Al-Ahram Weekly 30 March - 5 April 2000 Issue No. 475
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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	Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons

Through African eyes

By Gamal Nkrumah

Israel as the West betrays
Its murdered, mocked, and damned,
Becomes the shock of troops of two knaves
Who steal the dark man's land

Beware, white world, that great black hand
Which Nasser's power waves
Grasps hard the concentrated hate
Of myriad million slaves

W E B Du Bois
December, 1956

There is no end to the symbolism and surprises that Egypt, ancient and contemporary, holds for African Americans. To some, Egypt is an obsession, to others a way of life.

In a beautiful Giza apartment overlooking the Nile, we were sipping tea from glasses, "the Egyptian way," my friend said, stirring a sprig of mint and slipping another teaspoon full of sugar into his glass. His cook, a Nubian who had worked with his mother many years ago in the very same apartment, had prepared us a hearty meal which featured my friend's favourite Egyptian dishes -- stuffed grape leaves, a stew of okra and mutton, rice cooked the Egyptian way, and Umm Ali, a bread and butter pudding topped with nuts, shredded coconut and raisins.

What's in a name? My friend's name is David Graham Du Bois. He is the son of Shirley Graham Du Bois, who was the wife of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the effective initiator of the pan-Africanist movement, America's most celebrated black historian and sociologist, and the first African American to be awarded a PhD degree. David spent the most exciting and rewarding years of his life in Egypt. Now 75, he visits the country on average twice a year. He reminisces about the Cairo he came to love with a passion in the 1960s. David Du Bois's novel And Bid Him Sing was set in Cairo, perhaps the only novel written by an African American and focusing on the life of African Americans in the heady 1960s.

So what is it about Egypt that so attracted David? "Maybe it was my then newfound ability to participate in an active and meaningful way. As a journalist, I could write whatever I wanted, which I couldn't in the United States at the time. Those, you remember, were the McCarthy years. I couldn't write what I wrote in the mainstream media and I couldn't even fully participate in leftist activism in the US. I had just got thrown out of the Communist Party in the US because of my insistence on the primacy of race and colour. They didn't accept that line then. In Egypt, I came to play a constructive role. I was given a free hand to partake in the development of English language publication at the time."

David Du Bois says that he tremendously enjoyed working for The Egyptian Gazette, the Middle East News Agency and Radio Cairo. He equally enjoyed teaching at Cairo University.

A spiritual homeland: Egypt's African American visitors include, clockwise from far left, Malcolm X; Lionel Richie; Louis Armstrong; Mohamed Ali, formerly Cassius Clay; Shirley Graham Du Bois

Born in Seattle, Washington, David himself first visited Cairo in October 1960 and stayed until 1972, when he left the country to study in China. He returned to live here again and for much of the 1980s and early 1990s divided his time between Egypt and the United States, where he teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is now working on his memoirs, which begin with his departure from the US and his new life in Nasser's Egypt. He is very excited about the Ministry of Culture's plan to translate W E B Du Bois's magnum opus, The Souls of Black Folks, for the first time into Arabic. "This is part of a series of globally significant works that the government plans to translate," David Du Bois explains. The introduction to the Arabic edition of The Souls of Black Folks is written by W E B Du Bois.

Du Bois senior visited Egypt once, on his way back to Accra, Ghana, after a visit to Romania in 1962. He never got to meet Egypt's late president Gamal Abdel-Nasser in person, but his widow, Shirley, did meet Nasser at an Afro-Asian women's conference convened in Cairo. Ironically, she was representing Ghana, not America. Toward the end of his life, W E B Du Bois had renounced his American citizenship and taken up Ghanaian nationality. He spent the last few years of his life in Ghana and died at his home in Accra. It was after the February 1966 coup d'état that overthrew the Nkrumah government that his widow left Ghana to take up residence in Nasser's Egypt. Shirley loved the apartment in the Farid Al-Atrash building, a Cairo landmark for as long as it remained the city's tallest building.

"Egypt has been renewing my residence permit and work visa here for nothing -- merely because they know who I am and appreciate what I am doing. Egypt, too, is Africa," Mrs Du Bois wrote in July 1970 to her friend Kwame Nkrumah, then living in exile in Conakry, Guinea. She was grateful that Egypt had offered her sanctuary at a critical moment of her life. She realised that it was a difficult time for Egypt itself, which was experiencing the painful aftereffects of the 1967 War. "I was with her most of the time during the last year of her life, when she was hospitalised in Beijing. I came back frequently to Cairo and then returned to be with her in Beijing," David mused. "She left Egypt for the last time in the Christmas of 1976."

Egypt has changed beyond recognition since then, and so has the lot of African Americans. African American hairstyles quickly come into vogue on Cairene streets, and African American street fashion is popular among a broad swathe of Egypt's youth. But attitudes are changing, especially among the children of the country's wealthy elites. Some have now picked up a few of the derogatory terms used against blacks in the US. Perhaps it is the negative influence of Hollywood?

In June 1964, the legendary Malcolm X founded the Organisation of African American Unity (OAAU). Shortly afterwards, Malcolm X went on an extensive tour of Africa and the Middle East, beginning with a visit to Cairo, where the second summit meeting of the Organisation of African Unity was being convened from 17 to 21 July 1964. Malcolm's main aim was to highlight racial problems in America at the time. During his welcoming address, Nasser made specific reference to the condition of African Americans, and hailed the then recently passed Civil Rights Act of 1964. Malcolm X was accepted as an observer at the OAU summit and in this capacity was permitted to submit an eight-page memorandum urging African support for the African American civil rights struggle. He urged African leaders to internationalise the plight of African Americans and bring the issue before the UN. Malcolm delivered his memorandum on 17 July, a day before what later became known as the "Harlem riots", which rocked New York that summer. African American director Spike Lee filmed most of the Middle Eastern scenes, including many Hajj shots, of his film Malcolm X in Egypt, but the symbolic significance of Malcolm X's visit hardly featured.

Then, of course, there are other less internationally renowned, perfectly ordinary, African Americans who have the same infatuation with Egypt. Take my friend Karen, from Oakland, California. We met on the Internet a couple of years ago, and discovered a mutual passion for Ancient Egypt, especially the pre-dynastic and early dynastic periods. Karen has been visiting Egypt regularly for over a decade now, and her fascination with the country has not subsided. In the past couple of years she has been here on average twice or thrice a year. She comes in all seasons, and Aswan is her favourite city. "Don't laugh at me, but I feel it is a powerful metaphysical force that attracts me to this place, and pulls me, like with the full force of a magnet," she hesitatingly explains. Every time she returns, she learns something new and loves Egypt, KMT as she calls it, more. Karen cannot stay in Egypt longer than two weeks at a time because she must take care of her 36-year-old daughter Kim, who is terminally ill. But she saves up and makes sure that she returns year after year.

Manu Ampim, a historian specialising in Ancient Egypt at the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society, California, has conducted independent research on ancient Egypt and is a frequent visitor to Egypt. He lectures about KMT, or Ancient Egypt, in the US and when I met him in California he outlined some of the theories he elaborates in his Egypt As A Black Civilisation: The Counter School, published in 1992. This work, he explains, was the first part of his two-volume Critical Issues in the Current Africentric Movement. He returns to Egypt regularly because he believes that its ancient treasures are central to his cultural identity as an Africentrist in America today.

Another outspoken Africentrist closely associated with Egypt is Dr Yosef Ben Jochanan, popularly known as Dr Ben, who has lived with his Egyptian wife near his beloved Giza Pyramids for the past four decades. He speaks passionately of the importance of celebrating Africa's past as embodied in Ancient Egyptian and Nubian remains. The scholar, who flies to the US at least once a year, was until quite recently one of the most popular public speakers on the glories of Africa's, and Egypt's, past. Born in 1917, he is a prolific writer; his most widely-read works include Africa: Mother of 'Western Civilisation' (1971) and Black Man of the Nile and His Family (1972).

It is in part because of the works of Manu Ampim, Dr Ben and others that many African Americans have flocked to Egypt in the past few decades to rediscover their historical roots. There are now several tour operators and travel agencies that cater specifically to African Americans interested in Egypt. Akbar Mohamed, of the Nation of Islam, is a frequent visitor to Egypt who runs one such travel agencies from St Louis, Missouri. He brings in ever increasing numbers of African Americans, not all of whom are associated with the Nation of Islam. "It is a growing market, and we target the youth and the elderly who want to have the trip of a lifetime, and perhaps come again next year," he explained.

Then of course, there are African Americans like David Snipes, who are not particularly political in an activist sense. David moved to Cairo from New York in 1994, and he does not see himself moving back to the States permanently in the foreseeable future. After a spell at Al-Ahram Weekly, he now edits Sports and Fitness and He magazine. He first came to Egypt for adventure and fun. He is by no means religious, yet he was inspired enough to live in Cairo's popular Al-Wayli district for a couple of years and eventually convert to Islam. His experience is fairly typical of many African-Americans who have frequented Egypt over the past four decades and made Cairo their home. "That experience of living in Al-Wayli among ordinary Egyptians was the best thing I could have done. The poorer Egyptians are more down to earth and practically colour-blind. I was living among families some of whose members were much darker than I was. So you had a brother who was real dark and another who was white, and all shades in between." That, in a nutshell, is partly why many African Americans feel at home in Egypt. In this respect, Egypt is nothing like the US.

So why does David Snipes, like so many other African Americans, stay on? He thinks for a minute: "Here, more than in the US, you are judged by your abilities, rather than your colour. Yes, there might be some racial prejudice, but it is on a much lesser scale than in the US. Here I don't stick out too much in the crowd. I blend in, and when I am with white Americans, people assume that I am their Egyptian or Sudanese tour guide. One is constantly conscious of colour in the US. In Egypt, one is not constantly reminded of being black."

Indeed, this seems to be the recurring theme of African Americans in Egypt. Whether casual visitors or old-timers, African Americans feel at home in Egypt. "Cairo is probably one of the best examples for the American Negro. More so than any other city on the African continent, the people of Cairo look like American Negroes -- in the sense that we have all complexions, we range from the darkest black to lightest light, and here in Cairo, it is the same thing; and throughout Egypt, it is the same thing. All of the complexions are blended together here in a truly harmonious society. You know, if ever a people should know how to practice brotherhood, it is the American Negro and it is the people of Egypt. Negroes just can't judge each other according to colour, because we are all colours, and all complexions." So spoke Malcolm X in Cairo in 1964.

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