Thread by @negrosubversive

I've been thinking a lot about the idea that African Americans have lost our African heritage. And, it is based on the expectation that said heritage is supposed to be come with a giant, flashing neon sign...

...An example from my own life would be boiled peanuts. I've eaten them all my life. My grandmother used to make them in a pressure cooker on the stove. I just thought of them as a "southern" maybe a "southern Black" thing...

...One day when I was in college, I was riding back to college with two Nigerian classmates, I mentioned that back where I came from, South Carolina, we boiled peanuts one guy exclaimed: "You eat boiled peanuts in America!?!?"...

...Turns out, boiled peanuts are a common street food in Nigeria and Ghana, beginning in the 16th century when they replaced the Bambara groundnut as a boiled staple...

...My grandmother never held me aloft as a young child and said: "Behold, the only thing greater than yourself. And now, we will eat the boiled peanut as did our African ancestors," because she didn't know, she just knew it as part of her Black heritage...

...In South Carolina, there is a tradition of "root" (pronounced like foot) magic. I came to know of this for the first time when I was a young child and overheard the adults raising hell because the pastor had preached against such supernatural practices...

...Frederick Douglass said an old man gave him a bag of roots which he was supposed to carry around and that if he did so, no White man would ever beat him again. Well, he didn't really believe it, but he tried it anyway...

...The next time a sadistic White bastard tried to beat our hero, something blew in from the east and told Douglass that somebody was gonna catch an ass kicking, but it wasn't gonna be him. He ended up beating the shit out of his "master." And it seems the root did its job...

...This moment in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is not mentioned as containing an African survival, nor are any of the other Black American supernatural traditions. But, they certainly do...

...Blues songs often share refrains, one common refrain is: "I'm going back down to old Kansas soon, to bring back my second cousin, little John the Conqueroo" it sounds like a name as sung, but they're referencing High John the Conqueror root...

...John the Conqueror root is described as a plant whose root when dried resembles "the testicles of a dark skinned man." High John the Conqueror is a traditional Afro-American folk hero, a captured African prince...

...John outsmarted Whites and the devil himself in a series of stories, before depositing his power into the root bearing his name and flying back to Africa...

...(thread continued) I listened to the Blues and I ate boiled peanuts, nothing about either of these activities immediately presented themselves to me as "African" on its face. How could it have initially? I knew nothing about African culture...

...For one thing, there is not one African culture, there are thousands, each one capable of supporting its own field of deep study. How exactly would one expect to know if one's culture reflects Africanity if all one knows is the stereotypes one sees on televsion?...

...On top of that, Black Americans are not the heirs to a single African culture, but dozens from west and central Africa, we are Igbo, we are Hausa, we are Asante, we are Bakongo, we are Dahomey, we are Benin, I could go on...

...On top of that, we were not all removed at the same time. The slave trade began in the 1600s and ended in the 1800s, a two hundred year period during which we were being stolen away and brought here. The cultures we were stolen from weren't static...

...Think about how much different the culture of France in 1618 would be from the culture of France in 1818, African cultures are no different, so you have a massive number of moving indicators all coming together thousands of miles away over the course of centuries...

...How exactly does one expect to untangle this incredibly complex process without study? There are people who have dedicated their careers to doing so, they write books, which all should read before proclaiming what we do or do not have...

...Next we have the Afro-American nativist posture: "I don't need to go digging for an African past, I have my own culture in America." Where do you suppose that culture came from?...

...The idea that Black Americans came to America and created a new culture out of whole cloth betrays a basic misunderstanding of how culture works. Culture develops by taking what you have and building on it. There is no pure, autonomous creativity...

...Take rap for instance. Rapping comes from a tradition of rhythmic speaking and linguistic virtuoisity that can be found throughout Black American history and goes back to the Griots of West Africa who told stories accompanied by drums...

...Listen to old gospel quartets, sometimes they will drop away the harmonic elements of their instrumentation and just tell part of a biblical story over a percussive rhythm with a semi-breathless intonation...

...And of course we have the "talking blues" where the singer just talks over percussive guitar strumming, I would argue both of these are precursors to rap, which show a tradition begun in West Africa and translated into contemporary culture...

...On top of that, rap samples a lot of soul music, soul music is a fusion of rhythm and blues/blues and gospel, gospel grows out of the spirituals our ancestors created when they first got here from Africa, and blues comes out of the field hollers created at the same time...

...All of this begs the question: If you have not studied West African culture, or Black American culture in any depth beyond what came on the radio last week: HOW EXACTLY THE HELL WOULD YOU EXPECT TO KNOW IF WE'VE PRESERVED ANY OF OUR AFRICAN CULTURE OR NOT?!?!...

...Another major influence which leads us to assume we've lost our culture is the longstanding, now outdated, scholarly assumption that the middle passage was so traumatic that we must have lost our culture. Which makes no sense in terms of how culture actually works...

...I would expect a group of people who have experienced a horror of such striking magnitude to cling more tightly to their culture, not abandon it. I think this also reflects the unspoken assumption that Africans and their culture are/were not "deep."..

...Now it is generally understood that as soon as Africans got to America, they sought to make things as much like home as possible. They made drums, they sang their songs, they set about trying to figure out which plants they could use to curse and poison the Whites...

...But yeah, back to what I said about how culture builds upon culture, every Black American cultural expression has an antecedent and can be shown in a chain going back to the beginning, why should we suppose this chain to have begun in Charleston harbor?...

...The basic assumption should be that everything that makes us different and unique goes back to Africa, because that's how culture works, you build and transform what you have. And in the beginning, we had Africa...

...There are scholars who examine Afro-American patterns of movement and vocalization, the practice of "teeth sucking" that so many of us got knocked in the mouth for as kids has been revealed in the scholarship as a West African survival...

...As has the classic "side-eye." Moreover, one of the reasons that Whites find themselves hopelessly imitating our speech is our tonality and flow, African languages and speech patterns have been found to have a high degree of tonality...

...But again, even where you don't have the scholarship. Once you understand that humans don't create culture out of thin air, you need only to look at how different we remain from the White man after four centuries to recognize we must have brought something with us...

...The default should therefore not be: "What a shame that we didn't preserve any of our African heritage." It should be "Let me study African-American and African cultures to see how they intersect." Ashe.

“Those who say it can’t be done are frequently interrupted by others doing it.”- James Baldwin
Thenegrosubversive.com