It was a view from the other side of the fence, as it were, as befitting the papers delivered at the international conference that took place at the University in January. The conference title: “More Than Cool Reason: Black Responses to Enslavement, Exile, and Resettlement.”

Sobel’s intention, which she has tried to convey in her own work, was to “try to hear the voices” from the 18^th and early 19^th centuries. In the historian’s view, there has been too little consideration of black rage. “The narratives confirm,” she said, “that as the slaves came to see themselves as Africans and blacks, they came to see Americans and Europeans as whites.” Meaning, she explained, as “an alien ‘other’ that they would not be.”

Conference subjects ranged from whether the dances of the slaves of the West Indies were cultural and leisure entertainment or were used as a political stage, to exploring differences in religion based on where the enslaved Africans had originally come from and where they eventually settled. The event closed with a session that took historical issues into the present by considering some of the reactions of Ethiopian Jews to resettlement in Israel.

Prof. Daniel D. Littlefield of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had arrived at the conclusion about the Africans’ view of Europeans after finding and reading the writings of various slaves. He quoted Olaudah Equiano, an Igbo, who had been kidnapped from Nigeria in the mid-18th century when he was about ten years old. “...I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits....their complexions, too, differing so much from ours, their long hair, the language they spoke....I feared I should be put to death....I had never seen among any people such instances of brutal cruelty.”

Equiano was sold as a slave in Barbados, and what stuck him first was “the houses built with stories, and people on horseback. Indeed I thought these people were full of nothing but magical arts.” According to Littlefield, although there were an initial aversion to white appearance and an abhorrence of white cruelty, there was an appreciation of white capability. The Africans learned in their new environment that whites were on top and blacks were on the bottom, and they absorbed a sense of inferiority based on color.

According to Prof. Robin Law of the University of Stirling in Scotland, the idea of African tribes did not exist in the pre-colonial period but was a creation of the 20^th century. Ethnic identity, he argued, was influenced by the Atlantic slave trade: taken out of their native land, different Black Africans sought with a “self-conscious awareness” what they had in common. As a result, previously distinct peoples who might have shared cultural aspects and a linguistic dialect formed larger “nations” in the Black diaspora. In the case of the Igbo, this occurred long before the amalgamation took place in Africa.

Law contends that the process of ethnogenesis across the Atlantic influenced the African homeland because the diaspora was not totally cut off from it. “The slave trade,” he said, “did not involve merely a one-way movement of slaves from Africa to America--but continuous reciprocal relations.” The new ethnic identities that evolved in the diaspora had input into the redefinition of ethnicities in Africa. He illustrated his point with the case of the Yoruba, who lived mainly in what became southwestern Nigeria, but who “as a self-conscious ethnic group are a recent phenomenon.” The process of their aggregation occurred while in slavery in Brazil and the Caribbean.

Sojourner Truth, a black woman’s rights activist and advocate of black nationalism, was known for her fiery preaching. Although the former slave was introduced to Methodism in 1827, Dr. Margaret Washington, Assoc. Professor of History at Cornell University, believes that “the power, depth, and strength of Sojourner Truth’s mystical calling were rooted in African spirituality and the Dutch Reformed church.”

Sojourner was born Isabella, a third-generation slave of a merchant and gentleman farmer who belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, to which she was exposed. The naming process, Washington said, offers some evidence of her forbears’ background, as “Isabella” was not common among the 18th-century New York Dutch. It was, though, the name of a Catholic female saint known of in the Congo.

Sojourner Truth’s development of a rich, powerful singing voice, though nurtured among the Methodist, was undoubtedly rooted not only in her African heritage, Washington believes, but in Dutch women’s love for Psalm singing. This Psalm singing, she believes, helped instill strength, hope, and endurance in black slave women.

“The majority of Israelis think all Ethiopians have the same color skin - black. They do not know that there exists a cultural difference and color stigma in Ethiopian society.” Dr. Hagar Solomon of the Departments of Anthropology and Jewish Folklore at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem made this revelation, which surprised even those in the audience who had been working with these immigrants.

The 65,000 Ethiopians in Israel have gone through a re-mapping process, according to Solomon. From being Jews in Ethiopia to being Blacks in Israel has been a dramatic and far from ordinary story. The Jews of Ethiopia were similar in appearance to other Ethiopians, she explained, but there is racial subjectivity in Ethiopia. “Skin color is a highly dominant factor: the lighter the shade, the more superior the person or race.” The distinction is not perceived by other Israelis.

Originally the Beta Israel tribe believed that they came from white origins but changed color from living under the extremely hot sun. On returning to the Holy Land (Israel), they would become white again.

During the period of the slave trade in Africa, the Beta Israel tribes converted their slaves to their religion. Even after this conversion, though, the latter—the “blacks”--were still considered inferior to the original members of the tribe. Social communication and inter-marriage were forbidden between the two classes. The attitude still formed an integral part of the culture of Ethiopian Jews who arrived in Israel.

Seeing themselves for the first time as black first, not Jewish, has been one unfortunate aspect of the Ethiopians’ emigration to Israel. Race, Solomon said, previously had referred to differentiating Jews and non-Jews. Now, however, it was being associated with color in Israel; and color was assuming increasing importance among Ethiopians as a rallying point and symbol. Worse, perhaps, is that many Ethiopian immigrants believe that racism exists only in Israel and that in the United States there is no racism.

“This came as a surprise to Israeli society, which until then had considered Ethiopians to be quiet. The demonstration, which led to the throwing of stones and a response of tear gas, resulted in an article written by an Israeli-Arab, entitled, “Palestinians and Ethiopians in Israel: We are Kindred.”