cover image Kinship: A Family's Journey in Africa and America

Kinship: A Family's Journey in Africa and America

Philippe E. Wamba. Dutton Books, $24.95 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-525-94387-7

In a beautifully written, extensively researched personal response to the idea that shared skin color implies a shared heritage, outlook or destiny, journalist Wamba examines his African-American family roots in order to understand the importance, if any, of racial affinity. Born to an American mother and a Congolese father, Wamba spent his formative years in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam and in the suburbs of Massachusetts. A child of the 1970s, he writes that while he took for granted that black was beautiful, he was less sure of what being ""African"" meant. Each time he crossed the ocean, either literally or figuratively through music and literature, Wamba was confronted with cultural expectations and prejudices. Each place was viewed as either a jungle (whether it was an urban jungle or one flush with lions and tigers) or a paradise, and its people as either savages or saviors. Most troubling for Wamba was that, beyond myth and preconceptions, neither Americans nor Africans seemed to have much interest in the other's politics, history or people. In addition to his own family's experience, Wamba examines decades of political, literary and musical reactions to the pan-African ideal of all black people sharing common interests and goals. In the end, he argues that though simple Afrocentrism serves only to contribute to the ""often seemingly unbridgeable cultural gap separating black Americans from their African counterparts,"" pan-Africanism remains a desperately needed political force lying dormant. Agent, Tina Bennett, Janklow & Nesbit Associates; 10-city author tour. (Sept.)