Roots and branches
Basil Davidson
THE BLACK DIASPORA by Ronald Segal Faber, £17.50, pp. 492 That mediaeval African sailors floated or were blown across the Atlantic to the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico is a claim which winds and currents can support; and there is some arguable archaeological evidence to suggest, even, that they did this on a colony-founding scale. Records in China for the same remote period speak of Africans, from the east coast of the continent, not the west, who were used as `sad doorkeepers'. Here at home, some- what earlier, though not much, the legions of the Wall surely included a number of men from North Africa, also no doubt suffering from sadness as well as cold.
The Diaspora in Ronald Segal's book is the hugely greater one that came after Columbus and the Spanish American piracies, and was mostly the work of the European slave trade. Given its conse- quences, one might have expected Segal's account to join a long list of books about the forced emigration of Africans through the western world. At least some 12 million hapless captives survived the horror of the slave ships and made it to the Americas. Moreover, their contributions to American life have been many and fundamental, whether in tropical agriculture or the everyday arts of life. Perhaps not so strangely, in view of the gruesome nature of slaving and its uses, there is no other generalising book to rival this one; and this one, happily, is very well done.
The reasons why it is well done are at least three in number. It is a story of black deprivations which is tough in its style to the point of never becoming sentimental: no wailing here, no fruitless pounding of the breast. It is skilfully written and always readable, even when the facts threaten to become statistical. And it manages a nice mix of visual reportage with serious infor- mation, quite a feat in our period of media self-admiration when the provision of seri- ous information is thought to be bad for business. As a BBC documentary pundit once admonished me: 'You're getting edu- cational, and we can't have that.' But Segal is a determined fellow, and determined to provide serious information.
This is a panorama rather than a synthe- sis as the author claims, and, as such, a tour de force. Mainly in the Americas, though sometimes closer to home, he travels with the conviction, which I find admirable, that we really ought to know what he has to tell: not because it is he who is telling us — in the manner of so many newly-baked travel- writers — but because he has an enthusi- asm for what he finds and explores. His many chapters achieve a cool importance for their subject and not for their author, and this keeps his pages turning.
An opening section, much less than a quarter of the whole, sets the historical scene with a minimum of fuss, and then moves briskly into the action scenes. Some of these cover well-conned ground, especially about the Spanish Main, but even a familiar reader will be moved to admiration for Segal's choice of situations and his skill in moving through them. In Guyana, for example, Stedman's experi- ence has been often told before, but I doubt if any reader will regret its dramatic rehearsal here. This equally applies to the
Pamela Wilkie Cataract
In that fudgy pre-dawn light furniture dissolves into smudges.
Dark stains shimmy and blurt out of framek then suddenly engulf your foreground with gestures and mouths.
Morning mist lingers on and on. Fog patches seep into the house, blunting your rods and your cones. You're feeling out of touch.
Walking down the street you're on a ghost-train, bracing for nasties and the things that go bump in the day. You wipe your windscreen till you're blue in the face . . . .
Caution! Signals not working. Expect delays.
stiff confrontations in Saint Domingue before it became Haiti as to the peoples of the British Caribbean with their fore- runners of the cricketers of today; and along this always surprising route Segal finds his dramas for extended telling down to present times: as, for example, whoever was President Aristide and why is he inter- esting? His ingenuity in this linking the unknown past to the vaguely known pre- sent proves a happy talent, and again scores especially well with his tales of Trinidad and Barbados. Other scenes shift to North America, with a brief and rather impatient account of that least forgettable of the cities of the USA, which is Detroit, and then a glimpse of 'Blacks in Britain'.
Segal, as I said earlier, travels unsenti- mentally, and a lot of his strength comes from being a South African of those valiant Jewish origins which, offsetting the Barney Barnatos, have stood through all these many years for the defence of human decencies against racial miseries. He man- ages to persist in looking for the bright side even when this is very hard to find, and he finds it in some little-noticed places, not least in the formative arena of Creole arts and ambitions. The outcome is a shrewd resilience which spares no abrasions, and sets forth its appalling record of black frustration and self-destruction with an undercurrent that remains, magically enough — even in Haiti, even in Brazil, even in Detroit — the reverse of wretched. Here his insights chime with my own, as when, not long ago in Detroit, I had the bracing task of lecturing on history to some 3,000 secondary-school teachers, every one of them black, and found them quite able to empathise with the plight of this elderly white man, telling them about black histo- ry, without the least shuffling of feet. 'You may find this strange,' I said; and they did find it strange, and laughed through that vast audience with a gentle enjoyment of the strangeness.
The likelihood came through to me on that occasion, if not for the first time, that whatever of American civility may yet be found owes no few of its deeper diapasons to a black input and its culture of survival. Segal seems repeatedly to have found the same thing in places still less probable than Detroit. He could have multiplied his fortunate encounters without losing this reader, one relevant omission being the Creole civility of the Cape Verde archipelago, hopeless in its poverty and yet so patently hopeful in its deployment of a humour that no white people could invent. As it is, Segal ranges far and wide without mistakes, or, rather, I found only one where he twice places the Mansfield anti- slavery judgment not in 1772, but in 1722 when it could not possibly have happened. A serious complaint goes to Messrs Faber for their heaping of conscientious notes at the end of the book, and without reference to page numbers. They used to know better.
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