ton to Ouagadougou, without forgetting Lagos, London, and Los Angeles, and
Cuba and Canada--indeed, anywhere in which our people have been compelled
to settle. Black aesthetics, an amalgam of artistic, cultural, and political com-
mitment, was our model. We were following in the footsteps of our ancestors,
singing songs of freedom, declaring pride in our blackness, building bridges of
love.

Unfortunately, in our euphoria, we forgot to concretize ideas thrown out in
moments of mirthful madness, just as we in Africa failed to see through the
mirage of independence. Regarding the latter, needless to say, we are now pay-
ing the heavy price for our naivete, as we are being trampled upon by monsters
hiding behind masks of messiahs; highway robbers posing as revolutionaries;
sellers of the nation back to Civilization preaching sermons of saviors actually
sent to us from hell. As for the former relationship culminating in Pan-
Africanism, we are reluctantly coming to terms with the consequences of our
overzealous expressions of love: if you chase the shadow without catching and
holding onto the substance, you risk losing love and living hate. For commitment
to last, you must base it upon concrete, dynamic substance to which you must
continue to add positive elements. For Blackness to be meaningful, we must go
beyond negative notions of suffering and misery, which, although these have
been our shared experiences, must be transformed into acts of survival and
growth in order for us to march forward to the beat of our own music. The
maelstrom of militancy swept us along towards what we saw as the ultimate
world of our dreams, supposedly back to our heritage, but, in actuality, we were
being led to the precipice where dreams were liable to die as the fires ebbed in
the soul of folks finally forced to attend once again to basic aspects of self-
survival.

Those of us from Africa did not know our American brothers and sisters.
They were ignorant of us. In Africa, foreigners included Blacks from the dias-
pora. The Yoruba word oyinbo means not only "white" but "foreigner." And
we recall that colonial officers, especially in francophone Africa, were quite
often black. Besides, continental Africans, due to the ignorance of racism used
to dehumanize those taken abroad and due to our good fortune in remaining as
majority on our land, could not understand why Blacks from America would be
so desperately in need of an explicit emphasis on blackness. For their part, the
latter could not understand our ignorance; and in addition, there arose from time
to time the whispered question: "Why the hell did you all sell us into bondage,
you savages from the jungle?"

Today, that question remains unanswered or, indeed, transformed into an ac-
cusation of criminality, even as our brothers and sisters appear to have chosen
for themselves a name that includes the word African. Many Africans are wean+00AD
dering what happened to the solidarity expressed in joyful greetings and shared
activities. This critic believes that an examination of the ideas of those involved
in the American Dream would lead us to an understanding of the essence of

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