My Notions of Blackness Died on a Bus in Africa
Early November meant the southern hemisphere was creeping closer toward summer. Small amounts of rain were already greening up the shrub desert and occasionally perfuming the air with the smell of appreciatively cooled earth. It also meant the already ridiculously hot weather was finding a way to get hotter still. Not far from the village’s school was a lone standing tree with a broad, thin canopy and a hand-painted sign that simply read: “Bus.” With the sunbaked, sandy soil crunching before giving way to my boots, I made my way there under a big bright blue sky.
Dropping my backpack unceremoniously to the ground, I took out a water bottle and joined a few other people sitting on a log in a small patch of shade. The dryness that had already overtaken my mouth meant the warm water was a welcome relief. Not content with the sensation of shade-cooled air on my skin and warm water in my stomach, I started fanning my stubbled, bespectacled face with my sweat-stained safari hat, passed the bottle around to the other passengers, none of whom spoke English, and waited.
After a couple of hours, the twice-a-day fifteen-seater bus finally pulled up in a cloud of dust, blaring music. The driver turned the stereo down, and his assistant immediately hopped out to help the other passengers with their things. Tossing him my backpack — three days’ worth of dirty clothes — I got on the bus and squeezed my large frame into one of the last remaining seats next to a colorfully dressed, elderly woman who greeted me with a toothless smile. Everyone on the bus was laughing and chatting, and all the new arrivals joined right in. I was thoroughly convinced everyone in Botswana knew each other since this always seemed to happen. Just four months into my year of doing volunteer work, my Setswana still wasn’t good enough to understand what they were talking about, though cows did seem to be a reoccurring topic of conversation if I heard them correctly. The instant joyous camaraderie was familiar. I’d felt the same thing many times growing up in the States whenever large groups of Black people got together.
Once the other new passengers and I were settled in and started paying the assistant, the bus slowly took off down the untarred, bumpy road. As it bounced along, kicking up a trail of dust in its wake, the driver turned the music back up. Drum-filled, melodious African music poured out from the bus’s overused speakers and was amplified by all the passengers either singing or clapping along. Their combined harmonies vibrated my body and enveloped me in warmth as lyrics I didn’t understand spoke to my soul. If I were to ever sit next to a person who didn’t at least tap their foot to this kind of music, I’d scoot away for fear their soulless condition might be contagious. With everyone on the bus radiating joy, I couldn’t help but smile from ear to ear as I moved along to the music and the swaying of the bouncing bus. It was one of those simple, yet euphoric moments of life you could live in forever.
After about thirty minutes of this perfection, the tape ended. The driver popped it out and quickly found a replacement. On came AC/DC’s She Shook Me All Night Long, a rock classic and arguably the polar opposite of what had just been playing with its focus on guitars and high pitched scratchy-voiced singing.
I instantly stiffened up and forced all the good vibes out of my body. While I could say it was the contrasting musical style that caused the joy to run out of me, it was something much more profound than that. I didn’t deem the music to be Black enough, and I hardened up to show everyone how committed I was to my Blackness. But I was clearly the only one suffering from this belief. The other passengers immediately went right back to enjoying themselves and bobbing their heads to the music, including my elderly seatmate. These people, whose Black credentials were beyond reproach — not only were they Black, they were African Black — were enjoying the music because they found it enjoyable.
Sitting there in my newfound rigidness, the restrictions I thought came with being Black died all at once when I realized why I, alone, had so dramatically changed my disposition. Growing up in America and fresh out of high school, my racial identity — my Blackness — was something I consciously thought about all the time because it was regularly challenged by both Blacks and whites. The result, I realized all at once on that bus, was that I had internalized other people’s ideas of what it meant and what I must do to be “Black.” I had imposed limits on myself about what I could and couldn’t like or do, and classic rock was high up on the list of things that weren’t “Black enough” for me to appreciate.
At that point in time, my entire educational career had been in overwhelmingly white schools, which means I can tell you that when someone says they have a “Black friend” it often says a lot more about their friend’s tolerance than it does theirs. Regardless, I did a good job of fitting in. Maybe too good of a job since I would frequently be told while in high school that I was “the whitest Black guy” many of my classmates had ever met. They would say this in flagrant disregard of the fact that I was one of the only Black people they’d met, given that our 1,000 person high school was 97 percent white. The comment, which was sometimes said as though I should take it as a compliment, always stung, even before I had the words to articulate why.
I’m intelligent, well-spoken, and generally haven’t modeled anything about myself from hip-hop culture. I have a good work ethic and can be impressively well-mannered if I feel a situation warrants my best behavior. These have been the underlying reasons some have felt they could question my racial identity. The idea that any of that should cause me to not be viewed as Black, however, is out-and-out racist; it’s saying these relatively common characteristics are out of reach of the typical Black American. When Black Americans made similar comments or called me an “Oreo,” a cookie that’s black on the outside and white on the inside, it was because they had similarly taken issue with the way I speak, the way I carry myself and that I had adapted to a larger swath of American culture than just Black culture. And I believe it was often said in an attempt to shame me into some type of conformity. Unlike when these remarks come from white people, when coming from a Black person, I don’t consider them to be the result of racist thinking. They are instead an effect of having racial stereotypes imposed on us. For some of us, these stereotypes have acted like a knee on the neck strangling our ability to imagine for ourselves who we might become. These same Black Americans taking issue with those of us who dare to exhibit the kind of individuality white Americans take for granted have labeled things like taking school seriously, speaking English formally, eating healthy or being able to maneuver in environments that aren’t Black-dominated a betrayal to Blackness. But why the hell would they have us give up such valuable ground, and how on earth does that do anything but play into the hands of racists?
“Why am I holding myself to some restrictive idea of Blackness that these Africans on this bus most certainly aren’t?,” I thought to myself as everyone continued rocking out to the music. The realization that, in trying to live up to other people’s notions of Blackness, I was denying myself untold opportunities, experiences and pleasures made me think of an African proverb I’d heard earlier in my trip about a man looking to buy crabs: As the story goes, a man went out to a dock where a crabber had three barrels of crabs. Two of the barrels had lids on them and on top of the lids were large rocks holding them in place. Still, the lids on these two barrels were clearly being pushed up on from beneath and it looked like the crabs might make their way out at any moment. The third barrel, however, was completely uncovered even though it was just as full as the others. Curious about this, the man asked the crabber, “Why do those two barrels have lids while the other does not?”
The crabber replied, “That barrel, unlike the others, is full of African crabs. You don’t have to put a lid on them.”
“Why is that?” the man asked.
“Well, with African crabs, anytime one of them tries to climb out, the others will pull it back down.”
I had, with a lot of help, been trapped in a barrel of my own making and all I had to do to escape was stop caring what other people thought about me. From that moment on, I would fight against allowing any decision in my life to be dictated by other people’s definitions of Blackness or manliness, or any other social construct meant to inhibit me. My only standard for deciding what I liked would be if I liked it, and I could rest assured that I’d still be Black, just like the people on that bus. They didn’t let being Black limit who they could be, they let who they were expand what it meant to be Black.
Like dead vines concealing a beautiful mural, brushing away the wilted remains of my crippling notions of Blackness revealed a more authentic connection I had to both Black Americans and Black Africans. On the one hand, I came to view being Black as being nothing more than an adjective to describe the color of my skin. On the other, however, it is the bond forged by the shared experiences, mistreatment, and oppression that has resulted from how people who look like me have been and continue to be treated. More importantly, it comes from how we’ve never let it dampen the joy, the music, the laughter that is so deep within us that they were able to survive a trip across the ocean in the most unspeakable of conditions. This way of being sustained generations of us through hundreds of years of slavery, colonization, apartheid, segregation, and discrimination and is still so evident that when this stolen child returned, the warmth that greeted me was already known and felt like home.
This bus ride and the remainder of my time in southern Africa showed me that my Blackness wasn’t about a checklist of things I must like and interests I must avoid. The death of this way of thinking allowed me to realize there were no restrictions on who I could be as a Black person. It would still be a couple more frustrating years before I was able to come up with a retort that properly shut down people who dared try to pigeonhole me over race and properly frame the thinking behind such comments: “Oh, I’m sorry. Exactly which one of your racial stereotypes am I not living up to?” is now my locked and loaded reply to comments so steeped in narrow, repressive racial thinking — regardless of who says it.
This was an excerpt from Brian’s upcoming memoir, “When a Stolen Child Returns: A Black American Teen Finds Liberation in Southern Africa.” For another excerpt, click here.
