Folks,

The following article deals with the real and
perceived fissures in relations between Africans and
African Americans. I shudder to think that given our
collective histories of pain and suffering, the chasm
could be as wide as the story details.

Enjoy.

BY MICHELLE BOORSTEIN
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
NEW YORK - The poster on the wall at Louise's diner
says, "Black is Black," but the people and the food
here tell a more complicated story.
Louise's sits in the heart of a neighborhood called
Little Senegal, in central Harlem. Most of the faces
you see along Little Senegal's wide boulevards and on
the stoops of its brownstone homes are black -
Africans and Americans both. As in any heavily
immigrant neigh-borhood, culture here is a fusion:
African-run restaurants offer dishes spiced gently for
black Americans; groceries sell yam flakes and
hamburgers; videos are available in English, French
and the Senegalese language of Wolof.
But members of the two com-munities say they live
largely disconnected lives, praying, shopping and
socializing among their own, sometimes harboring harsh
stereotypes of one another.
The separation is painful to many black Americans, who
long for their lost historical roots. They rallied
here in 1999 to protest the police killing of a West
African immigrant, and they increasingly push for
slavery reparations. They adopt Africa's hairstyles
and adapt its music and wear T-shirts like one that
calls the faraway conti-nent "Home of the Original
Black People."
"We're not as bonded as we should be," says Butch
Williams, a 51-year-old steelworker, over a plate of
eggs and grits at Louise's. The connection to Africa
is "one of THE ongoing questions for black Americans,"
he says. "You look around and you say, 'What tribe am
I from?' You can't help but wonder."
The disconnect has no such meaning to many African
immi-grants, who often come to this country to make
money and then return home. They say don't
nec-essarily see life in America as black vs. white.
"You go on with your life and them with theirs," says
Adam Fofana, who came here from the Ivory Coast eight
years ago and runs a restaurant called Fatou - down
the street from Louise's.
Still, Fatou offers food that Fo-fana hopes will bring
all blacks in Little Senegal together: West African
and Caribbean fare and an all-American beer,
Budweiser. So far, the clientele is strictly West
African.
Talk about the inter-group dynamics has grown in the
past dec-ade with the dramatic swell of African
immigrants to New York City neighborhoods, including
Harlem. (The number of immigrants to New York from
Ghana alone increased 220 percent from the mid to late
1990s; from Nigeria, 380 percent. Figures for all
nation-alities are not available.)
A new French film called "Little Senegal" is about a
Senegalese man who comes to Harlem and the profound
rift he finds there. And in the next few months,
museums in New York and Philadelphia will hold
programs exploring the topic.
"Africans want to make money (in the United States)
and go home. African-Americans want them to play their
citizenship role and have solidarity as black people.
They have two different agendas," said Manthia
Diawara, a Malian filmmaker who heads the Africana
Studies Department at New York University and has
written extensively about black culture.
The divide was highlighted for the world two years
ago, when four white New York City police officers
shot Amadou Diallo, an un-armed immigrant from Guinea,
41 times. Black Americans took to the streets to
protest what they saw as a racist attack, and were
shocked to find their fervor largely unmatched by
their African neighbors.
Yet Africans who immigrate here say they don't
necessarily feel closer to black Americans than to
anyone else. In fact, they often have their own set of
negative stereotypes.
"My father told me not to be friends with black people
in America," said Cheick Sissoko, a 27-year-old dancer
and drummer who came from Ivory Coast five years ago
and now lives in lower Manhattan. "What we see on TV
is so bad - guns and everything. Then I come and I
realize it's true."
Fofana, the restaurant owner, says black Americans
think they're above the sort of gritty work immigrants
must do to establish themselves in a new country.
For black Americans who ache from that lost
connection, such sentiments can sting.
At Djoniba, the downtown Man-hattan dance center where
Sissoko works, dancers of all colors and backgrounds
take classes ranging from the style of the Mandingo
tribe, in West Africa, to Congolese, Haitian and
hip-hop. The only actual Africans there are the
teachers, but students wearing traditional African
fabrics and others in Lycra bicycle unitards mingle
alongside posters advertising vacations in Africa.
"Come home!" one says.
Some of the black American dancers say they resent
that the African teachers don't feel a special
connection to them, don't recognize that there is a
reason they are doing African dance rather than
kickboxing or Roller-blading.
"There's not a sense of cultural solidarity between
African-Americans and Africans, and we are always
looking for that connection," said Tracy Austin, a
45-year-old black corporate lawyer who lives in Harlem
and has been in-volved with the Senegalese community
here for many years. "I think a lot of
African-Americans are responding to that lack of
solidarity, that sense that there is a lack of
race-consciousness among Africans, which we have very
deeply."
According to John Arthur, a University of Minnesota
sociologist and anthropologist and Ghana native who
has researched African migration to the United States,
part of the reason for the gap is that a key stretch
of the bridge is missing. The slave trade is not a
regular part of the curriculum in many schools in
Africa, and Arthur be-lieves that this is because
Africans would prefer not to face their role in the
industry.
As a result, he says, "they don't understand that they
do have a connection."
While it is common for immi-grants in general to
insist that they will return to their native country,
it is more so among Africans, says Arthur, author of a
book on the subject called "Invisible Sojourners."
Mabel Haddock, head of a Harlem-based group that
promotes films about blacks, says black Americans'
longing for Africa is like other romanticized feelings
people have for places. Many African films, she says,
explore the longing of people for their hometowns
after they migrate to large cities.
"I think some people have this rather exotic vision of
what Africa is," said Haddock, head of the National
Black Programming Consortium, "that if you go there
you'll find something better than here that's better
for your spiritual self."
Waly Ndiaye, a 49-year-old translator from Senegal who
lives in Little Senegal, says he thinks black
Americans who focus on their history in Africa and on
slavery should think about the future.
"I think people need to forget and move on. No matter
how hard it was, there are a lot of opportuni-ties,"
he said. But in a reminder of the depth of the
connection, Ndiaye adds that he and his African
friends can tell what part of the continent black
Americans were originally from by their look - and
their smell.
Ndiaye said he was brought to tears by "Little
Senegal."
The film tells the story of Alloune, a widower who
runs tours at Goree Island, once a slave export center
off the coast of West Africa. Upon retirement, he
travels to the United States in search of his
ancestors who were brought here as slaves.
Among its characters: a fat, money-obsessed black
American who refers to an African mechanic as "a big
ape"; an African immigrant who whips his girlfriend, a
pregnant African-American teen-ager, and an African
who says "we're too black" for black Americans.
Depending on one's view-point, "Little Senegal" is
jammed with simplistic caricatures - or truths.
To some, the film's African characters are idealized -
wise, educated, family oriented and proud, while its
black Americans are rootless, materialistic, crude
about topics like sex and love and cold about topics
like parenting and community.
Others say it was evenhanded and note that an African
character loathed American blacks even while admitting
he had taken no interest in getting to know them - an
insular attitude black Americans in Little Senegal say
is dead-on.
What exactly prompted Ndiaye's tears shows how complex
the issue is. He was moved both by the notion of an
African coming to America to find his roots - that the
two communities DO share roots - and by the fact that
Al-loune did not try to bring the Americans he met
back to Africa, home to Africa.
For now, the relationship re-mains part history and
part myth, distant and close.
While Fofana hangs drawings of slain American black
nationalist leader Malcolm X on the walls of Fatou, a
map of Africa is up at Louise's.
"Simply because our skins are black doesn't mean we
have any-thing in common," said Williams, the
steelworker eating breakfast. "But we do."







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