At this, panelists Steven Newsome and Howard Dodson looked at each other, chins tilted, and shook their heads in resigned disbelief, their mouths gathering at one end into tight, disapproving puckers. Newson directs the Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution, and Dodson heads the Schomburg Institute for Research in Black Culture.

"For our children there is no Africa in its glorious antiquity because with the coming of the slave trade all of that got blocked from our sight," Robinson said. Basil Davidson, author of several books on the subject of Africa, also describes in his book, The African Slave Trade, this disenfranchised sense of self, so closely associated with a loss of a personal history. Said Davidson,
" . . . The mentality of the slaving years has tended to indoctrinate Africans with a sense of inferiority and even . . . of guilt and shame."

Rex Nettleford, Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, who called the slave trade "the greatest scourge of the twentieth century," said that slavery resulted in "the psychological conditioning of millions into stations of self-contempt." Booker likens this psychological pain to that of other minority groups, including Jews.

But if Richburg is really just too full of "guilt and shame" to embrace his heritage, he is not alone. Writing for the Chattanooga Free Press, Walter Williams, an economics professor at George Mason University, agrees with the foreign correspondent, now based in Jakarta. "Assuming I would have been born anyway," Williams wrote, "my wealth and my liberties . . . are greater as a result of being born in the United States than they would be in any country in Africa. In other words, while slavery was a brutal institution, I can be thankful for its results."

Booker counters that being black in America is not much
different than being black in Africa: That being born on American soil affords no more opportunity for the black man than that which he might have in Africa. "Why would anyone be thankful for the institution of slavery? As if being an African-American is so quantitatively greater than being an African," he said. "One's prospects in Africa are no worse than those of an African-American in Detroit," Richburg's hometown. Booker, who was born in Cleveland, thinks that Richburg makes unfair comparisons in his book and that "history of the most unimaginable cruelty against people" has occurred everywhere. "Whether it's with the Jews, the Khmer Rouge or in Rwanda," he said.

And Richburg certainly did witness atrocities horrific enough to scrape the most hardened heart. The book opens with Richburg's remembrance of standing beside a river in Tanzania, counting the bodies floating by, thirty every hour, 700 a day, most with severed limbs or missing heads. These were the victims of the genocidal war in nearby Rwanda, waged not with guns but machetes and spiked clubs. Africans killing Africans. Bodies too numerous to bury, being sent down the river by Rwandans into Tanzania.

Some 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu peoples were killed in Rwanda during that 100-day rebellion. Parallels to the atrocities of the slave trade are not difficult to draw. Though less in total numbers, in percentage of population, Rwanda in 1994 and the African continent in the 1800's both suffered the loss of many generations of its most productive people, disabling the social structure from the inside out. Booker thinks Richburg "danced on the graves of millions lost to slavery. And not just those who died fighting their captors to save themselves from the horrors, but also those who lived through chattled slavery."

Richburg was unavailable for comment while on assignment in Dili. But in his book, he was resolute in his position. For black Americans, he wrote, "the reaffirmation of some kind of lost African identity is rooted more in fantasy than reality." Richburg goes on to ask, "How can we, sons and daughters of America's soil, reaffirm an identity that for us never existed in the first place? No, America is home. There's no point in talking about going 'back' to anywhere, in finding some missing 'roots', in finding a homeland. Far better that we all put our energies into making America work better, into realizing the dream of a multiracial society, than in clinging to the myth that we belong anywhere else."

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