The essay offers a new reading of African Journey by Eslanda Goode Robeson, who in 1936 set out on her first trip to the \u2018Dark Continent\u2019 \u2013 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\u2019s diary, the paper argues that Robeson\u2019s 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\u2014a conscious legacy\u2014to her Negro son
