Unlearned Lessons

In the 40 years since Halifax city fathers wiped it off the face of the earth, Africville—a tiny black community of 400 people that had snuggled and struggled to survive along the harbour’s edge for 150 years—has become a more iconic symbol than actual physical space.

For its former residents, the very mention of its name evokes an idyllic, partly idealized past where everyone knew your name and everyone’s mother was everyone else’s mother. For Nova Scotia’s black community more generally, Africville has become both a warning and also a rallying cry—“Never again!” For Nova Scotia whites of a certain age, the name usually prompts not only a hasty rationalization of the past—“those were different times”—but also a guilty reminder that the past, too often, does not seem all that past.

Jennifer J. Nelson is interested in those symbolic manifestations of Africville, but her real focus in Razing Africville: A Geography of Racism is much more narrow—on Africville the place and on the “significance of racialized spaces and their regulation to the fabric of Canadian society.” “At a basic level,” she writes, “Africville’s establishment and eradication is all about territory. It is about white people’s self-proclaimed right to land that was not theirs.”

Razing Africville began life as a doctoral thesis, and it shows. Much of this slim volume is taken up with a tortured and often tortuous attempt to set the Africville story in the context of critical race theory and then make the theory neatly conform to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s complex arguments about space, knowledge and power.

The SparkNotes version of this obvious point making is that the story of Africville all comes down to one explanation: racism.

At one level, of course, that is a conclusion that is difficult to argue with.

Like dozens of other black communities in Nova Scotia—and hundreds throughout North America—Africville was a small, poor black neighbourhood plunked on the outskirts of a much larger, much more powerful white community. The land the blacks lived on was a cage to keep them in their place and away from the larger white-occupied space. But the land was never really theirs; if the power structure ever decided the land was too valuable for them to occupy, they were gone, most likely to some other, more remote cage of the white community’s choosing.

In its earliest days in the mid 1800s, Africville was segregated but generally self-sufficient. Even if blacks were permitted into the city proper to perform the menial but necessary duties below the station of their white “betters,” they were expected to return each evening to “their place.”

When the white community needed a facility it did not want to locate in its own backyard, it was inevitably built in or around Africville. The city dump, sewage disposal outflows, a prison, an infectious diseases hospital, an abattoir and a stone-crushing plant all ended up crowding in on the community.

Africville also became a forbidden place where white Haligonians could come at night to indulge in vices they would not want in their own neighbourhoods, to participate in what one historian delicately refers to as “raucous living.”

Africville residents did their best to maintain their community and their dignity in the face of such threats. They protested the fact that Africville had been turned into a dumping ground. They petitioned for police and fire services, as well as city water and sewer services. The white community routinely rejected or, more often, simply ignored their pleadings.

Unsurprisingly, over time, Africville became stereotyped as a shantytown, a slum, dangerous and a blight on an otherwise modern, progressive city.

At the same time, ironically, as the city grew, the waterside patch of land on which Africville stood increasingly came to be recognized as valuable industrial real estate. Over the years, city planners—without ever consulting the residents, of course—began to use Africville as a pawn in any number of their grand urban redevelopment schemes.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, the eagerness of planners to get control of Africville land for redevelopment meshed neatly with both the desires of city fathers to rid themselves of an embarrassing eyesore and also the reformist impulses of many white liberals, who believed modern concrete-and-steel public housing complexes could end segregation and poverty by giving poor blacks a leg up on the ladder to the goal of middle class life.

Unfortunately, no one asked Africville residents what they thought, or wanted.

Racism? Certainly. In the end, it really is all about race, stupid.

Part of the problem with Nelson’s analysis, however, is that she tries to make this seem like a revelation. “Without a critical race analysis, however, we are left unable to name the racism present.” With apologies to Bob Dylan, we do not need Foucault to know which way the wind blows.

To make matters worse, Nelson feels the need to shoehorn the messy, complex, occasionally contradictory reality of the Africville relocation into her neatly drawn cause-and-effect map of racism and racialized spaces, without, in the end, connecting all the dots, lines and swirls.

Consider the issue of space itself. While it is true that many urban planners and developers had long coveted the land on which Africville stood, the reality is that the land, with the exception of one small chunk that became a footing for a new cross-harbour bridge, was never actually redeveloped as commercial or industrial space. Africville, in the end, was eventually transformed—more out of embarrassment than purpose—into public parkland.

In her analysis, Nelson makes much of those earlier pressures to redevelop Africville lands to justify her arguments about racialized spaces, but then never really comes to grips with the inconvenient reality of what actually happened to them, except to note that Seaview Park was “built amid contention over the appropriate use of the space and ongoing pressures for industrial development.”

But the park—now a federally designated national historic site, officially acknowledging it as the place where the culturally significant, historic community of Africville once stood, not to forget the home of an annual Africville reunion weekend that attracts hundreds of former residents from across North America and also the proposed location of a much-promised-but-yet- to-be-rebuilt Africville church and interpretive centre—has been a spatial reality for close to 25 years. Nelson acknowledges that, but she never asks how well it fits with her larger thesis.

One could argue—and Nelson does—that the decision to relocate the residents to Uniacke Square, a large, new sterile public housing project in the central city, was deliberately designed to once again contain them out of sight and out of mind of the white community. While that may be partly true, it is also true that many self-identified progressives of the era—people probably not unlike Nelson today (or myself, for that matter)—supported it at the time, confidently believing the best way to achieve racial integration and promote economic and social development was to raze segregated “slum” communities like Africville and replace them with modern, rent-subsidized public housing. There, blacks and other disadvantaged people could get their lives together while they “transitioned” into private-property suburban paradises where everyone would live together happily ever after.

That was the theory.

Today, that notion seems hopelessly dated and naive. In truth, the public housing solution had fallen out of fashion even before the last Africville resident was carted off his land. Uniacke Square not only became one of such massive urban public housing projects built across North America but also a potent symbol of our wrong-headed do-goodism. Which may be one reason why Africville—and what we did to its people—haunts us still.

To “name” racism as the root cause of what happened in Africville is all well and good, if unoriginal, but where does it lead us? Beyond blaming, what can we learn from it for the next time? Not to be racist? That’s nice.

Tellingly, there have already been a number of “next times” in recent years, including attempts by local authorities to quietly locate landfills no one else wanted next to other Nova Scotian black communities. Those were beaten back not by whites, but by the organized opposition of newly energized black communities using Africville as a rallying cry.

There are fears today that Halifax’s powers-that-be would like to raze the increasingly valuable piece of peninsular real estate that Uniacke Square has become and displace its residents—many of whom are children and grandchildren of those displaced from Africville—to make way for expensive condos for upwardly mobile young urbanites.

As was the case with Africville, no one in authority is asking the residents what they think or want, and, more importantly, listening to what they have to say.

That is the real lesson of Africville.

It is not that Nelson does not recognize this. At one point, for example, she notes city development officer Robert Grant’s stunning admission that he had only learned about Africville “indirectly.” In preparing a critical 1962 report for city councillors on the community they were about to obliterate, Grant explained that his research consisted of “several discussions with a young gentleman who had been a resident of Africville as a youngster and pretty well knew … what their circumstances were, not necessarily up to date, but generally the situation.”

“The people of Africville,” Nelson herself points out with some passion, “were fundamentally, discursively, and materially defeated from the outset. There was no way that black people in Nova Scotia could win: When they failed to speak or were unheard, they were said to be docile and apathetic. When they did protest the invasion of their communities, they were called paranoid and hostile. When they analyzed their oppression, they were assumed to invent or exaggerate it, yet when they failed to see racism, they were criticized for their ignorance. When they questioned the white-defined solutions imposed on them, they were called irrational. When they rejected these arrangements, they were labeled ungrateful … to deny people their rationality, their ability to think, to speak, to object, is ultimately to deny their humanity.”

Nelson is at her best when she gives up trying to be a PhD candidate and allows her own humanity to show.

But the largest problem with this book is that Nelson herself does not appear to have ever spoken to a single Africville resident or descendant in her own research. Instead, she relies on reports and studies by the very people she often criticizes in her writing—the journalists, academics and officials, most of whom did actually speak to living, breathing Africville residents—and then tries to shape what she learns to neatly fit her own predetermined conclusions and critical-race- theory, Foucault-fixed perspective.

In the end, she does what she—rightly— accuses everyone else of doing: not listening to the people of Africville.