Eslanda Goode Robeson's African Journey

Quayson, Ato. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality & History
in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka & Ben Okri.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Schalkwyk, David. “Portrait and Proxy: Representing Plaatje and
Plaatje Represented.” Scrutiny 2. 4/2 (1999): 14-29.
Schalkwyk, David and Lerothodi Lapula, “Solomon Plaatje, William
Shakespeare, and the Translations of Culture.” Pretexts: Literary and
Cultural Studies 9/1 (2000): 9-26.
Seddon, Deborah. “Shakespeare’s Orality: Solomon Plaatje’s Setswana
Translations.” English Studies in Africa 47/2 (2004): 77-95.
Shole, Shole J. Forward. A Setswana Reader (Folk Narratives). By Sol. T.
Plaatje and Daniel Jones. Kimberley: The Sol Plaatje Educational Trust,
2004. ii-iii.
Willan, Brian. Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist, 1876-1932. London:
Heinemann, 1984.
Nicholas M. Creary
Ohio University
76
Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey
In 1936, Eslanda Goode Robeson and her eight year old son
Pauli left London and went to South Africa and Uganda for three
months. At the time she was the wife of the famous African American
singer and actor Paul Robeson. During the 1930s the Robesons lived in
London and New York while Paul pursued a successful career in
theater, movies, and concert performances. He played major roles in
Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, which he performed on stage and in
film, Jerome Kern’s musical Show Boat, also on stage and in film, and a
London stage performance of Othello.
Eslanda Goode Robeson, known as Essie, had studied at the
University of Illinois and Columbia University. At the time she met
and then married Paul Robeson in 1921, she was working as a chemist
at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. When the Robesons lived in
London, she began studying Anthropology at the University of London
and the London School of Economics with, among others, Professor of
Anthropology Branislaw Malinowski. As an African American
woman, she had a long-standing interest in Africa that was heightened
in London where there was much more information about English
colonies than in the US. The Robesons had African friends in London
who could help Essie see both South Africa and Uganda. Paul Robeson
could not go with his wife and son because of his dramatic and concert
commitments. By 1936, he was also becoming interested in and
sympathetic towards the Soviet Union, where he performed to great
acclaim. During Essie’s African trip he was in Moscow discussing a
possible film about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture
with the leading Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein.
Goode Robeson’s plan to visit Africa was something that she saw as
part of her American identity. The opening words of the diary of her
trip, published in 1945 by John Day with the title African Journey, state it:
I wanted to go to Africa.
It began when I was quite small. Lots of Americans, when they
could afford it, went back to see their ‘old country.’ I remember
wanting very much to see my ‘old country,’ and wondering what it
would be like.
In America one heard little or nothing about Africa…In
England, on the other hand, there is news of Africa everywhere: in the
press, in the schools, in the films, in conversation. [13]
Yet in England she found the same prevalent attitude toward
Africans, that they were primitive. When she identified herself as
77

African, white people in London told her, “No, you’re not primitive, my
dear,…you’re educated and cultured, like us” [15]. She immediately
saw in this attitude the same patronizing racism that African
Americans heard from whites. She writes,
It was the same old army game every Negro in America will
recognize: the white American South says the Negro is ignorant and
has a low standard of living; the Negro says the South won’t give him
adequate schools or decent wages…White America generalizes in its
mind about the primitiveness, ignorance, laziness, and smell of
Negroes” [16].
One of the elements that makes Goode Robeson’s journey to Africa
relevant today is that she brings an African American’s perspective
and background to South Africa. As the privileged wife of a celebrity,
she traveled with and was hosted by white Europeans and South
Africans as well as black Africans. Though her white hosts treated her
as if she were more of an honorary white than a black person., she
knew that she couldn’t count on that attitude from every white person
she met. Her language, her clothing, her tickets for the ship, all marked
her as a middle class westerner. Yet at the same time her identity as the
wife of an African American celebrity and leader in the black
community made it difficult for her to get a visa for South Africa. She
writes: “the white people in Africa do not want educated Negroes
traveling around seeing how their brothers live; nor do they want
those brothers seeing Negroes from other parts of the world, hearing
how they live” [18]. Nevertheless, she persevered and was admitted to
South Africa because the English colonial authorities feared a scandal
from the liberal side of their own press.
On board the ship from London, Goode Robeson was befriended by
quite a few white South Africans returning from visits to Britain. She
immediately understood the patronizing tone that they used to refer to
their African servants: “I could almost feel I was a home again,
listening to a white Southerner from our own Deep South. It think it
will be easy for me to understand the South Africans; their attitudes,
especially their patriarchal attitudes, are entirely familiar” [30].
Goode Robeson’s unique traveling position began when she was
escorted off the boat by the prominent South African Anthropologist,
Professor Isaac Schapera, a colleague of her professor in London. But
before Eslanda and Pauli could get off the boat, they were besieged by
newspapermen from Cape Town who wanted to know all about her
prominent husband Paul Robeson who was then famous in London.
They asked her why Robeson wasn’t with her, when he will give
78
concerts in South Africa, whether he’s expressed his views on racial
segregation and discrimination in South Africa, why she has come
there, whether she’s interested in local native conditions, and finally
who will win the boxing match between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling.
She was questioned as the wife of a black celebrity artist who had
already become a spokesman for black rights in the US and Europe.
Goode Robeson’s answers to these questions were as non-controversial
as she could make them. She said that Paul Robeson had expressed his
views on segregation and discrimination in general everywhere, but
they did not know enough about specific problems in South Africa to
express an intelligent view. When asked for her views about the
Africans’ primitive minds, she replied that Africans she had met
studying at universities in Europe had no trouble assimilating
European thought and culture. She identified herself as a person of
mixed racial background with much European and native American
blood in her family who had always considered herself a Negro and
had always been considered as a Negro by white Americans.
Essie Robeson’s real introduction to South Africa begins when she
meets Africans who take her to the black communities in and around
Cape Town. First she learns that in South Africa the terms colored and
African do not refer to the same people. The term ‘colored’ means “any
mixture of white blood with African, Indian, Chinese, or Malay blood.
[36]. In 1936 there were about a half million colored people and seven
million Africans, “the indigenous native people,” in South Africa.
While in Cape Town, Goode Robeson visited both the urban slum,
District Six, as well as the African location of Langa which was seven
miles outside of the city. Each one offered her a view of the worst
aspects of South African society. Colored South Africans were
permitted to live in certain designated parts of cities, but Africans
were forbidden to live in colored sections and were forced to live in
locations and reserves outside of the cities. They could not leave the
reserves without written permission or a pass. Africans walked seven
miles from the Langa reserve to work in Cape Town and then back
home again at night. The restrictions on African workers were so
oppressive that Goode Robeson learned, when she reached
Johannesburg, that there were 32,000 convictions for Pass Law offenses
in 1930 in that one city. One of the most divisive aspects of South
African racial policy was that the white government pitted the colored
community against Africans even though the so-called legal
superiority of the formers’ social standing was minute, given the awful
conditions that Goode Robeson saw in the urban colored quarter. In
79

the mid-1930s, she lists the populations of South Africa as more than
nine million people, divided into two million whites, comprising the
ruling class, half a million colored people, a quarter of a million Asians,
mostly Indians, and seven million Africans.
On her trip Essie was guided through South Africa by nurses, social
workers, and even chiefs, who constituted an African middle class and
elite. She was also hosted by white officials who treated her very well.
She was a guest at an African wedding, school children came out to
sing for her, and she was taken to the big African convention at
Bloemfontein, where representatives of organizations from all over
South Africa discussed how to improve conditions for people of color.
In fact, traveling in South Africa reminded Goode Robeson of traveling
in the deep South in America:
You are passed from friend to friend, from car to
car, from home to home, often covering thou
sands of miles without enduring the inconve
niences and humiliations of the incredibly bad
Jim Crow train accommodations and lack of
hotel facilities for Negroes. [65]
Goode Robeson and her son were personally spared the experience of
South African poverty that so moved her. As they were driven through
the country they encountered countless African families on the road,
walking endless miles between white farms that reflected the worst
conditions of poverty. She writes,
And always the heartbreaking sight of African families
on the road on foot, trying somehow to escape from the
slavery of these farms. The father often leads the small
child by the hand, in front, followed by other children
and the mother, who has all their worldly possessions
on her head: perhaps a crude stove, blanket, a
few clothes, a little food. [67]
As Goode Robeson often compares South Africa to America, it is
relevant to note that in the same year, 1936, American writers were
describing similar scenes of rural poverty. James Agee and the
photographer Walker Evans were recording their journey through
rural white poverty in the American South in their powerful book Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men. John Steinbeck was documenting the
80
struggles of migrant agricultural workers in his novels In Dubious Battle
[1936] and The Grapes of Wrath [1939]. Major African American writers
were also at work. Zora Neale Hurston would publish Their Eyes Were
Watching God in 1937 and Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children,
published in 1938, deals in part with African Americans leaving behind
racism in the American South. Like Agee, Goode Robeson’s sympathy
also extended across racial lines to poor whites. She writes about them
with both identification and ambivalence:
Occasionally on the roads we passed families of poor
whites, usually Boers trekking in their oxcarts. They
had make a failure of their last place and were moving
on to find new land to waste and exhaust. Their faces
were often wild, unkempt, and vacant, rather like
roaming house animals. It is said they are lazy, shiftless,
and ignorant, but these accusations are familiar to
us. The same things are said about Negroes, to ease the
consciences of those who grind us down. The same
economic exploitation accounts for the desperate plight
of Negroes and poor whites. [50]
Goode Robeson here reflects a sharp consciousness of economic
class divisions that she shares with her husband Paul. During the
1930s both Paul and Eslanda had become deeply concerned about the
threat of fascism in Europe. In fact, Paul Robeson went to Spain during
its Civil War to sing to soldiers and audiences on the loyalist anti-
Fascist side. Both Robesons were also becoming increasingly
supportive of the society they saw developing in the Soviet Union. Her
brothers were already living in Moscow and her mother joined them
when Eslanda and Paul decided to send their son Pauli to school there
after their African trip
During the course of her journey, Goode Robeson discussed the need
for improvement in black education with her African hosts, one of
whom, Max Yergan, was an African American working for the YMCA in
South Africa. On the subject of improvement in racial conditions,
Goode Robeson held up the Soviet Union as a model. Her idealism is
clearly evoked in the following excerpt:
And the one hopeful light on the horizon—the
exciting and encouraging conditions in Soviet Russia,
where for the first time in history our raceproblem has
been squarely faced and solved; where for the first time
thefine words of the poets, philosophers, and well
81

meaning politicians have been made a living reality.
[47]
As with her husband, Goode Robeson’s background in confronting
American racism and then South African racism led her to
idealistically embrace the hope represented by the new communist
society in the Soviet Union. In the next twenty years, especially when
the Cold War began after World War II, both Robesons, particularly
Paul, would pay a heavy price for their sympathies toward Soviet
communism. In 1953 Eslanda Goode Robeson would herself be called to
testify before the Senate Investigating Committee and would there
confront Senator Joseph McCarthy and argue him to a stand-off.
As Goode Robeson sees the striking similarities between racial
oppression of Africans in South Africa and African Americans in the
US, she begins to reflect on the view of Africans widely held by most
Americans, even African Americans. She writes, “I blush with shame
for the mental picture my fellow Negroes in America have of our
African brothers: wild black savages in leopard skins, waving spears
and eating raw meat” [48]. She was undoubtedly thinking of the movie
Sanders of the River that her husband Paul had recently made in England.
In it he played a primitive African Chief named Bosambo who swears
allegiance to the English colonizers of his imaginary African tribe. The
film was intended to show that European domination was necessary to
bring order and civilization to wild Africa. In fact, Paul Robeson made
other movies in the 1930s about Africa in which he usually played the
figure of a noble African chief who wears animal skins. The films
feature charges of hundreds of African warriors carrying spears, yet
also include popular songs to show off Paul Robeson’s singing voice.
Almost none of these movies were successful artistically or
commercially. None was as politically supportive of English
colonialism as Sanders of the River, but they all presented the image of
Africans as either noble or threatening primitives. In her book, Goode
Robeson takes responsibility for perpetuating this stereotypical image
of Africa that Americans were familiar with from watching Tarzan
movies. But she insists that Paul Robeson will stop such portrayals in
the future when she writes, “and we, with films like Sanders of the River,
unwittingly helping to perpetuate this misconception. Well, there will
be no sequel to Sanders” [48].
Paul Robeson had always hoped to visit Africa himself. He did get
to Cairo when he filmed the movie Jericho, or Dark Sands, after Essie’s trip.
In 1937 he supported the International Committee on African Affairs,
82
an organization based in New York that was headed by Max Yergan,
who had been one of Essie’s hosts in South Africa. In 1941, Paul became
chairman of the Council on African Affairs, which was dedicated to the
struggle for African freedom from European colonialism. The FBI
considered the group to be a Communist front organization. Both Paul
and Eslanda Goode Robeson became ardent participants in the anticolonial
movement not just in Africa, but in India and other parts of the
third world. Eventually they hailed the independence that new African
nations won from their European colonizers after World War II. There
is no doubt that Eslanda Goode Robeson’s trip to Africa in 1936 had
helped to form that support for African rights and independence.
Works Cited:
Robeson, Eslanda Goode: African Journey. New York: John Day, 1945.
Duberman, Martin. Paul Robeson. New York: The New Press, 1989.
Daniel Gover
Kean University
83