Eslanda Goode Robeson's African Journey

meaning politicians have been made a living reality.
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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,
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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
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