Translating Black Power in Postcolonial Accra

This presentation examines how translation contributed to the development of Black Power in postcolonial Africa. Using the writings of an early proponent of black power, the African American author Julian Mayfield, this presentation examines his role as an advocate for black political sovereignty during his time as an expatriate working for the Ghanaian government in the early sixties. Influenced by the work of Brent Hayes Edwards on how African and African American expatriate intellectuals produced diasporic consciousness through translating their works in interwar Paris, I examine here how translation contributed to the development of Black Power in postcolonial Africa. Scholarship on postcolonial Accra, a center of pan-Africanist political and intellectual production during the 1960s, has been largely silent about the ways translation influenced the practices of diaspora there. This has been largely due to the fact that much of the writing there was in English, the lingua franca of Ghana and of the African American expatriate community.

However, a shared language did not mean ideas were mutually intelligible. Mayfield was quick to note that this mistaken assumption was held by many at the U.S. State Department, who believed that English “language [gave] Americans a decided advantage over the Russians,” in appeals to Ghanaians. Mayfield pointed instead to the ways in which these appeals were regarded with suspicion because Africans, “[are] used to dealing with the terms ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ as realities,” not as abstract concepts. Such comments point to Mayfield’s concerns with a kind of translation to make his writing legible across political contexts. In analyzing Mayfield's private correspondence, published works, and his work on the journal African Review, this presentation examines early articulations of Black Power as they traveled across and through a center of Pan-Africanist thought and politics at the height of the decolonial era.