The shoga of the East African coast, a man accepted as a member of women’s society, did not emerge from a vacuum nor from the imposition of outside influence. She was born from the long encounter between Bantu-speaking Africans and Muslim traders from the Arabian Peninsula. Unlike medieval Christianity, which not only condemned “Sodomites” but sought to prosecute and exterminate them, the posture of classical Islam was categorically different. Liwat [anal intercourse between men] was prohibited, but in practice Islamic jurisprudence was less interested in policing private lives than its Christian counterpart. That was left to Allah’s judgment. Sin may have required repentance, but not necessarily prosecution. This created a de facto tolerance for discrete same-sex relationships throughout the Muslim world. And not always that discrete. The beloved youth – the ghulam or amrad – appears throughout classical Arabic and Persian poetry, not as a scandalous figure but as a positively conventional object of male desire. It is into this Islamic cultural framework, transplanted to the East African coast over centuries of trade, settlement, and intermarriage, that the figure of the shoga first appears. The Swahili world was not an African world that Islam touched lightly. It was a world in which Islam was constitutive—shaping law, poetry, architecture, commerce, and domestic life. Kiswahili reflects this: some thirty percent of its vocabulary derives directly from Arabic. To understand the shoga is to understand how an Islamic cultural tolerance for gender difference was absorbed, transformed, and ultimately owned by the African women who gave the role its name. Kiswahili-speaking women used the term shoga [pl. mashoga], roughly equivalent to “girlfriend,” as a term of endearment. At some point—we do not know how or when—this term was applied to Swahili men who dressed as women, performed women’s tasks, and were accepted into women’s society. It wasn’t the men who named and defined the shoga. It was the women. This is crucial and makes any presumed Western equivalent inadequate or misleading. Western women had little influence on societal perceptions of transvestites, sodomites, inverts, or male homosexuals and did not make room for them in female-only spaces. Furthermore, mashoga were recognized for the social roles they played and were not defined by same-sex desire, either coming from or directed towards them. (This is very hard for modern gays to grasp.) How did the shoga develop? How did she find her place in society? Written non-Western sources are silent on the subject. Early Arabic travelers and geographers wrote about commerce, politics, and religious practice, not about the interior arrangements of women’s domestic spaces. The shoga was part of the women’s world—sometimes with special ritual or societal functions—smoothly and unproblematically integrated into the whole. What was there to say? Plenty—once the Europeans started meddling in Swahili affairs. The judgments and pejorative terms—none of them accurate—followed in predictable train. Johann Krapf, a German missionary working outside of Mombasa, compiled the first comprehensive dictionary of the Swahili language, published posthumously in 1882, in which the secondary meanings of shoga are defined as 1) A "catamite" or passive homosexual partner, and 2) an "impotent" or feminized male. A "catamite”? [A boy kept for sexual purposes by an older man] So much to unpack here, but let us not go down the inviting rabbit hole of pederasty, man-boy love, and paideia. We see again the Western insistence on defining variant male gender identity not through integrated and accepted social roles but through sexual desire and sexual acts. Well, as the saying goes, when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The hammer in this case was Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, drafted by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1860 for the British colonial administration. This punished “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” with up to life imprisonment. Since all people of color were equally degraded and immoral, British administrators exported this provision to their African colonies without qualm, even if some of them were boinking their young charges on the sly. (More than half of the world’s remaining sodomy laws are relics of British colonial rule across 17 African countries.) Colonialism didn’t bring same-sex desire and gender variance to sub-Saharan Africa—the historical and anthropological evidence is irrefutable on that point—but it did introduce homophobia. Criminalized now, mashoga had to go underground or into hiding. They were never in control of their own narrative, and generations of missionaries, anthropologists, administrators, and “observers” forced upon them whatever Western sexual-deviant theory was in vogue at the time. And just when it seemed that the mashoga could be permanently dismissed or explained away, they were resuscitated and transformed beyond recognition by theories of essentialism imported from the gay liberation movements of the West. They were “born this way” and needed to band together in order to reclaim their humanity. “Shoga” was now translated into English as “gay” or replaced by a new word, gei [pl. magei] that LGBTQ Swahilis, both men and women, used to describe themselves with something approaching pride. Heterosexual Africans who had coexisted, often without difficulty, with the shoga, hated this new identity. The Pride marches, the public declarations, the demands for recognition and legal equality—that was what “homosexuality” came to mean for them. They saw it as an alien imposition, and were they not right? What they were rejecting was not African same-sex practice or gender variance. What they were rejecting was a Western political identity organized around a Western sexual ontology. Of course, the barbarous homophobia of the American fundamentalist Christians who flooded into Africa after their domestic defeats on gay rights was equally alien. And now the culture wars of America are torching the social fabric of Africa. And where is the shoga in all of this? Gone… long gone. She was destroyed twice: first by colonial law and the missionary exegesis that preceded it, then by the liberation movements that sought to replace colonial stigma with Western-style pride. She was never allowed to speak for herself, and we’ll never know what she had to say. — Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in An Earring in Tanzania. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

I came out to my doctoral dissertation advisor under unusual circumstances. It was August of 1988, the seventh month of my residency at the University of Dar es Salaam, where I was researching and writing on East Africa’s most famous playwright, Ebrahim Hussein. As an American with an uncertain but growing grasp of Kiswahili, I was a recognizable figure on campus – all the more so because I was sponsored by a popular Tanzanian professor in the Department of Literature, Joseph Mbele. We had become friends while both pursuing graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin. My dissertation advisor and principal Swahili professor at Madison was a lovely, kind-hearted woman named Magdalena H. From July through August, she was also at the University of Dar es Salaam on an exchange program sponsored by USAID (and which I had facilitated due to contacts I had made while working in Washington, DC in the early 80s). Magdalena’s Swahili was flawless. Her charm and enthusiasm for the language redounded to me to a certain degree, and I profited socially from my association with her. Naturally, we hung out together quite a bit and became friends in a way that wouldn’t have happened or would have developed much more slowly back in our home environment. And so, six weeks into her stay, she took me aside to tell me that there were “extremely negative” feelings about the simple hoop earring that I wore (and still wear) in my left earlobe. “People think the earring means homosexuality, and in this culture, homosexuality is out!” Then she ran off, perhaps due to the pressure of another social engagement, but also embarrassed by having to bring up the subject. She felt compelled to do so because she feared it would restrict my ability to conduct my research. She wasn’t wrong, as I later found out. My sponsor, Joe Mbele, was also privy to negative assessments of my sexual orientation but hadn’t been able to pluck up the courage to say anything about it. Several acquaintances from the conservative Department of Kiswahili avoided having drinks with me at the faculty club because, as Magdalena put it, “they don’t want to have anything to do with you.” I was being maligned, she told my detractors. She pointed to the fact that I was living with an expatriate British woman and her children as evidence that I was having an affair with her (there was nothing to the gossip; we were just good friends). Her reasoning was that I had innocently alienated people by wearing the earring for reasons of style, which sent out the “wrong” message. “The complicating factor,” I explained to Magdalena when we met again, “is that in fact I am gay.” The surprise on her face was evident, but not a reflection of any homophobia. Anyway, I’d thought through my stance and had my arguments prepared. “There are two reasons I’m not removing the earring,” I said. “The first is that the ill effects are so low-key that I haven’t noticed them. I feel I’m achieving my aims in research, writing, and learning the language. And I know how homophobic this society can be. Mzee Punch taught me that.” I didn't need to explain to Magdalena that Mzee Punch was a student tradition, a mythical keeper of community morals. If a student or student group violated the self-imposed norms (sexist, elitist, heterosexist), they were “punched.” Abusive notices about the offenders went up on the cafeteria wall. Mzee Punch’s language was scurrilous and sophomoric – heavy-handed in its humor, bombastic in spite of its imperfect grasp of English, and supremely confident that it was expressing the values of the community. As a reflection of the crude conformism and blinkered pretentiousness of this elite-in-the-making, it was depressingly accurate. A cafeteria dress code was to be respected (female students were told that wearing kangas made them look like Manzese bar maids); women were expressly forbidden to attend high tea (“they should practice their cooking technology at home”); and homosexuals were the slime of the earth. “There is a group of imbeciles, notorious skunks who published a punch-like handout accusing MZEE with stupid fairy allegations alien to MZEE’s grandchildren. These homosexual insipient rumormongers will be crucified to doom... MZEE warns these wide-assed homosexual bitches on heat to stop contemplating that MZEE is interested in their HIV infected blinking assholes.” Yes, the homophobia was real and ugly, but strangely enough, my earring protected me. I was white, educated, and chummy with many professors. I couldn’t be beaten up in a back alley. “The earring keeps people from making homophobic remarks in my presence," I told Magdalena. "My mother would occasionally have to endure antisemitic remarks because she didn’t always have the courage to speak up. I saw her suffer under an antisemitism that, thank God, doesn’t emotionally affect me. I try to treat homophobia similarly. Any kind of hatred directed towards me as a member of a despised group hurts them more than it hurts me.” “And what about the members of the Department of Kiswahili?” Magdalena asked. “Let them hate me,” I replied, “as long as they shut up about it. I don’t want the esteem and friendship of bigots.”At this, Magdalena broke out in a wide smile and grabbed both my hands. (Back home, she would have hugged me, but had to moderate her actions in accordance with the prevailing cultural norms.) “Shujaa!” she exclaimed. [Brave man!] I faked a modest response. “Hapana, mwalimu. Mimi ni gei tu.” [No, teacher. Just a simple gay.”] — Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in Shoga: An Indigenous African Identity That Predates By Centuries the Laws That Criminalize It. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts.

Great Grandfather Moses Haas, the balding scholar, and Father Joseph Philipson I vaguely knew that my paternal grandmother had grown up in Texas, although she married and spent her adult life in Chicago. She died when I was 2 years old, and since my father, seemingly uninterested in family history, never spoke of her nor contextualized the few aunts that flowed from the Texas branch, I gave it no thought. I really believed that our family history unfolded its unremarkable story in the Midwest – German Jews who had preceded the unwashed masses fleeing the pogroms and constricted horizons of Russia and Eastern Europe.  In 2003, I visited friends in San Antonio and took the opportunity to dig into the family history, not only in Alamo City but also in Victoria, Galveston, and Houston. Well… it turned out that I had lots of relatives in the Lone Star state, some of them of local renown, but growing up liberal in California meant Texas was not only a foreign land but inhabited by foreign people as well.  However, the dark oil painting hanging over the parlor fireplace that I never asked about was of my great-grandfather, Moses Haas, who immigrated to the U.S. from Prussia in 1866, married a Levi from Victoria, TX, and became a solid member of the San Antonio Jewish community. The language of his home was German, as was the case for 97% of settlers in the German belt encompassing Houston, the Hill Country, and San Antonio. But it was the family of his wife, Rosa Levi, which provided the real distinction of the Texas branch. Rosa’s father, Abraham Levi, grew up in Alsace, France, and immigrated to the U.S. via New Orleans and up the Mississippi in 1846 at the age of 24. He followed the typical Jewish trajectory of starting a dry goods store that morphed into a bank (who else had safes and cash reserves on the frontier?). In Abraham’s case, A. Levi and Company became the largest state-chartered bank in Texas. And, taking on the coloration of the local population, the Levi company purchased 25,000 acres of land in six Texas counties and acquired extensive cattle interests.  Nonetheless, although the Texas branch attained moderate to rather impressive commercial success, its social world was strictly segregated. Both Moses in San Antonio and Abraham in Victoria helped establish synagogues. When the Levis married, they did so in Jewish temples and never  married outside the faith. When they died, they were buried in Jewish cemeteries. (What makes this fact so striking for me – a gay Jewish man without wife or children, who never belonged to a synagogue and who spent most of his life without Jewish solidarity – was that this socially ghettoized existence was only two generations back.) The patriarch, Abraham, produced a brood of children from his Texan wife, Mina Halfin (a ranching family and another story), including my great grandmother, Rosa Levi (1858 - 1952), and the most spectacular exponent of the Texas branch, Leo Napoleon Levi (1856 - 1904). Leo lived up to his grandiloquent name, the first Texas-born Jew to achieve national recognition. Of course, he was brilliant and graduated from Victoria High School at age 15. His father sent him to New York to take a commercial course because that was "the Path of Jewish success", but Leo hated it, dropped out, and enrolled the following year, 1872, to study law at the University of Virginia. This was at the beginning of the so-called Southern “Redemption,” a movement which successfully dismantled Reconstruction, restored white supremacy, and eliminated Republican political power. It wasn’t a great time to be a minority in the South. Leo was the butt of severe antisemitism, but pluck, determination, and a gift for eloquence pulled him through. He won the university’s debater's medal, the essayist's medal, and ultimately the respect of his fellow students. (One of his classmates, Thomas Nelson Page, a tragically successful proponent of “plantation literature” mourning the loss of happy "darkies" and the white nobility of the antebellum South, depicted Leo N. Levi as a noble Jew overcoming adversity in the 1903 novel Gorden Keith .) Anyway, Leo finished his studies, returned to Texas at twenty, and got admitted to the bar despite being underage. Leo continued his life of distinction and accomplishment, mostly as a lawyer in Galveston. He married a Jewish woman, produced six surviving children, moved to New York, was elected President of the B’nai B’rith in 1900, and died of a jaundice attack in 1904. He is buried in a Jewish cemetery in Brooklyn. His last public act was a petition he drew up and sent to the Russian government protesting the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. I haven’t looked into the politics of the Texas branch, but I’d be surprised if they were anything but conservative to right-wing. They would have only been out of step with their neighbors on the issue of antisemitism, and I really  doubt they gave much thought to the black and brown people in their environment. No Rosenwalds or Spingarns in the Texas branch. One other anecdote surfaced in 1966. My father accepted the invitation to attend the wedding of the daughter of a Houston cousin, L. Miller, whose boastful materialism and Texan arrogance were not to my father's taste. The wedding reception was held at the one Jewish country club since the Houston elite wasn’t going to let kikes into their  social spaces. And -- wouldn’t you know? -- The Willowisp Country Club also had an exclusionary policy: no people of color allowed. My father signed the guest book, MARTIN LUTHER KING. — Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in The Atlanta Compromises. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts .

On September 18, 1895 Booker T. Washington was invited to deliver a speech for the Cotton States  and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia before a mixed audience, a historic first for a Black leader south of the Mason Dixon line. In his speech – a masterpiece of balance and rhetoric – Washington famously declared, "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Washington accepted for his people segregation and political disenfranchisement in return for an implied guarantee from Southern whites of an industrial education that allowed for economic progress and a minimal degree of safety and security if African Americans remained docile. This came to be known as “the Atlanta Compromise.” Whites in both the North and South loved  the speech and lionized the speaker. Here at last was a judicious and pragmatic approach to the perennial problem of race relations in the South. (90% of the African American population lived in the South, and the North didn’t recognize that it had a problem – yet.) Frederick Douglass, always loud and cantankerous, had died in Washington, DC just six months before, and after the speech, Washington was appointed HNIC, a position he held until his death in 1915. Not everybody was pleased with the policies of The Tuskegee Machine, most famously W.E.B. Du Bois who rejected the accommodationist principles of the Compromise and advocated for higher education, full civil rights, and an immediate end to segregation. And here I quote an excerpt from Dudley Randall’s poem, “Booker T. and W.E.B.” “It seems to me,” said Booker T., “That all you folks have missed the boat Who shout about the right to vote, And spend vain days and sleepless nights In uproar over civil rights. Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse, But work, and save, and buy a house.” “I don’t agree,” said W.E.B., “For what can property avail If dignity and justice fail. Unless you help to make the laws, They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause. A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot, No matter how much cash you’ve got. Speak soft, and try your little plan, But as for me, I’ll be a man.” “It seems to me,” said Booker T.— “I don’t agree,” Said W.E.B. “But the title of your blog is plural!” I hear you cry. “To what other Compromise do you refer?” Astutely noted. There was another Compromise, enjoined upon another minority community - Southern Jews. They too took a largely accommodationist stance, if they weren’t enthusiastic sons of the South to begin with. The names of two Jews associated with the South have come down to us through history – to those of us who know any history – Judah P. Benjamin  (1811 - 1884) and Leo Frank  (1884 - 1915). They represent different modalities of unacceptability.  Benjamin was a traitor to the Union. While serving in the U.S. Congress as a Senator from Louisiana, he resigned in 1861 to serve in the Confederacy. Acting as President Jefferson Davis’ right-hand man throughout the Civil War, Benjamin was dubbed “the brains of the South” by many but also “the fat Jew sitting at his desk” by disgruntled others. Leo Frank has gone down in history as the Victim, the only Jew in the American chronicle to be lynched. Frank moved to Atlanta from New York City to work as a supervisor for the National Pencil Company which used white girls as employees. One of these, Mary Phagan, was found raped and dead in the factory basement, and suspicion eventually centered on Frank, already resented as a “Yankee Jew.” A kangaroo court convicted him and sentenced him to death, but the obvious miscarriage of justice forced a reluctant governor of Georgia to commute his sentence to life in prison. This inflamed “the Knights of Mary Phagen” (later to morph into a renewed Ku Klux Klan) who extracted Frank from prison and lynched him with an evident pride that shows in the postcards that were made of the event. Under the circumstances, Southern Jews were not inclined to make ethnic claims nor even to complain too loudly when members of their community were attacked. Their best hope, they thought, was to present themselves as Southerners, just like their neighbors, with the only difference being one of faith. Whatever their feelings were in the face of the evident and daily oppression of African Americans they either witnessed or participated in, they weren’t going to rock the boat.  Even the obscenity of the Leo Frank case brought no squeak of protest. Established Southern Jews distanced themselves or stayed silent, fearing that vocal defense would endanger the broader community — a direct parallel to the logic of Washington's compromise of trading short-term solidarity for a hoped-for (but ultimately illusory) long-term communal security.  What do you do when surrounded by a majority with a seemingly unbreakable grip on the levers of power, one that threatens to annihilate you at the first sign of protest or move towards liberation? Perhaps the Compromise was the best you could make of a bad hand. You accept a permanent subordinate position, but you may  make it through the night. The prime directive was clear: shut the fuck up! There could be no Jewish equivalent to Washington’s Atlanta speech. Washington spoke for a community under severe legal and violent oppression. He had to negotiate survival against a hostile white power. Jews were way more integrated into civic and social life, but their “acceptance” was always conditional and could be withdrawn at any time. They couldn’t even mention  the Compromise. Naming it would have undermined the illusion of natural belonging it was meant to project. The Southern Jewish community was – and is – steeped in accommodationism. “Be model citizens,” they were told by their rabbis and leaders. “Avoid controversy. Do not draw attention to distinctively Jewish concerns–particularly anything touching on race or labor relations. Show yourselves to be civic-minded, patriotic, deferential to local custom.” It was accommodation by ethos rather than by formal declaration. Shut the fuck up! — Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in The Texas Branch. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 1920, Perry Bradford, a Black composer and publisher, had the crazy idea that African Americans would buy music recorded by Black artists and musicians. He convinced Okeh Records to shellac a vaudeville and cabaret singer from Harlem named Mamie Smith backed by Black jazz musicians. “Crazy Blues” proved to be a smash hit. Within two months of release, it had sold 75,000 copies. Record company executives (all white) woke up. There was a market here! Money to be made! And so “race music” was coined and advertised. When you have a success in the entertainment field, what do you do? You copy it for as long as the formula holds out. And that’s exactly what Paramount, Columbia, et. al. did. They went out and signed their own Black female singers to contracts. That’s why all of the first hits were delivered by a cohort of blues queens whose names, with the exception of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith (and possibly Alberta Hunter), you’ve never heard of: Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey, Edith Wilson, Sippie Wallace and various unrelated Smiths (Trixie and Clara). These women were Black superstars of the era. However, they did not necessarily specialize in the blues. They were versatile theater and cabaret singers who performed a variety of popular music styles. For their race catalogs, the labels wanted blues, and that’s what they captured on record. In 1926, Paramount Records recorded a Texas street singer and guitarist named Blind Lemon Jefferson. Lightning struck again. The sides sold well, and Jefferson’s popularity initiated a wave of country blues records. These were primarily solo singers who performed their own compositions and accompanied themselves on acoustic guitar. Enshrined saints within that tradition are Charley Patton and Blind Willie McTell. These artists came nowhere near the level of success or renown enjoyed by the blues queens, but their music was valorized by later generations in ways that the music of the neglected and forgotten foremothers of the genre were not. The Great Depression killed the careers of the Classic Blues queens – vaudeville circuits finally collapsed and the sound itself had fallen out of favor – but the heartfelt renderings of an oppressed Southern Black man still sold, and they were way cheaper to record! Between the Depression and the restrictions of materials (like shellac) imposed by fighting World War Two, the record industry contracted sharply. By the time it began recovery in the 40s, white men had discovered the genre as an artistic expression of authenticity and predictably took it over. Folklorists and collectors, such as John and Alan Lomax, searched for “roots” music in the South and invented a new narrative structured around the following values: GOOD INAUTHENTIC Rural male guitarists Urban female singers Solo performers Use of bands – even jazz bands! "Primitive" sounding styles Variety of styles, genres, and instrumentation Folk expression Professional entertainers Artists such as Robert Johnson, Son House, and Lead Belly became central to the emerging canon. The Classic Blues women did not fit the folklorists’ narrative, but while they could not write Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith entirely out of the account, the rest were consigned to the dustbin of history. The die was cast, and later developments in both the genre itself and the white historiography that developed around it only amplified the erasure. In the latter half of the 40s, the blues went electric in Chicago and unleashed a new cohort of male stars: Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Elmore James. (Shout out to Etta James who cracked the boys club late – in the 60s.) Electric blues spawned Jump Blues. The revival of the record industry introduced local scenes – West Coast Blues (T-Bone Walker), Swamp Blues (Lightenin’ Slim) – into the mix. Piano blues even recognized a white man, Mose Allison, as a legitimate practitioner. Race music got rechristened as Rhythm and Blues and started reaching towards the big money – the white market. Look at the list of blues stars from the 40s to the 60s and you’ll find few women. The blues world was a man’s world, and, honey girl!, maybe you should direct your efforts towards pop or jazz. The folk revival of the early 60s, although instrumental in resuscitating the careers of still-living country artists (Mississippi John Hurt), did nothing to challenge the younger generation’s acceptance of the sexist lens promoted by early histories ( The Country Blues  by Robert Charters, 1959) and supposedly definitive record collections ( The Anthology of American Folk Music , 1952, by the eccentric and extremely sexist collector, Harry Smith – 4 recordings by women out of 84 tracks).  When rhythm and blues morphed into a white genre in the mid-fifties, rock and roll was poised for world domination. With no knowledge of or interest in the blues queens who had launched the genre, British and American rockers continued to idolize – and sometimes share the stage with – Delta and Chicago bluesmen. The British invasion, with its covers of past blues hits (Robert Johnson’s “Love In Vain” by the Rolling Stones; Howlin’ Wolf’s “Spoonful” by Cream) sealed the deal – and the history. The blues origin story became: Delta men → electric blues → rock and roll.  Furthermore, all of the protagonists in this mythical lineage were unproblematically heterosexual, which was not an assertion you could make about the blues queens. Some of them even sang about economic independence (hmm), domestic abuse (sad but understandable), same-sex relationships (abominable), and female desire (what?!?). No wonder we had to bury the foremothers! But dammit – some of them wouldn’t stay dead! In 1970, Janis Joplin bought a headstone to put on Bessie Smith’s unmarked grave. “ The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing.” — Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Where My Mother’s Name Didn’t Come From. SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Aimee Semple McPherson preaching at her Angelus Temple, Los Angeles My mother once told me that her mother, Jeanette, had named her Amy after the celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. I didn’t give this statement much thought at the time, but it would have been odd that my conflicted Jewish mother had inherited something from a Pentecostal evangelist.  When I did think about it, however, I figured that religion had nothing to do with Jeanette’s choice. In Jeanette’s world, men, even weak ones, held power. A few exceptional women, like Aimee Semple McPherson, did  have power. How any woman in America came to power in the second decade of the 20th century was certainly a conundrum. Women couldn’t even vote  in federal elections until the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 – and this only after 50 years of ceaseless suffragette effort. Middle class women gained organizational and leadership experience through the burgeoning women’s clubs movement (social clubs, civic leagues, improvement societies), but although the hinges were being loosened on the doors to public power, the patriarchy successfully kept them closed. There were, however, two fields of endeavor where women could shoot to national renown: entertainment and religion. Aimee Semple McPherson amassed enormous success at the intersection of both when she ended her wandering life as an itinerant preacher to settle in Los Angeles. Pentecostalism was pretty fringe-y at that time (faith healing, speaking in tongues), but McPherson eschewed the fire and brimstone delivery for a softer (more feminine?) approach, and it was enormously successful.  It would take McPherson only a few years to reach the heights of power. She built and founded America’s first megachurch, the Angelus Temple, with a seating capacity of 5300. Multiple services and other programming went on all day, every day, and her dazzling approach of combining theatrical spectacle with the gospel made her a pioneer of Christian entertainment.  McPherson presented salvation through her legendary “illustrated sermons,” renting costumes and scenery from nearby Hollywood studios. The temple boasted a 14-piece orchestra, a brass band and a hundred-voice choir, two-thirds female, all dressed in white. She used live camels, tigers, lambs, palm trees — whatever it took to bring biblical truth to the hearts of her listeners.  Her critics called her the P.T. Barnum of Christianity, but she built massive and lasting institutional power in a system designed to exclude women. She founded an entire denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.  The year after the opening of the Angelus Temple, McPherson broke ground for the televangelists of the later century when her church acquired a broadcast license, and she sent her sermons over the airwaves, making her the first religious figure to gain a national audience. By 1926, she was one of the most charismatic and influential women of her time, her fame on par with Charles Lindbergh ,  Rudoolph Valentino, and Babe Ruth. Yet she gave up nothing of her femininity. She worked through glamor, fashion, emotional expressiveness, and maternal imagery.  All this hoopla was far removed from my grandmother’s quiet domesticity in Hyde Park, Chicago. McPherson was so famous that even Jeanette would have known of her in her heyday. What did the content of Aimee’s message matter when Jeanette was considering a name for her only daughter? What my grandmother wished for her daughter in bestowing her that name, I hypothesized, was a kind of masculine agency that Jeanette may have wanted but was certainly beyond her ken. Her middle class aspirations as a Jewish woman – a servant, nice material things, social prominence in the “right” temple – were even more constricting than those of her Gentile counterparts. The only power she knew was exercised through charm, seduction, and an attractive appearance.  Unfortunately, the dates for this invented origin story didn’t work out. When my mother was born in 1920, Aimee’s fame was still confined to Pentecostalism and Angeleno circles. It’s unlikely that Jeanette knew of her. Still, my mother thought that was where her name came from, so the retrospective feminist gloss I came up with may have applied to Amy, if not to Jeanette. N.B. McPherson also anticipated the waystation of outsized religious figures blemished or brought down by scandal when she disappeared for five weeks in the summer of 1926. After an enormous funeral service for her, she stumbled out of the Sonoran desert near Arizona with a far-fetched story of how she’d been kidnapped and held captive. The subsequent media frenzy and grand jury investigations wounded her reputation but did not bring her down. She continued leading (and growing) her denomination until her (accidental?) death by an overdose of sleeping pills in 1944. — Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in How the Women of the Classic Blues Got the White Patriarchal Erasure . SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts .

It's funny how you can live in a society whose wealth was built upon the slave trade and not be aware of it even though the legacy of the trade is layered in the language, social relations, and racialized prejudices of the present-day population. No, I'm not referring to the American South. I'm reflecting on the time I spent learning about Swahili language and culture on the East African coast. My introduction, through a two-month intensive Swahili language program for graduate students, was not designed to bring out the dark underside of Swahili history. A cohort of 25 students from around the U.S. was subjected to language classes, lectures, and excursions in Malindi, Mombasa, and Lamu. The program, put together by Yale, was an elite training that drew its contacts and expertise from the Swahili crème de la crème of the Kenyan coast. Our principal lecturer, Sheikh Ahmed Nabhany, was a highly regarded poet and scholar but clueless about how to impart his deep, culturally embedded knowledge to American neophytes. (One of his lectures was comprised of a slide show and the Swahili names of 40 different kinds of local fish.) The men, during our stay in Mombasa (the women were housed elsewhere), were the guests of the illustrious Fahmy Hinawy whose family home had served as the Imperial German Consulate for Britain's East Africa Protectorate from 1903 to 1914. We learned about Swahili cuisine, marriage customs, Koranic education, styles of dress, local structures of government, but nary a word about slavery. I returned to the Swahili coast three years later, spending ten months as a Research Associate in the Literature Department of the University of Dar es Salaam. I was writing my dissertation on Ebrahim Hussein, East Africa’s best-known (but still untranslated) Swahili playwright. Hussein was also a product of elite Swahili society, but he came of age as part of the Arusha generation, briefly inspired by President Nyrere’s socialist idealism, and opened his thinking up to Marxism and class analysis that were permanently beyond the ideological horizons of Nabhany and his ilk. In fact, Hussein's second great play, Mashetani (Devils), confronted the great historical schism of the East African coast head-on, and still I didn’t see it!  The “secret” lay in the very name of the country that had adopted an indigenous language as its national medium of commerce, education, and government — a radical linguistic move that no other African country attempted. Tanzania was the welding together of Tanganika, the large inland empire that England had “inherited” from German East Africa when that country was stripped of its colonies after losing World War One, and Zanzibar, the Arab-dominated archipelago that had flourished under Omani and Swahili rulers as the last great slave entrepot in history. I had done my background research. I'd read that the sultanate of Zanzibar, at the apogee of its trade dominance in the mid-19th century, extracted enormous wealth from the African interior in slaves and ivory — as if "ivory" did not entail the slaughter of elephants and "slaves" did not require the dehumanization of the "washenzi" (savages) of the mainland. The coastal town where I'd visited the College of the Arts was called Bagamoyo — lay down your heart — because it was the point of departure for the tens of thousands of captives who were then transported to the Zanzibar slave market, where they were sold to masters in Arabia, India, and sometimes kept on the island itself. But there was no slave castle, no "Door of No Return," no anguished groups of New World Blacks confronting the brutality of their past — no physical evidence at all. When I spent time on Zanzibar, I, like all tourists, was dazzled by the exoticism of the Swahili populace, the coral rag masonry, the elaborately carved doors, the profusion of street food sold from the stalls fronting the Indian Ocean. Furthermore, my knowledge of Swahili allowed me to be adopted by a baraza of young men who met nightly for dominoes and banter. Now I was rubbing shoulders with the people, not the elite, who were mostly dark (colorism played its usual noxious role), mostly descendants of the inland tribes who had been forced to carry elephant tusks to the coast and then sold into a domestic slavery of clove plantations. And yet everybody was Swahili, everybody spoke Swahili, and — this was key — everybody was Muslim. Even though the Arab overlords had been killed or chased out during the uprising of the oppressed that fueled the Zanzibari revolution of 1964, Arab values and culture remained dominant.  Slavery had played an integral role in Arab culture from its burst onto the world stage in the 7th century to the 20th. The toll of the Arab slave trade on the African continent was much greater in terms of numbers (some 17 million as opposed to the 12 million of the Atlantic trade) and lasted almost 1000 years. Zanzibar’s most famous native son, Tippu Tip, had built up his fabulous fortune as the second richest man in history on the backs of the thousands of inland Africans he had forced into slavery. That was how the coastal language of Swahili had become the lingua franca of East Africa, the trade. And yet as far as I could tell, here in the amputated heart of the great empire, nobody spoke of it. It was everywhere and nowhere at once.  I returned to the States, finished my dissertation, published articles on Swahili literature, and privately vowed to return someday to Zanzibar, even though academia had cast me aside and I had no professional reason to go again. In 2022, I made good on my promise. My Swahili was in tatters, so I hired a local guide to pilot me through new tourist adventures. He took me to see something that hadn’t existed during my first sojourn, the Slave Monument located next to the Anglican Church, which began construction on the site of the last functioning slave market in the world when it was finally forced out of business by the British in 1873.  There wasn’t much to look at. The sculpture, five downcast figures in rough pebbled stone, is rather restrained. The underground slave chambers are empty. The nearby Heritage Education and Visitors Centre was simply two rooms containing large explanatory panels in English and Swahili. However, this was the only extensive public presentation of Zanzibar’s role in the slave trade, and the picture of the recuperated captives on the HMS Daphne that I photographed there I have not seen reproduced anywhere else. The guides add many gruesome details, not necessarily historically corroborated, about the ordeals that the upcountry captives had to endure during their passage through the slave market.  Many Zanzibaris refuse to visit the monument or museum, claiming that the narratives are born of more Christian prejudice or Western Islamophobia. That may be so, but look at the photograph. The difference between the slavers and captives, in dress, in demeanor, in gestalt , is just as clear as in any sketch of an American antebellum slave market. Having grown up in the United States, I associated these oppressions with race. I couldn’t do that with the Arab slave trade, at least not on the Swahili coast. The chasm between the masters and the enslaved was defined by religion. Swahili culture — and language — had been Islamized since its inception centuries ago. The word for "civilization" is  ustaarabu , the root being -arabu . There was no “black” population; everybody was “black.” There was no identifiable subset of slave descendants in the destinations of the Arab trade as there was in the West. The trade favored women over men, two or three to one, for obvious reasons. If a female slave gave birth to her master’s child, both were eligible for emancipation. As for the men, the vast majority were castrated, which either killed them off immediately or ensured that they’d leave no biological inheritance. Anyway, once the Arab dhows had sailed over the horizon with their doomed and helpless cargo, their fate provoked zero concern on the part of the Swahilis past or present. — Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in An Embarrassing History . SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts .

Americans with a moderate knowledge of musical history know about the minstrel shows that originated in the 19th century — how could they not? Some of them might even be aware that the Black musical reentered and transformed the Broadway stage during the 1920s. But there is this gap from the last decade of the 19th century to the 1920s where only fragments of Black musicality (ragtime, the cakewalk) flicker through the imposed amnesia of the time. Why? Take a deep breath and read the following historical facts. The first popular song to chart a million sheet music sales was "All Coon Look Alike To Me," written by Ernest Hogan and published, to his permanent economic benefit (he was smart enough to put a royalty clause in his contract) in 1895. In spite of the Irish-sounding stage name he adopted, Ernest Crowdens (b. 1865) was unequivocally Black. As an early adaptation of the syncopation that became the hallmark of ragtime, Hogan's song sparked a "coon song" craze that produced a tidal wave of demeaning stereotypes phrased in an artificial "darky" dialect written by Blacks and whites alike — 600 songs between 1895 and 1900. An embarrassing history, indeed. But who deserved the shame — the white producers and audiences that skewed Black representations on stage — no matter who was under the burnt cork — into prefigured stereotypes of shiftless layabouts, dimwits, pompous blowhards, transparent con artists, razor-toting bad men, watermelon eating, chicken-stealing... the list goes on and on. Was it the white folks who published the songs, produced the shows, sold the tickets, bought the sheet music, and reaped the profits who felt embarrassed? Or was it the stage-struck boy, the musically inclined singer, the talented dancer who had to force himself into these clown costumes in order to make any kind of living and possibly — who knows? — strike the flickering bullseye of a hit song or comedic role and rise, however temporarily, above the circumscribed fate of his race?  The tortuous truth of the coon song was that while it was certainly a cultural straight jacket — as had been the minstrel show and Uncle Tom roles of the nineteenth century — it could also be an escape route. Coon songs and ragtime (the instrumental version, if you will) brought syncopation into American music, a wildly popular innovation whose Black origin could not be belittled or erased. Appropriated by white performers and composers for sure, but the music's popularity built the careers of the first generation of Black stage professionals whose achievements, in the first decade of the 20th century, were astonishing. With the exception of Bert Williams, the names of these extraordinary men (unfortunately few women were allowed in that vanguard) have been fogged over by the humiliating miasma of the coon song craze that launched their careers. "Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome," wrote Booker T. Washington, who well knew the ground on which he and his post-Reconstruction generation, abandoned now to the not-so-tender mercies of a recrudescent white nationalism, had to stand. One need only look at the sheet music covers to see what they were up against.  And yet, Bob Cole turned the craze to his advantage when he wrote and produced A Trip to Coontown in 1898, the first musical entirely created and owned by Black showmen. (He also handily skewered Jim Crow injustice in the show's song "No Coons Allowed," reprinted in a special end section of the newsletter.) That same year, Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk, " a one-act musical by composer Will Marion Cook with an all-Black cast premiered on the rooftop of a Broadway theater and was a hit. Three years later Cook's music graced  In Dahomey , the first full-length African American musical to be staged at an indoor venue on Broadway. During its four-year tour,  In Dahomey  proved one of the most successful musical comedies of its era.The show helped make its composer and leading performers, George Walker and Bert Williams, household names. A command performance at Buckingham Palace capped its 1903 residency in the United Kingdom Dizzying heights had been scaled, at least in England. More triumphs awaited in New York. Ernest Hogan fulfilled his pet ambition to be the only colored star in a full-scale Broadway musical, Rufus Rastas , in 1905. Bob Cole, after having teamed up with composer J. Rosamund Johnson (of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" fame), created several Cole & Johnson Broadway shows that strenuously transcended the coon tropes still dominant on Tin Pan Alley. The leading man of The Shoo-Fly Regiment (1906-07) was a military hero and a college man. T he Red Moon (1908-1910) not only depicted a misceginated world of Black and Indian alliance but its plot turned upon a romantic relationship between its Black protagonist and his half-Indian love interest. (A serious depiction of romance imparted too much gravitas to Black characters and was thus avoided, it was mistakenly thought, until the return of the Black musical in 1921 with Shuffle Along .)  The Williams and Walker Company, quite large now and able to access financial resources unknown heretofore, continued its Broadway successes. Ernest Hogan wrote and starred in a second Broadway musical, The Oyster Man (1907). And then, it all came crashing down. Hogan had to leave The Oyster Man , closing the show, due to illness. George Walker retired early in the middle of the 1908-09 season also for health reasons. In 1911 Bob Cole collapsed on stage while performing with J. Rosamund Johnson. Syphilis carried off this first generation of giants, though the explanations offered to the public cited other causes. They were mourned by their contemporaries, but their memories did not survive. Bert Williams was absorbed and enshrined in the world of white entertainment as a headliner for the Ziegfield Follies from 1910 to 1919. Bereft of its stars, African American musicals entered a Wilderness Period from 1908 to 1921, during which Shuffle Along opened . Between the "embarrassing" beginning (coon songs) and the stigmatized end, there was much to celebrate — but much that was easier to forget. If you're African American, can you look at the sheet music cover of "All Coons Look Alike To Me" with equanimity? Discretion was the better part of pallor.  N.B. The family of M. Witmark and Sons, a founding force of Tin Pan Alley and major publisher of coon songs, was of Jewish origin.  — Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in The Arab Slave Trade Finally Breaks Through . SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

Marion Michelle with FIAF colleagues, 1957 I've written elsewhere of how my cousin Marion Michelle probably made cinematic history filming the first guerilla documentary, Indonesia Calling , for the famous Dutch filmmaker, Joris Ivens , in 1945. This was well before I was born. Marion was the same generation as my mother — they were first cousins — although of course we were cousins as well. Since 1950, Marion had settled as an expatriate in Paris. I lived in Paris on two different occasions, once as a child of 11 in 1961 and again as a university student of 27 in 1977. It turned out, though I didn't know it, that Marion had extensive experience with the documentary film tradition as it developed in Europe. Marion was never one to toot her own horn, so I didn't learn about her association with Joris Ivens, how she had wrested the leadership of the International Federation of Film Archives from the derelict and imperious Henri Langlois, her sustained friendships with such giants of documentary film as Paul Strand and John Grierson until much later, until I myself had taken up documentary film in an accidental manner. But all of this knowledge came well after I had known Marion best, back in 1977. Had it not been for my unexpected detour into filmmaking and a class on documentary film, I might never have learned about or appreciated Marion's accomplishments. To me, she was cousin Marion, and even at 27 I was myopically focused on my life and its curious trajectory. I knew nothing about Marion's history, but she knew everything about mine. This didn’t strike me as unbalanced. I’d never been much interested in the biographies of my parents’ generation. Nonetheless, bits and pieces of her former life emerged. She told me about a Joris Ivens retrospective at the Pompidou Center — she unfortunately had to go to a film festival in Italy during that time — and I asked her who he was. She couldn’t believe I had never heard of him. .....“ Pare Lorentz ?” she quizzed further. .....I shook my head. .....“ John Grierson ?” .....“Who are these people?” .....“You didn’t watch any documentaries when you were growing up?” .....I racked my brains. “ Woodstock ,” I offered. .....She’d never heard of it. It was truly a dialogue des sourds , as the French expression goes, but Marion gave me a truncated version of her relationship with Ivens. Of course I'd seen many documentaries, but they were on television — shows such as See It Now and 60 Minutes — and didn't count. Without thinking about it, what Marion and I were both referring to were theatrical documentaries. There'd been plenty of those, mosty government sponsored, during the Great Depression and World War Two, but with the advent of television, whose 16 mm films stock required much less in equipment and the fine resolution that the big screen demanded, theatrical documentaries fell into a trough that extended for two decades. I never saw non-fiction films featured on cinema marquees. Woodstock was the first documentary for which I paid the full price of $1.50 to watch in a theater. And I did it again that same year, 1970, for Gimme Shelter .  The theatrical documentary was just beginning to rouse from its coma, but I didn't have much personal experience — and no historical knowledge — of the genre when Marion and I had our discussion seven years later. When I went to the Pompidou screening of Indonesia Calling , I came away unimpressed. The subject matter didn’t engage me; the editing seemed choppy; the soundtrack, blaring and overblown; and the narration bordered on corny. Even with the Aussie accent, I recognized the ponderous Voice of God from the “educational” films shown during my high school travails (“The Defensive Driver”), and I was not a fan. When Marion came back to town, she didn’t ask what I had thought of the film, and I let that sleeping dog lie. — Robert Philipson  Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in Early Docs of the Harlem Renaissance . SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts .

Cotton Club dancers circa 1930s This is a still from a British Pathé newsreel, filmed sometime during the 1930s of dancers at the Cotton Club. Up until the advent of the internet, it would have been impossible to find this episode titled "Harlem (AKA Harlem, New York)." Although the footage, long since recovered and incorporated into every Harlem Renaissance history, is now recognized as a unique and invaluable moving image window on Harlem during the waning days of the Renaissance, at the time the newsreel episode was a throwaway human-interest story buried deep in the vaults of British Pathé. Harlem! How colorful and exotic! This was an ur-documentary of the Harlem Renaissance before the movement had a name or was recognized as a cultural epoch. It did not arrive wearing a name tag. It crystallized as a historical phenomenon only after decades had passed.  As the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War eclipsed the 1920s energy, the Harlem Renaissance began being discussed as a bounded period (the 1920s and early 30s), a coherent cultural episode, something with a beginning, peak, and decline. But it wasn't until the 1960s that the Harlem Renaissance became a named historical phenomenon taught in universities, periodized in literary histories, and framed as foundational to African American literature and art. But the dawning realization that the Harlem Renaissance was a key cultural episode was slow to grow. (Guess why.) The first book to give the era a definitive historical synthesis was the now-forgotten  Harlem Renaissance by Nathan Huggins in 1971. The history was impressive in its scope and the sophistication of its analysis, but it was ahead of its time and didn't make much of an impression. Academia was not ready to accept the Harlem Renaissance as a fully-fledged historical epoch. That history was later nailed down by David Levering Lewis' magisterial volume, When Harlem Was In Vogue , published in 1981.  Although the party started late, the documentary was a late comer to even that party. African American history was marginalized and considered insufficiently important to expend the (white) money and resources necessary for the production of a theatrical documentary. Such a documentary could not even be conceived until the reduced costs of video production and the seismic shift to television broadcasting democratized, to some degree, the trajectory and subject matter of the American documentary. And even that might have been further delayed by the fundamental warp and woof of racism had not the Black Power movement of the late 1960s ripped through some of the fabric. The year after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr . , the public broadcasting syndicate National Educational Television (a direct predecessor to the modern-day PBS) instituted a magazine-style news program, Black Journal , devoted to the lives and concerns of African Americans. William Greaves, one of the only Black filmmakers and documentary producers on the scene (he had to get his training and early work experience in Canada) was promoted as the show's Executive Producer, and his three years at the helm produced an extraordinary run of non-fiction films. Leaving Black Journal to work again as a filmmaker, Greaves conceived and directed the first documentary to define and demarcate the period with a synthetic historical sweep. The first stand-alone Harlem Renaissance documentary,  From These Roots , was made for television in 1974, half a century after the epoch it set itself to contextualize. There was one little problem, though—moving pictures had missed the Harlem Renaissance almost entirely. No stock footage, no government-sponsored documentaries, no home movies of the places (the Cotton Club) or personalities (Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois) who had since been established as central players. What to do? Greaves made the radical move of creating the documentary from historical stills ( only historical stills) that were scattered and incompletely catalogued in libraries, archives, and private collections. The images he found have since become the stock-in-trade of all Harlem Renaissance documentaries and photo exhibits. The decision to tell an African American story through stills, though born of necessity, catapulted photography, even in the documentary genre, into the realm of witness, fact, and argument. Stills were no longer illustrations of narrated history. They were stand-ins for an absent cinema. As such, stills were treated with unusual reverence: slow zooms, careful reframing, voiceovers that supplied poetry and context, music that served as temporal glue. (The original score was written by Eubie Blake.) Greaves' seminal mix of stills, camera moves, narration, and music was Ken Burns before Ken Burns. The script, intoned by the African American actor Brock Peters, was a blend—not always signposted—of historical narration, quotes from the writers, and sometimes extensive excerpts from the era's most famous poems. Today , alas, the technological advancement in movie production and editing has relegated this groundbreaking achievement to a YouTube museum piece. It badly needs restoration and the appreciation that should be bestowed on an early cinematic miracle of Black creativity, invention, and reverence for the past.  — Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Dialogue des sourds . SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In January of 1975, I was lying on top of a water tower in the middle of Africa. It was a fine, warm night. A full moon had scrubbed the sky of its spangle of stars. Stretched out next to me was a handsome African man, one month younger than I. His name was Yves D-, a Central African English teacher at the high school that used to be serviced by the defunct water tower, which served as our perch. We were both stoned on grass I had purchased over the Christmas break in Bangui, the capital of the country where I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I too was an English teacher at Bossangoa High. Though English was our shared teaching discipline, Yves and I spoke in French, the language of business, education, and occasionally friendship in the Central African Republic. Sango, the lingua franca, served most often as the language of intimacy, but intimacy with the Central Africans was difficult to achieve. Most of my relations with the people surrounding me were conditioned by a colonial past I had known about only in theory. The master/servant dynamic dictated by my race never ceased to disorient me, even as I made my accommodations. I had surrendered to the deference shown to me by shopkeepers, bus drivers, and public servants. I had my own servant, Jacques, who came every day except Sunday, whom I had “inherited” from the site’s previous Peace Corps Volunteers. I was on good terms with the other Central African teachers at Bossangoa High, but nothing developed beyond a collegial level. With Yves, it was different. He had lustrous skin, dark, regular features in a wide oval face topped by neatly cropped jet-black hair. His brown eyes sparkled with intelligence and humor. I found him arrestingly good-looking, and I enjoyed the banter we exchanged in the shabby little room that passed as a teacher’s lounge. Several months into my first year, I asked Yves to help me perfect my French. The Peace Corps paid for lessons. Thus, through this mutually beneficial arrangement, our friendship formed. The evening on top of the water tower was the first time I’d gotten a Central African stoned. Drugs had none of the glamour for the locals that my youth culture had invested them with in the sixties. Smoking grass was considered low-class. But Yves, even though he had never left the country, was drawn, like all ambitious young men, to the glitter of the West. I asked him as we were lying next to one another, dazzled by the moon, if he had wanted to do something big. “I wanted to be a pilot,” he replied. “Even growing up in the bush, I saw the planes flying in the sky and going to places like Paris and New York.” “How did you end up as an English teacher?” “It was a strategic choice,” he replied with a hint of sadness. “I was enrolled in the science series in high school, but I couldn’t make the necessary grades to stay afloat. I was in danger of flunking out, so I switched to series C.” “The humanities series.” “Yes,” Yves replied. “Much easier than Series A.” By this time, I had absorbed enough of the French educational system to understand the difference between the various tracks (A, B, C, D) and where they were supposed to lead. The Central African school system, an exact copy of what reigned in the former colonial power, was ruthlessly efficient in cutting away all but the brightest students as they strove toward a middle-class berth that promised ease and power in a country where the gross per capita income scarcely matched the two-month salary of a factory worker in the West. The goal of the Central African system of education was to narrow the field of candidates for the limited number of jobs in the civil service. Yves saw that he was in danger of falling through the net and specialized in English, a foreign language in the C.A.R. This allowed him to get on the rolls of the state as a high school teacher, and America, anglophone America, glowed on the horizon like a full moon rising. At 24, Yves had married and fathered a baby girl. As a rare source of revenue in a peasant economy, he was already supporting a household of six, including two young cousins who were also attending high school. “How sad,” I wrote in my journal, “that he had to give up on his dream so early! A real-life counterpart to Bigger’s frustrated desire to pilot the plane he sees flying over Chicago. I wonder if I can find a French translation of Native Son for him the next time I’m in Bangui.” I was very literary in my journal. What I didn’t write – what I didn’t dare write and barely acknowledged – was that I was strongly attracted to Yves. There was a powerful erotic component to our friendship – on my side only. Friendship between men was well understood in African culture and often included a physical dimension that sometimes delivered an enjoyable surprise. Occasionally, an African would grab my hand, and though I had to smother the impulse to pull away, the gesture would fill me with pleasure and sometimes a powerful excitement. I let none of this show. Homosexuality was even more distasteful to cultivated Africans than drugs. They acknowledged it only in the context of white perverts who paid for their sexual pleasure with Black men. “La maladie des blancs.” As for myself, I was confounded by the unruly nature of my desires and filled with internalized homophobia. Yet my attraction to men powered my friendships in their direction and helped me break through the bitter historical shell that separated Blacks from whites. Once, during a reception at the high school principal’s house, I went to fetch Yves on my mobylette, a French motorized bike that provided Peace Corps Volunteers with a rare mobility in the African bush. As I rode into the principal’s compound with Yves’ arms around my waist, the one female student who had made it into the upper grades and who was preparing the meal remarked in Sango that I seemed to be really fond of Yves. Yes, the principal replied, also in Sango, he’d never seen that kind of friendship between an African and a white person before. Yves told me about the conversation, and I flushed with pleasure. – Robert Philipson Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay Langston and Carlo - A Cross-Racial Friendship SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts

In 1924, Carl Van Vechten, a white writer, music critic, and promoter of African American cultural art forms, met Langston Hughes at a Harlem party. "Kingston" he called him in the journal he kept at the time, but when he met Langston a second time as the winner of the first poetry contest sponsored by a Black magazine, Langston’s recital of “The Weary Blues” knocked him off his feet. Then and there he committed to getting Langston's first book of poems accepted by his own publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf. Van Vechten, 45, famous and well connected, published articles about his discoveries of life in Harlem in Vanity Fair. Hughes, 23, was still unknown and living with his mother in Washington, DC. Hughes was very beautiful, and Van Vechten, actively bisexual. There was cause to suspect that Van Vechten's interest in the young poet was not entirely literary, but the older white man played it cool. As good as his word, Van Vechten got The Weary Blues published in 1925 and wrote the forward -- a mixed blessing as Van Vechten's framing revealed a patronising stance and a tired -- but common -- belief in the salutary primitivism of Black culture. "You are my good angel!" Langston enthused, and although there was undoubtedly some sycophancy in his sentiments in the beginning, a genuine friendship developed between them. In fact, Langston saved Van Vechten's ass when the latter published his sensational novel, Nigger Heaven, in 1926. Feeling himself at that point to be a privileged commentator, Van Vechten arrogated the insider's use of the explosive term to insure its highest degree of visibility. (It worked but not always to his benefit.) In the same spirit, he casually lifted some blues lyrics quoted in the manuscript without attribution or permission, but a threatened lawsuit put him in a panic. He turned to Langston who was in his first year as a student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Langston jumped on a train and replaced the borrowed lyrics with originals in a night-long session at Van Vechten's apartment. Although the novel became the biggest best-seller of Van Vechten's career (amongst white folks), it caused an uproar in Harlem. Langston defended Van Vechten in print, arguing that the novel was "neither praise nor condemnation," but a portrayal of "life as it is." Langston's defense of the novel put him in a tricky position as the book's sensational title and white-authored voyeurism ignited anger among Black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois who described it in his review as "a blow in the face." Still, there was a deep commonality of appreciation that Langston and Van Vechten shared regarding the valorization of popular Black culture -- blues, jazz, speakeasies – and a disdain for the middle class pieties of taste and morality embraced by the Talented Tenth. "You and I are the only colored people," Van Vechten wrote to Langston, "who really love niggers." Langston never upbraided Van Vechten for the effrontery of the "joke" and perhaps took it in stride as a condition of their friendship. We'll never know. Over the next 40 years, the two friends exchanged 1500 letters; letters filled with gossip, in-jokes, aesthetic judgements, and an evident mutual affection. (However they didn’t touch on queer topics nor evince any queer sensibility, a sensibility on full display in the scabrous scrapbooks that Van Vechten willed to Yale’s Beinecke library collection under a 25-year-seal of secrecy.) As Langston’s star rose, Van Vechten’s sank, but he had a personal fortune to cushion his disappointment of being culturally sidelined and forgotten. However one may judge Van Vechten’s role as cultural impresario of the Harlem Renaissance and mediator between the races, the genuine affection he roused in some of his Black friends went beyond fetishism or exploitation. Langston was no fool, and the friendship between the dandified magpie and the African American 25 years his junior was one of equals – a difficult feat to bring off between two people of such different class backgrounds and races to this day. – Dr. Robert Philipson Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Yves and Robert - A Cross-Racial Friendship SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts