BRIEFING: THE AFRICAN UNION AT TEN: AN APPRAISAL
Author(s): Tim Murithi
Source: African Affairs , October 2012, Vol. 111, No. 445 (October 2012), pp. 662-669
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal African Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23357174
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African Affairs, 111/445, 662-669 doi: I0.i093/afrafads058
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rig Advance Access Publication 26 August 2012
The Author 2012.
BRIEFING
THE AFRICAN UNION AT TEN: AN
APPRAISAL
Tim Murithi*
As the African Union marked its tenth anniversary on 9 July
2012, it was still recovering from one of its most public disagreements. At
the heart of this disagreement was the AU’s interpretation of and commit
ment to good governance and humanitarian intervention. Sparked by the
uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and the contested November
2010 elections in Côte d’Ivoire, these issues came under intense debate.
The NATO-led intervention in Libya – the AU’s backyard – caught the
organization unaware and divided its members on whether the military in
cursion, under the rubric of the UN doctrine of the ‘responsibility to
protect’ (R2P), was warranted. Similarly, the earlier crisis in Côte d’Ivoire
and the involvement of the UN and France led to criticisms of the AU’s
failure to respond in a unified and coherent manner.
The key issue of debate was whether the AU should act as a bulwark
against external intervention and become the primary agent of humanitarian
intervention and democratic consolidation on the continent, or whether this
role should continue to be usurped by foreign actors who are often perceived
to pursue their own strategic self-interests. South Africa, which was involved
in the AU efforts to mediate the crisis in both Libya and Côte d’Ivoire,
adopted a strategic position premised on moulding the leadership institutions
of the African Union, with a view to making it a more effective and profes
sional regional organization. Arguing that the AU Commission, and by exten
sion its membership, was slow and indecisive in addressing the two crises,
South Africa attempted to take over the leadership of the Commission
towards the end of 2011. It did so by proposing its former Minister for
International Relations and Cooperation, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, as the
Southern African Development Community (SADC) candidate for the pos
ition of Chairperson of the AU Commission. This was an unprecedented
*Tim Murithi ([email protected]) is a Research Fellow at the Centre for African
Studies, University of the Free State and Head of the Justice and Reconciliation Programme
at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town, South Africa.
662
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THE AFRICAN UNION AT TEN: AN APPRAISAL 663
move, and a direct critique of the existing chairperson, Jean Ping of Gabon.
The subsequent vote to elect the Chairperson was conducted through a
secret ballot so the exact break down of the voting pattern is difficult to
discern, but initially the incumbent Ping received sufficient votes to prevent
an outright majority for Dlamini-Zuma. However, in July 2012, Dlamini
Zuma secured the support she required to be crowned as Chair at the
Summit of Heads of State and Governement. The very public disagreement
over who should lead the AU revealed two competing notions of the nature
and character of the organization. At the heart of this debate lies the question
of whether the AU should make a robust transition towards becoming an ef
fective norm entrepreneur as far as the ideals of peace, security, democracy,
and development are concerned.
This Briefing provides an assessment of the AU’s achievements to date. It
focuses on the Union’s attempts to become a norm entrepreneur, particularly
in the areas of peace and security, democracy, and human rights. It also assesses
the organization’s achievements in terms of establishing itself as ‘a voice of
Africa’ and concludes that the project of Pan-Africanism has made some
progress under the AU, but that the dream of African unity remains unfulfilled.
The AU as a norm enterpreneur: from Pan-Africanism to regional integration
An endeavour to re-animate Pan-Africanism was the directing force
behind the establishment of the African Union.1 Pan-Africanism is an
invented notion, but with the purpose of addressing Africa’s insecurity
and underdevelopment.2 The ideal of African solidarity was first institu
tionalized in the form of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in
1963, and subsequently re-articulated in the establishment of the AU in
2002. It continues to act as the animating drive behind the AU and its
commitment to regional integration. However, the first ten years of the
AU reveal that the Pan-Africanist project remains predominantly a
top-down affair with elites from across Africa crafting and moulding the
institutions to govern the continent, often without sufficiently consulting
their publics. That said, there are social movements developing across
African borders, which are also fuelling Pan-Africanism from below.
In the ten years of its existence, the AU has attempted to play a contin
ental role as a norm entrepreneur, understood here as a normative leader
who encourages others to uphold a range of norms for the improvement
of the livelihood of people within their jurisdiction or authority. The AU
1. Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, Pan-African History: Political figures from Africa and
the Disapora since 1787 (Routledge, London, 2003), p. vii.
2. Timothy Murithi, The African Union: Pan-Africanism, peacebuilding and development
(Ashgate, Aldershot, 2005).
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664 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
has sought to advance norms related to peace and stability and tion as a collective security regime. The AU Constitutive Act asc the Union the right to intervene and a responsibility to protect tions of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. In norms and policy this means that African countries have to agre their sovereignty to enable the AU to act as the continental guar protector of the security, rights, and well-being of the African peop African Union Peace and Security Council (PSC) was established as a
legal institution of the Union through the ‘Protocol Relating to the
Establishment of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union’ in
2002, and in this sense the AU has undoubtedly led in promoting the
norms of peace and security on the continent. Currently the AU is
seeking to operationalize these norms through its peace operations in
Somalia, the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM, launched in
2007), its Electoral and Security Assistance Mission to the Comoros
(AU-MAES, launched in 2008), and its contribution to the Joint AU-UN
Hybrid Mission in Darfur (UNAMID, launched in 2007). In addition,
Union personnel contributed towards stabilizing the situation in Burundi,
through the AU Mission in Burundi (AMIB) from 2003 to 2004.
Promoting governance and development norms
Similarly, on issues relating to governance the AU has sought to establish
norms to guide the behaviour of its member states. In particular, the
African Union Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance is a
seminal document, which has been ratified by the required fifteen member
states and is accordingly a living document that outlines a range of provi
sions on how countries can improve their governance. The challenge is to
ensure that these norms are actually adopted and implemented.
African countries have consistently expressed their desire to regain
control of their economic development policies, in order to improve their
citizens’ access to education and health care. The Structural Adjustment
Programmes (SAPs) and so-called Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers
(PRSPs) promoted and enforced by the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and World Bank have had a negative impact on development.
Both the IMF and the Bank have admitted that these programmes did
not achieve the desired results, while the United Nations Conference on
Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that IMF/World Bank
policies led to a 10 percent decline in economic growth in Africa.3
3. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), ‘Trade perform
ance and commodity dependence’ (UNCTAD, Geneva, 26 February 2004).
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THE AFRICAN UNION AT TEN: AN APPRAISAL 665
The AU’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD)
should be understood in this context. NEPAD was conceived as the
means to enable Africa to accelerate its active participation on equal
terms in the international economic sphere, and was endorsed by the
Group of Eight (G8) in June 2002.4 The key objectives of NEPAD
include developing a viable Pan-African market economy, through infra
structure development and the promotion of intra-African trade, as well
as improved access to education, training, and healthcare.5 NEPAD has
now been fully integrated into the AU with a Coordinating Agency based
at the Union’s headquarters in Addis Ababa.
At the African Union’s Assembly in 2002, held in Durban, the
Declaration on the Implementation of NEPAD was adopted. It included
a more specific ‘Declaration on Democracy, Political Economic and
Corporate Governance’, which also established the African Peer Review
Mechanism (APRM). The objectives of the APRM are to enhance
African ownership of its development and governance agenda, to identify,
evaluate, and disseminate best practices, and to monitor progress towards
agreed goals. Member states are invited to join the APRM to participate
in a self-monitoring programme with a clear timeframe for achieving
certain standards of inclusive governance, premised on a commitment to
accountability through peer pressure. However, as with many good inten
tions both NEPAD and the APRM have fallen short when it comes to im
plementation.6 The G8 (now the G20) have not lived up to the
development promises that they made in 2002 in terms of approaching
Africa as a partner rather than a patron, while critics of NEPAD argue
that the programme cannot succeed because it tries to integrate Africa
into a global framework of neo-liberal laissez-faire economics, which is
part of the reason why the continent found itself in such a difficult eco
nomic position in the first place.7 In addition, African governments have
only paid lip service to the APRM, due to its intrusive approach to do
mestic governance issues.
4. Godwin Dogbey, ‘Towards a strategic vision for a continent in distress’ in Olubenga
Adesida and Arunma Oteh (eds.), African Voices, African Visions (Nordic Africa Institute,
Stockholm, 2001).
5. New Partnership for Africa’s Development, ‘The African Peer Review Mechanism’
(Base Document, Sixth Summit of the NEPAD Heads of State and Government
Implementation Committee, NEPAD/HSGIC/03-2003/APRM/M0u/Annex II, 9 March
2003, Abuja, Nigeria).
6. Ayesha Kajee, ‘NEPAD’s APRM: a progress report, practical limitations and challenges’
in South African Yearbook of International Affairs (South African Institute of International
Aifairs, Johannesburg, 2004).
7. George Monbiot, ‘At the seat of empire: Africa is forced to take the blame for the devas
tation inflicted on it by the rich world’, The Guardian, 25 June 2002 <http://www.guardian.
co.uk/politics/2002/jun/25/foreignpolicy.greenpolitics?INTCMP=SRCH> (1 July 2012).
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666 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
The AU as an international actor: the voice of Africa
The continental body has a dual role of forging unity among its states and advocating their interests internationally. During its years of existence the AU’s role as an international actor has bee cated by the difficulty of promoting consensus among African s then maintaining that consensus in the face of often divergent interests. The Africa Group at the UN General Assembly works consensus on key issues of Pan-African interest, such as develo trade, debt cancellation, infectious diseases, small arms and light
weapons, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, climate negotiations,
trans-national crime prevention, and the election of Africans to various
UN activities and bodies.8
In March 2005, the AU issued a declaration known as ‘The Common
African Position on the Proposed Reform of the United Nations: the
Ezulwini Consensus’, which highlighted issues pertaining to HIV/AIDS
and security, poverty, debt, environmental degradation, trade negotia
tions, the responsibility to protect, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding.9 In
addition, the AU issued a position on UN reform and in particular on the
reform of the Security Council by noting that ‘in 1945, when the UN was
formed, most of Africa was not represented and that in 1963, when the
first reform took place, Africa was represented but was not in a particular
ly strong position’.10 It continues that ‘Africa’s goal is to be fully repre
sented in all the decision-making organs of the UN, particularly in the
Security Council’.11 The Common Position enumerates what ‘full repre
sentation’ of Africa in the Security Council means by demanding ‘not less
than two permanent seats with all the prerogatives and privileges of per
manent membership including the right to veto’ and ‘five non-permanent
seats’.12
On paper, the AU was attempting to establish and maintain a common
position, but in practice some countries, including South Africa, broke
ranks with the Ezulwini Consensus and sought ways to ascend individually
8. See the statement of the Africa Group at the 11th UN Congress on Crime Prevention
and Criminal Justice, 18-25 April 2005; the statement of the Coordinator of the Africa
Group to the Chemical Weapons Convention, April 2003; and the Africa Group position
statement to the UN Climate Negotiations, August 1997. Controversially, in May 2004, the
Africa Group submitted and successfully achieved the election of Sudan to the UN
Commission on Human Rights, see Economic and Social Council, press release ECOSOC/
6110.
9. African Union, ‘The Common African Position on the Proposed Reform of the United
Nations: the Ezulwini Consensus’ (EXT/EX.CIV2 (VII), African Union, Addis Ababa, 7-8
March 2005).
10. Ibid., p. 9.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
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THE AFRICAN UNION AT TEN: AN APPRAISAL 667
to become permanent members of the Security Council. This in effect
undermined efforts to demonstrate African ‘unity of purpose’. It was not
the first time this had happened: time and again African countries have
shown that they are unlikely to vote as a collective on matters before, or
pertaining to, the Security Council – a clear indication that member states
are not respecting the AU as a norm entrepreneur. Governments generally
tend to adopt positions that best serve their interests, or positions that
enable them to receive certain benefits from more powerful countries that
‘pick and choose’ which countries they want to work with. Malawi’s move
to deny President Omar Al Bashir of Sudan access to the AU Summit, due
to be hosted in Lilongwe in July 2012, is a case in point. Explaining
Malawi’s reasons for taking this stance, President Joyce Banda stated that
her country’s commitment to its donors, notably the United Kingdom as
the largest bilateral contributor, and its desire to uphold the ICC’s Rome
Statute, would not allow it to host Bashir, an alleged war criminal. The AU
Commission subsequently took the decision to relocate the Summit to
Addis Ababa, rather than submit to Banda’s injunction. The logic of na
tional self-interest and political realism can thus be seen to have prevailed
among African countries, as well as member states at the UN.13
The A If s discontents
Those who are discontented with the African Union acknowledge the
formal existence of unity, but fault the genuineness of its Pan-African
commitment and its achievements. This is evident at several levels. While
the political and business elite, as well civil society actors, who work
across borders, are often supportive of Pan-African interaction and soli
darity, the vast majority of citizens across the continent do not know that
the AU exists. For this silent majority, Pan-Africanism is not yet a lived
experience. Stringent visa restrictions, for example, remain in place,
making a mockery of the notion of unity as citizens from African coun
tries are deported from other African countries. Freedom of movement to
and from the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, in par
ticular, should not be constrained by visa restrictions on African citizens,
and the AU leadership should commit in principle to removing visa
restrictions on the travel of African citizens across borders.
At its inception the AU waxed lyrically about its commitment to reach
ing out and engaging civil society. Its founding document, the
Constitutive Act, is unambiguous in its commitment ‘to build a partner
ship between governments and all segments of civil society’ and to
13. Currently there is no systematic analysis of the history of the voting record of the
Africa Group.
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668 AFRICAN AFFAIRS
promote the ‘participation of the African peoples in the activiti Union’.14 However, ten years on, it is clear that the AU has mai lip service to empowering African citizens to engage and influen states.15 This is particularly evident in the difficulties faced by civil society organizations that seek to engage the AU in Addis A well as its liaison offices around the continent.
The regional economic communities (RECs) are another issue where
genuine Pan-Africanism is challenged. The RECs have often positioned
themselves as countervailing focal points for collective action and the AU
has yet to ensure effective coordination, particularly on issues pertaining
to peace, security, governance, the rule of law, citizen participation, and
development. The AU and the RECs need to increase their level of inter
action and communication in order to ensure effective coordination and
collective action.
The AU has also faced criticism for being lethargic and slow in
responding to crisis and conflict situations across the continent.16 This is
due to the administrative bottlenecks that constrain the emergence of a
culture of professionalism and efficiency, particularly within the AU
Commission. These administrative challenges also undermine the morale
of AU staff in its various offices around the continent and ultimately
affects the AU’s ability to engage member states, African citizens, and
partners effectively.
In the pursuit of its peace and security interventions the AU has not
always seen eye-to-eye with the UN, the International Criminal Court
(ICC) or NATO. The UN Security Council’s referral of the President of
Sudan to the ICC for alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity, and
genocide in Darfur in 2009 precipitated a tense stand-off between the AU
and the ICC, which is yet to be resolved. In the interest of peace and se
curity, it is essential that the relationship between the AU and these key
international organizations is improved.
Conclusion
At its tenth anniversary, the African Union remains, at its core, a dispar
ate collection of nation states that recognizes the value of collective action
and solidarity on a range of regional and international issues. The AU,
14. African Union, Constitutive Act of the African Union (African Union, Lome, 2000),
preamble.
15. Mammo Muchie, Adam Habib, and V. Panayachee, ‘African integration and civil
society: the case of the African Union’, Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa
61, 1 (2006), pp. 3-24.
16. Sadiki Koko and Martha Bakwesegha-Osula, ‘Assessing the African Union’s response
to the Libyan crisis’, Conflict Trends 1 (2012), pp. 3-15.
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THE AFRICAN UNION AT TEN: AN APPRAISAL 669
since it holds primary responsibility for establishing and operationalizing
the continent’s peace and security architecture, has become the leading
norm entrepreneur on issues pertaining to peace, security, democracy,
and development on the continent. However, this role is tempered by the
primary character that continues to define the constituents of the
Westphalian system, namely the self-interest of nation states and the per
sistence of political realism in their day-to-day interactions. A decade
after its establishment, the AU is only just beginning to assert its voice in
the international system. Even though the AU is not always taken serious
ly by its interlocutors and powerful countries in the global north, it is
laying the foundation to empower its member states to play a more pro
active role in international relations. The AU has emerged as a home
grown initiative to take the destiny of the continent into the hands of the
African people. However, there is a long way to go before the AU’s role
as a norm entrepreneur is actualized and its vision and mission realized.
The injunction that the great Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah
bequeathed to subsequent generations continues to animate the African
Union and is still valid: ‘Africa must unite, or disintegrate individually.’17
17. Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite (Heinemann, London, 1963).
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The Career of “John Henry”
Author(s): Richard M. Dorson
Source: Western Folklore, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Jul., 1965), pp. 155-163
Published by: Western States Folklore Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1498069
Accessed: 26-12-2019 04:46 UTC
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facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]
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The Career of “John Henry”
RICHARD M. DORSON
FOR THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS after the completion of the Big Bend Tunnel in West
Virginia, where John Henry presumably defeated the steam drill, his ballad
escaped attention. Then in 1909 it received a short and cryptic note in the
pages of the Journal of American Folklore. A collector of folk songs from the
North Carolina mountains, Louise Rand Bascom, coveted a ballad on “Johnie
Henry,” of which she possessed only the first two lines.
Johnie Henry was a hard-workin’ man,
He died with his hammer in his hand.
Her informant declared the ballad to be sad, tearful and sweet, and hoped
to secure the rest “when Tobe sees Tom, an’ gits him to larn him what he
ain’t forgot of hit from Muck’s pickin’.” 1 Apparently, Tobe never did see
Tom, but the key stanza was enough to guide other collectors. In the next
decade, five contributors to the Journal expanded knowledge of the work
song and the ballad carrying the name of John Henry. In 1913 the pioneer
collector of Southern folk rhymes and folk songs, E. C. Perrow, printed four
snatches of the hammer song and the first full ballad text, though from a
manuscript. Perrow noted that workmen on southern railroads knew a con-
siderable body of verse about the famous steel-driving man, John Henry.2 An
as yet little-known collector, John Lomax, printed a splendid text of eleven
stanzas in 1915, saying this was the ballad sung along the Chesapeake and Ohio
Railroad in Kentucky and West Virginia, but he provided no source at all,
nor the tune.3 The next year, W. A. McCorkle, governor of West Virginia
from 1893 to 1897, published an article in the Journal mixing John Henry
with John Hardy, a Negro desperado hung in West Virginia in 1894. His
view was followed by the folk song collector John H. Cox in the Journal in
1919 and again in his standard collection of 1925, Folk-Songs of the South,
in which he mingled ballad texts of the two Negroes.4 However the confusion
1 “Ballads and Songs of Western North Carolina,” Journal of American Folklore, XXII (1909),
249.
2″Songs and Rhymes from the South,” Journal of American Folklore, XXVI, 163-165.
8″Some Types of American Folk-Song,” Journal of American Folklore, XXVIII, 14.
‘”John Hardy,” Journal of American Folklore, XXXII, 505-520; and Folk-Songs of the
South (Cambridge, Mass.: 1925), pp. 175-188. The same identification of John Henry with
[155]
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156 WESTERN FOLKLORE
between the two folk song characters became apparent to Newman I. White,
who separated their texts in his American Negro Folk-Songs of 1928.5
Meanwhile two scholars had dedicated themselves to the task of recovering
and weighing every last scrap of evidence surrounding John Henry. A pro-
fessor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Guy B. Johnson, in-
cluded a chapter of texts on “John Henry, Epic of the Negro Workingman,”
in Negro Workaday Songs, a collection he made in 1926 with Howard W.
Odum.6 At this time Johnson believed the song hero to be a “myth,” but he
changed his mind during the next three years and ended up accepting Big
Bend Tunnel as the factual basis for the ballad. Johnson interviewed many
Negroes and advertised his quest in Negro newspapers in five states, even stag-
ing John Henry contests to secure song texts and information. The resulting
harvest of letters and statements revealed a pervasive and widespread tradition,
deeply enough rooted to manifest all the vagaries and inconsistencies of popu-
lar legend. Nearly every state in the south, and several in the north, claimed
John Henry as their offspring. One particularly circumstantial account placed
the steam drill contest in Alabama in 1882-but no documentary support
could be found. However, struck by the relative stability of the ballad as com-
pared with the fluctuations in narrative accounts, Johnson searched for and
uncovered a printed broadside by one W. T. Blankenship, undated, which
presumably both drew upon and contributed to the singing of the ballad.
Johnson presented his book-length study in 1929-John Henry, Tracking
Down a Negro Legend.7
Coincidentally, a second sleuth had been pursuing John Henry, and trailed
him to Big Bend Tunnel before Johnson. Louis W. Chappell, an associate
professor of English in West Virginia University, published John Henry, A
Folklore Study in 1933.8 It took the form of a minutely detailed critique of
Johnson’s methods and interpretation, mainly because they preceded, and
derived from, his own. Chappell accused Johnson of using without acknowl-
edgement a preliminary report he had made in 1925 on his findings at Big
Bend Tunnel. The evidence painstakingly gathered and skillfully evaluated
by Chappell builds a powerful case for the historicity of John Henry at Big
Bend.9
John Hardy was made by Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (Cambridge,
Mass.: 1925), pp. 218-222.
5 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1928), pp. 189-191, “John Henry.”
8 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
7lIbid.
s (Jena: Frommannsche Verlag, Walter Biedermann).
9Between the two monographic studies, various related items were published. Chappell de-
manded an explanation from Johnson in American Speech, VI (Dec., 1930), 144 if. Lowry C.
Wimberly wrote a note in admiration of Johnson’s John Henry and praised the ballad as great
literature, for its theme “of the individual pitting his lone strength and courage against an en-
vironment” and “its ringing hammer music” and portrayal of “the struggle of sentient hu-
manity against the unfeeling machine” (Folk-Say, A Regional Miscellany, ed. B. A. Botkin
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JOHN HENRY 157
With Chappell’s exhaustive monograph, the scholarly probe into John
Henry virtually ceased, and the two main questions-the relationship of John
Henry to John Hardy and the factual basis for the steam-drilling contest-
were laid to rest. Popular interest in the Negro hero, however, continued to
grow.
Already, in his inquiry into the John Henry tradition, Guy B. Johnson had
anticipated its potentialities for the creative arts. “I marvel” (he wrote) “that
some of the ‘new’ Negroes with an artistic bent do not exploit the wealth of
John Henry lore. Here is material for an epic poem, for a play, for an opera,
for a Negro symphony. What more tragic theme than the theme of John
Henry’s martyrdom?” 10 A response was not long in coming. Within two years,
a book-length story of John Henry had been published and distributed by the
Literary Guild. Its author, Roark Bradford, while not a “new Negro,” had
grown up on a Southern plantation near the Mississippi River and seen Ne-
groes closely. Exploring Southern Negro culture for literary themes, he struck
a profitable formula with fictional works depicting the childlike Negro con-
ception of the world based on Scripture. Bradford achieved his greatest suc-
cess with 01′ Man Adam an’ His Chillun (1928), rendered by Marc Connolly
into the Broadway hit, The Green Pastures. The revelation of a tragic Negro
folk legend seemed timed to assist his literary career. In Bradford’s John
Henry, the contest with the machine occupies only 5 out of 223 pages, but it
serves as the dramatic climax for such structure as the book possesses. A cotton-
rolling steam winch on the levee replaces the rock-boring steam drill, and New
Orleans and the Mississippi River form the locale. John Henry is a cotton-
loading roustabout, when he is working; much of the time he is loving and
leaving his girl Julie Anne, who follows him into death after his fatal contest
with the new machine. At other times, he performs great feats of lifting, eating,
and brawling. The whole narrative is written in a repetitious, rhythmic stage
dialect, interspersed with plaintive little songs and centering around Negro
literary stereotypes. The sporting man, the hell-busting preacher, the woman
of easy acquaintance, the old conjure mammy are all present. John Henry is
a new stereotype for the Negro gallery, but a well-established one in American
lore-the frontier boaster-and he reiterates his tall-tale outcries on nearly
every page.
In 1939 an adaptation of John Henry, billed as a play with music, appeared
on the Broadway stage. Co-author with Roark Bradford was Jacques Wolfe,
[Norman, Okla.: 1930]), “Steel-Drivin’ Man,” pp. 413-415). Gordon H. Gerould in his well-
known study, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford, 1932), pp. 264-268, discussed the confusion of
“John Henry” with “John Hardy,” speculated that “John Henry” was of Negro origin, and
reprinted a 22-stanza text from Johnson, pp. 289-292. Louise Pound lauded Johnson’s John
Henry in her review in the Journal of American Folklore, XLIII (1930), 126-127.
10 Johnson, John Henry, p. 150.
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158 WESTERN FOLKLORE
who supplied the musical scores for the song numbers. The play followed
closely the original story, which contained obvious elements for a musical
drama. Paul Robeson starred as John Henry. The Broadway production
closed after a short run.11
The book and the play of Roark Bradford, with attendant newspaper re-
views and magazine articles,12 popularized the name of John Henry, and fixed
him in the public mind as a Negro Paul Bunyan. In many ways, the growth of
the John Henry legend and pseudolegend parallels that of the giant logger,
who was well established as a national property by the 1930’s. Bradford’s John
Henry resembles James Stevens’ Paul Bunyan of 1925 as a fictional portrayal
of an American “folk” hero based on a slender thread of oral tradition-in one
case a few northwoods anecdotes, in the other a single ballad. Bradford, like
Stevens, created the picture of a giant strong man, although with a somber
rather than a rollicking mien, as befit a Negro hero. In 1926 Odum and John-
son called John Henry the “black Paul Bunyan of the Negro workingman.”
Carl Sandburg made the comparison the following year in The American
Songbag, saying both heroes were myths. Newspapers referred to John Henry
as the “Paul Bunyan of Negroes,” “the Paul Bunyan of his race, a gigantic
river roustabout whose Herculean feats of work and living are part of
America’s folklore.” 13
In the later history of the two traditions, the parallelism persists. Writers,
poets, and artists attempted to wrest some deeper meaning from the Paul
Bunyan and John Henry legends and failed. But both figures lived on tri-
umphantly in children’s books of American folk heroes and in popular
treasuries of American folklore.
The first presentation of John Henry as a folk hero came in 1930 in a chap-
ter of Here’s Audacity! A merican Legendary Heroes, by Frank Shay, who had
published books of drinking songs. His account of “John Henry, the Steel
Driving Man,” followed Guy B. Johnson’s preliminary essay of 1927 on “John
n Published by Harper and Brothers (New York & London: 1939). Josh White played the part
of Blind Lemon, a folk singer, and in his 25th anniversary album (ca. 1955) recorded “The Story
of John Henry,” based on songs in the stage production (Elektra Records 123-A).
1 Time and Newsweek carried notices on Jan. 22, 1940, and Theatre Arts in its March issue
(XXIV, 166-167). Roark Bradford wrote a piece for Collier’s on “Paul Robeson in John Henry”
(Jan. 13, 1940), pp. 105 f.
3 Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, Negro Workaday Songs (Chapel Hill: 1926), p.
221; Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag (New York: 1927), p. 24 (“In southern work camp
gangs, John Henry is the strong man, or the ridiculous man, or anyhow the man worth talking
about, having a myth character somewhat like that of Paul Bunyan in work gangs of the Big Woods
of the North”); R. M. Dorson, “Paul Bunyan in the News, 1939-1941″ Western Folklore, XV
(1956), 193, citing newspaper notices of the Bradford-Wolfe music-drama in which John Henry
was likened to Paul Bunyan.
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JOHN HENRY 159
Henry: A Negro Legend.” 14 Shay’s formula was repeated by a number of other
writers for the juvenile market, all of whom inevitably included the story of
John Henry and his contest with the steam drill in their pantheon of American
comic demigods. Such folk-hero books were written by Carl Carmer (1937),
Olive Beaupr6 Miller (1939), Anne Malcolmson (1941), Carmer again (1942),
Walter Blair (1944), and Maria Leach (1958).15
Other authors of children’s books found it rewarding to deal individually
and serially with Paul Bunyan and his kin. Consequences were John Henry,
the Rambling Black Ulysses, by James Cloyd Bowman (1942), John Henry
and the Double-Jointed Steam Drill by Irwin Shapiro (1945), and John Henry
and His Hammer, by Harold W. Felton (1950). Of these, Bowman’s nearly
three hundred pages went far beyond the ballad story to give a full-length im-
provisation of John Henry’s career, from a slave boy on the old plantation
through the Civil War to freedom times. John Henry encourages unruly
freedmen to mine coal, cut corn, pick cotton, and drive railroad ties. He out-
smarts confidence men and gamblers, stokes the Robert E. Lee to victory over
the Natchez, and at long last dies with his hammer in his hand at the Big Bend
Tunnel. But a final chapter presents an alternate report, that John Henry
recovered from overwork and resumed his ramblin’ around. In Shapiro’s much
briefer story, John Henry never dies at all, but after beating the steam drill
pines away to a ghost, until his old pal John Hardy convinces him that he
should learn to use the machine he conquered, and the tale ends with John
Henry drilling through the mountain, and the steam drill shivering to pieces
in his hands! So for American children John Henry unites the Negroes in
faithful service to their white employers and accepts the machine. In these
children’s books, the full-page illustrations of a sad-faced Negro giant swing-
ing a hammer contributed as much as the printed words to fixing the image of
John Henry.x6 In the 1930’s, Palmer Hayden completed twelve oil paintings,
14 The chapter “John Henry, the Steel Driving Man” in Frank Shay, Here’s Audacity! (New
York: 1930), pp. 245-253, was based on Guy B. Johnson’s chapter in Ebony and Topaz, A
Collectanea, ed. Charles S. Johnson (New York: 1927), pp. 47-51, “John Henry–A Negro
Legend.”
1rThe titles are Carmer, The Hurricane’s Children (New York and Toronto: 1937), “How
John Henry Beat the Steam Drill Down,” pp. 122-128; Miller, Heroes, Outlaws and Funny
Fellows (New York: 1939), “John Henry’s Contest with the Big Steam Drill,” pp. 147-157;
Malcolmson, Yankee Doodle’s Cousins (Boston: 1941), “John Henry,” pp. 101-107; Carmer,
America Sings (New York: 1942), “John Henry,” pp. 174-179; Blair, Tall Tale America (New
York: 1944), “John Henry and the Machine in West Virginia,” pp. 203-219; Leach, The Rain-
bow Book of American Folk Tales and Legends (Cleveland and New York: 1958), “John Henry,”
pp. 33-35.
“I One such volume, Their Weight in Wildcats (Boston: 1946), carried only the name of the
illustrator, James Daugherty, on the title page. The selection of hero tales reprinted from earlier
volumes was made by an editor, Paul Brooks, at Houghton Mifflin, the publisher. For John
Henry he reprinted the statements of one of Guy B. Johnson’s informants, Leon R. Harris of
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160 WESTERN FOLKLORE
now hanging in the Harmon Foundation in New York, on the life story of
John Henry.’7
Folklore treasuries and folk song collections also continued to keep the story
and song steadily before the public. In his best-selling A Treasury of American
Folklore (1944), currently in its twenty-third printing, B. A. Botkin reprinted
accounts of John Henry in oral hearsay, balladry, and fiction; he gave him
further notice in A Treasury of Southern Folklore (1949) and A Treasury of
Railroad Folklore, done with Alvin C. Harlow (1953).18 The lavishly illus-
trated Life Treasury of American Folklore (1961) offered a picture of John
Henry spiking ties on a railroad track rather than driving steel in a tunnel,
and in a skimpy headnote to the retelling of the ballad story revived the dis-
credited hypothesis that the contest might have occurred in Alabama in
1882.19 John A. and Alan Lomax, naturally sympathetic to the ballad hero first
presented in a full text by the elder Lomax in 1915, always included John
Henry ballads, some adapted and arranged, some recorded in the field, in
their popular folk song compilations: American Ballads and Folksongs (1934),
Our Singing Country (1941), Folksong U.S.A. (1947), and The Folksongs of
North America (1960). “John Henry” was the opening song in their first book,
and in Our Singing Country they called it “probably America’s greatest single
piece of folklore.” In the latest and most ornate garland, Alan Lomax (the
sole author), having meanwhile shifted from a Marxian to a Freudian analysis,
found John Henry equally receptive to his altered insights. The steel-driver
shaking the mountain is a phallic image; singers know that John Henry died
from lovemaking, not overwork:
This old hammer-WHAMI
Killed John Henry–WHAMI
Can’t kill me-WHAMI
Can’t kill me-WHAMI
Thus the hammer song vaunted the sexual virility of the pounder.20 Lomax
Moline, Illinois. Brooks saw in John Henry only “brute strength and dumb courage” (p.
170).
17 Ray M. Lawless, Folksingers and Folksongs in America (New York: 1960), pp. 12-13.
1 A Treasury of American Folklore (New York: 1944), pp. 230-240; A Treasury of Southern
Folklore (New York: 1949), pp. 748-749; A Treasury of Railroad Folklore (New York: 1953), pp.
402-405.
“gThe Editors of Life, Life Treasury of American Folklore (New York: 1961), pp. 168-169.
Other popular publications to retell the story of John Henry and reprint a ballad text are
Freeman H. Hubbard, Railroad Avenue (New York: 1945), pp. 58-64, “The Mighty Jawn Henry”;
The Book of Negro Folklore, ed. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps (New York: 1958),
“John Henry,” pp. 345-347; American Heritage, XIV (Oct., 1963), 34-37, 95, Bernard Asbell,
“A Man Ain’t Nothin’ but a Man.”
20Alan Lomax( The Folk Songs of North America (New York: 1960), pp. 551-553. For the
work song, cf. Chappell, p. 99, Support for Lomax’s position is given by Roger D. Abrahams in
his note and ballad text on John Henry as a sexual hero of South Philadelphia Negroes (Deep
Down in the Jungle, Hatboro, Pa.: 1964), p. 80.
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JOHN HENRY 161
had returned full cycle to the psychoanalytic views of Chappell. The steel-
driver also appealed to social reformers. In American Folk Songs of Protest
(1953; reprinted as a paperback in 1960), John Greenway called “John Henry”
the “best-known (and best) Negro ballad, the best-known Negro work song,
the best song of protest against imminent technological unemployment.” 21
While collected folk songs and literary retellings of the John Henry theme
poured into print, only one or two folk tales landed in the net of collectors. A
curious folk narrative, mixing tall-tale elements of the Wonderful Hunt, the
Great Eater, and Schlaraffenland with heroic and erotic legends, was told to
Howard Odum in 1926 by a Negro construction camp worker in Chapel Hill.22
Yet subsequent Negro tale collections added only one substantial text to the
John Henry tradition, while a whole cycle of trickster John tales dating from
slavery times were being uncovered.23 A folk tale volume of 1943, prepared by
the Federal Writers’ Project in North Carolina, contained a graphic and fan-
tastic prose tradition of John Henry’s birth, deeds, and death in the contest
with the steam drill on the Santa Fe Railroad. Data are given on the informant,
an aged Negro of Lillington, North Carolina, who asserted John Henry was
born north of him on the Cape Fear River, and worked with him on the Santa
Fe road, but the text is obviously edited.24 The talented Negro novelist and
folklorist, Zora Neale Hurston, explicitly asserted in Mules and Men (1935)
that the ballad was the only folklore item connected with John Henry.25
The greatest impact of John Henry on American culture has come outside
the printed page through commercial recordings. In 1962 the most widely
recorded folk song sold to the public was “John Henry.” That year the Phono-
log Record Index listed some fifty current renditions of the ballad “John
Henry” and fifteen of the work song “Nine Pound Hammer.” As many popu-
lar singers have made recordings for the general public as have folk singers for
collectors in the field. The Library of Congress Copyright Catalogue reveals
over one hundred song titles devoted to John Henry from 1916 on, embracing
all kinds of musical arrangements from simple melodic line and text to full
orchestral composition. Arrangers staking out claims include: the well-known
American composer, Aaron Copland; the Negro song-compiler, John W.
Work; the musicologist, Charles Seeger; the celebrated Negro ex-convict,
2 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), p. 107. Reprinted as paperback by A. S.
Barnes & Co. (Perpetua edition, 1960).
22 Negro Workaday Songs, pp. 238-240.
SThere is no connection between the trickster John cycle and John Henry, as Alan Lomax
suggests (The Folk Songs of North America, p. 553). For folk tales of John the slave and his Old
Marster, see R. M. Dorson, Negro Folktales in Michigan (Cambridge, Mass.: 1956), chap. 4, and
Negro Tales from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Calvin, Michigan (Bloomington, Ind.: 1958), pp.
43-62.
” Bundle of Troubles and Other Tarheel Tales, ed. W. C. Hendricks (Durham, N. C.: 1943),
pp. 37-51, “John Henry of the Cape Fear.” (Told by Glasgow McLeod to T. Pat Matthews.)
2 Hurston, Mules and Men (Philadelphia and London: 1935), p. 306. She prints nine “verses of
John Henry, the king of railroad track-laying songs,” pp. 80-81, 309-312.
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162 WESTERN FOLKLORE
Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly); W. C. Handy, the “father of the blues”; con-
cert arranger, Elie Siegmeister; and popular singer Bob Gibson. Chronologi-
cally, only ten copyrights are registered before 1937, ten in the period 1938-
1945, twenty from 1946-1954, and eighty from 1955-1963.26 While the general
popularity of “John Henry” has dramatically climbed in the past decade,
fresh field texts are rarely reported.27 Still the commercial recordings are fre-
quently traditional or semitraditional in source.28
Popular singers and recording artists have altered the formless sequence of
independent stanzas which comprised the folk ballad into a swift-moving,
tightly knit song story. John Henry has shifted from the sphere of Negro
laborers and white mountaineers into the center of the urban folk song revival
and the entertainment world of jukebox and hootenanny, radio and television.
The earlier texts from tradition show the usual variation characteristic of
folklore. John Henry drives steel chiefly on the C8cO, but once it is located in
Brinton, New Jersey, and he also drives on the AC and L, and Air Line
Road, the L and N, and the Georgia Southern Road. He comes from Ten-
nessee most often, but also from East Virginia, Louisiana, and Mobile, Ala-
bama. His hammer weighs nine, ten, twelve, sixteen, twenty and thirty
pounds; sometimes he carries a hammer in each hand. His girl is named
Julie Ann, Polly Ann, Mary Ann, Martha Ann, Nellie Ann, Lizzie Ann, and
Mary Magdalene. In one unique text, John Henry’s partner kills him with
the hammer. Among the visitors to his grave are, in one instance, Queen
Elizabeth.
Yet the shifts and twists of tradition are perhaps less surprising than the
tenacity and recurrence of key phrases, lines, and stanzas. Analyzing his
2 This information was kindly supplied to me by Joseph C. Hickerson, Reference Librarian
in the Archive of Folk Song, Library of Congress.
~ Field-collected texts are reported by G. Malcolm Laws, Native American Balladry (Phila-
delphia: 1950), p. 231. “John Henry” is 11 in his index. He refers to thirty-nine recordings from
eleven states and the District of Columbia in the Library of Congress folk song archives, including
five releases. He cites, in addition to works already mentioned, Mellinger E. Henry, Folk-Songs
from the Southern Highlands (New York: 1938), pp. 441-442, 446-448, for a text and many
references. In Folk-Songs of Virginia, A Descriptive Index and Classification (Durham, N.C.:
1949), p. 294, Arthur K. Davis lists six John Henry texts collected between 1932 and 1934. Only
one full text of eight stanzas is presented in The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina
Folklore, Vol. II, Folk Ballads (Durham, N.C.: 1952), 623-627. The editors, H. M. Belden and
A. P. Hudson, say, “Few if any folk songs of American origin have been so extensively and
intensively studied as John Henry.”
28 Some representative examples of commercially released “John Henry” recordings currently
available, which appear indebted at least indirectly to traditional southern Appalachian sources,
are Laurel River Valley Boys, Music for Moonshiners (Judson L3031); Mainer’s Mountaineers,
Good Ole Mountain Music (King 666); Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, New John Henry
Blues (Decca 45-31540); George Pegram and Walter Parham, Banjo Songs from the Southern
Mountains (Riverside RLP 12-610); Harry Smith, Anthology of American Folk Song (Folkways;
re-recordings of early hillbilly and race records), No. 18, Williamson Brothers and Curry,
“Gonna Die with my Hammer in my Hand” and No. 80, Mississippi John Hurt, “Spike Driver
Blues”; Merle Travis, Back Home (Capital T891). Neil Rosenberg and Mayne Smith kindly
furnished me information for this list from their personal record collections.
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JOHN HENRY 163
thirty-odd texts, Guy Johnson determined that the three most frequent
stanzas, and therefore probably the earliest, were the opening stanza of John
Henry sitting on his papa’s (or mama’s) knee, the declaration to his captain,
“A man ain’t nothin’ but a man,” and the verse about his gal dressed in red,
Polly Ann. Otherwise, the story line varied considerably, and Johnson ob-
served, “The stanza, not the song, is the unit” (p. 87), a conclusion later sup-
ported by Alan Lomax. Phonograph, radio, and record-player have however
given the episodic stanzas of the ballad a structure and symmetry; already in
1929 Johnson could list eleven examples of “John Henry” on commercial
records, and in 1933 Chappell added eleven more. One of the most astute folk
song scholars in America, Phillips Barry, believed that mountain white song
tradition, perhaps in the person of John Henry’s white woman, helped sta-
bilize the ballad. He pointed to its parallelism with the opening stanza of the
well-known old English ballad of “Mary Hamilton”:
When I was a babe and a very little babe,
And stood at my mither’s knee,
Nae witch nor warlock did unfauld
The death I was to dree.
“Mary Hamilton” and other English and Scottish ballads lingered in the
southern mountains and so could easily have influenced the new ballad.29
Today the ballad of John Henry lives on in remarkably stable form for an
anonymous oral composition. It has been refashioned by the urban folk song
revival into a national property, shared by singers and composers, writers and
artists, listeners and readers. The ballad commemorates an obscure event in
which several lines of American history converged-the growth of the rail-
roads, the rise of the Negro, the struggle of labor. Various interpreters have
read in the shadowy figure of John Henry symbols of racial, national and
sexual strivings. Negro and white man, teenager and tot, professor and per-
former, have levied upon the John Henry tradition. The explanation for
these multiple appeals lies in the dramatic intensity, tragic tension, and simple
poetry combined in one unforgettable American folk ballad.30
Indiana University
29 Phillips Barry, review of L. W. Chappell, John Henry, in Bulletin of the Folk-Song Society
of the Northeast, VIII (1934), 24-26. As further evidence of “non-tunnel” influences, Barry cites
a “John Hardy” tune transferred to “John Henry” but known only to white mountaineers.
80 That new surprises are still possible in the career of John Henry was shown in the remarka-
ble paper by MacEdward Leach presented at the regional meeting of the American Folklore
Society at Duke University on April 23, 1964, “John Henry in Jamaica,” suggesting the possi-
bility of the John Henry tradition’s originating among Jamaican Negroes.
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We have a privacy and confidentiality policy that guides our work. We NEVER share any customer information with third parties. Noone will ever know that you used our assignment help services. It’s only between you and us. We are bound by our policies to protect the customer’s identity and information. All your information, such as your names, phone number, email, order information, and so on, are protected. We have robust security systems that ensure that your data is protected. Hacking our systems is close to impossible, and it has never happened.
You fill all the paper instructions in the order form. Make sure you include all the helpful materials so that our academic writers can deliver the perfect paper. It will also help to eliminate unnecessary revisions.
Proceed to pay for the paper so that it can be assigned to one of our expert academic writers. The paper subject is matched with the writer’s area of specialization.
You communicate with the writer and know about the progress of the paper. The client can ask the writer for drafts of the paper. The client can upload extra material and include additional instructions from the lecturer. Receive a paper.
The paper is sent to your email and uploaded to your personal account. You also get a plagiarism report attached to your paper.
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Delivering a high-quality product at a reasonable price is not enough anymore.
That’s why we have developed 5 beneficial guarantees that will make your experience with our service enjoyable, easy, and safe.
You have to be 100% sure of the quality of your product to give a money-back guarantee. This describes us perfectly. Make sure that this guarantee is totally transparent.
Read moreEach paper is composed from scratch, according to your instructions. It is then checked by our plagiarism-detection software. There is no gap where plagiarism could squeeze in.
Read moreThanks to our free revisions, there is no way for you to be unsatisfied. We will work on your paper until you are completely happy with the result.
Read moreYour email is safe, as we store it according to international data protection rules. Your bank details are secure, as we use only reliable payment systems.
Read moreBy sending us your money, you buy the service we provide. Check out our terms and conditions if you prefer business talks to be laid out in official language.
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