BLACK POWER
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did not want to come to the United States, yours did. Once we arrived
in the United States, yes, we both worked - but separated from each
other. We did not mix. You remained, essentially, a European people.
We remained an African people.
We remained African because in Africa we had possessed a complex
and highly-developed oral tradition. Knowledge - of the past, of the
environment, artistic traditions, philosophy, myth, cuisine - was passed
from one generation to the next, orally.
For the most part, we did not have written languages, books. You
had books, libraries, where knowledge of the past, the environment,
artistic traditions, philosophy, myth and even cuisine was boxed, pack–
aged, stacked, catalogued, categorized, entombed and enshrined. In
books. You must have money to get into such places, to study books, to
buy books. Everybody cannot do it.
Many more people talk than write. Many more people hear and see
than read. And we, those of us whose ancestors came from Africa, we
had, still have, an oral tradition.
Unlike many immigrants, we did not suffer the shock of being
separated, by English, from languages which were both oral and written.
We were torn only from spoken cultures.
We missed the sounds of each of our languages, but the content,
its meanings, stayed with us. An important aspect of our African cultures
was the strong emphasis on Improvisation. Improvisation, in many dif–
ferent forms, is common to all of Africa.
In the United States, we improvised. An African, a grown man,
taken in battle or kidnapped, marched to the coast in chains, forced
onto a ship, carried across an ocean, unloaded, sold and told, finally,
that he must pick somebody else's cotton, such a man had better im–
provise.
He did. We all did. We improvised on English. We improvised on
Christianity. We improvised on European dress. We improvised on
European instruments. We improvised on European games.
'Orally. An African woman may have learned to cook her owner's
dinner the way he liked it, but when she cooked her own food, she added
a little pepper, as she had done in Africa. And that's the food she fed
her children, or the African children she was feeding. And she taught
the girls to cook that way, the old way. And those girls taught their
girls. Orally. To our day.
We talked. We improvised. And our ancestors came from Africa.
That is why you cannot compare James Brown to Elvis Presley, or the
Temptations to the Beatles, or Duke Ellington to Aaron Copeland, or
even the Black Power Movement to the Abolitionists and the Anarchists.
We are different.
