broadly on Guyanas reception of Black Power. An exposition of the new documents forms the background to a broader discussion of Rodneys subsequent life and work, up to the point of his assassination in 1980.

Equal Rights for all Civilized Men

Between 1924 and 1961 elite Africans in Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) waged a protracted political struggle for the right legally to drink “European” liquor, which had been banned to colonized Africans under the Brussels Treaty of 1890. Refusing to be lumped with the black masses and basing their claim on the notion that there should be “equal rights for all civilized men”, elite Africans argued that they had attained a cultural level comparable to that of the dominant European settlers and should therefore be exempt from the liquor ban. This struggle, which ended successfully in 1961, also highlights other important themes in the history of the emergent African elite in Southern Rhodesia, most notably its political tactics and consciousness. The quest for European liquor helped to hone political skills as well, as a number of individuals who participated in it later became important African nationalist leaders.

Between Diaspora and Homeland: The Study of Africa and the African Diaspora in the USA

The end of the Cold War resulted in a decline of one of its academic handmaidens, area studies, and a rise in other academic pursuits, including diaspora studies, among them African diaspora studies. Yet African diaspora studies is not new, but rather has a long genealogy, especially among the Western African diaspora, meaning the African diaspora in the Western world, in the Americas and Europe. Ideologically, the defining contribution of the Western African diaspora was a worldview that conceived of peoples of African descent not in ethnic, national, imperial, regional, or even continental terms, but in global ones. In the new academic dispensation, the study of peoples of African descent globally should build on this tradition and eschew particularism, exceptionalism, and national historiography in favor of a transnational, transcontinental, and transoceanic approach.

China, Africa and the Bandung Idea, Then and Now

What does China’s rise portend for Africa, and Africa’s place in the emerging, potentially Sino-centric, new world order? Will China’s engagements with Africa—economic and political—redound to the mutual benefit of both parties? Alternately, will Africa remain a downstream supplier of energy and raw materials, only now more and more to China? Put another way, does the road to African development run through China? Or will future writers, as others have done in the past in respect of Europe, be moved to essay on how China perpetuated Africa’s underdevelopment? These, today, are burning questions, much debated in African intellectual, political and policymaking circles, and also in Chinese ones. To pose the question in the language of another era, an era that may have implications for the current one, what role has the Bandung idea in contemporary Sino-African relations?

Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture

Nancy Abelmann’s book, The Intimate University, reveals stories of Korean American students at the University of IllinoisUrbana/Champaign, where she has been teaching for many years. She indicates that the American public image of Korean and other Asian Americans is that of model minorities whose racial characteristics do not have a negative effect on their academic achievements and socioeconomic mobility. But she shows that Korean American students, the largest ethnic group at the university, are socially segregated, which dogs the liberal promise of the university emphasizing the ideology of multiculturalism. The author points out that at the time she started the book project, a journalist contacted her to complete an article about Korean students’ ‘‘self-segregation’’ for Time magazine. However, in her view, racism and racial stereotypes are the main sources of Korean students’ social segregation at the university. She is not afraid to point out that the university administration is not concerned about Korean students’ social segregation, which contradicts the ideal of a multicultural education. Thus the main objective of the book is to show that Korean students at the University of Illinois cannot leave the their ethnic ‘‘comfort zone’’ due to racism and racial stereotypes. In addition, Ablemann also shows exceptions to stereotypical images of Asian Americans, associated with the model minority thesis, as ‘‘hardworking and successful,’’ and seeking ‘‘instrumental striving and materialism.’’ Through the voices of several students and some of their parents, she makes clear that both Korean students and their parents also stress the importance of a liberal education. As an anthropologist, Abelmann used ethnographic research as the major research technique for this book. She talked to the student informants about ‘‘how they managed their lives and studies in college; how they envisioned life after college; and when it mattered to them . . . how their families figured in their college lives’’ (p. 4). She took the intergenerational approach, analyzing stories of not only students, but also some of their parents. She took the transnational approach by looking at the parent generation’s history and educational aspirations back in Korea. Although she interviewed over fifty students for this book, each chapter focuses on each of several members of the Han extended family and a few other Korean students. By devoting four of the seven chapters to members of the Han family, including two children, their parents, their cousin and uncle, the author has made the book an intergenerational family study. While three chapters (Chapters Four through Six) respectively focus on each of the male members of the Han family, the last chapter introduces narratives of two immigrant women from the Han extended family to capture women’s concerns and gender issues. The author’s intergenerational and transnational approaches and her focus on family, class and gender bordering South Korea and the United States reflect her ongoing research interest in these topics, reflected in her previous publications. Abelmann is partly successful in dispelling stereotypes of Korean and other Asian Americans associated with the model minority image. Several studies have documented that Korean and other Asian immigrant parents emphasize their children’s achievement and success in school and push their children to choose science, law, medicine and business related to high-paying and high-status careers. These studies and journalistic stereotypes tend to give the general image that Asian immigrant parents and to a less extent Asian American students only emphasize the instrumental value of college education, failing to recognize the value of liberal studies. But this book shows that many Korean students and their parents do

The Struggle for Zimbabwe, Then and Now: Notes Toward a Deep History of the Current Crisis

The struggle for Zimbabwe is coterminus with the commencement of the Southern Rhodesian colonial project, which was part of the larger European scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century. Like everywhere else in Africa and beyond, colonialism in Southern Rhodesia centered on expropriation. That is, the expropriation of natural, mineral, and agricultural resources and the human labor that was needed to exploit those resources. This was not, of course, an enterprise that proceeded with the consent of the colonized. Colonialism—and the point bears emphasizing in the face of ongoing white-washing narratives to the contrary—was a violent process. Like African slavery in the Americas colonialism in Africa was imposed by violence and maintained by violence. The most potent symbol of European rule in Africa was not the vaunted schoolhouse of Christian missionaries, but the colonizer’s whip, that ubiquitous instrument that was everywhere deployed upon the colonized body—on the job, in the streets, in the prisons, even in the missionary schools and churches. This was indeed colonial slavery, as certain radicals took to calling it. The long-standing struggle for Zimbabwe, then, began as a struggle against terror, the systemic and systematic terror and violence of colonialism. This struggle was all the more vexed because Southern Rhodesia experienced colonialism of a special kind: settler colonialism. The influx of relatively large numbers of white settlers into the colony magnified the horrors of colonialism. White settler colonialism amplified

From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980

Americas ambivalent role in an African liberation struggle In November 1965, lan Smiths white minority government in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) made a unilateral declaration of independence, breaking with Great Britain. With a European population of a few hundred thousand dominating an African majority of several million, Rhodesias racial structure echoed the apartheid of neighboring South Africa. Smiths declaration sparked an escalating guerrilla war that claimed thousands of lives. Across the Atlantic, President Lyndon B. Johnson nervously watched events in Rhodesia, fearing that racial conflict abroad could inflame racial discord at home. Although Washington officially voiced concerns over human rights violations, an attitude of tolerance generally marked U.S. relations with the Rhodesian government: sanctions were imposed but not strictly enforced, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American mercenaries joined white Rhodesias side in battle with little to fear from U.S. laws. Despite such tacit U.S. support, Smiths regime fell in 1980, and the independent state of Zimbabwe was born. The first comprehensive account of American involvement in the war against Zimbabwe, this compelling work also explores how our relationship with Rhodesia shaped interracial dynarnics in the United States, and vice versa.