Toward an African integration

JON ARIZTIMUÑO/Adelante Embracing her African heritage has been an intricate journey for Adelante founding writer Sara Nso, who lives in Madrid.

By Sara Nso
Adelante contributor

The prestigious U.S. philosopher and Africanist Molefi K. Asante responded to the challenge of an attendee at the Fourth International African Congress in Barcelona, Spain, with a simple and defiant affirmation: “Well, if you don’t want to be an African, then you’re not.”
With these words, the father of the theory of Afrocentrism, which proposes a rediscovery of history, philosophy and the arts with the African continent as a reference, put on the table not just the cards but the whole deck of the many identities that comprise all of humanity.
Asante introduced, moreover, the element of human will, which has no inherent reason to embrace the entire spectrum of identities that are present in a person, sometimes for the simple fact of having been born here or there.
The daughter of an African of the diaspora and a Spanish mother, for years I’ve carried the banner for the need to integrate our identites, instead of ignoring those that are less manifest in our daily lives, in order to transcend our social being and open ourselves to what until that moment was “the other,” the different one, the one with whom we’ve never had anything in common.
But the choice of a concrete identity is not something gratuitous, nor lacking in significance.
An abundance of U.S. blacks call themselves Africans, seeking a reconciliation with a glorious classical history beyond the degradation to which they were subjected for centuries, as slaves and later as second-class citizens. In contrast, many of the inhabitants of the Spanish-controlled Canary Islands, on the west coast of Africa, identify more with their Spanish and, by extension, European identity, and have difficulty in accepting their African identity.
Blackness, then, is nothing more than another one of the multiple identities that can define a Hispanic in this world. But from there one cannot participate in the realities of the African world, unless that is one’s choice — as Asante says, “to be an African.”
The discovery and confirmation of my African heritage has been one of the most emotional and inspirational journeys in my search for my authentic self. As Afro-Uruguayan poet Cristina Rodríguez Cabral told me a few years ago, having been born in a white society, she had to accept a variety of prejudices against blacks that she wasn’t liberated from until her first trip to Brazil. My experience has been similar to hers, only that the first contact I had with the black community was in the United States.
Recalling some very concrete experiences that I, as a black Hispanic, had to confront during my stay as a student in Columbia, three years ago, I remember how strange the reaction of some black people seemed to me when, after exchanging their first words with me, they realized that I was not African-American, but Hispanic (because the simple fact of speaking Spanish always identified me more with Hispanics than with Europeans). It was as if they felt that I had committed some sort of faux pas and, although I never felt rejected, I did feel that they put a discrete distance between us. Something that seemed to me natural, given that I couldn’t participate in many of the experiences of their people.
In this sense, I ask myself sometimes the reason for this distance that the African-American community has established with black Latin Americans, because they are by definition Afro-Americans as well. And why, in spite of that fact, the Hispanic presence has had to grow at an overwhelming pace in this country before the possibility of integrating these two communities could even be considered.
I realize that many obstacles stand in the way of this opening to integration, such as the obvious one of the language barrier. Another one is the difficulty of some U.S. African-Americans in trusting those who don’t share their historical burden — and a lack of recognition that Afro-Latin Americans in fact do share the historical bond of slavery.
For Hispanics on the other hand, whose history is lost in a rich mestizaje, integrating the African identity can seem of remote significance. But choosing to embrace the cultural universe of their forgotten heritage can, even without their realization, change the essence of who they are.
In my case, it wouldn’t be until after my return from the United States that I would decide to embark on the path of discovering my African identity. Being in college and at the point of beginning my doctoral studies, I met a young German woman who spoke to me about the intellectual world ignored by the West, to which her Moroccan husband had introduced her. Through long and deep discussions about those faraway and unknown realities, my curiosity about my own African heritage grew.
So I spoke with my father and for the first time in my life, he shared with me the sadness he felt at not having returned to his native Equatorial Guinea to work for the development of his people. But “a man is from the place where his children are born,” as he told me. That’s why he clung to his Spanish home for all of those years, struggling to give the best future possible to his descendents. I believe my father lives with a certain sense of failure for his decision to distance himself from his country of origin, but I often think that perhaps if he had returned to Africa, my brother, sister and I wouldn’t have had so many educational opportunities, and perhaps now I would be wanting to flee a Third World country instead of embracing the commitment to work toward an African resurgence.
Because I haven’t closed any doors, and I am challenging myself to delve into my African origins, now, in my day-to-day routine, I breathe the fresh breeze and I live the life of this new person who is slowly growing in me: the other, the every day closer, the African woman.