Essayist Clarence Page, a columnist for the "Chicago Tribune,"
looks at a photo exhibit about the origins of man.
CLARENCE PAGE: Perhaps once upon a time, Adam and Eve saw this vision, Dawn over the
great Rift Valley in Ethiopia. Adam and Eve were Africans, scientists say, and they probably
lived in this part of the world, Ethiopia, in East Africa, and if we are all descended from Adam
and Eve, that makes us all, all of us humans, African, all cousins.
We are the world, and the
world is us. For 30 years, African-American photojournalist Chester Higgins, Jr., has traveled to
over 30 countries tracing the contours of the African diaspora. What he found is currently on
exhibit in New York's International Center of photography and the recently published book
dealing with spirit. "I believe there is a collective memory in all of us," Higgins wrote, "a memory
in tune with a universal flow of light." Maybe he's right. Maybe no matter how black or blonde we
may look on the outside, we have the memory of Africa on our inside.
Our veins flow with the
blue waters of the River Nile, the Niger, the Congo, the Limpopo, to look at the African is to look
at you. We all are related, only some of us are related a little more closely than others. Africans
have a saying about us, their visiting American cousins. The African-American comes to Africa,
they say, to find themselves, only to discover that he left himself back in America. The African
has many cousins around the world. Few of us ever get to Africa, but we all carry Africa around
in us. We Africans abroad are the children of the diaspora, which means we are children of
mixed marriage, "two warring ideals in one dark body," said W.E.B. DuBois.
We are burdened
and buoyed up by a double consciousness, a terrible twoness, at once anchored in African soil
and orphaned from it like others in the diaspora, scattered like seeds to the shifting winds of
history, and commerce, and change. We are the offspring of Mother Africa, kidnapped more
often than not, then abandoned. Now we long for both parents, the conqueror and the conquered.
Yet, there is a hesitation. Our parents are reluctant to claim us, and we them.
We made changes
in the world. We brought our African food, our rice, and our yams to the dinner tables of the
world. We brought our rhythms and our language, and the world also changed us. We became
West Indians; we became Afro-Europeans; we became Afro-Brazilians; and we became African-
Americans. When we travel, we marvel at how many cousins we have and how much we have in
common, yet how different we are. To be African-American is to be questioned.
Why? We are
often asked. Why do you call yourself African-American? Why can't we all just be American? I
think most of us would rather just be American, but that choice never has been left up to us.
Maybe someday it will. Then the many races of the world will return to what they once used to be
in Mother Africa, one race, the human race. I'm Clarence Page.
