|
COPYRIGHT 2000 Professors World Peace Academy
Many of the new African-American and African alliances for peace may hold tremendous promise. During the 1990s, African countries formerly caught in the vortex of cold war politics began to deal with the many unresolved conflicts, wars, and tensions between groups. African-American women in particular, acting through non-governmental organizations such as their clubs, churches, sororities, associations, or neighborhood groups, have responded to these crises by providing assistance or the education and training that their fellow African colleagues needed. The networks that have resulted from this African-American collaboration seem to persist, and may be useful for dealing with problems of peace building and social reconstruction in the future.
Introduction
Increasingly, over the last two decades, as African-American women have turned their attention to international affairs, human rights and peace issues, they have done so using a double-edged meaning of "peace" that has developed out of their historical experiences. As they have attempted to create alliances and networks with African women interested in these issues, they revive a long-standing interest in Africa, but this time it is a more focused and results-oriented endeavor. Now, African-American women's African focus has three characteristics: (1) It is designed to achieve mutual good, (2) the effort involves many black American institutions, and (3) it is driven by philosophical and value concerns that African American women believe they share with their African female counterparts. Both of them see peace as intrinsically connected to how race/political economy and violent conflicts have played out within African and African-American families and communities. Both of them engage peace issues in their rol es as mothers, wives, and professional women who value social cohesion within their own societies. Thus, African-American women have responded to African crises by acting through organizations such as their churches, schools, clubs, sororities, associations, or neighborhood groups to provide financial and humanitarian assistance, as well as the education and training that their African colleagues need. This kind of mobilization took place during earlier periods of the 20th century as well, but it has become characteristic of their international philanthropic efforts over the last twenty year as crises in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Africa have captured American attention. Now, however, this mobilization for peace has resulted in alliances and networks between African-American and African women that may have lasting impacts.
My focus is on how African-American women have related to Africa in the past two decades, but their tactics were born of the domestic challenges of post-1960s urban poverty, unemployment and drug-violence. The African problems to which African-American women respond have become more visible since the 1980s as Africa has attempted to address its economic and political crises. Africans have tried to deal with thorny structural adjustment and debt crises, to develop strategies to move their countries toward multi-party politics and stable governance and to deal with the heightened incidences of violence and armed conflicts on the continent since the end of the Cold War. Some of these armed conflicts were the final phases of wars of liberation from colonialism or anti-apartheid struggles, especially those in Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa, which were brought to a conclusion in the mid-1990s. Some were the result of how cold war politics played out within regional and often religious contexts, such as those in the Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Congo-Zaire, and Rwanda-Burundi. Most of these conflicts have involved deaths ranging from 100,000 people upward, hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, the victimization and abuse of women and children, the forced recruitment of boy-soldiers, the disruption of family and community life, and the collapse of food production over wide areas (Copson, 1994: 26-30). Many of these crises (APPENDIX I) have been devastating, and have drawn sympathetic responses from many parts of the world, including African-American women's groups.
However, why African-American women responded needs to be clarified. Skinner (1981) and Kilson (1992) have argued that the general public has often misunderstood the relationship of African-Americans to Africa, because they point to a "schizophrenic dialectic" resulting from marginalization within American socity, rather than to the deeper identity connections that have been ongoing in black American responses to Africa. [1] Notwithstanding earlier attempts to deny Africanity African-Americans have increasingly claimed a link to Africa and noted that their destinies were entwined. In the twentieth century the common struggles against racial oppression and colonial oppression have been highlighted, and the education of the African elite in Black Colleges such as Lincoln, Tuskegee, Morehouse, and Howard, created enduring familial links between the two population. African-American women, in particular, have noted the existence of "a more generalized ethic of care" among African-American women and African women. This care ethic seems to have its roots in the traditions of shared parenting and child care in Africa, then was transmitted to the U.S. and heightened given the trauma of slavery and post-emancipation experiences of black American households (Billingsley, 1969). Stanley James has noted that women leaders extended this "other-mothering" to the African-American community, and through their organizations to the wider public (James, 1993).
The African-American women who noticed and nurtured these common values and behaviors were recognizing principles of black nationalism and race loyalty, which were central values among the black elite at the turn of the century in the face of heightened white racism. During the reconstruction era that followed emancipation, as African-Americans migrated from south to north, their elites adopted strategies that would ensure community survival and progress. Booker T. Washington's approaches tried to ensure continued black collaboration with whites in the subordinate-dominate relationship between the races given the new threat posed by the massive European immigration into the United States in the 1880s and the new competition for jobs and status. W.E.B. DuBois recognized these conflicts as not only national in nature, but also international, given the emergence of race-hierarchies around the world. Nationalist responses became typical of the elites of both Africa and the U.S., because the onset of European col onialism in Africa in 1896 exposed Africans to similar dilemmas with British and French control. Thus, DuBois' comments that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line..." was taken to heart. On the one hand, the African-American working class responded to Marcus Garvey's movement, [2] and on the other the elite helped build institutions and organizations that would address the myriad social problems among blacks in the U.S. and Africa. These elites, who were among the few privileged to have had the benefit of college educations in elite institutions, then faced discrimination at home as they tried to work in their chosen professions, or live in the cities where exclusionary practices or racial enclaves existed. This pushed to community prominence those individuals who were called "race men" because of their efforts to address the problems of employment, education, and political representation of blacks between 1900 and the 1920s. The race-men systematically applied pressures for t he franchise for blacks in those states where blacks could not vote during this...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
