What is Africa to Me?

Out of America:
A Black Man Confronts Africa
by Keith B. Richburg
Basic Books, 1997 263 pp $24

In 1923, a then-little-known poet named Langston Hughes embarked for Africa. Just twenty-one years old, Hughes had produced the epochal “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” two years before, in which he traced a continuous river of black history from the Nile and the Congo to the “muddy bosom” of the Mississippi. Now he resolved to trace that river to its source. He s...