Nye tekster om svik: The Betrayal of Erasure // Afua Hirsch
Finst det noko større svik enn å bli viska ut frå historia? I det tredje essayet publisert i samarbeid med LitFestBergen og tidsskriftet Revista Abismo, utforskar Afua Hirsch etterdønningane av slaveriet.
I forkant av festivalen publiserer vi alle tre essayene på originalspråket på LitFests hjemmeside. For å lese norske versjoner, se vinduet.no. Og for essayene på spansk, se revistaabismo.com
The Betrayal of Erasure
By Afua Hirsch
There is an oral history of migration within the lineages of many black families in Europe, and mine is no exception. In 1944, my grandfather sailed from the Gold Coast, in West Africa, across infested ocean waters. It was treacherous journey – putting his life in the hands of a shipping company which had lost twenty four of its vessels in the War that continued to rage, including a passenger mail boat similar to the one he sailed on torpedoed without warning on the same route. He arrived in September, the summer developing the chilly bite of autumn, to find Britain consumed by War.
Before he could complete his journey, he had to spend weeks living in a rudimentary hut in an agricultural camp in Basingstoke, a small, heavily militarised market town in southern England, trying to hide his disappointment at the reality of this much lauded imperial motherland. “It is a great change for me; for we live in tents a few yards from the town and have to queue up for food and our bath,” he wrote in a letter to Cambridge University, where he was impatient to take up his studies. Coming from Aburi, a breezy village amongst lush mountains and valleys, renowned for its healing waters and temperate climate, the contrast must have been painful. But he never complained. Britain represented opportunity, even with the sacrifices involved in the War effort.
Besides, this was an effort with which my grandfather was familiar. 65,000 of his fellow countrymen were deployed in Asia under British command in 1944. The West African Division served Britain with such distinction in Burma, they achieved one of its rare victories on land. Meanwhile my grandmother’s hometown Takoradi had become one of the most important bases for the British Royal Air Force. On a coast lined with the forts that once imprisoned enslaved Africans, Ghanaians helped assemble almost 5000 aircraft that were then flown to Egypt, a vital base from which Britain fought to protect its control of the Suez Canal and Middle Eastern oil.
The Gold Coast’s war effort was, as the writer and journalist Howard French describes it “a clear case in which peoples of colour had in effect saved the colonizer’s bacon[1].” It was swiftly forgotten by the by jubilant British public. Just as the end of the Great War saw black troops forbidden from joining peace celebrations in 1919, so the contribution of black soldiers during WW2 fell quickly from whatever visibility it had achieved.[2]
My grandfather had been selected to study at Cambridge, so that he could return and serve as a colonial civil servant. The strangeness of cold and war-weary Britain he encountered in the 1940’s was mitigated by the deep well of knowledge he had spent his whole life accumulating. Missionaries from Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, England and Scotland had been announcing uninvited in his hometown for centuries. My grandfather had been educated by Methodists, affording him a pastor’s knowledge of the Bible, impeccable English, a deep affection for Chaucer, and an intimate knowledge of British history – the names of English monarchs, cities, major battles and laws.
The knowledge my grandfather possessed about his new home, he would discover, was held in profound asymmetry. While he knew so much about the British, they knew nothing about him. Worse than nothing, they regarded him with distressing ignorance, calling him names, making monkey sounds, and offering him differential treatment to his white peers. Even within the cloistered, imperial world of Cambridge University, he and the other African students found the terms of their tenure so punitive compared to white colonial students, they had to campaign to be able to afford books, and even the coal to put on the fire while reading them.[3]
Evidence of their perceived inferiority was everywhere. Even Aburi, my grandfather’s ancestral village, attracted the scholarly attention of Britain’s elites. The Scottish merchant and administrator Brodie Cruickshank for example wrote that “a dark impenetrable mystery seems to hang beneath the shade of these gloomy forests, fit abode for idolatry and cruel superstition.”
“Where could the human mind find a scene more calculated to impress it with superstitious awe, or to prepare it for the bloody rites of pagan worship,[4] Cruickshank asked. The British were as afraid of these rich natural ecosystems, as they were of the cultures that lived in symbiosis with them, seeing everywhere an opportunity to crush and remake in their own image, rather from which to learn.
“Gods always behave like the people who make them,” observed the African American author Zora Neale Hurston in her notes from Haiti, made while studying Haitian voodoo culture in the 1930’s. In its colonizing Africans, Britain decried their gods as cruel, bloody and barbarous, an appraisal which mirrored its view of Africans themselves. It sought to replace them with a Christian God who saw their potential for imitating whiteness. In towns like Aburi and across the African continent, missionary Christianity and education served as two prongs in one civilizing mission, because teaching Africans to assimilate into European norms and behaviours was not just desirable, it was holy. My grandfather’s culture and traditions, passed down by generations, even millennia of ancestors, was not just discouraged, punished, or even erased. It was aligned to the forces of evil itself.
Although I was born decades later in 1980’s Norway and raised in Britain, the remnants of this gaze misted the air my family and I breathed, lurking in our story like a ghost. In the time between the education of my grandfather, who died before I was born, and my own, the world changed beyond recognition. Ghana proudly led the charge of decolonization in Africa, becoming in 1957, the first black country to free itself from European colonial rule. The forced labour and punitive regimes of Empire were cast aside, sovereign parliaments and self-government installed in their place. And yet systems of power stayed the same. Economies dependent on raw exports collapsed with the price of their commodities. The pressures of migration propelled Africans further down the socioeconomic ladder in the countries in which they ended up, while they lived on what remained after sending remittances back home. If being black, an immigrant, and disproportionately impoverished by globalization penalized Africans, assimilation offered rewards. A reality that continues to this day.
***
When Britain voted to leave the European Union, it quickly became clear the British government had been caught completely unprepared. Not even David Cameron, the Prime Minister who had called the Referendum to pacify Eurosceptic voices in his own party, actually expected those voices to succeed. To say that the details of how Brexit could work were a mystery, would be a monumental understatement. Brexiteers, intoxicated with the fantasy of the UK as a plucky island set culturally and geographically apart, largely forgot the existence of a land border with the EU in Ireland. That Brexit could be transformed from a slogan into a reality sparked great controversy. Many believed it required an Act of Parliament. None more so than the British businesswoman, Gina Miller.
Miller, an attractive wealth manager who looked younger than her actual mid-50’s, launched a campaign to “End Brexit Chaos”, fact-checking false claims, and litigating for parliamentary oversight. These seemingly mundane demands triggered multiple threats to her life. One man was jailed for trying to pay people to run her over, and 24-hour security had to be installed in her home. In Miller, with her brown skin, Indian heritage, and Caribbean birth, right-wing Brexiteers had found a focal point for their belief that anti-patriotic, racial others were attempting to foil their native nationalist dream of change.[5]
Yet in her book Rise, Miller describes her childhood in British Guiana, now Guyana, where she was raised with an intense belief in Britain, one that likely exceeds that of many of her critics. Her family, like many schooled in an imperial system, was deeply attached to the British monarchy, both as a matter of Commonwealth membership and in terms of personal identity. And like many descendants of the colonized, Miller raised on the propaganda of Empire, creating an idealised perspective on Britishness. “As a child of the Commonwealth, I had been brought up to believe Great Britain was the promised land,” she writes, “a culture where the rule of law was observed and decency was embedded in the national fabric.[6]”
The colonized believed in Britain, because they were raised to. They were told, like my grandfather, that they came from “gloomy forests, fit abode for idolatry and cruel superstition.” A system that taught its subjects to internalize its superior gaze, enabling the resulting disdain for our non-European past to persist long after the collapse of Empire itself. “One felt that the West Indian of my generation was truly backward,” wrote Barbadian poet George Lamming. “For he was not only without this experience of freedom won; it was not even a vital force or need in his way of seeing himself and the world which imprisoned him.”
Like almost everything about colonial history, most British people are completely unaware of the ongoing legacy of this dynamic. It has been erased, along with the other, lasting effects of these racialised systems. As if to seal the deal, the figures who overcame extraordinary odds to reject this system, the self-loathing or self-imprisonment it generated, who could provide a blueprint for who to continue rejecting it today, find themselves equally erased from the modern consciousness, too.
***
To be erased is to be undone in time and memory. Before Zora Neale Hurston gathered oral histories in Haiti, the African American scholar’s attention was fixed closer to home, in Alabama. Here she sought out the story of the last known male survivor of the last known slave ship to arrive in the United States, the Clotilda, which sailed in 1860. Cudjo Lewis was reluctant to tell his story, but when he did, he revealed multitudes. He had born Oluale Kossola to a Yoruba family in West Africa, captured and sold into enslavement, and trafficked into American through the Middle Passage. Well after the end of the First World War, he was still mourning his bondage and displacement. ‘I lonely for my folks,’ he told her. For the photograph Hurston took of him, he wore his best suit but removed his shoes. ‘I want to look lak I in Affica,’ he told her, ‘cause dat where I want to be.’[7]
The system of transatlantic enslavement was such a violation of basic humanity, that it can only be seen as a betrayal. There is no parallel in history for an ideology that purports, with the legitimacy of a science, to designate people to a subspecies, to chattels, and to deny the very idea we each have feelings, dignity and dreams. Perhaps it is unsurprising that twentieth century America, built on the premise of such ideas, would have paid little attention to a man like Kossola – poor, black, and illiterate.
That it would deny the existence of Hurston, however, is an erasure of a more surprising magnitude. The anthropologist, essayist, novelist and author was a central character of the Harlem Renaissance, co-founding for example, the magazine Fire! alongside Langston Hughes. But in her lifetime, she struggled to find publishers for her work giving voice to the vernacular histories of black subjects. When she died, in poverty, she was buried in an unmarked grave, “in a field full of weeds”. The novelist Alice Walker resurrected her quite literally, obtaining a gravestone and insisting that others bear witness to the erasure of a woman she termed “a genius of the South”. “There are times,” Walker wrote, of her experience finding Zora Neale Hurston’s grave “when normal responses to grief, horror, and so on do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of emotion one feels.”[8]
The world we inhabit is, thanks largely to Alice Walker, the world of the Hurston Renaissance. Hurston frequents the syllabi of schools and universities in the US and beyond. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is now one of the most highly regarded in the entire American canon. Zora Neale Hurston has haunted me, from the first time I read her, with her rare gift for distilling the intergenerational pain of black women into lyrical, transcendent fiction. And yet I cannot unsee the symbolism of her last years, in a welfare home, none of her seven books in print, fading simultaneously from memory and from living. I cannot unlearn the knowledge that spent her life protecting black memory, was buried in an unmarked grave.
The double betrayal repeats itself, again and again. First, the stories of those imperilled and dehumanized by Empire and race, face oblivion. How many students at Cambridge university today know of my grandfather and his friends, the Africans who studied there, almost a century earlier, pleading for coal to heat bodies in shock at the harshness of winter. How many of us, their children and grandchildren, determined to keep their stories alive, will find platforms commensurate with their value?
The storyteller who protects that memory – so often a black woman - no matter the genius, historical stature or visibility at the time, ends up facing the same oblivion herself.
Most British people have heard of Mary Seacole. A Jamaican doctress and entrepreneur, she is now one of the most widely celebrated pioneers of Black British history. She travelled the world, a single, Black woman alone, throughout the mid nineteenth century, itself a feat worthy of notice. In Seacole’s case, her Jamaican and African heritage, skills she learned from enslaved maternal ancestors, and business skills set her truly apart. She treated British soldiers in Jamaica, and American gold prospectors in Panama, curing their cholera and healing their wounds. She rivalled Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War and rubbed shoulders with Queen Victoria’s royal court. She attempted to cement into the historical record by writing her own autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole, a bestseller in her lifetime.
Yet the book fell out of print and, with the exception of living testimonies that kept Seacole’s memory alive in Jamaica, out of the world’s consciousness for more than a century. Until two black British women, Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee, found and reprinted The Wonderful Adventures in 1984[9]. Like many of my generation, Seacole was a staple of the idea – basic but important – that in British history, we were there. Yet even I, who had read the book and researched Seacole’s life, did not know the names of Alexander and Dewjee, or appreciate the extent to which the memory of Seacole depended on their labour.
Precarity is embedded in our stories. Without memory, each generation must struggle from scratch, unaware and unequipped by the ideas left for us by our forebears. It’s a pattern of erasure that limits our progress towards a more equitable and truthful future, making it slow, repetitive and limited. Yet I am my grandfather’s granddaughter. Destined to plough forwards, even into hostile territory, believing education, learning and knowledge offers the potential for a better future. And this is perhaps the true betrayal. That I still know so much about them. And they still know so little about us.
Kilder:
[1] French, Howard W, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (pp. 26-27). (Function). Kindle Edition.
[2] Bourne, Stephen, Under Fire – Black Britain in Wartime 1939-45, The History Press: 2020
[3] Hirsch, Afua, Brit(ish): on Race, Identity and Belonging, Jonathan Cape: 2018
[4] Cruickshank, Brodie, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, Including an Account of the Native Tribes and Their Intercourse with Europeans, Hurst and Blackett, London: 1853, 2-8.
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/24/gina-miller-the-woman-who-took-on-the-uk-government-and-won-twice
[6] Hirsch, Afua, Rise by Gina Miller Review: unapologetic and impatient to make a difference, The Guardian, 23.08.18 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/23/rise-gina-miller-review-woman-defeated-government-article-50
[7] Hurston, Zora Neale, Barracoon, New York, Amistad: 2018, p. 113.
[8] Walker, Alice Walker, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," Ms. Magazine, March 1975, pp. 74- 89.
[9] Davis, C. 'Mary Seacole'. [Review of the book Wonderful adventures of Mrs. Seacole in many lands]. New Statesman, 107, 39. 1984