and (initial) rejection of proposals that AMSAC concentrate on educating U.S. citizens about African culture demonstrate the basic elitism of the organization’s self-conception and its lack of an organic relationship with ordinary African Americans. Moreover, AMSAC’s attitude toward Africa and Africans tended to the paternalistic or “redemptionist”—that is, the notion that diaspora and, in particular, American blacks had a duty to save the “dark continent” from the forces of atavistic mysticism on the one hand and communist manipulation on the other. In both these respects, the “AMSAC Afros” (as Cruse contemptuously referred to them) fit the bill perfectly for the CIA, which viewed African cultural nationalism as a vehicle for modernization and anticommunism rather than black self-emancipation.
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Still, Cruse’s blanket indictment ignores certain complexities and nu-ances. The suggestion that there was something insincere and opportunistic about participation in AMSAC is unfair. Wright and Davis were second to none in their opposition to communism, which they perceived as supporting the black freedom struggle for ulterior purposes, and they were equally passionate in their dedication to the concept of cultural freedom—or, as Horace Mann Bond put it, “the ideal of the free man—the independent man—who owes no allegiance to any power that would . . .
trammel the free expression of the individual artistic genius.”120
That said, there clearly was an element of self-interest about a common complaint of the “AMSAC Afros”: the lack of black faces in the U.S. foreign service. The organization’s constant agitation of this issue—in May 1961, it even called a special meeting of black leaders to discuss the failure of government, foundations, and other institutions to utilize African American expertise in foreign affairs121—might be interpreted as part of what historian Penny Von Eschen has called “a middle-class politics of symbolism and federal patronage,” but it could also be counted as (yet another) instance of a CIA front group using covert patronage to enhance its own status and legitimacy in American society.122 There were even hints that some of the events staged on American soil by AMSAC were used by elements of the old, anticolonial African American left for cultural purposes that had little to do, and even conflicted with, the official U.S. mission in Africa.123
Similarly, the AMSAC encounter with African culture was not an entirely one-way street. In 1959, for example, the arrival at Atlanta’s airport of Kenyan trade unionist Tom Mboya (a darling of the American noncommunist left and target of a number of CIA front activities) not only excited true feelings of African identity in Horace Mann Bond, it also gave him a fine opportunity to thumb his nose at southern segregation.
Dressed in a dashiki and clutching a huge banner in red, gold, and green emblazoned with the legend “Uhuru” (“Freedom” in Swahili), Bond paraded around the arrival hall “curiously . . . observed by the crowds of travelers” before entering a whites-only toilet where “a big cop” could only stand and stare, “absolutely dumbstruck at the intrusion.”124 Jazz pianist and composer Randy Weston, another black American who wore the dashiki as a gesture of cultural solidarity with Africa, returned from an AMSAC-sponsored trip to Nigeria reportedly “enthusiastic about tapping the rich variety of African music in his own compositions.”125 CIA pa-
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tronage did not always reinforce American “cultural imperialism”; sometimes it “helped to nurture the development of oppositional transnational and Afro-diasporic sensibilities” (to borrow again from Von Eschen’s in-sightful discussion of overt U.S. cultural diplomacy in Africa).126