I had mail to deliver them and hoped they had been saving family letters and heirlooms for me. Through these authors and others, I tried my best to identify a return address and chart a return route to ancestors lost to me. Mbiti, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Ivan Van Sertima, Na’im Akbar and Wade Nobles dotted my bookshelves and shaped my thinking about African identity. As a college student and young adult, I devoured everything I could find regarding African-American history and culture. Many of my formative years were spent attempting to see the world from the distinct vantage point of African people, to be African-centered. The result, as Deborah Dickerson observes in her irenic and insightful book The End of Blackness, is that African-Americans are at once a history-conscious people and “a people with no return address.” Three centuries of American chattel slavery did much to uproot generations of American-born Africans from specific African linguistic, cultural, religious and historical soil. And yet, we are a people who know so little about our history. A portrait of Lemuel Haynes as it appeared on the frontispiece of his biography, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Reverend Lemuel Haynes, A.M., written by his Congregationalist colleague Timothy Mather Cooley and published four years after his death in 1833.Īfrican Americans are a people who care deeply about history.
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