Dreams of the New Land Africa I guard your memory Africa you are in me My future is your future Your wounds are my wounds The funky blues I cook are black like you-Africa Africa my motherland America my fatherland Although I did not choose it to be Africa you alone can make me free Africa where the rhinos roam Where I learned to swing Before America became my home Not like a monkey but in my soul Africa you are rich with natural gold Africa I live and study for thee And through you I shall be free Someday I"ll come back and see Land of my mothers, where a black god made me My Africa, your Africa, a free continent to be. Ted Joans, "Africa" Schoolhouse Rock didn"t teach me a damn thing about "freedom." The kids like me growing up in Harlem during the 1960s and early 1970s heard that word in the streets; it rang in our ears with the regularity of a hit song. Everybody and their mama spoke of freedom, and what they meant usually defied the popular meanings of the day. Whereas most Americans associated freedom with Western democracies at war against communism, free-market capitalism, or U.S. intervention in countries such as Vietnam or the Dominican Republic, in our neighborhood "freedom" had no particular tie to U.S.

nationality (with the possible exception of the black-owned Freedom National Bank). Freedom was the goal our people were trying to achieve; free was a verb, an act, a wish, a militant demand. "Free the land," "Free your mind," "Free South Africa," "Free Angola," "Free Angela Davis," "Free Huey," were the slogans I remember best. Of course, "freedom" was also employed as a marketing tool to sell us things like Afro wigs, hair care products, and various foodstuffs, but even these commodities were linked in our minds to the black struggle for independence, not just in the urban ghettos but around the world. "Freedom" even became a kind of metonym for Africa-the home we never knew, the place where we once enjoyed freedom before we were forcibly taken in chains across the sea. We drank Afro-Cola, which came in a blue can emblazoned with a map of the African continent, partly because slick marketing executives told us it contained the taste of freedom, partly because we pretended it was nectar from the motherland. Of course, not everyone identified with Africa or associated the continent with dreams of freedom, but we were living in Harlem, of all places, during the era of the "black freedom movement." Formal colonialism had ended throughout most of Africa-the exceptions being southern Africa and the Portuguese colonies-so those who paid attention to such things were excited by the prospects of a free and independent Africa.

By the time I enrolled at California State University at Long Beach, the black studiesBlack Studies program there reignited my nascent, underdeveloped Pan-African vision of the world. Our professors turned diehard party people and wannabe Greeks into angry young "Afrikans." And we had good reason to be angry. After twelve years of public miseducation, reading works by pioneering black scholars such as Eric Williams"s Capitalism and Slavery, Cheikh Anta Diop"s The African Origins of Civilization, George E. M. James"s Stolen Legacy, Angela Davis"s Women, Race, and Class, W. E. B.

Du Bois"s Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction in America, J. A. Rogers"s World"s Greatest Men and Women of African Descent, among others, opened up a whole new world for us. We learned of the origins of Western racism, the history of slavery, the rise and fall of African kingdoms before.