Eslanda Goode Robeson's African Journey

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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
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Eslanda Goode Robeson's African Journey

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