KINSHIP

A strange, wonderful hybrid of memoir and history by a man who has periodically lived as an African and an African-American. Journalist Wamba painfully strides two continents and cultures, with his mother from Ohio, his father from the Congo, and years of living in Boston and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. His parents met at the college French Club in Kalamazoo, Mich., and they have had to speak French ever since. The linguistic gulf between Africans and their kin who were shipped here as slaves 300 years ago is the least of the gap between these communities “bound by blood but living worlds apart.” Africans often find their American cousins “frivolous and unfocused,” while American blacks frequently see Africans as “highly judgmental” and their regimes as frighteningly repressive. The author’s father, a historian who later gets subversive, is held and beaten in a Zairean jail without formal charge or trial. But Wamba’s return to his father’s homeland and other African experiences are too warmly positive for him to forgo his pan-African idealism. He explores mythologies that have clouded the two black communities and provides an overview of W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and others. In the context of his brother’s death from a childhood illness, he discusses the spiritual options open to Africans and African-Americans, his family “sampling from various religious traditions for answers—; they agreed to move from Tanzania because they felt the boy’s soul would join them, just as American slaves believed “their souls would return to Africa after death.” With his scholarly father turning rebel leader in the Congolese political turmoil—attempting to replace the tyrannical Mobutu—and moving from Tanzania to Goma, the author hopes the conflict will lead to the African renaissance envisioned for the century ahead. The best book dealing with the African half of the compound African-American.