[bright upbeat music] - [Announcer] The following program is from N-E-T, the National Educational Television Network.

[plane engine roaring] - [John] My name is John A. Williams.

I'm an American writer, a novelist, and journalist.

I was born in Mississippi almost 40 years ago in my grandfather's farm.

Three months later, we returned to my father's home, Syracuse, New York.

Although I live in New York City this Nigeria may have been my home some seven generations ago.

I don't know for sure.

I'm just like one of the 22 million other American Negroes.

[bright upbeat music] [background chatter] I grew up, went to school, married, and became a father.

Then went into writing full-time, producing several books, and a great many articles, and short stories.

[speaking foreign language] [bright upbeat music] In Yoruba, one of the languages of Nigeria I would be called Omowale, the child returns home.

[bright upbeat music] [background chattering] This is Nigeria, over 55 million people the largest population of any African state, and its people speak about 300 languages and dialects.

It has been independent since 1961.

[bright upbeat music] [vehicle engine roaring] My mother's given name is Ola.

In the Ibo tongue of Nigeria it means courage and it is pronounced Ola.

[bright upbeat music] The faces here often remind me of people I know back home, men, women, children.

I have two sons, like most of us, they are curious to know all about the family.

They ask me, "Where do we come from?"

In 1963, I drove to Jackson, Mississippi but no one remembered the Joseph Jones family.

They had all moved north or vanished.

My great grandfather had seen the last ravages of slavery in the South.

Beyond him there was nothing, nothing except Africa.

[bright upbeat music] In January 1965, I went to Africa.

Other Black Americans had dreamed about going.

Some really went.

[bright upbeat music] In the early 1920s, when racial antagonisms in the United States reached a peak, this man Marcus Garvey, tried to turn America's Black bitter millions back to their roots in Africa.

He rallied 3 million Negroes together.

The biggest Back-to-Africa Movement ever conducted by Negros.

Garvey said, "When Europe was inhabited by a race of savages, naked men, heathens, and pagans, Africa was people with a race of cultured Black men who were masters in art, science, and literature.

Back to Africa, Africa for the African."

Word of the coming of the Black American penetrated deep into Africa.

Under Garvey, the Black American brothers were going to rescue the Africans from colonialism then settle in the Black mother.

In Africa, the people waited.

People who lived along the shores lighted bonfires to guide Garvey ships safely to land, but Marcus Garvey never came.

Fate decreed that he would not live a ruler in Black Africa but die in White London, forgotten by all but a few.

This is Badagry, Nigeria, along whose beaches many people waited for Garvey.

Badagry was one of the most important slave ports in West Africa.

The Africa of Western man Black and White still exists in many places.

There is no tires and swinging through the trees here but there's the sea, the forest, and the primitive houses.

Many of America's 22 million Negroes started from villages just like this, six or seven generations ago.

Once this place, Badagry, Nigeria was peaceful but then the chains of slavery.

White Western Christian civilization with a long, slow, and bloody explosion, hurled itself upon the sprawling masses of humanity in Asia and Africa.

"Buttressed by their belief that their God had entrusted the earth into their keeping, drunk with power and possibility, they waxed rich through trade in commodities human and non-human," so wrote the late Richard Wright.

This is the home of an African whose grandfather and great-grandfather, sold people into slavery.

And this his father's mausoleum the largest grave in Badagry.

The Europeans could not have succeeded without the aid of Africans like this.

Together they completed the destruction of empires already falling into decay.

The impressive empires of Ghana, Mali or Songhai, or Bornu, Kanem or Benin.

The Europeans tried to modify tradition in their former colonies.

They did disrupt it, but they could not destroy it.

[singing in foreign language] The religion of my ancestors was pagan which does not mean the absence of a belief in a God, but in the belief of the presence of many gods.

A temple is being dedicated, whole families are here.

The worshipers are happy, the elders are solemn as solemn as their pagan idols, but the dancers celebrate the dedication.

It is a happy time.

[singing in foreign language] This is another ceremony.

The ceremony of death, a man has died.

His wife is in mourning but this high priestess takes her place.

[singing on foreign language] All about the substitute wife, there is life, music, dance, and song but for the substitute wife, there was only sadness.

The vague movements of life.

For somehow life must go on.

The priestesses sway to the beat.

The dead must be honored but the craft of the living must also be honored.

A coin placed on the forehead, a tribute to the drummers and chanters who take them place to place in the village .

The dual message that man must die and man must live.

[singing in foreign language] Where Garvey failed to unite the Black men of the world the doctrines of Mohammed of Islam are succeeding.

[speaking in foreign language] Islam is giving the African a God who is not concerned with color.

All men are children of God.

Islam makes no great demands upon its followers.

A man has but to declare himself willing to follow Allah.

It is unsophisticated, close to the ways of its followers.

A man may pray where he works.

It is libertarian, a Muslim may have many wives if he can afford them.

And Islam is in the tradition of man's unity with nature so prevalent in the societies of Black and Brown men.

[speaking foreign language] There are over 100 million Muslims in Africa, more than twice the number of Christians, why?

Because many Africans say, wherever a Christian missionary has gone in our land an army ultimately followed.

Africans are choosing Islam for Africa.

Color is the cementing force.

[soft music] When independence came to Africa, Black men became free.

The oppressors were gone but some of their influences lingered on.

Cyprian Ekwensi is the director of the Federal Ministry of Information of Nigeria and a leading African novelist.

I asked him about the extent of White influences in Africa.

- The influence of a White man is decreasing in that he's no longer occupying the strategic positions but Africa has not rejected the good thing the White man left behind.

There is for instance, administration.

I don't know whether administration is a good thing or a bad thing.

In the long run, it tends to organize a place to give it order.

There are such things as international standards in behavior, and in production, and in relationships, in industry and so on.

All these things have been left behind and the society is still bearing...

There is still the mark of the White man's contact with Africa here.

Quite definitely.

- Well, I'll tell you one of the things that rather surprised me particularly in this visit, and that was going over to Tarkwa Bay.

After you go to Bar Beach and it's 99 and 44, 100% Black.

- [Cyprian] Yes.

- [John] Then you go to Tarkwa Bay and it's 99 and 44, 100% White.

- [Cyprian] Yes.

- [John] And I find it a little paradoxical to come to Africa and see this kind of racial division again.

- [Cyprian] Yes, yes.

- [John] Can you tell me why this occurs?

- [Cyprian] Well, it's not a conscious division.

It's as I say, it's an approach to life.

The African has always had his beach there.

He's always had the sun.

You don't find Nigerians going about the streets with their shirts off, because the sun to them is part of life, it's not novelty.

- [John] Yeah.

- [Cyprian] But when I was a student in Britain and there was a bright summer day, all the girls wore what they called the sun dresses.

Which I don't know why they think topless is a new thing now, topless has always been a fashion, all along.

And our women wear the topless dress but they don't do it in a provocative manner or trying to put it on.

It's just part of how you react to light and heat.

And Tarkwa Bay is a luxury bay, the Nigerians are too busy in their own families and in their own approach to life, to take a day off on an easy chair in Tarkwa Bay.

It's not their kind of life except perhaps those who are migrating into the sophisticated, to owning boats and so on.

The Black man has come into his own.

But I think what is required now is for the Black man to be able to retain the essences of his own Blackness.

But he doesn't have to do it in an aggressive manner.

- [John] The Black man must retain the essences of his own Blackness.

In Africa, many writers are concerned with the experience of being Black.

Some call it the African personality others call it Negritude.

What does it mean?

It means French African poet Léon Damas wrote, that the White will never be Negro for beauty is Negro and Negro is wisdom and Negro is magic and Negro is loose walking for a dance is Negro and Negro is rhythm, for laughter is Negro and joy is Negro.

This talk of the African personality and negritude is annoying.

It's a mistake that in the end could become a philosophy of racism, but negritude or Black supremacy as the American press calls it, gave a hell of a lot of Black people who'd been called niggers for 500 years, instant pride and Black people today no longer believing that they are niggers.

Negritude is the mystique of the few, the intellectuals, and sometimes the well-off.

It has little meaning for the masses the illiterate African millions.

It is the reaction of the world's colored people to centuries of dominance by Whites and White people should not be surprised by it.

After all they started it with White supremacy.

[lively jazz music] Saddest of all, negritude too often says about Africans and Afro-Americans precisely what the White bigot will say.

But will turn a point of prejudice into one of superiority.

Example, Black people have natural rhythm.

Whatever the similarities or differences between the Black man of Africa and the Black man of America, the writers in both continents have been concerned with freedom from the oppressive rule of the White man.

We found ourselves in a race to see which Blacks, Africans or Americans would first be free.

American Negroes free within the American society, Black Africans free from oppressive colonial rule.

We were brothers, the Negro and the African and some of us knew very well, that even with an ocean and seven generations between us, Negroes had given the Africans something special, like pride in being Black, like free negritude.

Out of our own perpetual anguish we gave ourselves and the African a sense of pride and a new meaning to the word freedom.

The quest for freedom.

Many Africans had lived among us Nkrumah of Ghana, Senghor of Senegal, Mboya of Kenya, Azikiwe of Nigeria, and many others.

In the United States, they suffered as we suffered.

They were Black too.

Before World War II, the distance between us served only to bring the African and the Negro close.

[loud music] Yes we were close, some of us very close, then something happened.

[man blowing trumpet] [lively orchestral music] Freedom, Nigeria, Libya, and Tunisia, Sudan, and Ghana, Guinea, the Mali Federation.

[lively orchestral music] By 1965 there were 37 free African nations.

[lively orchestral music] American Negroes felt the great tide of freedom sweeping Africa.

Where was our freedom?

The illusion of freedom came in 1954 with a Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools.

But time proved that that was too slow, too painful.

[lively orchestral music] [people cheering] It seemed that once again we had been betrayed into believing that most White Americans wanted us to share fully, in the American society.

One year after the Supreme Court decision American Negroes took to the streets and every time they've walked and they are still walking, they've gained, but what they've gained often cost too much.

Disenchanted with America, those Negroes who could went to Africa when independence first began to sweep the continent.

Africa was the continent of the future.

By the early 1960s, there was acquired knowledge that Africa was not the promised land for American Negroes.

Seven generations in the United States, deep in the hubbub of New York or Chicago the upbeat technologically geared pace, the center of, but not the reality of democracy had made the difference.

And perhaps inspired by the swift pace of independence in Africa, Negroes for the first time were totally committed to the civil rights struggle at home.

Many of the Negro leaders who might have led the move for more contact with Africa, turned all their energies and resources towards securing a democracy that now seemed well within reach.

Even so, there were some who gambled with their lives to make democracy a reality in America.

James Meredith is one of them.

The first Negro to attend the University of Mississippi.

He is now studying at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.

I asked him how American Negroes were received in Africa.

Well yours is a very special case but have you known any other American Negro who complained that he felt looked down upon by Africans because he was an American Negro?

- Well yes, this is a rather common thing.

There are certainly many individual Africans who feel for one reason or the other, that because the Negro is somewhat of a second-class citizen in his own country that he somehow might be a little better too.

- If you were back in Mississippi right now and a White man said to you, why don't you go back where you came from?

What would you tell him?

- I think there's no White American that can establish any more right to calling America his home than I can.

- [John] This man made history then fled from it, but he's not given up his heritage.

He is an American, a very special American and no Negro knows how American he is, until he has gone to Africa.

- The impression I got was that the Negro American is he's an American first and a Negro afterwards.

If he's an African, it is a historical fact now.

He's far away from Africa now and there must be some readjustment and realignment of ways of approaching problems before the African and the Negro American can claim to be the same.

After all there has been an evolution of well over a hundred years, and people don't just stand still.

Of course, I think there has been a lot of synthesis and interchange of culture between the American Negro and the African.

- You were in America.

That was your first time in America?

- Very first time, yes.

- Now did your concept of the American Negro tie in with what you really saw when you were there?

- No, they didn't tie in with what I saw.

- What was your concept before you went to America?

- Well my concept before I went to America was the the suffering, victimized, voiceless man and out there, I found that in America, these people in many fields of the arts leading, actually leading, in sport and in material things, there were Negroes living in...

Some of them of course the majority of them living in not very wonderful quarters but driving Cadillacs, and Lincolns, and that kind of thing.

At least they had the symbols outside.

They had the symbols of affluence.

And this struck me as very refreshing and very interesting.

Well what I think is that the Negroes have been very modest on the whole.

And the goal which they have set has not yet been achieved, and because of this, it appears as if they have achieved nothing.

The goal of complete equality, complete opportunity, has not yet quite been achieved.

Although a long step has been taken in that direction.

- But as your concept was so startlingly change, now earlier you had said that if American Negroes came to Africa, that there is a strong bond of brotherhood, what is that based upon?

Color merely or?

- Color is one and the one is the public sympathy for the victimized or the the man who appears not...

The deprived man.

- [John] The underdog.

- There is always yeah, there is always this public sympathy for the one who is deprived.

- [John] I see well uh, - Yes.

And again, the African wants his dignity upheld everywhere.

And when we as Nigerian see a Negro on the screen, we want to see him in a dignified role because we see ourselves in him.

Well, most Nigerians think that the civil rights struggle in America received its impetus from this great independence movement throughout the continent and the Negro Americans suddenly realized that it was possible to really come into one's own.

And I think Africans are impatient about the progress.

They think it should go faster - [John] With me is Chinua Achebe, novelist and director of External Broadcasting for Nigeria.

- If I may take first of all the American Negro outside of the story, it seems to me from this side that many of them have been brought up, on the same kind of fallacies about the Africans as the Europeans have been brought up on.

Namely this is uh... - You mean White Americans have been brought up on.

- Yes, yes and Europeans, see?

- Yeah I know, yeah.

- That Africa is a jungle, it's inhabited by savages without any culture, without any civilization.

Their society is completely mindless and this is putting it very stark, you know.

What I was trying to get at is thing, because Americans Negroes have these pictures in their mind, even if they think that it's still a little exaggerated they still think there is an element of truth in it.

And therefore, they come out feeling like missionaries, you know.

- [John] Even when they come here?

- When they come here, they know they think we ought to come out and embrace them for coming to help us.

But let us not think that because this happens we do not appreciate the fact that in the world, taking the world as a whole, we belong to the same family.

You know, the Black people we've been through hell together, you see.

Now I've talked about that American Negro.

Now the African, we have been brought up on lies as well.

I mean, we have been told that the American Negro is spineless.

He hasn't put up a fight.

- [John] How did you get this information?

In the press, the radios?

- Well yes, yes.

- Yes, yes.

- Sought of just handed down you see.

I mean, all they do is sing spirituals and wait for God to to save them.

- And march?

- Yes, yes.

Now nobody has ever told us about the slave revolts and you know, and all the struggle that the American Negro has been... All the fight he's been putting up you see.

Now this is what I mean when I say that it is ignorance on both sides, that has caused this situation.

- [John] Once you understand your roots and place them in perspective, you really have no need to go home again especially to one some seven generations removed from you.

White Americans may ask, why don't you go back where you came from?

Well, the right to live in America never rested upon the mere fact, that a man had a White skin.

Although many people with White skins think so.

More so than most Americans, I have earned the right to call America my home.

It wasn't easy.

For 500 years, White Americans have tried to steal my dignity and sometimes they did, but I am still alive.

Living, breathing, every threatening, you've bred me strong.

When Lafayette came, Negroes were already dead at Lexington and Bunker Hill.

Without Negroes soldiers and sailors, Lincoln said, "The union would have collapsed."

I now know that when the first Russian, Chinese, German, Japanese, Hungarian, all of those people from some other place first arrived in America, the Negro had already plowed the furrow that would ultimately feed and clothe him.

Why don't I go back where I came from?

I am going home, I am.

[bright upbeat music] [speaking foreign language] [bright upbeat music] [plane engine roaring] [bright upbeat music] - [Announcer] This is N-E-T, the National Education Television Network.