The Legacy of Atlantic Crossings: Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey (1945)

The essay offers a new reading of African Journey by Eslanda Goode Robeson, who in 1936 set out on her first trip to the ‘Dark Continent’ – a three-month journey that took her from Cape Town to Cairo with her eight-year-old son. At the time Robeson was 40, and a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics, specializing in anthropology with a focus on the colonized black people of the world. She had already published Paul Robeson, Negro (1930), a biography of her famous husband, who was a well-known actor, singer and political activist. The notes and photographs she took during her African experience became a volume published by John Day in 1945 as a diary-formatted chronicle of the visit. Differently from existing readings of Robeson’s diary, the paper argues that Robeson’s quest in African Journey is far less a search for personal roots, far less a pilgrimage in search of an ancestral home for herself as a Black American woman, than it is an offer of a powerful narrative of belonging—a conscious legacy—to her Negro son.