James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Borno

We here at the blog finally read the brief autobiography of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw. Said to be from Borno, we thought it mandatory to examine his autobiography as another potential source on the history of Kanem-Borno. Unfortunately, upon closer examination, the fascinating character which emerges in this autobiography could not have been from Borno. Too many inconsistencies and errors suggest that James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw was probably from another part of West Africa, perhaps a region closer to the Gold Coast than his narrative suggests.

While Borno certainly did have trading links to the Gold Coast in the 18th century, which may have involved ivory, it is remarkable that Gronniosaw's autobiography creates a portrait of a Borno which couldn't have been in the 18th century. Claiming to be the grandson of the king of Borno, one would expect Gronniosaw to have been a Muslim, or at least familiar with Islam. Unless his mother married a non-Muslim, he would have definitely been raised in the faith and possibly received at least a basic Koranic education. Instead, Gronniosaw fails to mention Islam, but mentions the worship of the Moon, Sun, and stars. Further, Gronniosaw was astonished when he first saw a man (the Dutchman who purchased him on the Slave Coast) read a book. If he was indeed from Borno's capital, and of royal blood, one would expect him to have familiarity with literacy and books. 

Furthermore, when describing their congregations of worship, he only mentions worshipping under trees in the city. Supposedly their day of Sabbath was on Saturday, not the expected Friday of Muslims. How could he not have been familiar with the mosques of Birni Gazargamo or the rituals of Islamic worship? Was his Islamic background erased by the Christian writer who recorded his narrative? Or, as we think more likely, was he from another part of West Africa? That might elucidate the autobiography's allusion to palm wine consumption in Gronniosaw's homeland. It would also explain the use of bark to produce cloth. After all, in our experience with the sources on textiles in Borno, most was produced with cotton.

Despite these flaws and questions of its accuracy for the origin of Gronniosaw, one should still read it. As an autobiography, filtered through the Christian propaganda and symbolism of his interlocutor, it provides some insights into the experiences of West Africans in the "Atlantic World" in the 18th century. Gronniosaw visited Martinique, Barbados, and Havana and lived in New York, Holland, London, and other parts of Britain. He experienced the life of a privateer in the Caribbean, as well as a difficult life of poverty in Britain. Indeed, his white wife, Betty, a weaver, experienced hardship due to labor unrest in her field. Thus, one can see elements of 3 forces that defined the increasingly closer "Atlantic World" of Africa, Europe and the Americas through the lens of race, class, and colonialism in the life of Gronniosaw. 

Let's Get to the Nitty Gritty: The Autobiography of Horace Silver

Horace Silver's conversational autobiography is short, earthy, and cookin', much like his music. It provides an overview of his entire life, from his origins in Connecticut, growing up with an African American and Cape Verdean father, the local forms of racial discrimination in New England, and his musical career, which encompassed a key period in the history of jazz in the mid-20th century. While most people I have spoken with have long pigeon-holed Silver into the hard bop/Blue Note vein, if one reads this autobiography, one gains a more nuanced view. For instance, Silver was a fan of Jimmie Lunceford's group, one of the major black swing bands in Harlem. Silver also imbibed Cape Verdean musical influences from watching the dances held at his home when his father and his compatriots performed for the local Cape Verdean community in Norwalk, Connecticut. Even more surprising, Silver's post-1970 recordings experimented with electric keyboards, gospel, spiritualist, vocals, and larger ensembles.

Silver's piano playing was also profoundly shaped by Lester Young (in addition to Monk, Bud Powell, and Nat King Cole), so he was always capable of smooth, sweet, and a 'cool' style. Indeed, Silver used to play the tenor saxophone, although he later focused on piano and composition. Moreover, the Horace Silver Quintet was, to paraphrase the editor of the autobiography, innovative and important in its use of breaks, shout choruses, countermelodies, interludes, and background riffs. This becomes evident when listening to recordings of Silver between 1955-1970, which contains more than enough material to interest those less pleased by the bluesy dominance of much of Silver's style or compositions. 

However, what does the autobiography reveal about Silver the man and his times? Through the influence of his spiritualist beliefs and pleasant nature, Silver refrains from making negative statements about nearly everyone who appears in the book. And the list is quite long, including famous musicians such as Miles Davis, singers of the caliber of Freda Payne and Miriam Makeba, or various relatives and sidemen. Since he did not drink or abuse drugs, but experienced the racial stereotyping and targeting of black jazz artists , he was critical of the impact of narcotics on musicians and the stereotyping of black musicians as drug users or purveyors, especially in Philadelphia. He also experienced, to a certain extent, many of the same problems Charles Mingus highlighted in his fictionalized autobiography, mainly the exploitation of jazz musicians, racial discrimination from law enforcement, and record labels seeking to control or profit from their musical labor (although Blue Note was, for the most part, a positive experience for Silver). 

Most surprising is Silver's skepticism of terms like hard bop to describe his music. He did not see his music of the 1950s or 1960s to be a "new style," although the Silver Quintet and the Jazz Messengers undeniably defined a particular jazz aesthetic. While most jazz aficionados have likely not followed up on Silver's music after 1970, he was clearly versatile, desired to try out new ideas, and sought to surround himself with talented young musicians. While this later became a problem, especially as he saw students from jazz programs as lacking improvisational skills and harmonic knowledge, it is too reductionist and unfair to restrict Silver to his music from 1955-1960. Personally, I prefer his work of the 1950s and 1960s, and I find his original compositions to be clever, funky, sophisticated, and intriguing for their rhythmic sense. "The African Queen" or "Song for My Father" are not alone as indications of Silver's seemingly simple yet complex work. 

Beneath the Underdog

The fictionalized autobiography of Charles Mingus is as fascinating as it is irritating. Since much of it is likely fictionalized or exaggerated (particularly the tales of pimping), it's a priceless testament to how a major figure in the history of jazz wanted to present his life story. Given the centrality of his attempts to display himself as a masculine figure, and the comparison of jazz musicians to prostitutes, Mingus unsurprisingly runs with the theme throughout the text. Jazz musicians, especially colored ones, are used and abused by the record labels, agents, critics, and club owners, mostly white. The black jazz musician is forced, by necessities of survival, to prostitute themselves, but their creativity and ability to support themselves is limited by their meager pay and the greater rewards to white jazz musicians. However, by becoming pimps and hustlers, black men were able to accumulate greater sums of cash than any honest work of the era available to them, and one presumes the various pimps (Billy Bones from Santo Domingo, a wealthy black pimp in San Francisco, included) provided an outlet for Mingus to reassert his manhood and dignity as an independent jazz musician. Yet, Mingus's ambiguous embrace of pimping and eventual abandonment of it suggests emotional growth. 

The best aspects of this autrebiography are the plethora of details of life in Watts and Mingus's upbringing. In fact, most of the book is centered on his upbringing and early career in California (LA, San Francisco) instead of New York, the jazz capital. Mingus regales us with details of growing up in a very different Watts. There were still whites living in the area, as well as Japanese, Mexican, Chinese, and blacks. Central Ave had its fair share of jazz and entertainment. Mingus's family were of mixed-racial origins, but he was neither light enough nor dark enough to find acceptance. Thus, as a child, he turned inward and to music, until he discovered love and sex. Surprisingly, he does not dwell too much on his early musical career in LA, although his friendship with Buddy Collette and other local musicians clearly shaped him. Just as learning the harsh realities of racism in pre-Civil Rights Movement Watts taught him important lessons, Mingus chooses to delve into personal details of his various attempts at finding happy romance, including an elopement with Lee-Marie that ends in tragedy. In terms of the music, Mingus also alludes in his own way to other budding talent in 1930s and 1940s LA, such as Eric Dolphy, plus visiting luminaries from New York (Charlie Parker, Art Tatum). Whether or not most of these tales of neighborhood roughs, early Watts Towers, or fantastic sexual escapades truly occurred is not the point.

Unfortunately, for those eager to find more about Mingus's life once he permanently relocated to New York, Beneath the Underdog skips around chronologically. We learn of his time in Bellevue, plus some other additional experiences with the irrational Jim Crow of the South, but nothing like a detailed account of his musical evolution. For instance, his welcome party to New York City sounds almost certainly fictitious, with Charlie Parker, Monk, Leonard Feather and other prominent figures in the jazz world attending a party in a home "Donnalee" received for Mingus through their work as prostitutes. Here and there, Mingus hints at his self-perception as a composer who wants to surpass the limitations of the jazz world. This, I assume, is due to Mingus's Third Stream inclinations and desire to elevate the status of jazz beyond the Jim Crow music industry's needs. Strangely, Mingus leaves out his attempt to establish an artist collective label with Max Roach, although such an initiative definitely links with his desire to escape the confines of the white man's world and assert his dignity. Nonetheless, I would have loved to learn more about various recordings and club dates of Mingus at the time, as well as his relationships with Eric Dolphy, Roach, Donnie Richmond, and others in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Ultimately, Mingus, who partitioned his being into at least 2 or 3 selves, and desired a raceless world, could never find solace from the squalid racial categories thrust upon him. While today his legacy as a composer and musician of the finest caliber is unquestioned, I am not certain how Mingus saw himself: as artist, man, composer, genius, pimp, black man, "racially ambiguous," or something else entirely? The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady? Corrupted by vices and pleasures, yet striving for something his faith and theistic belief encouraged? Is this representative of the jazz musician of the era, exploited, abused, underappreciated, ripped off, Jim Crowed, and creatively stifled? As Mingus allegedly explained to a British jazz critic, without the black jazz musician, none of the popular music of the world would be around today, but look at the conditions of life for jazz artists. Or, for that matter, the "underdogs" of the world, toiling at work unfit for humans, as Mingus states in reference to his brief attempt at skilled industrial labor in his youth. Perhaps the jazz musician was truly beneath the underdog. 

Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life

"After he left, there is a debate about what to do with the teacup. The custom, it appears, is that after a person of colour has drunk from a cup the cup must be smashed. He is surprised that his mother's family, which believes in nothing else, believes in this. However, in the end his mother simply washes the cup with bleach."

Coetzee's fictionalized memoir of his boyhood days is fascinating to compare with similar works by other South African authors. Although born before the official beginning of apartheid, the legacy of racial discrimination obviously preceded that, as Coetzee's youth indicates. Although coming from a white and on the surface, well-to-do background, John Coetzee (and the book is written in the third person, to distance the 'real' Coetzee from the fictionalized version of his younger self) experiences family dysfunction, loss, sexual discovery, a keen awareness of the suffering of animals, and acknowledgement of racial and class discrimination. 

Of course, anyone looking for a factual account of apartheid and white-minority rule in South should read Down Second Avenue or Kaffir Boy for insights into the Black South African experience, but it's interesting to see the evolution of Coetzee's identity and attention to social inequality from a sympathetic white perspective. The earliest reference to racial or ethnic discrimination is in the casual anti-Semitism of Worcester, something Coetzee's supposedly 'liberal' and English-minded mother and uncles participate in. "Natives" are rare in young Coetzee's world (except for the delivery 'boy,' a man, who is seen by Coetzee's parents as representative of a wasteful new generation of 'Natives'), but clearly inhabit the shadows. The Coloured (multiracial) inhabitants of Worcester, the Karoo, and Cape Town are clearly the major Other in the text, yet presented as being closer to the 'earth' and romanticized by a young Coetzee.

The numerous allusions to impoverished Afrikaans whites without shoes (and bearing brutish behavior patterns from the Anglophile point of view of John), the Coloured children abused and beaten, the Coloured children who cannot afford to see the circus but peer through the flaps of the tent, the Coloured farm workers who are the "real" inheritors of the land yet are forced to work it for white owners, or the absurd customs that Coetzee's supposedly 'English'-minded and nontraditional parents preserve about the need to smash a teacup used by any person of color in one's home indicate how before the Nationalists took power, white society in South Africa instituted a class/color hierarchy. Coloureds were not to touch guns, nor were they given the access to education that whites possessed.

The young John's hatred of his father, life in the dusty development of Worcester, and complete breakdown of the family by his teen years (back in Cape Town, after his father's wastefulness and foolish drove the family into deep debt) presents parallels with many other works by authors exploring their childhood. The archetypal loss of innocence, death, disillusionment, and constant search for identity are present here in this short memoir. Certainly, huge themes such as the aforementioned importance of race, as well as shame, disgrace, guilt, love (is it a prison, as a young Coetzee ponders) are also suggestive for the novels Coetzee wrote before and after the publication of Boyhood in the late 1990s. 

It's touching that only in the veld, or on the farm, where John can be free, is where he seems happiest, not afraid, feeling no shame, fear, or confines of family or society. On the Voelfontein farm of his father's family in the Karoo, where anything that grows in that arid landscape is blessed, he is most happy, yet, like all children facing adulthood, he knows life on the farm is not his future. Instead, the memoir ends on a rather unfortunate note in Cape Town, where John is attending poorly staffed  Catholic school, his alcoholic father, after driving the family into debt, does not look for a job, and his mother's willingness to sacrifice herself for the family (as well as see through her love, forcing John to realize his mother is an independent being with disillusionment, disappointment, hardship) propels him into adolescence.

As a short read in the three-part 'autobiography' of Coetzee, Boyhood is undoubtedly useful for fans of Coetzee's work and for a serious reading endeavor on an era in South Africa (the Western Cape in the 1940s). For anyone interested in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the divisions among white South Africans, Coetzee's embellished memoir also attests to the seemingly impenetrable divisions wrought by class, language, religion, culture, nationalism, war, and race. Indeed, many Afrikaans words or phrases permeate the text, in addition to the cultural and linguistic divides that separate English South Africans from the Afrikaans-speakers. A family like Coetzee's, of Afrikaans origins yet English speakers in the home, they are caught in the interstices of white South Africa, offering a unique vantage point on the nation's looming social inequities that ushered in the Nationalists and apartheid.

Favorite Quotes

"I'f being a Christian means singing hymns and listening to sermons and then coming out to torment the Jews, he has no wish to be a Christian." (24)

"Being a Catholic is a part of his life reserved for school. Preferring the Russians to the Americans is a secret so dark that he can reveal it to no one. Liking the Russians is a serious matter. It can have you ostracized." (26)

"Soon every one in his class knew about it: the new boy was odd, he wasn't normal. From that mistake, he has learned to be more prudent. Part of being prudent is always to tell less rather than more." (29)

"Afrikaans children are almost like Coloured children, he finds, unspoiled and thoughtless, running wild, then suddenly, at a certain age, going bad, their beauty dying within them." (56)

"There are white people and Coloured people and Natives, of whom the Natives are the lowest and most derided. The parallel is inescapable: the Natives are the third brother." (65)

"He does not see the point of having elections if the party that wins can change the rules. It is like the batsman deciding who may and who may not bowl." (68)

"With Coloured people in general, and with the people of the Karoo in particular, he simply does not know when they cease to be children and become men and women. It seems to happen so early and so suddenly: one day they are playing with toys, the next day they are out with the en, working, or in someone's kitchen, washing dishes." (86) 

Thoughts on Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur’s text describes her life leading up to her eventual escape to Cuba. The structure of the book switches back and forth every chapter to describe her life in prison and the trials she encountered while the others described her life from birth to living in the South, growing up in Queens, NY, and her involvement with activism in the United States. Although the back and forth structure was sometimes confusing, she helped bridge the gap with poetry that facilitated the reading. Numerous observations on the part of Shakur merit further discussion, particularly her views on the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power organizations, and race relations abroad. Moreover, she never denounced armed self-defense or rejected the idea of armed guerrilla-warfare styled resistance or violence as a tactic, further complicating her relationship with activists of all kinds in her lifetime.
Interestingly, Shakur criticizes the mainstream Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s as doomed to fail due to an excessive focus on racial integration and relying on integration, something mainstream organizations like the NAACP used. In addition, a reliance on nonviolent tactics was bound to fail because they relied on moral suasion of whites. Arguing that no revolutionary struggle ever succeeded through moral suasion of their enemy, the Civil Rights Movement’s success would be limited. Another weakness she saw was a dependence on integration, the idea of putting black and white children into the same schools, living in the same neighborhoods, and magically whites would no longer see blacks as inferior. Though her characterization of the Civil Rights Movement has some accuracy regarding naiveté perhaps on the part of some activists and organizations, it perpetuates a false single narrative of the Civil Rights Movement that is surprising to see from Assata Shakur. As someone who believed in diversity of tactics as well as organizing underground and within the context of black community organizations, it is difficult to imagine Shakur sweeping away so much of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement and its accomplishments. Perhaps due to her negative experience with an NAACP instructor in civil disobedience for youth while in the South because she could never accept being spit upon, Shakur’s extreme generalization of the Civil Rights Movement reflected her own preference for armed self-defense.

On the issue of Black Power organizations engaged in the struggle, Shakur is also critical. Embracing many aspects of black cultural nationalism by taking on the name Assata Shakur and naming her child with an African name, too, Shakur rejects Joanne Chesimard as a slave name (186). A broader reflection of her investment in black cultural nationalism, however, was her involvement and interest in organizations like the New Republic of Afrika and challenging dominant Eurocentric views on history. However, she also criticized the reluctance on the part of some Black Liberation-oriented organizers on the issue of working with others, such as the Red Guard Chinese-American movement on the West Coast, which inhibited the internationalist dimension she saw all revolutionaries needing () Furthermore, she saw the Black Panther Party’s Political Education program as lacking because it focused on European and other non-African writers as well as the history of black resistance in the United States. For Shakur, this inhibited the organization’s ability to work alongside black community organizations (Shakur 221). That likely influenced her views on Huey P. Newton, who she saw as a poor speaker who was inaccessible to the masses because of his unclear words and intellectual jargon (227). Surprisingly, Shakur did not describe too many experiences with sexism, although her brief-marriage with a “brother in the struggle” ended poorly because he expected her to conform to a stereotypical gender role as a homemaker (196). Besides alluding to sexism in the criminal justice system and broader society, such as gangrape and harsh laws criminalizing poor women, there is no consciousness of herself as the only prominent Black Power figure connected to a male. Perhaps her joining the Black Liberation Army and having experienced both organizing breakfast programs as well as more leadership positions blinded her. Alternatively, while writing her autobiography in Cuba, she may have wanted to avoid casting further criticism of the Black Panthers and BLA to not tarnish their reputation or her involvement.

Shakur’s bias while writing in Cuba likely impacts her description of race relations in post-revolutionary Cuba, too. She describes Communist Cuba as lacking institutional and structural racism (270). Afro-Cubans and white Cubans mingle everywhere and she argues that Cuba’s history of racism lacked violent institutionalization (269). This surely represents either bias in favor of Cuba because racism has historically and currently its own problems with racism. Referring to Antonio Maceo and the collaboration of white and black Cubans in the wars of independence and the Cuban Revolution does not negate Cuban racism throughout the 20th century. Moreover, she cites a speech by Fidel Castro describing all Cubans as Afro-Cuban, which rhetorically masks ongoing differences and disparities. Regardless, her life in a society where anyone of African descent who was not very dark-skinned could be a mulatto or various other terms for people of varying shades, challenged her self-identity as a black woman, despite attempts by Cubans to label her as such (271). Intriguingly, she argues that a US-centered version of blackness that was influenced by the one-drop rule in America is better for people of African descent than “mulatto pride” in Cuba for the goal of inculcating pride in one’s African ancestry (271). So her criticism of racism in Cuba is present, but not overtly stated perhaps due to gratitude on the part of the Cuban government’s asylum.

Shakur’s text overall presents some interesting perspectives on black organizing as well as insight on Cuban race relations through the lens of an African-American activist. Her misrepresentation of the Civil Rights Movement has elements of truth, but her silence on misogyny within the Black Panther Party is baffling. Similarly, her blind eye to Cuban racism is surprising, although there are some critiques of Cuban race relations embedded in the conclusion. Like other forms of activism seen in the lives of Septima Clark or Amy Jacques Garvey, Shakur’s life included militant, underground activities as well as community-based uplift, like the Black Panther’s breakfast program in New York City.