Back in July of this year, God smiled on me and allowed me the opportunity to visit the Holy Land, Africa. Yes, I said the Holy Land and Africa in the same sentence. For me, it’s like when I would hear someone mention classical music, my first thoughts are Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and the list goes on.
Those same thoughts come to mind when I hear Holy Land; I think of my culture, my people and where “life” began, Africa. It took some time, but I try every day to always look at myself, my situation, my understanding of things through the lens of my culture as an African man, born in America. Malcom X said it best, “A chicken born in an oven, don’t make it a biscuit,” and for all you “love it or leave it childish patriots,” I don’t have to love it nor do I have to leave it, in honor of my ancestors that built it, I’m going to do all I can to fix it.
I remember growing up in Detroit and my mom telling my brothers and me about our great-grandmother and how she was always talking about Africa, being African, and the importance of remembering our homeland and that she always wanted to go back. As I think about it now, that was deep!
My great-grandmother back in the 30’s and 40’s, this fair skinned woman, had a deep yearning to go back to a place she knew nothing about—Africa. A place that I know most of our people here in America had been taught to be ashamed of at best, and to hate, at its worst. I say this because the dominant society did all it could to teach us to hate OUR color, and celebrate their’s, and to see our homeland and its inhabitants as savages. All of this to say, my great-grandmother was one hell of a Black woman!
One day as we were going through a bunch of old photographs, mother said, “Here’s a picture of your great grandmother when she was a secretary in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), movement under the leadership of the honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey.”
I just remember smiling as I looked at the picture seeing all these beautiful Black men and women dressed so nice. That was the day the light came on for me!
Going to Africa was always something I wanted to do for so many reasons. You know for me, living in America as a Black person, I find myself having to work every day to not forget who I am, why I think like I do, and why I feel the way that I do. Before July 7, 2023, I’d been fortunate to be able to visit the continent through books, shared conversations with friends that had been to the Holy Land (Africa) and countless times in my head while sitting in boring meetings.
My good friend and colleague, Dr. Gail E. Wyatt made my dream come true! Dr. Wyatt received an NIH-funded training grant, “Sustained Academic Research and Training Program” (SACERT). An NIH-funded international training grant, collaborating with 14 South African universities to create a network of training, supervision, and mentoring for pre-doctoral scholars in the behavioral and biobehavioral sciences. Gail and the team mentors and co-create with these South African academics and clinicians, an Integrated Measures Bank (IMB) and train scholars in the selection, administration, scoring, interpretation, and translations of measures of chronic stress and mental health utilized in South Africa.
Dr. Wyatt is a Clinical Psychologist, a board-certified Sex Therapist and Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at UCLA. Gail was the first African American woman in the state of California to receive a license to practice psychology and the first African American woman to be named a Full Professor of the UCLA School of Medicine. So, you see I was traveling in good company.
From the time I landed in Cape Town until the time I got back on the plane in Johannesburg heading back to the states, I never felt more at home, welcomed, and absolutely embraced by every one of my brothers and sisters that I came in contact with. I also made it my business to go and visit the brothers and sisters that lived in the townships.
You know what was funny? A couple of people cautioned me about going into Lango Township in Cape Town. I felt that if I stick to the affluent areas of my hotel and the university, I will never know all of South Africa.
That’s when I heard the lyrics of that great song by my nephew, Gregory Porter, “Well, they guild their houses, In preparation for the King, And they line the sidewalks With every sort of shiny thing They will be surprised When they hear him say Take me to the alley, Take me to the afflicted ones, Take me to the lonely ones that somehow Lost their way.” Whenever I travel, I always want to go where I can see the masses of my people—take me to the barbershop!
Walking around Lango Township and seeing the conditions of my brothers and sisters saddened me, but it was no different than walking around parts of downtown Los Angeles. What saddened me the most about the poverty in Lango was, here I am on the richest continent on the face of this earth and because of fear and jealousy, my people were suffering.
After getting over my sadness, walking around Lango made me more proud to know that my people, both here in the US and those at home in Africa, that no matter what, those that would do and have done anything and everything to oppress us, yet we’re still standing.
When I got back to my hotel, I remembered a speech by Martin Luther King, one of his speeches you will never hear on January 15th where he said and I quote, “Don’t let anybody take your manhood. Be proud of our heritage. We don’t have anything to be ashamed of. Somebody told a lie one day. They couched it in language. They made everything black, ugly and evil. Look in your dictionary and see the synonyms of the word ‘black’. It’s always something degrading, low and sinister. Look at the word ‘white’. It’s always something pure, high, clean. Well, I want to get the language right tonight. I want to get the language so right that everybody here will cry out, “YES! I’M BLACK. I’M PROUD OF IT. I’M BLACK AND BEAUTIFUL!”
I can’t wait to go back to the Holy Land, Grand-Ma!
