-
Few scholars or activists today take proposals to leave America and return to Africa or some other “homeland” seriously. Back-to-Africa proposals in principle are almost universally dismissed as “escapist” or associated with essentialist, romantic ideas about black cultural unity. Critics dwell on the impracticality of such schemes, or they point to sharp cultural and class differences that keep the black world divided. They are not wrong to do so, but any wholesale dismissal of the desire to leave this place and find a new home misses what these movements might tell us about how black people have imagined real freedom. The desire to leave Babylon, if you will, and search for a new land tells us a great deal about what people dream about, what they want, how they might want to reconstruct their lives….Exodus represented dreams of black self-determination, of being on our own, under our own rules and beliefs, developing our own cultures, without interference. Even before New World Africans laid eyes on the Bible, the fundamental idea behind Exodus was evident in the formation of Maroon societies throughout the Americas. Maroon societies were settlements of renegades from the plantation system made up primarily of runaway slaves, some indigenous people, and, in a few instances, white indentured servants who rebelled against the dominant culture. These settlements often existed on the run, in the hills or swamps just outside the plantation economy. Africans tended to dominate these communities, and many sought to preserve the cultures of their original homelands while combining different Old and New World traditions. Over time, Africans adopted elements of various Native American cultures, and vice versa, and Europeans relied on aspects of these cultures for their own survival. In the words of political scientist Cedric Robinson, these movements were inventive “rather than imitative, communitarian rather than individualistic, democratic rather than Republican, Afro-Christian rather than secular and materialist[;] the social values of these largely agrarian people generated a political culture that distinguished between the inferior world of the political and the transcendent universe of moral goods.” The impulse toward separatism, defined broadly, is rooted in maroonage and the desire to leave the place of oppression for either a new land or some kind of peaceful coexistence.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams
