The Message

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, colonialism, and enslavement, including a reference to sexual violence.

This chapter opens with a poem by Sonia Sanchez in which the speaker talks about making home anew in order to build a future. In the essay proper, Coates reflects on his trip to Dakar, Senegal. While packing for the trip, he received a sketch from his mother depicting his father reading a book. A young Coates captioned the sketch “Daddy reads all the time” and “Daddy says he reads to learn” (25). Coates later learned that his father had come home without a paycheck that day and was perhaps looking in his books to figure out why he, a Black man who worked hard for his family, had so little financial room for error, while those who profited from the exploitation of others enjoyed the privilege of not having to worry about their errors.

Now, Coates knows that the oppressors justified their actions with narratives from figures like Josiah Nott, a racist anthropologist who claimed that Black Americans were inferior and that they had made no contributions to the great civilizations of the world. He made a point to discount the fact that one of antiquity’s so-called “great civilizations”—ancient Egypt—was on the African continent, and when he did grudgingly acknowledge that fact, he argued that Egyptians and other North Africans were not truly African and that sub-Saharan Africans were viewed as low, enslaved people in Egypt just as in the West. This lack of an African past worth celebrating, by Nott’s account, was further justification for the enslavement of African people and people of the African diaspora. Nott’s pseudoscience was an attempt to erase the shared humanity of Africans and Europeans, which makes sense considering that he was an enslaver and adventurer with an eye on colonizing Africa. Nott even colonized the discourse around the history of African people by claiming that he was the only intellectual doing work in this area, making him an expert.

Black thinkers countered work like Nott’s with the celebration of African civilizations, particularly Egypt, as proof of African dignity. Historian St. Clare Drake called this movement the “vindicationist tradition” (33). This veneration of Black history rooted in the African empire of Egypt shaped the identities of the Coates family, a point made obvious because Coates’s name means “Nubia,” the name of an African kingdom. Coates was thus marked early on by that tradition. He knows why his parents made the choice to give him an African name—they wanted him to gain a sense of pride and dignity from a connection to Africa. During Coates’s childhood, the intellectuals he knew—including the barbershop ones—made that vindicationist tradition one of the planks in their Black nationalist belief system.

The other heritage that Coates comes from is one of skepticism, however, so he always viewed this vindicationist tradition with some suspicion. He saw that tradition as exchanging white supremacist myths—of Western culture as one belonging to the conquerors—for an African mythology that was no less prone to elevating ideology over truth. Coates glosses the meaning of his name and concludes that unintentionally or not, his parents and Black nationalists that he knew bought into the logic of empire, which he now sees as discredited since it means aligning with people who are destroying the Earth through the extraction of resources. Despite all this heavy skepticism, Coates still wanted to see Africa, which he thought of as a mythical home, just one time before he dies. He wanted to see Africa even if he understood it as “not a fact but a need, a wish, a dream” (35). Thus, Coates went to Dakar, Senegal.

Upon landing in Dakar, Coates experienced a mix of excitement and dread about what he would find. As he traveled to his hotel, he noticed abandoned exercise equipment on the roadside and briefly feared that it bore out the stereotype of people in Africa and the African diaspora as feckless; then, he felt ashamed for this thought, and he later learned that the equipment was part of a thriving sports complex where people regularly work out. His unease grew when he dined alone at a cosmopolitan restaurant with a view of the Atlantic, the symbolic divide between Africa and the African diaspora. Being in Africa felt like reconnecting with the origin of his Blackness, but this origin is rooted in loss.

Determined to explore Dakar on his own terms, Coates spent the following days observing the city in concrete detail. It has always been his way to learn by doing and direct encounter. His exploration reinforced his belief that physical presence in a place is essential to understanding it. He bought beautiful Senegalese cloth after a Senegalese man in an exquisitely tailored suit cajoled him into a cloth shop. This is just the kind of thing that a tourist (not a journalist) would do, but Coates couldn’t help but feel happy as he walked around with his purchases.

Some of what he learned on the ground made him uneasy, however. During lunch with Senegalese writers, Coates learned that some Senegalese people view Black Americans as “mixed” due to their multiracial heritage and Black if they do things like play basketball (35). Among many Senegalese people, being multiracial is taken as a mark of sophistication, and some attempt to approximate this supposedly elevated status with hair straighteners and skin lighteners that reinforce Eurocentric beauty stands. Learning about this view unsettled Coates, especially given that the multiracial identity of many Black Americans is a result of the systematic raping of enslaved Black women by white men and because this same poisonous way of thinking about beauty exists on his side of the Atlantic. Coates’s myth of Africa as home began to fade.

Coates also visited Gorée Island, known for the Door of No Return, where many enslaved Africans supposedly embarked on the Middle Passage. He ended up there with a tour guide despite his efforts to be alone. Although Coates knew that few Africans actually entered enslavement through the Door of No Return, he was moved to tears by the symbolic weight of the place. Coates acknowledges the irony of this emotional reaction to such a heavily mythologized place given his insistence to students that they avoid mythologizing narratives in pursuit of clarity. The feeling reminded him of his father’s wistfulness after learning that the Guyanese slave rebellion ended with infighting and collaboration with the colonizers; his father was disappointed because he knew that there was no getting back to the “Africa of our imagination, that glorious Eden conjured by exiles, a place without the Mayflower, Founding Fathers, conquistadores, and the assorted corruptions they had imposed on us” (56).

On his last night in Senegal, Coates attended a party. The attendees were his kind of people: writers and artists who, like Coates, have been shaped by the legacies of colonialism, slavery, and racism. However, he remained unsure of how to articulate this connection with the specificity and clarity that he demands of his students. Later, Coates was startled when a star-struck graduate student mentioned that she was writing her dissertation on his books: His work had reached Africa before he did.