Heritage

The last two stanzas of the poem reveal that the speaker’s main reasons for asking “What is Africa to me?” are grief and anger, caused by an awareness of the suffering Black people experienced, from being captured and abducted in Africa to being sold into slavery and abused in antebellum (before the Civil War) America, to various forms of segregation and racist discrimination ever since the Civil War. That suffering is the speaker’s heritage in a way that is more immediate and impactful than the vague knowledge of African landscapes and jungle animals.

However, the speaker has been socialized into suppressing how that heritage makes them feel, or perhaps suppressing these feelings is a defense mechanism enabling them to live a civilized life as a Black man in a historically racist society. Instead, they fantasize about a primal Africa with wild cats “[c]rouching in the river reeds, / Stalking gentle flesh that feeds / By the river brink” (Lines 35-37) and “the savage measures of / Jungle boys and girls in love” (Lines 50-51). Unlike them, the speaker has been tamed, unable to freely and passionately express their needs and desires, reduced to passive contemplation rather than action.

Nevertheless, their grief and anger are real, bubbling just below the surface.