A reader with a very strong postmodernist bent might read Keith B. Richburg's Out of America as a perverse attempt at a film noir script. In film noir, the protagonist is beset by various legitimate and illegitimate group and institutional interests, almost always in a case of mistaken identity. The protagonist is thought to be someone he isn't. Here, in this book, our protagonist (the hero, for conservative whites and blacks, or anti-hero, for Afrocentrists, black nationalists, and white liberals) just happens to be Richburg himself, an enterprising, truth-seeking, if somewhat harried, black American journalist, who spends the length of this work running from the mistaken identity of blackness. He does not, in the end, wish to be mistaken for underachieving American blacks who want government handouts, the type who burned down their Detroit neighborhood in 1968, as Richburg's father showed him from their front door, or those nasty, savage black Africans who threaten to stain their entire continent with murderous political chaos and diseased blood. It is his literal fear in the book that he will be mistaken for a Hutu, a Somali, a Tutsi, a black South African, or, when he is shopping or banking in America, an outlaw black. It comes as his great relief that he is none of these, even if it is sometimes difficult for him to convince the world of that fact.

If Richburg had been a more imaginative writer, there would have been something here for an exceptional, or at least unusual, book about identity as a form of power and as an expression of fate, as the psychology of group disharmony. The problem with this book lies not in the fact that the real subject here is Richburg himself and not Africa. We might lament the fact that the author seems not to recognize that Africa is indeed the greater subject and the more laden with possibilities, but nonetheless Richburg himself as subject would have been sufficient if he had taken a more detached view of himself or had taken himself as outsider in Africa a great deal less seriously, or less histrionically, than he does. (There are, for instance, all those moments when Richburg describes himself as wishing to punch his fist through a wall in frustration at African corruption, or ready to weep at African tragedy, or numbed by a persistent African brutality, or banging his fist on the desk of some petty African bureaucrat who cannot understand what Richburg seems to see so clearly, so that the entire book can be reduced to one rhetorical device--the exclamation point--and one emotional pitch--moral outrage--while the author seems to be "mugging for the camera," so to speak.) The secret in writing a book about yourself is knowing the limitations of your subject. This, Richburg apparently did not know.

The subtitle, "A Black Man Confronts Africa," expresses clearly enough why this book really falls down. First, there is nothing new in black American authors writing books about going to Africa, expecting to find "the Great Me" or something like that, only to come away cursing and screaming about Africa as "the Absolute Not Me" or bemused by an Africa that is "the Great Disorder." The stranger-in-a-strange-land theme seems fairly exhausted soil for a book about Africa these days. Richard Wright did this theme in his 1954 book about Ghana, Black Power. Eddy Harris did this in his more recent survey of the entire continent, Native Stranger. Both are better-written books than Out of America. Marita Golden's Migrations of the Heart is another such book. George Schuyler's Slaves Today, a 1931 novelization of his impressions of Liberia, is as scathing about African life as anything written.

Martin R. Delany was one of the black Americans to write about traveling in Africa. In his 1861 Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, he saw, to use Ras's phrase from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, more "black possibilities" in Africa as a place where black Americans could emigrate than many twentieth-century black writers have tended to see. The great nineteenth-century American black nationalist Alexander Crummell, who lived in Africa for many years, wrote extensively about his time there and the people. Langston Hughes wrote about traveling in Africa in both volumes of his autobiography. The transplanted Jamaican novelist and poet Claude McKay wrote about traveling in Africa in his autobiography. In France in the late 1950s, Presence Africain published a volume called Africa Seen by American Negroes, not a travel volume exclusively but nonetheless valuable and instructive, with such first-rate black thinkers as William Leo Hansberry, Martin Kilson, St. Clair Drake, and Rayford Logan, several of whom spent considerable time in Africa. And there is black journalist Louis Lomax's 1960 journalistic survey of the continent, The Reluctant African.

Richburg refers to none of this rich, varied, and extensive material. He seems to think that he is unique in making the claim that he can talk about Africa because "I've been there." Many have been there and written about it, often despairingly. Few black Americans, whether in the nineteenth century, when many thought of Africans as backward and heathen, or the twentieth, when many thought of Africans as backward and colonized, have seen Africans as equal to themselves or sub-Saharan Africa as anything other than the harsh physical geography that it is. Even Marcus Garvey thought African culture inferior. It was only with the rise of both African independence and the civil-rights movement that Africans began to take on in the black American imagination some type of cultural and political authentication, at least, and even this has been--with the advent in recent years of an implausible Afrocentrism--desperately tied to North Africa in a nonsensical worship of ancient Egypt because it has monuments and symbols that Europeans and white Americans respect.

In the nineteenth century, many black Americans saw themselves as redeemed by America only inasmuch as they could redeem a "fallen" Africa through the idea of America. Today, many black Americans see themselves as "fallen" people, destroyed by America and the white West, who can only redeem themselves through the idea of Africa. Richburg's book would have been enriched immeasurably, both intellectually and artistically, had he not only indicated to his reader that he was familiar with this body of writing but actually discussed his views in light of some of these earlier ones. He owed this to his readers as an informant and to himself as a writer. His book would then have had a context, a sense of tradition, and a great deal of the false theatrics about "alienation" from the race could have been profitably eliminated. The result would have been a much more grown-up book than the one we have.

Second, regarding the subtitle, is the only thing to recommend this "Africa-as-the-great-horror" book the fact that a black American wrote it? As Richburg's response to Africa seems indistinguishable from what he describes as his white colleagues' response, why should his race fundamentally matter? All that seems to matter, according to Richburg himself, by book's end, is that he is an American, not a black American, and certainly not an African American. His is an American, a Western, response. Indeed, the upshot of the book is precisely this: there is no reason to think that by virtue of the fact that he is a black person he has any special knowledge of, interest in, or connection with Africa.

Why couldn't Richburg go to Africa and report his findings in a book without his race or his ancestry ever becoming an issue? Is that impossible? I assume not, since Richburg wrote a number of stories about Rwanda and Somalia for the Washington Post where his race was never mentioned. So, why choose to write a book about the problems of Africa in this way? Doesn't a consideration of his alienated ancestry simply get in the way of a straightforward look at the problems of Africa? Whether he likes Africa or Africans has nothing to do with what Africa is. The book never really answers these questions, and thus it never justifies what it defines as its "occasion." It simply assumes that its occasion is self-evident. This may say a great deal about race in the United States, but nothing at all useful about Africa.

Oddly, this book also advances a Pan-Africanism that appears to contradict other strands of Richburg's argument. This is evident when, for instance, Richburg draws parallels between black Americans and Africans, initiated by a conversation with his father about enterprising Asians who have opened businesses in the black community of Detroit:

Most Africans were born in independent black countries, but their leaders still harp about colonialism the way black America's self-described "leaders" like to talk about slavery and Jim Crow. There's another similarity, too: Black African leaders talk about foreign aid as if they're entitled to it--it's something that is due to Africa, with no strings attached--the same way many American blacks see government assistance programs as a kind of entitlement of birth.

Later, Richburg describes the expectation of many Africans that the United States should come and straighten out their internal problems. It would seem that Richburg is arguing--the merits of the argument being another matter--that the flaws of black people worldwide are the same and emanate from the same cause: lack of discipline. This explanation is as unconvincing as saying that all of Africa's problems can be attributed to racism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. In either case, the person who holds the opinion wants to legitimate his or her values, not objectively understand Africa. What is interesting is the author's persistence, for reasons unclear to this reader, in linking Africans and black Americans in ways that seem strained and even racist. So earlier generations of British and American white philanthropists thought the problem of African education and adjustment to colonialism could be solved with the Booker T. Washington/ Tuskegee model because, in essence, there was no difference between Africans and black Americans.

Perhaps the greatest puzzle in Out of America is why Richburg went to Africa in the first place. He writes at one point that "I really did come here with an open mind, wanting to love the place, love the people." On the other hand, he talks about his "initial misgivings about venturing into the land of my ancestors" when he was first offered the position of the Washington Post's African bureau chief. By his own account, he did not seem to enjoy the African Studies course he took as an undergraduate at Michigan, where he always came late with a blonde girl who was a fellow student. What he describes indicates defiance of a particular ethos rather than interest in exploring or adopting it.

I can appreciate Richburg's impatience with many white liberals and white academics who tend to romanticize, overlook, or explain away real problems in black life wherever they are found. Such apologists wish to credit a black victimhood and "resistance" at the expense of a black set of responsibilities; by doing so, they actually reduce the scope of black humanity. I also found Richburg's chapter on black American leaders in Africa very compelling. Most black Americans today don't think straight about Africa, and their leaders and intellectuals have been of little help to them in this regard.

Yet Richburg's blanket disdain for Africanists and scholars is odd. First, he never presents what they say about Africa, except to say that they dislike the word tribe, so his disdain is never explained. Given his subject, a chapter on the African Studies Association and the state of African Studies seems mandatory to me. It is irresponsible to indict the failure of scholars and Africanists unless you are willing to engage them. Second, most of Richburg's own solutions for Africa differ little from those of many prominent Africanists, such as George N. B. Ayittey. I suspect that Richburg dismisses scholars and Africanists to give his book a marketable anti-intellectual veneer: here's a writer, we're to understand, who is dealing with hard-hitting, plainspoken truths and not overly subtle rationalizations. This cheap-shot strategy wins a certain set of readers even if it does nothing to improve the substance of a book's argument.

Finally, if this book was meant to expose Americans to the terrible problems of Africa, particularly in places like Somalia and Rwanda, with which Richburg has the greatest familiarity, it does not do so as well as it could because it seems so superficial, as if the author never engaged the place, never tried to dig down to its heart or its soul. He seems to marvel simply at the theater of his own disgust and revulsion. Africa is never truly a place for Richburg but only a kind of elaborate psycho-mirror. This explains the book's very truncated, surface view of African history and the hubris of the writer to think he can explain a continent as huge and diverse as Africa in the way that he does. If he really wanted to prove his arguments he would have taken on a book like Pierre Pradervand's Listening to Africa: Developing Africa from the Grassroots, published in 1989, which paints a very different and much more hopeful Africa than Out of America does.

If the book is meant to make a case for the degrees of separation between Africans and black Americans, one is better off reading James Baldwin's famous late-1950s essay, "Princes and Powers," on the same subject. It is more elegantly and incisively argued, more passionate and moving, and much shorter than Richburg's book. The power of Baldwin's essay is that he discerns this difference with such deftness and insight when meeting the African in Europe under the most humane and civilized circumstances. The Africans' difference does not hinge on their chaos, their inhumanity, their brutality, their cruelty--in effect, as Richburg argues, on their being uncivilized, on how obviously they are different from you and me--but rather in the fact that they see the world differently. Our own humanity hinges on the recognition that we cannot define their humanity simply as the sum total of their pathologies and inadequacies. Every people on the face of the earth deserves better reporting than that.

We do not get from Out of America any sense of how Africans see themselves and the world. Richburg never gets inside their culture to tell us. Africans are, for him, simply a shameful enigma. His book ultimately is not about how Africans are different from black Americans but how he as a black American can demonstrate his redemption by showing how Africans are different from, and lesser than, everyone else in the world.

Gerald Early is Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and director of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 24

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