"We, Too, Rise with You": Recovering Langston Hughes's African Turn 1954-1960 in An African Treasury, the Chicago Defender, and Black Orpheus

African American Review, Fall, 2007 by Daniel Won-gu Kim

Just months after publishing African Treasury, Hughes bega, n a series of momentous trips to Africa. (8) In November, at Nnamdi Azikiwe's invitation, Hughes attended the inauguration ceremony of Azikiwe as Governor General and Commander-and-Chief, marking the transfer of power in Nigeria "from the imperial British to black African hands" (Rampersad 325).

He sat alongside Ralph Bunche, W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., but he was honored when Azikiwe, after taking the oath of office, closed his address with a recitation of Hughes's "Poem" from The Weary Blues. The next year he returned to Nigeria with American artists such as Randy Weston and Nina Simone for the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) festival held at Lagos. One year later, he began a tour of Africa, starting in Uganda, where he attended the All-African Writers Conference, commonly understood to be the birthplace of modern African Anglophone literature. There, not only did he take up the burning political questions of African literature with Achebe, Soyinka, Mphahlele, Modisane, Ekwensi, and American J. Saunders Redding, but he received special recognition. Hughes was named spontaneously by the participants as the conference's "guest of honor," with Mphahele delivering a rive-minute tribute. Finally, in April 1966, Hughes emerged as a celebrity at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, covered avidly by the world press. Hughes delivered a major colloquium speech on "Black Writers in a Troubled World," in which, as Rampersad writes, "With the emphasis on Afro-American writers in the age of the freedom movement, he boldly--and perhaps dangerously--created for himself the opportunity to articulate, before an international gathering of blacks, his basic beliefs about the function of an artist" (402). Marking the distance in his journey from "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," Hughes delivered his final manifesto in Africa, in the language (now "Black Writers" instead of "Negro Artists') and in the context of anti-colonial pan-Africanism.