ARE WE AFRICANS?

ARE WE AFRICANS? Are we Africans? One need do no more than view the receptions of James Brown, Bob Marley, Jesse Jackson, when they toured Africa! It was ecstatic, emphatic, dramatic! When I went to Africa in 1983, in which our tour group visited ten countries, I was shown in starkest terms that I was not only a brother of African descent, but the brother who was very much most beloved. Only in the colonized city of Cairo as I walked along the banks of the Nile was I made to feel ostracized by an Egyptian-Arab. Even this unsavory man accused me of being Sudanese, still very African, not truly African American, ignorantly, incessantly. I dispensed with that traducer, but will never forget him. Being "African" is more than an attitude! African is perforce an epic ideal of man. Africans were blessed with cosmic rhythms, enduring beauty, celestial intelligence, from their being fated by endearing dusky divinities: for their primordial, original, earthly destiny to reproduce human life in the black fruitful womb of Africa by its seed, thence, to overspread earth with exacting, patient, faithful, philosophical love. 'What is Africa to me' asked black poet Countee Cullen in 'Heritage.' I reply "Africa is me. Africa is mine--" indelibly, indefinitely, holistically.