“I See Myself As The One Who Came Home”: Where in the world is Shaka Zulu?

“I, Shaka Zulu Assegai, am an African created by God. If you are an African born in Africa, you must repent or suffer until you die. Warning—we the Africans who are the descendants of slaves, are coming home to Africa—in peace if you let us, but if you refuse, we will come by force. Africa is our home and God will give us the mental, physical and military power to succeed.”

* Written defense and submission for the defendant, Republic of Kenya vs. Shaka Zulu Assegai, 1990

“I’ve been so surprised since I first landed in Africa . . . I can’t believe that intellectuals who actually studied at the university level can see me coming from America and not recognize that I am their brother. It makes me so angry. I am telling you sometimes I am so angry I’ve got to turn my head to keep from going into physical confrontation. I can’t believe this man can tell me, ‘You know I studied at Oxford and I schooled in America.’  You went to school in America and you are sitting here telling me you don’t understand who I am and you don’t understand my problems? Man I want to take you from behind that desk, and discipline you in the proper manner. So it is very saddening. Very frustrating . . .

           * Shaka Zulu Assegai, 1991

Seemingly well educated and well informed, the former Peace Corps volunteer and U.S. soldier arrived in Kenya armed to the teeth with law school experience, a graduate degree in Ethnic Studies from the University of Houston and a dream. Shaka Zulu Assegai VII arrived a liberation warrior with an unshaken confidence in the cultural superiority and enlightenment that his diasporic upbringing in the United States of America had rendered him prepared-- the militant ideologue and zealous advocate prepared, rhetorically or otherwise, to die as the forerunner of the Africans Coming Home Foundation, which certainly existed as an existential certainty if not a registered entity, at home or abroad. To interpret his most provocative declarations—of which there were many—as mere bravado would be unfair, as his various run-ins, incarcerations, attempted deportations, and extreme attempts at litigation would attest.

 It’s easy to dismiss the bombast, contradictions and many travails of Shaka Zulu Assegai as a series of delusions manifested as overreaching legal actions, lacking the legitimacy of a more measured, diplomatic and widely supported tact. The individual as well as the sum of the parts point to that conclusion. Yet to interpret his most provocative declarations as either mere bravado or the posturing of the Angry Black Man would be too simplistic, as his various run-ins, incarcerations, attempted deportations, and excessive attempts at litigation have shown. Having known the man personally—as a willing interviewee as well as an intense, uneasy houseguest-- and having sat together with him to tone down the rhetoric of his complaint against the Kenyan government in 1991, I had enough certainty in his righteousness to grant him the benefit of the doubt, and wished him well. He trusted me probably as far as he could throw me, befriended as we briefly were out of mutual self-interest; I was an American, and we had that in common, and I was married to African, as was he; he sat for an interview with my then-wife Chanya Mwakio, who wrote a candid feature article for the short-lived Echo magazine.  I convinced him to sit for a second interview one night in our Uthiru home, during which the daily blackout occurred and he reflexively mentioned that he wished he had his gun…

What resonates is the notion that reparation, such as he was seeking for the injustice, violence and the crime against humanity that fuels his activism, is somehow a proportionate rationalization for his actions. Yet following the sketchy trail of his exploits, one could just as easily surmise that Shaka may have ultimately been setting up his legal and political arguments as the means to obtain his personal objectives. That his skills at navigating court procedures and systems to create a legal quagmire easily surpassed the quality and tone of his written arguments only adds to this suspicion. For these reasons I have proceeded with more objectivity than usual in stitching together events which ended abruptly in 2005.

DB: You mentioned that you were in Niger with the Peace Corps, where you first experienced the shock of realization that you weren’t exactly welcomed back to the Motherland with the enthusiasm you expected . . .

SZ: That’s when reality began to set in. I realized I wasn’t actually being treated like an African, and more shocking than anything else even the white Peace Corps volunteer was being given more priorities than myself! And that’s when hell broke loose! We studied a local language, and I found that the instructors seemed to give more of their time to teaching White Americans than the Black volunteers. And that was very shocking. My Black friends and me used to discuss it (laughs). I said, “Did you believe this guy, men?”  When we were in the airplane, flying out of Philadelphia talking about how we were on our way home, you know, we were so naive, you what I mean? Because we didn’t wanna believe the stereotypical things that we had heard from the White professors.  They told us, “These guys in Africa don’t want you, you’d better stay here.” But you see we wanted to believe that wasn’t true. Because you always wanna see the good side especially when you know they are related to you.

DB: What about the forty acres of land? You realize that Kenya has a big squatter problem, and that there are a lot of landless people in this country. What right do you feel you have to request something like that?

SZ: I said to myself now who is the one to really give me forty acres? Remember Abraham Lincoln said forty acres of land and a mule? So we don’t want no mules, they move too slowly, give me a truck (laughs).  But seriously speaking, does White America really owe us forty acres or do the people in the land we were taken from, that was occupied by our ancestors, is that really where the land should be given? In my opinion, if God walked in here right now it seem like to me he would say, “Well you know where your home is, go home. Why are you staying here? Don’t you know the way home? You have fought through the struggle, you have overcome, you are now free to go. So when you stay (in America), whatever you suffer is actually your own fault.”

KENYAN OR NOT, HERE I COME…

Conspicuous in his trademark black cowboy hat and leather boots, dark blue suit and tie, and wearing a chunky gold ring on one finger, the former Peace Corps volunteer and U.S. soldier arrived in Kenya armed to the teeth with law school experience, an (unconfirmed) graduate degree in Ethnic Studies from the University of Houston and a dream. Shaka Zulu Assegai VII presented himself as a liberation warrior of the Black Diaspora, with a quick wit, quicker temper, and an unshakable confidence in the cultural superiority and enlightenment that his education and upbringing in the United States of America had given him. In legal documents and in the media, he declared himself, using rhetoric bolstered by references to Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson and others, prepared to fight and if necessary, to die as the forerunner of the Africans Coming Home Foundation, which existed at least as an existential eventuality if not a grassroots movement somewhere back in the United States. A phantom organization, I have never found any record of its existence, here or abroad.

“Like I told you before, I am involved with the Africans Coming Home Foundation. When I first came in the country it was not to my advantage to talk about it. I would be very foolish to mention this at the beginning because I’d had prior experiences and I know that what I had first thought about Africa was not true. My coming home and being a brother was just my imagination. In their minds I was simply an American and more surprising I was mzungu (white) American!” (laughs)

When pressed for some insight into the plans of the foundation, Shaka would only allow that he had been chosen to pioneer their efforts in Africa, and described a facility that would be built on the land they were granted, which would serve as a cultural and educational center of some unexplained description…

He started out straightforward enough, with an earnest if grammatically flawed one-page letter to the Principal Immigration Officer dated October 12, 1989. Professing his love for Kenya, he used the obligatory vernacular in expressing his loyalty “to the state of Kenya under the wise leadership of his Excellency President Daniel arap Moi.” “I have chosen to come home,” he pronounced. “Africa is my home given to all Africans by God the creator, and cannot be changed by Woman or Man. God’s law is final. When an African woman and an African man gives birth in America the child is simply an African.” A second letter to the same Immigration Officer followed a few months later, this time also filed at the High Court in Nairobi, and shared with “All Newspapers in the World,” laying out his economic position, with more emphasis on the big picture than solid mathematics:

“The children of former slaves have just pardon Kenyas debt of 175 million dollars. That money could have made every Africa in America millionaires. Every dollar given to Africa (Kenya) is coming from the Blood, and sweat of the slaves who were sold from Eastern Africa . . . The aid from America is not White Europeans only it is African slaves money 246 years without pay . . . Today Africans in Africa are their own worst enemies, because of Tribalism and GREED FOR MONEY.”

This was a direct echo of something that Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam in the United States had recently been quoted saying: “Let us ask our brothers and sisters in Africa to set aside a separate territory for us, and let us take the money that America is spending to maintain these convicts and invest it in a new reality on the African continent. Yes, many hundreds of middle-class blacks would go.”

What must have really gotten the government’s attention was Shaka’s ratcheting up the rhetoric to a point of no return: “I want my citizenship, but I do not want to pay one single shilling . . . If I am killed the Blood will be on your hands just like the Blood of those who were sold into slavery.”

CULTURE CLASHES

“My intentions are to make sure that the people understand, not only in Kenya but anywhere I have the chance within Africa, that Africans are just Africans and the mistake of slavery is something that we all have to regret, but we don’t have to perpetrate and continue. We have to show that we have developed not only economically, we have developed politically and also intellectually, and we understand that we are brothers. The reason we have some cultural differences is because we have been separated for so many years.

“So let’s do something reasonable, OK? Kenya can break the ground as being the first African country to understand the African-Americans by saying, ‘OK you have been here five years, you are married and you haven’t committed any crimes against the state.’ So they could give me the citizenship and then at the same time we look at some kind of a liberal way of accommodating a reasonable amount of African-Americans. It could be done within the laws of immigration and also according to the aspirations within the country.”

One morning in the early part of 1991, Shaka and a small entourage arrived at the colonial-era Nairobi courthouse, prepared to sit and wait until called to file yet another motion in one of his many cases. In the hallway Shaka bumped into a guard he knew from previous encounters, and a contentious moment ensued. They exchanged a few words, grappling with each other half in jest, each trying to assert himself as the alpha male.

It was a brief incident, but an apt metaphor for the relationship Shaka seemed to have developed with the government at large. Officials in the Kenyan government might not have taken his bravado as a serious threat, but did have to deal with the physical presence and the legal challenges he mounted. It was easy enough to throw roadblocks. Shaka’s claim that his ancestors had been sold out by East Africans provoked an absurdly procedural response from the Kenyan government. In the “Request for Particulars” filed on behalf of the Attorney General’s office in the High Court of Kenya, which named Shaka Zulu Assegai and “All African Americans who are the Children of Slaves” as plaintiffs, the government asked him to:

·      Give the names, identities and addresses of the Africans who were sold into slavery.

·      Give the names, identities and addresses of the Arabs and Europeans to whom these Africans were sold

·      Give the dates and places where sales took place.

·      Give the factual basis upon which the blame is apportioned between the Arabs, Europeans and Africans.

So this was going nowhere fast, with Shaka dismissing the AG’s tact as “absurd and ridiculous. It’s clear from the rhetoric of his subsequent legal filings that once the government proved an intransigent foe, Shaka dropped any pretense of settling for a diplomatic solution to his demands: 

“I, Shaka Zulu Assegai, am an African created by God. If you are an African born in Africa, you must repent or suffer until you die. Warning—we the Africans who are the descendants of slaves, are coming home to Africa—in peace if you let us, but if you refuse, we will come by force. Africa is our home and God will give us the mental, physical and military power to succeed.”

* Written defense and submission for the defendant, Republic of Kenya vs. Shaka Zulu Assegai, 1990

The waters were further muddied when he filed a civil suit against former Minister of Labour Peter Okondo and the Daily Nation newspaper after they quoted Okondo as referring to Shaka as a “negro.”

DB: But surely there are worse names that a Black person can be called. Out of ignorance some people here (that I’ve met) sincerely think that negro, and even nigger are common words used to describe Black Americans and they don’t seem to know any better.

SZ: I have been in Kenya for at least five years, and I’ve never heard the word being used in a newspaper or anywhere else. So you can’t make a “mistake” by using a word that’s never used. A cabinet minister like Okondo using the word “negro” has thought about it. That means it he used it maliciously.

DB: So you think he did it maliciously?

SZ: I don’t have to think. It is obvious. You’d have to have sat down and considered the terminology before you used it. If you’re not so educated you’d use the term “Black American,” and if you are more enlightened you’d know that in America, Jesse Jackson has made it his life ambition to make sure that the term “African-American” is common knowledge throughout the world.

Incarcerations

Authorities found just cause to lock Shaka in remand at least two times—the first before we met, when his immigration status was criminalized. The second was after he made the big scene at the airport while resisting deportation. One afternoon I brought some clothes to him at Nairobi Remand Prison, and spoke to him briefly through the small screen window in the prison door. He was frantic, managing only to get a few desperate requests in before being pulled away…

The last glimpse I caught of Shaka is still vivid. Things had changed—in June 1991 he was acquitted of being in the country illegally, and had recently been released from remand, and it was the first time I saw him on the streets of Nairobi without his mojo working. Dress shirt untucked and wrinkled, sans his customary cowboy hat, suit jacket, briefcase and boots, he was nevertheless walking in the direction of the city’s administrative and government center on a sunny morning. I was close enough in my car to notice his face was unshaven.

It wouldn’t be until three years after I had returned to the states that a friend would email with the news that an official at the Immigration Department, Mr. Paul Amdany, said “the African-American will not escape deportation this time around. This is the second time the Government is attempting to deport Mr. Assegai,” Amdany added. “The first time, he threatened to bomb the plane . . . the pilot panicked and refused to take off.” (Shaka’s account of this incident to me was that he had thrown himself on the ground, kicking and screaming until the pilot refused him as a passenger). The report also quoted the official as describing Shaka as an “undesirable person who does not deserve Kenyan citizenship,” adding “we have been unable to deport Mr. Assegai because he has been filing court cases one after another.”

But Assegai the attorney had yet one more trick up his sleeve, and on the day he was to be placed aboard KLM flight 566 he appeared at the High Court in Nairobi to give reporters a copy of the formal protest note he had written to the American Embassy, accusing the US and Kenyan governments of collusion in the denial of his human rights.

A year later Shaka was still in the country, and in November 1998 the Daily Nation ran their final story on him, “Court Rules in Favor of American Maverick,” reporting that Kisumu court had granted him custody of the two children he was raising with his Kenyan wife.

DB: Worst case scenario: you are refused citizenship, the foundation is never registered as a legal society, and you are sent packing. What would you say to that?

SZ: All I’d have to say to that, is if you’re not willing to take us back, well then we’ll just see you at the Olympics!” (laughs)

Lone Star State

There would be no more news until 2001, when Shaka Zulu Assegai resurfaced at his alma mater, legal guns a-blazing. Nine days after 9/11, the Houston Cougar published a photograph of him, casually dressed, filing a grievance before the Student Publications Committee. He insisted that the paper’s editor had no right to deny him a platform for his views as an opinion writer, a position he angled for after she refused to publish a letter presenting the agenda of the Africans Coming Home Foundation and their goal of taking “true African-Americans home” to help rebuild the “African-Empire.”  The letter included the contentious caveat "no gays, homosexuals or 
lesbians would be allowed to join … and while there were to be “no exceptions to the rules,” Shaka wrote “people like Iron Mike Tyson would be allowed to join.” This escalated into a lawsuit filed by Shaka in the Harris County civil court, seeking $11 million in “general, punitive and mental anguish damages” for violating his Title VII rights under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A subsequent article in the Cougar brought news of his defeat in that case and several other suits he had filed against a number of opponents:

“In the past year, Assegai has alleged similar acts of discrimination in cases filed against several governmental entities and representatives, including the State of Texas, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the U.S. Attorney General, the U.S. Secretary of State, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

“`This is the fifth lawsuit (Assegai) has filed in this district this year,’ U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes wrote in the Dec. 26 dismissal opinion. ‘His modus operandi: A claim that he is a citizen of Africa and a modern-day slave followed by a wild assertion that he has been robbed of some constitutional rights…Assegai has amply demonstrated his willingness to abuse this court's limited resources with frivolous litigation,’ Hughes continued. ‘He was ordered to explain why, given his continued waste of taxpayer dollars with baseless lawsuits, he should be allowed the privilege of an open forum. He did not.’

“Assegai was further ordered to obtain the court's permission and pay the filing fees before filing any future suits. Assegai, who claims to be a pauper because of a disability, has not paid the fees for previous lawsuits.”

The suit against Texas charged the state with refusing to “protect him from discrimination, Jim Crow laws and Ku Klux Klan.” That case made it to the Fourteenth Court of Appeals before finally being dismissed.

South Africa

When Shaka Zulu Assegai started making waves in Kenya, he sat for a wide-ranging interview Sidney Quntai of the Kenya Times, during which he refused to reveal his birth name, and explained why he had chosen the name Shaka Zulu in 1975:

“I had read enough African history and knew that Shaka was a true son of Africa who symbolized courage, self-reliance and hope. I did not want to adopt just any African name, and because of my faith in Shaka’s greatest achievements, I took the name . . . I did not want anyone to say I was claiming to be Shaka’s son, and because I knew he had won his wars through the Assegai I took the name Assegai as my surname. It would catapault me to the search for my roots.”

During our interview, he credited his father for introducing him to the Assegai legend:

DB: Do you know anything about your lineage? Have you ever tried to trace your family roots?

SZ: My father always told me about our ties to Africa. Actually the reason I took the name Shaka Zulu Assegai is because of what my father told me. If my father hadn’t told me that I don’t what name I would have taken.

DB: When did you take that name?

SZ: Five years before I came to Africa I had sworn that if it was the last thing I did I was going to Africa and I was going with an African name because I wanted my brothers to know that I was not a fake.

DB: I am asking because there are people who will say, what is he doing here? Why isn’t he in South Africa?

SZ: Well Africa is one big place. So that’s their problem not mine...

The circumstances under which Shaka travelled to South Africa remain as mysterious as those under which he left Kenya. There is little to go on, but an online search revealed a few articles that indicated he had lost none of his steam, nor his desire to repatriate permanently to Africa. Once in South Africa, previous accounts of how and why he took on the name of the legendary Zulu warrior changed. In 2004, he filed in the Durban High Court as a prodigal son come home, but the outcome was perhaps predictable. An article published by the news outlet Independent Online includes the only mention of his original name I was able to find in the media. The reporter, who in an email exchange remembered Shaka  as “wacko, to be blunt,” recalls that he was surprised to learn that he couldn’t change his name unless he was a South African.  If true, this presumably creating a Catch-22 while raising the question of whether he had been required to present his original birth certificate to the authorities there as part of his application for citizenship.

Assegai Aims to Spear Citizenship

ShakaZulu stood up in court last week to fight for South African citizenship. However, it wasn't the Zulu warrior raised from the dead but an American by the name of ShakaZulu Assegai VII. Assegai brought a Durban High Court application against the department of home affairs after he was refused citizenship.

Assegai's given name is Alec Mitchell, but he wants to be recognized by his African name. In court papers, he said he had received a letter from the department on February 27 denying him citizenship by descent. He claims he is South African by descent because his grandfather was taken to the United States as a slave between 1850 and 1860. The family was forced to use the slave name of Mitchell.

"I reclaimed my family name, which is Assegai. My grandfather was the fifth, therefore I am Assegai VII. My father was a genuine freedom fighter, a member of the Back to Africa movement in America in the 1920s led by the honorable messiah Marcus Garvey."

Assegai said the Ku Klux Klan killed his father when he was eight years old. "My father never let me forget my African name, ShakaZulu Assegai VII." He said he came to South Africa in 1983 but left because of apartheid. Assegai is married to a South African and is in the process of applying for permanent residence status. The matter will be heard in court on May 13. His visa has been extended until May 15.

A few months later, the case was postponed indefinitely, citing lack of proof that Shaka’s grandfather was in fact a South African. And that might have been it, if he hadn’t been involved in a car accident and subsequently sued the hospital for what he deemed as shoddy medical treatment and general disrespect. The incident was reported in a tabloid called the Daily Sun, which angered Shaka by including a quote from the hospital director saying that he “has a psychological problem, and needs help.”  This legal brief, published online in February 2005, is the last existing mention of Shaka Zulu Assegai VII:

“A man who claims to be a Zulu American is claiming R14m in damages from a tabloid newspaper and a KwaZulu-Natal hospital manager for alleged defamation. ShakaZulu Assegai VII (38), of Verulam, has lodged the claim in the Durban High Court against Stanger Hospitals assistant financial manager, Steve Govender, and the Johannesburg-based Daily Sun. He is suing them for R7m each. He said Govender’s comments, quoted in the report, implied that he was not capable mentally of knowing right from wrong.”

Nothing is resolved…

 . . . and many questions remain. African-Americans have moved back to the motherland of Africa. What went wrong here? I’ve held on to his story because it always touched me in a strange way that what Shaka was trying to accomplish, as flawed, misguided, and wrought with what in many instances were most likely unnecessary risks, threats and consequences. There is not one true version or blueprint to Shaka’s story; rather, both his noble and less-than-noble attempts to put the Diaspora in reverse spun out of control at most every turn.

One small part of the interview we conducted 25 years ago held my attention as I was trying to make sense of it all. Adding it here more as a consolation than a resolution, it’s a bittersweet reminder of how centuries of colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial history set the stage for one man’s attempt to use raw anger and desire in a doomed effort to demonstrate how simple it should be to let a proud race of people just go the fuck home:

“I remember when I was upcountry in Machakos, there was an old lady whom I will never forget as long as I live. She was so emotional and so happy, and she said, ‘you could be my son, you could be my brother.’ She said some people of hers were taken away many years before, and she didn’t know where they went. She invited me in the house to have tea, and then she told my friend-- she couldn’t speak English-- she told my friend to take these ten shillings, and told me to buy something with it. She was so happy to know that one of us had found our way back. God had blessed her before she died, letting her see me come back. She told me I was welcome to her house at any time.”