Emperor of Gondwanaland (37 page)

Shake It to the West

Shake it to the east, my darling,

Shake it to the west, my darling,

Shake it to the very one that you love the best.

—Street rhyme cited by Aaron Siskind in “Harlem Document”

Professor Rufus Sexwale found it vexingly hard to concentrate. It was seven in the morning, the time he normally began to write (starting so early usually gave him several uninterrupted hours before having to teach his first class at Lusaka University, a freshman introduction to the Unification years). It was a daily ritual Rufus cherished and anticipated.

The problem was that Rufus was not in his normal environment, the quiet and prosperous middle-class suburb of Lusaka known as Sugar Hill. There, most mornings, he would have had no distracting noises louder than tropical bird calls or the rumble of one of Lusaka’s shiny new “Memphis”-model garbage trucks. In his book-lined study, the new tubeless “Nile”-brand radio was tuned softly to the classical strains of Radio Pan-Africa’s early jazz program. Rufus could marshal his research, ponder his facts, become lost in the vastness of time, and compose his popular-history books, which commanded a sizable audience from Tangier to Durban.

But here, right now, in his first-class cabin aboard that newest, biggest, and most glamorously appointed ship of the Black Star Line—the
Chicago Bluesman
—Rufus had to contend with the party still going on outside on deck.

Not just any old party, either. This was the party of the century.

The hundredth anniversary of the first president’s birth.

The party had begun a week ago, when the
Chicago Bluesman
was in the middle of its passage from Monrovia to New York. The festive atmosphere of being at sea had encouraged the early start—not that the passengers needed much excuse. Last night had been the climax, though: the actual eve of the first president’s birth (the date popped obediently into Rufus’s trained mind: August 17, 1887). And the celebration’s finale had been boisterous and anarchic out of all proportion to anything Rufus had ever seen.

Rufus had attended the opening hours of last night’s celebration, had a few drinks—White Zombies—danced a slow dance or two with a charming Zulu girl six inches taller than he, then decided to leave. Such events quickly lost their luster for him. Truth to tell, he felt more at home at a faculty wine and cheese reception. Retiring to his cabin, he’d drifted off to an uneasy, booze-tinged sleep.

Around 3 a.m. he was jolted out of his slumber by an enormous round of fireworks. Poking his head out of his cabin, he witnessed a scene that could have come straight out of the climax of Ibrahim Reed’s fantasy masterpiece,
A Night in the Bush.

The electric lights mounted on the liner’s superstructure had been extinguished, and the deck was lit by flaring torches. Everyone Rufus could see was buck-naked. Their bodies—some already elaborately scarified and tattooed—had been decorated in various modes: paint, mud, glued feathers, colored ink (markers from the children’s lounge, he supposed).

The bodies were in elaborate syncopated motion, propelled by the sweaty band laboring atop a raised stage.

The band was not the suave jazz one that had earlier played at the slow tempos Rufus favored, nor even a somewhat more racy ragtime assemblage. It was one of these new “jit-jive” groups, a bunch of wild-haired teenagers who had taken traditional African rhythms, bred them with certain neglected Western forms such as Appalachian fiddle music, and mutated the bastard into something incredibly brazen, suggestive, and hypnotic.

The band found a primeval beat and wouldn’t let go. Circular pulses of sound washed over a stunned Rufus like the waves on the Capetown beach where he and Mudiwa and the children had spent their last vacation. To Professor Sexwale’s muzzy brain, it appeared the liner had passed through some kind of time warp out of the British mode of “experimentifiction” favored by his son Pete and had emerged in some primitive past before the civilizing effects of the Great Return and the subsequent Unification.

At this point, the snakes appeared.

Suddenly, many dancers were partnered not with fellow humans, but with an assortment of large, sinuous reptiles. The dancing became positively indecent. A shuffling circle of foot-stomping, howling celebrants spontaneously formed. Into it leaped a single man and a single woman, both barely clothed in leopard skins.

They began circling each other in mock predation.

Suspecting what would come next, Rufus retreated to his bunk, clamping a pillow to his head.

For once he regretted the largesse of Lusaka University, which had booked him first-class passage. In steerage, at least, he could have slept.

Now, for the tenth time, as the inexhaustible jit-jivers, laboring on past dawn, launched into a song even Rufus recognized (ironically, a furious version of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”), the professor tried to focus on the single-spaced sheet of paper in the gently humming Ovambo electric typewriter before him, the beginning of chapter 5 of the tentatively titled
Our Destined Start
.

The year 1921 witnessed the convergence and alliance of two groups that could not on the surface have appeared more dissimilar and antipathetic. I refer, of course, to First President Marcus Moziah Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association and the Ku Klux Klan. Although unequal in size and resources, both groups were led by powerful, crafty, charismatic figures who managed to put aside their mutual distaste and hatred to form an uneasy detente in order to achieve a mutual goal.

In this crucial year, the UNIA tallied its membership in the middling six figures and derived its not insignificant treasury from the donated pennies and quarters of maids and barbers, porters and dancers. Contrariwise, the KKK boasted six million followers and the backing of rich businessmen and politicians, industrialists, and farmers. Led by their Grand Cyclops (William Simmons, formerly a Georgia minister), the KKK stretched its tentacles into nearly every boardroom and ward heeler-stuffed voting booth in the United States.

The point of agreement upon which these two seemingly irreconcilable groups could meet was plainly stated.

Both organizations desired to empty the United States of its Negro population.

First President Garvey, in his early role as the “black Moses” of our childhood textbooks, wished to lead his people back to their ancestral homelands, which would at the same time contribute to the liberation and uplift of the African continent—in this not-so-remote period completely dominated by European colonial regimes, save for the two free countries of Liberia and Ethiopia.

Grand Cyclops Simmons and his numerous followers, on the other hand, wished to restore America to a mythical sixteenth-century white pristinity (perhaps—nay, certainly—mythical, when one acknowledges the presence of the indigenous red men), a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon, High Germanic, and Nordic culture, where little Virginia Dare would have no longer to fear the always lurking insults and assaults of Sambo.

Despite the root difference in their philosophies, both the UNIA and the KKK convinced even their most moderate and reluctant followers to cooperate in the mass repatriation we now call the Great Return.

They caused their shared program to be made the law of the land.

We now know, thanks to recent daring research efforts by a group of courageous and sympathetic Britons who smuggled certain key documents out of the Library of Congress, that the KKK had President Harding in the pockets of its robes, so to speak. The Harding administration (1920-1932) was as large an assortment of crooks and grafters, con men and swindlers, as has ever held the American White House. The simple threat to divulge the scandalous doings of the Hardingites to the press—controlled in large part by KKK sympathizers anyway—was enough to elicit President Harding’s complete cooperation (speculation has emerged that, had Harding been a man of stronger will and defied the Klan, the KKK planned to assassinate him in 1923 and run their own candidate).

First President Garvey, in a move of dubious ethical validity yet understandable practicality, given his position of inferior strength, was a full participant in this blackmail, piggybacking his schemes atop the enemy’s.

The passage and signing of the Negro Exclusionary Act in May of that fateful year set in motion the Great Return, the largest planned exodus in the history of humanity.

Over the course of a mere seven years, using the ships of the UNIA’s Black Star Line and numerous supplemental vessels (including some of the U.S. Navy fleet), more than one million Amero-Africans of all ages were funneled into the “Dark Continent” through the port of Monrovia, which quickly became the largest city in sub-Saharan Africa.

The importance of the rider to the Exclusionary Act barring all immigration into the United States from a long list of countries (basically, only England, Germany, the Netherlands, and the countries of Scandinavia were exempted) went unnoticed amid the general uproar occasioned by the uprooting of the native-born Negroes—

A drum solo from the jit-jivers broke Professor Sexwale’s concentration for the eleventh time. Sighing, he toggled off the typewriter.

Perhaps it was just as well he abandon his manuscript at this point for a short time. Early this afternoon, they were scheduled to dock in New York. The official celebrations attendant on this historic return of the first Black Star Line ship to America in over sixty-five years would doubtless occupy several days in which it would be impossible to work. After that, his researches would in all likelihood uncover so much new material—New York had been Jamaican-born Garvey’s headquarters—he might have to revise the first four chapters anyway.

Rufus stood up from the zebra hide-covered seat at his desk.

Time for breakfast and, more important, coffee. How he missed lovely Mudiwa and her considerate attentions. Had he been home, a steaming pot of Kampalan brew would have been waiting before he even began. It was a shame she and the children couldn’t come, but Mudiwa had her job as manager of the Lusakan Fabric Works to consider.

Straightening the lapels of his full-cut kente-cloth suit jacket (Mudiwa had his clothes made exclusively from conservative LFW prints), Rufus stepped outside.

Almost immediately, he encountered an entirely displeasing figure.

Forced to maneuver over and around unconscious bodies littering the deck, Rufus found his convoluted path bringing him directly toward the man in the leopard skin whose vulgarity had precipitated Rufus’s hasty retreat to his cabin. Slouched over the rail, the man appeared comatose. Just as Rufus was edging past, the party victim straightened, confronting the professor face to face.

That man, only shadowily apprehended last night, turned out in the bright light of day to be none other than the egregious Banga Johnson.

Banga was one of Rufus’s fellow Lusakans on board. Incredibly rich, slim and self-assured, the dapper owner of the Springbok Motor Company had a reputation as a playboy and bon vivant. Rufus had encountered him socially once or twice and been unimpressed. Granted, the man had a certain amount of guile and street smarts—he could hardly have brought his company so far if he had been a complete idiot—but his brusque speech and coarse manners were utterly disagreeable.

Banga gripped Rufus by the elbow, an imposition Rufus detested.

Banga’s eyes in his somewhat narrow head were bloodshot, and his thin mustache was flecked with dried beer froth (or worse). Yet he appeared relatively in control of himself.

“Professor Sexwale! Just the man I want to see! I’ve been meaning to speak with you the whole trip, but you know how these things can slide. We must talk before the ship docks. There’s not much time. Now would be perfect.”

Rufus tried to temporize. “I was just on my way to dine. Couldn’t it wait …?”

“No. I’ve made an appointment with a charming Ashanti girl for ten, and we’ll probably be quite busy up till noon.” Banga leered in the manner of the lecherous Mister Bushpig in Alake Walker’s
Shades of Violet
. “I could go for something to eat myself. We’ll breakfast together.”

Rufus regarded Banga, appalled. “Would you care to change—?”

“No time. Besides, every woman on board has already seen this leopard’s tail—fore and aft! Let’s go!”

Captured by his own good manners and by Banga’s bad, Rufus let himself be led to the liner’s vast and elegant chandelier-lit dining room, which turned out to be only sparsely occupied at this early hour. Nevertheless, a full buffet was laid out, everything from groundnut stew to grits.

Helped by liveried attendants, the two men soon carried heaped plates and cups of steaming coffee on their trays to an empty table. Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey played softly over the room’s speakers.