New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  I explained that this process had not taken place in the same way in every single Cuban family. The January 1959 victory of the revolutionary movement made the dream of equal opportunities in all spheres of social life come true, but the possibility of identifying opportunities and taking advantage of them was directly connected to individual accumulation of experience. At the family level, lifestyles and ways of being are simply absorbed and reproduced, and it is not at all easy to alter them, or escape from the intertwined network of habits in a close social environment. That is why, since the very first day and the very first actions, the emancipating endeavour of the Revolution was aimed at the social setting, so as to transform people’s living conditions, both materially and spiritually.

  The Revolution, in a matter of barely two years, demolished the economic, judicial and political foundations upon which 400 years of slavery were so staunchly built, after which those original symbols, the shackle and the clamp, had been replaced by marginalization and exclusion from the social fabric for a majority made up of all ethnic groups and all skin colors. After the collapse of Batista’s tyranny, that marginalization and the instruments of discrimination were suppressed; but stereotypes and biases are way too old and deep, and they continued by being transferred through the phenomena of social osmosis inherent to all human society, and settled into general consciousness because of the persistent inertia at the bottom of the pool, where things were less susceptible to the changes brought about by the swift currents on the surface.

  These stereotypes and biases—finding different expression in both those discriminated against and those doing the discriminating—link action and reaction in a way that can only be uprooted by making a revolution within the revolution itself in a permanent and conscious way, so that ever more increasingly ethical values, supported by solid education, wide culture, and a steady spirit of justice, may be the compass guiding the behavior of the people.

  Since the very beginning of the forging of Cuban nationality, suicides, revolts, runaways, and rebel hideouts in the woods bear witness to our resistance against all manner of enslavement. However, we need to understand that ever since the basic freedoms were gained five decades ago, the overcoming of racial discrimination has been a lengthy process—with predictable periods where there were setbacks, sustained in the midst of radical social transformation and consolidated over time.

  So I wrapped up that political-entrepreneurial conversation in London with an immodest but very truthful assertion: I am the Cuban Revolution, I am an outcome of the process started in the sixteenth century when, weighed down with chains in the lower decks of the slave ships, brutally dropped into their own excrement, and thrown overboard as garbage when they were on the point of death, more than a million African men and women arrived upon this island in order to keep on writing a history in which their offspring—all Cubans today, without any qualifying prefixes whatsoever—keep on with our struggles to win the fullest justice ever.

  Andrea Rosario-Gborie

  An African-American television and film producer and reporter in both the US and Africa, she was born in France, and has travelled extensively throughout the US, Europe and Africa. She studied Sociology at Boston University and received a BSc. Throughout her career she has worked for organisations including Reuters News Service, Voice of America, 20th Century Fox and Disney. Among other achievements, she acted as talent coordinator for the cultural festival PANAFEST ’94 in Ghana, which brought together musicians, performing artists, writers and intellectuals from the African continent and the diaspora. During the 1990s she worked as a television producer/reporter covering the war in Sierra Leone continuously from 1995 to 1998, and the issues and events associated with that conflict. She currently resides in Washington, DC, where she works as a software engineer.

  1992

  As has so often happened, the police have assaulted and beaten yet another Black man to within an inch of his life and gotten away with it. In this case, the police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted on 29 April 1992 by an all-White jury in nearly all-White Simi Valley, California. They were cleared of committing any crime at all, although the incident had been filmed by a civilian and sent to a local television station, the footage clearly showing King being beaten repeatedly during his arrest for speeding. The news of the jury’s decision caused an immediate response in the predominately Black community of Watts that quickly spread into the Black and Latino communities in and around the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

  Coincidentally, eight thousand miles away in the tiny country of Sierra Leone, another uprising had taken shape, although I didn’t know it at time. I lived in another universe that day, so far away from what happened in West Africa and yet so close to the seeming endless suffering for people of African descent. I didn’t yet know that for me the Los Angeles riots marked the start of what would be the most important part of my life journey.

  For the first time in American history, rioting was not confined to an area of the city that could be contained. The mobile telephone revolution and the twenty-four-hour news cycle of cable television news had changed the way people communicated, no longer relying on the media of the past—the television news hour, newspapers, landline telephones—to keep informed about what was happening. The cell-phone generation made it possible to communicate instantly with anyone, no matter their location. With access to round-the-clock news people could watch and communicate in real time as the riot grew and spread throughout the county of Los Angeles. From the Wilshire District to the San Fernando Valley, the general population didn’t have to be at home to get a phone call. The cellular revolution had begun and this was one of its first major unintended consequences.

  As people in Los Angeles began calling friends and family, telling them to come to X location to get a new refrigerator, television, and so on, news helicopters hovered overhead and broadcast the looting and mayhem. Law enforcement had no idea how to respond. The previously established policing policies of surrounding and controlling rioters in their immediate location, which had been very successful in the past, were powerless against this new threat. Riots broke out in pockets all over the city of Los Angeles, even moving into Beverly Hills.

  It was on that day that I realized I was never going to be successful in Hollywood. Looking back, I see that I was lacking so many things, in addition to facing the institutionalized racism that was still so prevalent in the Hollywood system.

  My final job in the Hollywood system was working at 20th Century Fox in the music department as the music licensing coordinator. There is one event that sticks out in my mind that happened while the studio was producing The Five Heartbeats, a film by African-American director Robert Townsend. The vice president of the department, Elliot Lurie, had to fire the composer on the film and to replace him they chose Stanley Clarke, a great bassist, composer and innovator who, with classically-trained jazz pianist Chick Corea, had formed one of the greatest jazz-fusion groups of all time, Return to Forever. I absolutely adored Clarke’s music and respected his talent. He was entirely capable of composing musical scores for the movies, but it was, and still is, an uphill battle for Black composers to get work in Hollywood. A chosen few, and none of them people of color, got most of the composing work in the Hollywood system—no matter which studio produced the film or television series. A meeting had been organized outside my office one day where several executives spent much of the time trading innuendos and jokes about Black people—including the director Townsend and the film’s producer, Loretha C. Jones—“not having what it takes” to make a successful Hollywood film, with no regard for the fact that I was sitting close by and could hear every word. I was invisible to them, like The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Anyway, Jones and Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats was a big success and the soundtrack and musical score by Clarke was even more successful. I wonder who is laughing now?

  The 2015 hack attack of Sony Pictures and the racist emails that were revealed from two of its t
op executives shows that little had changed in Hollywood since 1992.

  There were many hit television shows and films being produced on the 20th Century Fox lot at that time. LA Law, Doogie Howser MD, The Tracy Ullman Show and The Simpsons were just getting started, along with the show that I worked on most, In Living Color. My job was to clear music that was used on these shows, and In Living Color used more music from African-American recording artists than any show, with the exception of Soul Train, and made so many people famous. The Wayans Brothers and sisters, Jennifer Lopez, Rosie Perez, and Jim Carrey all became superstars because of this show and I am proud to have been a small part of making that happen.

  Still, Hollywood had a long way to go when it came to diversity behind the scenes for film and television making. I was moving up in the Music Department. I had my own office, which had actually been Marilyn Monroe’s dressing-room back in the 1960s. Had I stayed the course, I probably would have continued to grow there, but somehow I knew that my destiny lay elsewhere. I was one of maybe six African Americans working on the lot at 20th Century Fox in some area of television or film production. There were three of us in the music department; the others were working in human resources or as executive assistants. There were no producers, directors, script supervisors, development executives that were Black people. No Black people in the Film Workers Unions were the grips and gaffers or light and sound professionals either. The lot was a union house and one had to be sponsored to get into the union. I didn’t see that changing at all in the future.

  So let’s just admit that I had a chip on my shoulder when the Rodney King incident happened and during the trial of the police officers. But one thing is for sure, it is the advent of the digital age that changed everything. Now that people had their own affordable video equipment for the first time the world could see what we knew was happening to Black and Latino people at the hands of the police on national television.

  When the riots started after the trial acquitted the police officers who were charged with Rodney King’s assault, I was at work. The television was on in the conference room and there was a news helicopter circling the intersection where poor Reginald Denny, a white construction truck driver, was pulled from the cab of his vehicle during the riots and was being beaten in the street. Luckily for him, some compassionate Black folk in the neighborhood protected him from the mob. The last thing I wanted was for any innocent person to be hurt as a result of the verdict in the case, but that is indeed what happens when a system of justice breaks down. People lose faith in it and bad things happen.

  That was the day I quit my job at 20th Century Fox. I just quit.

  I remember watching the mayhem on the television in the conference room, and my crazy boss—who was known for periodically losing his temper and tearing up his office when something pissed him off—saying to me that I was not like those people on the screen, I was different. The whole weight of institutionalized racism suddenly just bore down on me. I had had enough. I could not understand how this man who behaved so inappropriately could manage to keep his job when no Black person could ever have got away with the things he did at work. After two years I had had more than enough.

  The studios all closed early that day, as reports of rioters moving up Wilshire Boulevard toward Beverly Hills persisted. As I left the lot and turned onto Century Park West, I saw young Black people in cars with signs that read “No Justice, No Peace!” Other Black people in their cars were thrusting up fists in the Black Power sign as a show of solidarity, while White people started putting up the tops on their convertibles and rolling up their windows. I drove home through the canyon roads to avoid the traffic. When I reached Benedict Canyon I was struck by the fact that the very wealthy people who lived at the top of the passes were all out in their gardens and streets, casually watching the city burn, so totally unafraid from that vantage point.

  I made it home to Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley, and that area seemed to be without incident until later that evening, when we began to hear reports on the news that rioting was breaking out in the San Fernando Valley as well.

  I didn’t then know of the extraordinary coincidence of events unfolding that very day at the same time: that some eight thousand miles away the tiny country of Sierra Leone in West Africa, also founded in slavery, was being violently transformed, just like Los Angeles. A group of young army officers, most of them in their twenties, had overthrown the deeply corrupt and indifferent government that offered them very little in the way of economic opportunity or justice. These young men—like the young men rioting in Los Angeles—had lost faith in a system founded in slavery and colonialism. Many of the African Americans in Los Angeles had arrived after the 1861–65 American Civil War and during the Jim Crow era, when racial segregation was enshrined in law in the Southern US, and saw California as a land of possible opportunity, just as many repatriated enslaved Africans saw Freetown, Sierra Leone, as a land of opportunity in a world that loathed people of African descent.

  When I arrived in Sierra Leone two years later I would find a country that had been transformed by rebellious young Black men. It was certainly not perfect, but they had managed to create something never seen before on the African continent: the possibility of change.

  1992 would pave the way for so many of my future experiences. I felt deeply that there was so much more that could add meaning in my life. And, indeed, so many things were to happen in 1992 that I could never have imagined, from a friendship with Stevie Wonder to the most important and meaningful relationships in my life. Just from that friendship with Stevie Wonder I would come to travel throughout Africa, to Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and eventually to Sierra Leone.

  But it was 1992 that pointed me towards all my future milestones. It was also the year that Daughters of Africa was first published—a year that transformed my life to one filled with adventure, romance, trauma, and countless other happenings, experiences and emotions that I have yet to write about. A year that was to lead to stories still untold, and as Maya Angelou said in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

  Marina Salandy-Brown

  Now living in Trinidad, where she was born, she drew on her background in publishing in the UK, as well as 20 years as an editor and senior manager in BBC Radio, to found in 2011 the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, the annual literary festival that has revitalised the world of Caribbean literature. Since 2005 she has also contributed a weekly commentary column to the Trinidad and Tobago Newsday. She has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Westminster and the University of the West Indies in recognition of her work over the years as a prize-winning journalist, programme editor and senior manager dedicated to the development of culture and the arts. She is a member of the British Council Arts Advisory Committee and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

  Lost Daughter of Africa

  Massa! Massa! Rua ina zua.

  The strange words, fragments of a forgotten language, fall off the tongue of my ninety-seven-year-old mother. We are sitting at the breakfast table on the patio of our home in Cascade on the southern Caribbean island of Trinidad, reminiscing.

  Massa! Massa! The rain’s coming.

  It is all that my mother remembers of the Hausa she heard spoken during the first seven years of her life while growing up in northern Nigeria. But the memories of her birthplace are vivid, unlike the events of yesterday or maybe even five minutes ago. The few faded, now sepia-coloured photographs that have endured from the early 1920s help me visualise her in that environment, but they do not contain the menacing hyenas, the curious giraffes or other frightening wild animals that are most etched in that memory of early childhood.

  In the 1980s while back in Trinidad and visiting my nonagenarian grandmother, for the last time before she died, as it turned out, the old, pale-skinned lady, whose paper-thin, brown-spotted face, arms and hands bore the proof of a lifetime of damage from sun-exposure, br
oke out in a peel of laughter. I had boasted to her about my sojourn in Ghana. I too had been to Africa.

  As we say here, mouth open, story jump out. My grandmother regaled us in fluent Hausa with tales of her time on that forbidden continent. My uncle and his family, with whom she lived, were as amazed as I was by this new bit of history, by the acknowledgement, finally, that my grandmother had an African past.

  She had been a constant in my life until the age of seventeen when I left Trinidad for life in London. She had never revealed that she spoke any language other than English, French [patois] and Spanish. She taught me to count in those three European tongues before I went to school at the age of four; the rest was her closely guarded secret.

  All questions about the finely worked, brightly coloured leather artefacts that hung in the privacy of her and Grandpa’s bedroom, away from prying eyes, were ignored. The intriguing, large, ivory-coloured ostrich eggs that sat in simple mountings on her tallboy, next to her glass bottles of scent; the two, no-longer-labelled rum bottles, full to the neck with gold dust, that stood mysteriously on the wooden ledge; the fly chasers with tails of silky, shiny feathers that my child’s eyes had never seen elsewhere on my island were too much of a draw for me, even though they were out of bounds. I would sneak in whenever I could to feast my eyes. From the time I became aware of them until I was aged seven when my grandfather died and mysteriously they all disappeared, I tried in my childish way to know more about these extraordinary objects. I was always diverted, my questions left unanswered by my grandfather. My grandmother berated me for being too curious and warned of the dangers of asking too many questions. Children should be seen and not heard. That thick leather strap named Toby that my grandfather kept within easy reach to right any childhood wrong kept my tongue in check, but not my fascination with the provenance of those objects.