The Barefoot Lie
The way the world sees Africa, and the way it sees black people in general, did not come from nowhere.
A friend told me his five year old daughter asked him whether Africans wear shoes.
I know that question. I grew up on television that gave me Tarzan, and Tarzan gave a whole generation its picture of Africa and African people. So the question was familiar. When I started leading groups to Ghana in 2007, potential travelers asked me things that revealed how little they knew. People asked me where I stay when I visit, as if there are no hotels in Ghana. I had heard grown folks ask worse. But this was a five year old child, and that alarmed me.
In the 1980s I joined protests that pressured local television stations to stop airing Tarzan reruns that showed Africans as barbaric, uncivilized, half-naked darkies. Those stations pulled the shows. The images did not leave. A generation was raised with them burned into its consciousness, and images like that shape the choices people make in ways more subtle than open bigotry. Teachers look at black children through the lens of Tarzan. Other folks look at black people through the lens of Tarzan. And too many black people look at themselves through that same lens.
So how does a five-year-old come to that question? She did not ask it about China or India, where there are also large numbers of poor people. She had been exposed to something that fixed her small attention on the standing of African people in particular. Somebody handed it to her.
The way the world sees Africa, and the way it sees black people in general, did not come from nowhere. It has roots in Western Christian theology. Much of the racial injustice committed by the hands of Christianity was justified by the so-called curse of Ham (Genesis 9:19-29), the notion that Noah’s curse fell on the dark-skinned descendants of Ham and marked them for servitude. It is horrible reading of scripture put to work for cruel ends. That lie financed slavery, blessed the whip, and outlived both. It is still traveling.
That is the point I want to sit with. Religious belief carries a generational reach. Decades after Tarzan left the screen, more than a century and a half after emancipation, a five-year-old child is carrying an intellectual burden that was born in racism that was born in biblical distortion. She inherited a lie that older and more powerful scoundrels wrote a long time ago, and she is too young to know she is carrying it.
So every chance I get to lead a group to Africa, I take it. I show them the cultural heritage, the history that has been hidden from them, the real and growing economic opportunity. I watch grown people marvel at beauty and development they had been taught not to expect. They come home changed. And they come home knowing that the children in Africa wear shoes.
