"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

"What Is this Africa?": The Meaning of African Liberation in America

As Hughes neared the end of his African Treasury immersion, he began to work more publicly to support Africa's freedom struggle. Nineteen-fifty-nine became a pivotal year. (15) Early that year, he took up a central role in the Afro-American Committee for Gifts of Art and Literature to Ghana (with Jean Hutson, Aaron Douglas, Louise Thompson), and he gave a public reading at African Freedom Day celebrations in April. (16) In February with the Mau Mau's on his mind, Hughes addressed his black history month columns in The Defender to the topic of armed black revolt in the US. In the first week of May, Hughes had his character Simple wishing he could take back his African name and heritage. In the very next Defender column, Simple started having his own nationalist "African dreams" in his sleep. These dreams would persist for over a month. (17)

The new, radical nationalist meanings of African liberation seem to have struck to the heart of Hughes's consciousness when he took to the public stage in the first African Freedom Day celebration in New York City on April 15, 1959. Hughes responded so strongly to a speech he heard that day that he included it in his African Treasury, the only text in the anthology not actually composed for an African audience. Titled "African Freedom" and given by Tom Mboya, the speech considers the meaning of the occasion. In answer to the question, "What is this Africa and what do we mean by the word freedom?" Mboya asserts that it is a modernizing Africa that demands the freedom to determine its own identity and destiny: "Africa is no longer willing to be referred to as British, French, Belgian or Portuguese Africa" (30). Declaring that "we shall never compromise" with "colonialism and European domination," Mboya emphasizes that Africa's sovereign right to self-determination is "a birthright which we need not either justify or explain," especially not to those colonialist powers that question "our readiness to shoulder the responsibility of self-government" (34). Mboya further articulates the right to self-determination to include the right of nations to choose socialism: "Too often we have heard of those who insist that African freedom involves the risk of communism. To them, all I want to say is that if they spent all their efforts in practicing the democracy that they preach they would have nothing to fear of communism. Let us therefore, join together and match the internationalism of communism, item by item, with the internationalism of democracy" (34-35).

Mboya's speech is a passionate and militant expression of his identity as a Left, pan-Africanist, Kenyan trade union and independence leader. (18) As such, his emergent African socialism serves Hughes as a bridge between the multinational proletarian focus of his radicalism in the 1930s and the Third World Marxism to which he begins to gravitate through his African turn. But the ideological tire of Mboya's speech is not individual to him; rather, it expresses the militant left-nationalist spirit of the pan-Africanist Conferences at which African Freedom Day had been declared: the Conference of Independent African States and the All-African Peoples' Conference, both held at Ghana in 1958. These conferences, especially the All-African Peoples' Conference, represented an historic project of uniting African nationalist forces across the continent. The beacon of left nationalist unity lit in Accra, Ghana, was noted intently by Hughes at the beginning of 1959 as it fired a radical shift in black struggles in the US. (19) The upsurge of African nationalism signaled in these conferences was met enthusiastically not only by the prominent US black delegates who attended (including Horace Mann Bond, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Maida Springer of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union) but also by the US black press. (20) In 1959, Hughes began writing Defender columns that shared this domestic embrace of Africa's new spirit of militancy.