BACK TO AFRICA

While Kamal Ali was on one of his frequent trips to Africa, an African friend asked him if Black Americans understand where they are from and if they are proud of their African heritage. Kamal understood why his friend asked the question. Altogether too many Black Americans settle in Africa and disclaim or disparage their American experience and even more come to visit Africa and act like tourist and gawk at their ancestry rather than embrace it. They don’t seem to know or refuse to acknowledge who they are and, because of their confusion and the behavior that it generates, they are, in Dr. Ali’s words, “not much liked by Africans.”

Kamal’s first visit to Africa came unexpectedly in 1970 while he was working as the special assistant to the director of New York’s Neighborhood Job Corp, who was invited to join a two-month trip to Africa. Kamal’s boss invited him to come along and sweetened the invitation by arranging for his wife to receive his full pay while they were away. The trip could not have been better timed. The year before, inspired by Malcolm X, Kamal had converted to Islam. It was not a casual conversion. He became a devoted Sunni Muslim and learned to read, write and recite the Koran in Arabic.

Call it coincidence, divine intervention or whatever helps you explain unlikely events, but it was Kamal’s good fortune that the group’s destination was Ghana, a West African country with a large Muslim population, made up of descendants of roaming traders who originally immigrated to Ghana from the North. They established neighborhoods similar to our “hoods” called “zongos” and used their trade experience to move up in society. In the words of an old African proverb, “Like likes like,” and Kamal was right at home in Ghana and when he started reciting the Koran in Arabic to his new Muslim friends, it “brought tears to their eyes and made [him] an instant celebrity.”

During one of his Ghana trips, Kamal traveled to Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city. Kumasi is the center for timber production in Ghana and the location of the University of Science and Technology, which was built by Kwami Nkrumah. While he was exploring the streets of Kumasi, a young African approached him and told him that his father, Yusif, wanted to speak to him. Alhaji Yusif Ibrahim owned a large supermarket and had many other holdings in Kumasi. By 1978 he had made his first million dollars in Ghana by selling bicycles and parlaying the money into real estate and lumber. Yusif was worried about his son, whom he had heard little from since he had left Ghana for America. He asked that Kamal, upon his return to America, visit his son and make sure he was doing well.

Upon returning to America, Kamal located Yusif’s son at an address in the heart of Harlem drug country. As it turned out, the son had left Ghana because Islam was too restrictive for him. Kamal began taking the son to church and otherwise encouraging him to make the best of his time in America. They became good friends. In 1994 Yusif paid for Kamal to come to Ghana to escort his daughter to college in America. Instead, Kamal returned to America with three of Yusif’s kids who attended college while living with Kamal and his family for their first year.

In return for Kamal’s hospitality and service to his family, the grateful Yusif gave Kamal a plot of land by the sea in Prim Prim located about 20 miles from the capital, Accra. Kamal built his family a house on the land and has since purchased two more plots of land, where he intends to build two more houses. “Africa, to me,” he says, “is a place to consider when we think of our future as families…my wife and I are as much at home in Africa as we are in America.” But there is more on Kamal’s mind. Though he is proud of his American identity, he foresees the possible continuation of ominous trends in America that might make Africa an attractive future alternative for Black Americans in general. He suggests that we buy now while land is cheap.

Kamal Ali, now Dr. Kamal Ali, is currently employed as the Assistant Dean of Multicultural Development and Director of Student Support Services at Westfield State College and his wife, Ayesha, is a professor of nursing at American International College. He earned a doctorate in International Education from the University of Massachusetts and she is working on her doctorate. They have three kids, all born in New York, and nine grandchildren. One son is a computer technician and the other a teacher. Their daughter is an attorney specializing in labor law in Connecticut. They are all devout Sunni Muslims.

Dr. Ali’s success did not come without ripples in the road. He was born on Lebanon Street in the Old Hill neighborhood to Edwin and Stella Marshall. The family moved to Quincy Street, where they lived with Stella’s sister’s family for several years. The sister, Mary, is the mother of Rubin Harris and Donna Harris Jordan, the wife of former State Representative, Raymond Jordan. They shared the street with the Griffins, the Braces, the Saunders and the Lewis’s and many more families of modest means as one large, extended family until the Marshalls moved to Jamaica Street in Sixteen Acres, where Kamal’s father used his own architectural skills and the labor of himself and his Black friends to build a home for the family.

Kamal received a quality early education, beginning at Eastern Avenue and Warner Street Elementary Schools. He attended Duggan Junior High School and then Classical High School. He excelled at Classical due to the firm base of his early education. His mother was fiercely committed to her kids’ education and she gave his Warner teacher, Helen LaRose, permission to “whip any of her kids who acted up.” Kamal fondly recalls how Ms. LaRose “taught [him] how to read, write and conjugate verbs.”

But Kamal always had an independent mind that educators could not repress. His independence flowered in high school where he began to read about his history and take interest in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana and the emerging independent African continent. His school essays were rebellious statements about world history and events that were considered off limits. Consequently, he attracted the critical attention of school administrators, who eventually used his own writings to sabotage his early college career.

A few days after Kamal arrived at Howard University in Washington, D. C., he was called into the Dean of Students office and informed that his Classical counselor had inserted a note in his school file stating that he had “communist tendencies.” As proof that he was not a communist, he was instructed to write an essay. Ever true to himself, he related his thoughts about the emerging Black Panther movement at home and the African independence movement, with particular emphasis on Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and the European meddling in the cocoa market that strangled Nkrumah’s socialist revolution. Although a few years later Howard was to experience its own successful student revolution, at that time it was more conservative than conservative White America and Kamal Ali was sent home.

Young, rejected, hurt and confused, Kamal returned to Springfield and, then, to New York. He had moved to New York for a brief time immediately after high school but he had hooked up with the wrong crowd and was headed for big trouble, when his mother put her foot down. Kamal returned to Springfield chastened and ready to take his college boards. His high scores would have been attractive to any college but he chose Howard and, it might be said, in doing so he chose his destiny. His second return to New York was more productive. He met his wife, enrolled in college and became immersed in meaningful employment that eventually led him to the Neighborhood Youth Corp and, from there to Africa, where he built a home and found an extended family in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. It doesn’t seem an exaggeration to say that he is a living example of what we mean by poetic justice.

The same African friend who asked Kamal if Black Americans understand where they are from and if they are proud of their heritage often said to Dr. Ali, “No matter how long a stone lives in the river, it can never become a fish.” Kamal understood the African saying to reflect his status on both sides of the ocean. His American roots could not erase his African heritage any more than his African heritage could erase his American roots. The day he stepped on African soil Kamal embraced his African heritage as though his life had been in preparation for that moment. Africans befriended him and made him part of their families because he was genuine and somewhat like them. They sensed that he knew who he was and from whence he came and they respected him for it and opened their homes to him. As he says without a note of arrogance, “Very few Black people go to Africa, as I have, and end up with an extended family of 100 plus members.” n