Maya Angelou, Africa, and Us
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A few years ago, while visiting a school in Ghana, I walked by a framed portrait of a woman who looked somewhat familiar. I stopped to examine it more closely, and then I recognized her: Maya Angelou.
A student saw what I was doing, and saddled up to me. “She lived here,” he said, proudly.
Indeed she did. Angelou, the acclaimed author who died last week, spent three formative years in Ghana in the early 1960s. But most of the tributes and obituaries about Angelou sped quickly past that period, focusing instead on the traumas of her early life and her triumphs later on.
That’s too bad, because Ghana – and Africa more broadly – were central to the way that Angelou and a whole generation of Americans thought about race, civil rights, and global affairs. Many countries in Africa were seen as comprising the vanguard of a worldwide march for freedom.
That’s why Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife Coretta traveled to Ghana in 1957, where they observed the ceremonies marking sub-Saharan Africa’s first independent nation. A range of other African-American luminaries also made the trip, including labor leader A. Philip Randolph and Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell.
So did U.S. Vice-President Richard Nixon, whom King met for the first time in Ghana. “I want you to come to visit us down in Alabama,” King told Nixon, “where we are seeking the same kind of freedom [Ghana] is celebrating.”
To Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah, who had worked and studied in the United States for more than a decade, civil rights campaigns in the West were intimately linkedto the African anti-colonial struggle. He chose to adorn Ghana’s flag with the “Black Star,” borrowing the name of the transatlantic shipping line envisioned by Jamaican freedom fighter Marcus Garvey.
Likewise, King and other American civil rights activists took inspiration from the newly liberated African nation. “Ghana tells us that the forces of the universe are on the side of justice,” King told his congregation in Montgomery, Alabama, upon his return.
Over the next few years, Ghana became a magnet for African Americans who were impatient with the rate of progress back home. Moving there with her son, Maya Angelou wrote for local publications and performed for Ghana’s National Theater. The most prominent African American in Ghana was W.E.B. Du Bois, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who was hounded out of the United States for his Communist affiliations....