Throughout its history and to this day, the United States has been the scene not only of many interethnic and inter-racial contradictions and conflicts, but also of attempts to smooth out these contradictions, to organize a stable, mutually acceptable coexistence of representatives of different ethnic groups and races. Taking into account the multiple migration processes that are currently taking place both in Russia and in many other countries of the world and lead to the mixing of peoples who adhere to different cultural norms, profess different religions, and sometimes have certain historically formed claims to each other, the study of the American "melting pot" - the relationship between white and white people-is based on the black Americans - now more relevant than ever.

African Americans - a community that began to form with the importation of slaves from Africa to the territory of today's United States in the XVII-XIX centuries. The slave traders were drawn from many different tribes of West Africa, speaking different languages and belonging to different cultural traditions. Naturally, once they arrived in America and became slaves, they almost completely lost contact with their native continent, adopted the language and adopted the culture of their masters to one degree or another. After the abolition of slavery in the United States, the black population, having found freedom, turned out to be an integral part of the state, whose authorities and ordinary citizens mostly treated them with contempt and hostility.

Even in the 1950s, the world around the average African American looked something like this:"...I constantly felt uncomfortable and ashamed because of the color of my skin. I could not get rid of these feelings, they did not give me peace. The negative emotions that haunted me were born out of the system's common perception that white kids are "smart" and black kids are "dumb." We didn't talk about it openly, but we always made it clear. Any positive phenomenon that could be described by the word "good" was inevitably associated with the color white, even in the fairy tales that we were given to read in elementary school. "Little Black Sambo", "Little Red Riding Hood", "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" seemed to tell us who we are. [ ... ] We, the children of Negroes, towards whites continued to feel something like a strange mixture of hatred and admiration. [ ... ] Thick African hair is bad, but straight hair is great; light hair was better than dark hair" [Newton, 2003, pp. 37-39].

In these circumstances, the natural act of a kind of "existential self-defense" for black skin owners was to form their own, African-American national identity. Since the end of the 19th century, there was an active struggle for spelling the word "Negro" with a capital letter, children's toys in the form of black dolls, etc. began to appear. In the speeches of black leaders of the early XX century. more and more often it was possible

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hear about "race", "people", "nation", "nationality". In general, the beginning of the XX century is associated with the development and formation of various African-American ideological trends, the activation of African-American public life. In 1914, for example, 398 black periodicals were published, including 249 newspapers (for more details, see Nitoburg, 1979). This coincided with the global process of the late XIX-early XX centuries-the formation of national identity among many peoples of the world. African Americans, like many peoples who were under the cultural and economic control of whites, were characterized by a desire to gain cultural and spiritual independence, but their search in this direction was based on the prevailing ideas at that time - that is, they created not something fundamentally different from the white Western culture, but a kind of cultural independence. "Eurocentrism on the contrary" [for more details, see: The Origin of ideology..., 1973].

When creating their own picture of the world, interpreting the history of their people, it was and still is important for African Americans to assess their past. And the past is not only American, but also African. When it comes to the pre-transatlantic slave trade, African Americans face a similar set of questions: Why was Europe able to gain control of Africa? Why is it that millions of Africans have become commodities for slave traders? What was the black continent like centuries ago anyway? Is it possible to compare Europe and Africa at that time in the categories of "worse-better"?; where is the real homeland of American blacks - in the United States or in Africa? Do I need to bring African traditions into the daily lives of African Americans?

Not only do African-American ideologues need answers to these questions, but those who study the social life of blacks in the United States are seriously interested in them. According to ethnographers, the fact that one people (in this case, African Americans) thinks about another (about the peoples of Africa), says a lot about themselves, helps to understand them. "The discovery of the dual nature of ethnic representations," writes the Russian ethnologist N. A. Yerofeyev, " made us change our view of the errors and distortions that ethnic images are full of, as well as the prospect of separating truth from fiction in them... Moreover, the presence of errors, biases and distortions in ethnic perceptions no longer looks like a disadvantage. It may sound paradoxical, but it even increases its value: by studying these distortions, we gain access to the depths of the national psyche, primarily of the people who create these mythical images" (Erofeev, 1983, p. 47).

Due to the breadth of this topic, the author, limited to the scope of the article, without claiming to be a complete analysis, will try to demonstrate these images on a few vivid examples, without building a chronology of their development, but only along the way mentioning the numerous connections of African-American national consciousness with the corresponding ideas of African, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-European theorists and practitioners of black nationalism.

At the moment, there are no works in Russia specifically devoted to analyzing the ideas of African Americans about their African past. But since this topic is extremely important for understanding African-American social processes, it has been touched upon both by Russian authors dealing with the racial identity of blacks outside the United States (for example, in the works of N. S. Sosnovsky and M. Yu. Frenkel) and by Americanists in our country. In Soviet Russia, because of the confrontation between the USSR and the United States, African Americans and their ideological trends were a popular topic of domestic American studies-they were seen as the "weak link" of the front line of a political opponent. Historians such as I. A. Geevsky, V. S. Grigoriev, R. F. Ivanov, A. P. Koroleva, A. N. Kuzmin, and L. N. Mitrokhin have written about the social life of African Americans,

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E. L. Nitoburg, N. V. Sivachev, O. V. Filanovskaya, D. E. Furman, A. I. Shaskolsky, V. K. Shatsillo and others.

A common feature of almost all Soviet historical works devoted to African-American social life is, on the one hand, a very thorough analysis of all forms of oppression and oppression to which African - Americans were subjected, on the other hand, the desire to evaluate all African-American movements from the point of view of Marxism-Leninism in the "good-bad"system. This approach was initially one-sided and - in this sense-flawed, since it did not in the least reveal the essence of African-American social processes. A striking example is the work of L. N. Mitrokhin [Mitrokhin, 1974], in which the study of a huge information array is combined with the suppression of fairly well-known facts of African-American history (for example, in the biography of Malcolm X, his hajj to Mecca is not mentioned).

In post-Perestroika Russia, on the one hand, interest in African-American history subsided, and on the other hand, opportunities for much more free research opened up [see, for example, Nitoburg, 1995]. Images of the African past among African Americans began to attract the attention of Russian scientists. Thus, there are certain intersections with the topic of this article in the PhD thesis of O. G. Novikov "Formation of the ideology of the African-American movement" Power to Blacks "in the 50s-60s of the XX century", defended in 2003 at the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In addition, against the background of the general increased attention to Islam and Islamism, some interest in Islamic movements in the African-American environment has recently appeared in our country [see: Muslims in the public space of America, 2005; Yastrebov, 2005].

If we talk about the works of African-American public figures and scientists, then almost all of them - from supporters of complete separation from whites (a bright modern representative is H. R. Madibuti) to supporters of the integration of blacks into American society (D. J. Dickerson) - see Africa of the past centuries as a highly technologically and culturally developed region that white Europeans colonized only with the help of guile and deception. There are only a few opinions that differ from this one. In particular, we can mention C. R. Richburg, a black journalist, author of the book "From America", who described life in present-day Africa and thanked the slave traders of the past for being African-American.

This unity in extolling Africa's past among the African-American intelligentsia is primarily dictated by polemics with the majority of white American scientists and politicians of the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. In the United States, works were constantly published that ideologically justified both black slavery and the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, representing whites as a whole as a race more developed than blacks. In addition, black intellectuals rightly believe that world history cannot be viewed only through the prism of Eurocentrism.

True, an alternative to "white history" is the practice of publishing inaccurate, unverified data-as long as they serve to glorify the past of the black race. This is justified by the fact that modern historical science is totally "whitewashed" and therefore it is impossible to work according to its canons. N. S. Sosnovsky believes: "Cultural nationalism as a kind of utopian consciousness is based on a historical myth. It is noteworthy, however, that despite the relativism shared by cultural nationalist theorists regarding the objectivity of historical knowledge, they usually do not have the heart to recognize the difference between their own constructions and historical science. The goal of such historiography is to create a past utopia of time, and, like any utopia, the image of the Golden Age fulfills certain necessary functions in the public consciousness" [Sosnovsky].

The spirit in which African Americans view African history can be inferred from the two quotes below. Both of these quotes reveal a complete ideological difference.

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unity, although the author of the first - X. Madubuti is one of the most uncompromising black racists in America, and the author of the second-D. Dickerson-is a supporter of the integration of blacks into US society.

"If we ask how many Africans (blacks) were killed during the Eurasian black slave trade, few, if anyone (excluding amateur historians), can give an exact figure. [ ... ] Yes, talking about numbers, especially on such a scale, can be considered liberal escapism. But talking about who we have lost directly concerns our current enslavement and economic backwardness. We have lost the greatest independent thinkers-those who chose death for themselves and their families over enslavement - we have lost scientists, teachers, doctors, religious leaders, artisans-those who were deemed "too smart" to be enslaved and therefore "potential rebels." We lost women and men whose loyalty to their people was more important to them than living as slaves. Those who refused to obey the "devils from the West". We lost women who were able to strangle their infants and then silently stop their own breathing at night, so as not to submit themselves sexually and spiritually to both foreign enemies and their own brothers who became traitors. The Eurasian slave trade has done so much damage to the black race that we have never been able to rise again. Our very soul, the spirit of our ancestors, the essence of our existence, the meaning of life have been stripped from us, as a lion flays the skin of a captured antelope "[Madhubuti, 1978, p. 15].

"Europe has not accepted anything from Africa "except slavery" - so these whites think, saying that Africa has no art, no culture, no knowledge, that Africa has not given anything to humanity. They believe that for tens of thousands of years, Africans ran naked in the mud, allowed hyenas and monkeys to raise their children, were unable to talk or make any kind of notes until they came up with rituals. They may believe that a person appeared in Africa, but they believe that he left his native continent when he migrated around the planet, "clean slate", did not take any skills with him. Otherwise, the image of "holy" Europe would be damaged. Consequently, there was no era in which there was no "white man's burden." But how did a person survive before and after leaving Africa, without any knowledge, culture?

[ ... ] Those who do not want to know anything perceive their lack of knowledge about Africa, the cradle of life, as confirmation of their ideas. One wonders what so many archaeologists are doing in Africa.

So strong was the aversion to blacks that early white "scholars" ignored the existence of writing in Sudanese Africa. The first texts of American slaves were written in Arabic, that African Latin. The whites were not pleased to admit the existence of Moors with a written language - then they began to claim that the Moors are not black, but "dark". In the same way that black women are portrayed as libertines responsible for their own sexual oppression, Africa is portrayed as devoid of intelligence, which makes it possible, in particular, to ignore and deny the existence of the Sudanese African intellectual tradition. Distancing themselves from an active role in the slave trade, whites say they knew nothing about the interior of Africa. So how could they know whether knowledge was spread there or not? " [Dickerson, 2004, p. 109-110].

African-American texts that contain such ideas usually refer to Egypt, Carthage, and the civilizations of West Africa. In all cases, attempts are made to show the civilizing role that these regions played in interaction with Europe, the influence of representatives of Negroid peoples on the success of these states of the past.

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If we talk not about intellectuals, but about average African Americans, then the formation of an idea of their African past rests for them on the weak education of most of them inherited from centuries of slavery and decades of segregation. Here is what our black compatriot L. O. Golden wrote in the 1990s:: "I was struck by how much they [African - Americans. - AL] don't know African history, while trying to embrace African culture while preserving the benefits of American society at the same time. Although they long to be African first and American second, their entire life experience, education, and manners are American for two or three generations. Some try to dress in traditional costumes, often mixing men's and women's clothing, as well as types of hairstyles. [...] Only a few Americans, as I discovered during lectures at American universities, understand that Africa is a multidimensional phenomenon. Americans often see Africa as a uniform continent. Despite the fact that Africa is home to six racial types (and not all of them are black), 1,600 nations and ethnic groups, as well as more than fifty countries - each with its own history, culture, religion, languages and musical styles. Whenever I talk in lectures about the ancient (and still ongoing) Arab slave trade, which is essentially comparable to the transatlantic one, inevitably I get the answer: "But they never told us." When I asked who these "they" were, the answer was "white "" [Golden, 2002, p. 185-186].

Ignorance is a natural way to make untrue judgments. Such judgments can be diametrically opposed. For example, speaking at the Olympics at the beginning of his brilliant sports career (sports in general play a more important role for African Americans than for most other nations), the most famous boxer Muhammad Ali (then still Cassius Clay) answered a question from a Soviet journalist about the situation of blacks in the United States: "Look here, commie! America is the best country in the world, even better than yours. I'd rather live in Louisville, because at least I don't have to fight snakes and alligators and live in a mud hut." "I knew nothing about Russia, and very little about Africa, which I had imagined from the Tarzan films," Muhammad Ali later defended himself in his memoirs [Muhammad Ali, 1975, p.63].

But such ideas about Africa and not too high opinion of it are common among African Americans today. The most popular basketball player in the African-American community and in the United States as a whole, Magic Johnson is known for saying during a speech on a TV show in response to doubts about his intellectual abilities:: "You think I'm from Africa?" The black mayor of East St. Louis, Illinois, on a visit to Zaire, brought a container of blood with him from the United States, so that in case of an accident, he would not be "transfused with monkey blood." African immigrants to the United States are often asked questions like: do people in Africa live in houses or not? how often do they have to run away from tigers? [Dickerson, 2004, p. 153]. S. A. Duf writes in the article "The West African paradox": "The accusation that almost all respondents heard in their address sounds like a curse: "You sold us out!" This is a deeply erroneous interpretation, which is reproduced in schools, mass media, and higher educational institutions and extends to all Africans - including modern ones - the collective blame for the slave trade" (Duf, 2005, p. 371).

However, such moods can easily be replaced by completely opposite ones. So, a few years after the above-mentioned statement so loyal to the American system, Cassius Clay abruptly changed his ideological positions and joined the "Nation of Islam". For so-called black Muslims, Africans are not " mud hut savages fighting snakes and alligators." To a Russian reader interested in the public life of the United States and the Islamic world

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or blacks from different parts of the world, more or less familiar with the mythology of the "Nation of Islam" - the change of "slave names" by members of the organization first to " x "(a symbolic act of awareness of the loss of African roots), and then to Muslim names; their ideas that in ancient times the world was ruled by blacks "Asian". humans", who created an incredibly powerful civilization, but the evil genius of the genetic scientist Yakub, who brought out 59999 "white devils" as a result of experiments, led to its collapse.

Noteworthy is an excerpt from Malcolm X's autobiography about how he joined the "Nation of Islam" and studied its ideas while serving a ten-year prison sentence. Malcolm X wrote that although the statement that" the white man is the devil " sounds very strange, but that the entire life experience of the American black poor, African-American prisoners leads to such an opinion [Autobiography of Malcolm..., 1975, p. 169-191]. More than 40 years after Malcolm X, our compatriot Dmitry Starostin, who spent five years in American prisons, wrote: "In a New York prison, I did not encounter any serious racial hostility. Although there are underground organizations of white and black racists ("Aryan brothers", "pyatiprotsentniki"), they rarely resort to practical actions and are more like clubs of interests " [Starostin, 2003, p.161-162].

It is not easy for residents of our Orthodox-atheist country to imagine the religious tolerance that exists in the United States. In America, neither a person who creates his own religious structure, nor followers of exotic cults are treated as socially dangerous mental patients. The word "sect" in the United States is not an expletive. As a result, many religious groups of various kinds are emerging and existing in the United States. African-Americans are members of a dozen relatively large Protestant churches, there are African-Americans who are Catholics [for more details, see Nitoburg, 1995], and there are a number of unfriendly associations of "black Christians" and "black Jews". African paganism has been preserved in a transformed form. The Afro-Latin American "Santoria" - a syncretic cult in which the spirits of the natural elements of the African Yoruba tribe coexist with the saints of the Catholic pantheon-has its adherents in the United States, where African Americans are also involved in this and similar religious structures.1
However, "black Islam" occupies a special place in all this diversity of beliefs. Information about African Muslim slaves imported to the United States is sketchy. And it is obvious that the vast majority of them were completely Christianized. If any Islamic trends persisted at the time of the abolition of slavery, they affected a tiny minority of African Americans. Interest in Islam among blacks gradually developed from the 1910s to the 1930s, starting with the now-forgotten "Moorish Temple of Science "and the now-active"Nation of Islam".

These organizations had very little to do with the Muslim tradition: in addition to extravagant ideas such as the myth of genetics Yakub or (also characteristic of the "Nation of Islam") the sacralization of "flying saucers" was characterized by a clear aggressive rejection of the white race (despite the fact that most Muslim peoples are not Negroes). In addition, declaring the founder of the Nation of Islam, Fard, to be an incarnation of Allah and Elijah Muhammad to be a prophet is a sacrilege for traditional Muslims. Islamic theologians view the "Nation of Islam" as a cult that has much more in common with Christianity, but has distorted the Christian vision of the world and decorated its buildings in a pseudo-Islamic spirit. It is quite characteristic that one of the program texts is the most radical-

1 You can give an example of the ironic text of "Voodoo" by the famous African-American rapper Ice-T "Body Count" / / http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Club/9364/exindex.html

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This is a clear statement on the rejection of whites by the group that broke away in the 1960s from the "Nation of Islam" - the "Nation of Islam of the Five Percent"2-it is called " Why are we not Muslims?". Such is the non-Muslim Islamic nation [for more information, see: Islam in the Mix...].

But Pseudoislam gave an impetus to the spread of real Islam among black Americans. Islam was ideally suited for the self-defining African-American identity - a monotheistic religion, on the one hand, close to Christianity (which is important because almost all the available cultural baggage of African - Americans is Christian), and on the other - on many issues (both theological and modern political) in confrontation with Christianity (the religion of white Americans). Again, no one denies the depth and power of the Muslim cultural tradition, which is flattering and honorable for a self-asserting national identity to join.

Prior to the Nation of Islam, the creator of black nationalism, Edward Blyden, showed an interest in Islam. While remaining a Christian, he put forward the thesis that Islam is "African Christianity". A religion best adapted to the specifics of the Black Continent. Since Christianity was brought to West Africa by white colonizers, who themselves constantly violated its principles and tried to use it to prove the superiority of whites over blacks, Islam is precisely the monotheistic religion that should consolidate the black race. This explains the well-known paradox of African-American history-that the" unusual "Christian M. Garvey turned out to be the generally recognized predecessor of the" unusual "Muslim organization" Nation of Islam " (Frenkel, 1997, pp. 118-131).

The Nation of Islam has gradually established ties with Muslim organizations abroad, as well as with Muslim immigrants in the United States. Here is one example: "Abdunaser arrived at Fishkill prison with a huge bag of Muslim books and a Palestinian flag painted on a bed sheet (the flag, however, was taken away during the search). He became a regular at the prison mosque. It was accepted as a gift of fate: the majority of American Muslim Negroes know only "Salam Alaikum" in Arabic and have approximately the same idea about Islamic worship " (Starostin, 2003, p. 164).

Now there are 7 million people in the United States. Muslims, and most of them are African - Americans. African-American Muslims call themselves "Bilalians" after the first muezzin of Islam, a black associate of Muhammad-Bilal [Yastrebov, 2006, pp. 129-130]. The extent of the influence of African-American Islam on the life of the United States is indicated at least by the fact that it is not uncommon for America to have several hits of African-American Muslim rappers in the top ten most popular songs of the month [Islam in the Mix...].

The Nation of Islam has experienced two major splits, when in the case of Malcolm X-a significant part, and in the case of Wallas Din Muhamad-the overwhelming majority of the organization's members converted to traditional Islam. Now it remains a vibrant religious and political force in the United States, led by Louis Farahan. But even Farakhan is increasingly seeking support among traditional Islam [see: Davidson, 2002, pp. 51-71].

Based on this trend, Muslim religious and political figures outside the United States are beginning to view African - American Muslims as "an instrument of effective influence of the Islamic Ummah on its main enemy-the United States of America" [Yastrebov, 2006, p.133]. But of course the interest of African Americans in

2 is also known as the "Nation of Islam of Gods and Lands", because all black men are considered gods by its members, and all black women are symbols that embody our planet.

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It is used not only by US adversaries. For example, there is a project to form an inter-African peacekeeping force from African-Americans, so that the peacekeepers are of the same skin color as the participants in the African civil wars. It is very likely that if such forces are formed, the United States will be able to significantly increase its influence on the African continent (Vishnevsky, 2001: 57-65).

The issue of reparations now plays a significant role in discussions about the past of African Americans. For a long time, many African-American public organizations have been advocating that America should pay reparations to African-Americans for the years of slavery. An example is the reparations paid by the American authorities to Indians and paid to Japanese-Americans. In addition, German payments to Israel for the Holocaust are constantly recalled in this context. In connection with the latter, African Americans have a number of complaints. Here are some of the most typical examples: only six million Jews were killed in World War II, and Africa lost 100 million people during the transatlantic slave trade; Jews were not exterminated for two decades, and in the United States we were reduced to the status of cattle for centuries; you can go to prison for denying the Holocaust in Europe, and white crimes against Africans in the colonial era - for some reason a controversial issue, etc.

Opponents of paying reparations, firstly, refer to the complicity of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade, and secondly, to the fact that today, as a result of the influx of immigrants and interethnic marriages, there are not so many direct, "pure" descendants of both slave owners and slaves. To this, African Americans respond that they do not demand reparations from all white Americans, but they demand reparations from the US government, which did not provide a decent existence for former slaves during and after Reconstruction (the so-called forty-acre and mule problem), and the implementation of amendments to the US Constitution that established racial equality. Also, reparations are required from banks, insurance companies, other firms and corporations that have been operating since the XVIII-XIX centuries and were somehow involved in the slave trade, from the authorities of cities and states where mass lynchings took place in the past. If attempts to get money from the authorities have not yet been particularly successful, then business structures in whose past meticulous American lawyers find connections with slave owners usually apologize to African-Americans and agree to finance certain cultural, humanitarian and other programs aimed at developing the African-American community [for more information, see: Williams].

An interesting aspect of the formation of the national identity of African Americans is the creation of the image of the "black warrior". In this regard, it is worth quoting the well - known anthropologist Roger Caillois: "A nation is a multitude of people fighting together, and war, in turn, is the highest expression of the nation's will to exist" (Caillois, 2003, p.284). The African-American military performed well in all the wars waged by the US Army, as well as in the War of Independence and in the Civil War. However, the baggage that black warriors took out of all these battles is rather negative. The War of Independence and the Civil War are symbols of unfulfilled expectations for American blacks. And the fate of black soldiers in the US army up to the second half of the twentieth century is racial segregation during service and very likely lynching when returning home from the war. This, despite the fact that the achievements of African-American military personnel occupy a prominent place in the works of most African-American historians, explains the need to create a completely different image of the "black warrior". One way to satisfy it is to promote Nat Turner and other lesser-known black leaders of the armed anti-slavery struggle (for example, runaway slave gangs).

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In the same vein, we should consider the zealous attitude of African Americans to boxing matches involving their blood brothers. Black singer Lena Horne described Joe Louis ' defeat of Nazi Germany's symbol Max Schmeling on June 22, 1935, as follows:: "Joe was the invincible Negro, the one who stood up to the white man and defeated him with his fists... But that night he was just another Negro who got a beating from a white man." Playwright Maya Angelou wrote how the black poor of Arkansas felt the end of the meeting: "It wasn't just some Negro in the ring, it was a knockout of our people. It was another Lynch trial, another Negro hanging from a tree. Another raped woman. A beaten and disfigured black boy. They were hunting dogs that follow the trail of a man running through a muddy swamp. It was a white woman slapping her maidservant for being careless" [Simonovich, 2000, p. 167].

In many myths about the African past, there is a claim that whites were once enslaved by blacks, and it is described how cruelly blacks treated whites [Sosnovsky]. "In the end, critically analyzing the fall of Africa," writes the American researcher M. Karenga, " we can conclude: it did not fall. Individual empires, states, nations, and ethnic groups were colonized. To talk about Africa as if it were a self-aware political entity and not just a geographical entity-a continent that unites different peoples and cultures - is to ignore reality. [ ... ] There was no African government or capital. Africa was a continent in itself, but not self-aware. Only with the rise of pan-Africanism did Africans begin to feel like a community. Disunity was good for Europeans, but if the conquest and colonization took 400 years, this project almost fell apart in less than 70. So we should put the question differently: not why Africa fell, but what factors led to the conquest and colonization of African societies "[Karenga, 1988, p. 67-69].

All these burning questions from the past of their historical ancestral homeland for African Americans inevitably generate interest in African military traditions. On this basis, African-American martial arts appeared. Legends about their origin most often come from the fact that among the slaves imported into the United States, there were many African warriors who, even while in slavery, managed to pass on their knowledge to the next generations. At least it is a historical fact that American slave owners, for their own entertainment, arranged fights between slaves from different plantations. According to legend, this is the origin of the jailhouse rock combat systems - a type of hand-to-hand combat common in our time among African-American prisoners, and kicking and knocking, also practiced by Mississippi blacks. Information about the origin and rules of these combat systems is very sketchy.

There are also a number of more recently introduced styles. Kwa asilia avita sanaa - "based on martial arts" 3 (another name is not shorter - Afrikan kimarehani kutia kivuli ngumi - "African-American boxing"), its creators call it "an attempt to preserve the martial arts of ancient African warriors"; this same system, in addition to the sports and applied component, according to its creators, " can become a source of enlightenment." There is an AKERU training course that involves studying African philosophy, culture, martial arts, African and Afro-Brazilian dances. There is kamu njia - "the silent way", which is a mixture of African dances and martial arts of different peoples of the world. The kiungo nja mkono combat system - "hand link" - often uses blocks and punches with hands close together. By-

3 Hereafter translated from Swahili by A. S. Balezin.

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in addition to the applied meaning, this, according to the interpreters of this system, symbolizes the chained hands of black slaves.

African martial arts were reworked in the African-American systems of Kupigan ngumi ("fist fight") and mshindi wit san ("martial arts winner")in a way that is familiar to modern Westerners [martialtalk.com]. Another similar system involves the use of Egyptian martial traditions that "appeared eight thousand years ago" [combat4u.com]. It should be noted that all these styles are practiced not only by black citizens of the United States. Despite the fact that they were created by African Americans and use elements of fighting styles from various countries, their creators prefer to give them names in African languages.

Apart from this series is the Black Karate Federation, which unites African-Americans engaged in various martial arts. It appeared in the 1960s due to cases of discrimination against blacks among Americans engaged in martial arts. There are very high-level fighters in its ranks. The Black Karate Federation collaborated with the famous actor and martial arts practitioner Bruce Lee. For a while, the media mistakenly referred to it as the "Black Panther Karate Federation." The halls of the Black Karate Federation have often been the objects of intense attention and repression by law enforcement agencies, although the Federation officially opposes mafia groups and extremist ideologies and declares its primary task to promote a healthy lifestyle among African-American youth. The Federation's club colors are red, green, and gold. For a long time there were links to texts by Marcus Garvey on its website (now they have been removed for some reason), as well as a program text that tells us that Africa is the birthplace of martial arts, Africans are among the best warriors on earth, and the roots of boxing are not far away. in Greece, and in Egypt, and the first evidence of the formed combat systems belong to Central Africa [bkfinternational.com].

It seems that an alternative to "black nationalism" for African Americans, who are still mostly at the bottom of the American social hierarchy, could be a left-wing idea with its internationalist pathos, a call for solidarity based on class, social (and not national) interests. However, the national question is also at the forefront of the African-American left. W. Dubois, the largest African-American public figure and scientist who stood on the left-democratic positions, was also a prominent figure of pan-Africanism. Another well-known ideologist of the American black left, the Marxist S. L. R. James, a fighter for black rights in Africa, England, the Caribbean, and the United States, put the interests of blacks no lower than the goals of the world proletarian revolution [for more information, see Grisby, 1987, pp. 305-313]. African-American folk idol Malcolm X, who in recent years before his death stood on socialist positions, comes from the "Nation of Islam". The legendary advocates of the black poor - the "Black Panthers", who ideologically mainly appealed to Mao Zedong and Franz Fanon, perceived the African-American population as an" internal colony of the imperialist United States " and were not against the creation of an African-American state on the territory of one of the states. An earlier example , the African Blood Brotherhood, which, despite its name, was an organization primarily dedicated to protecting the interests of American black workers, eventually joined the Communist Party of the United States (for more information, see Grisby, 1987, pp. 89-94). The title of the program text by Lorenzo Komboa Erwin, formerly a member of the Black Panthers and now a leader of the black leftist organization Black Autonomy, is "Anarchism and the Black Revolution". For him, Peter Kropotkin and Marcus Garvey are representatives of almost the same ideological tradition [Ervin].

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Of course, the African-American left understood the inevitability and necessity of coalitions with the white American left, but they constantly clung to their strictly racial structures, seeing in this a guarantee of the possibility of solving specific African-American problems. Their national orientation also significantly reduced their criticism of the African-American bourgeoisie or, for example, many obviously dictatorial (but independent of whites) African regimes. In cases where the African-American left is forced to criticize any of its fellow races, they often begin to accuse them of imitating whites.

In conclusion, a few words about how the study of African-American images of the African past can be useful for Russian researchers. First, many indigenous peoples of Russia in recent decades have developed a tendency to believe that the current Russian historical science studies history exclusively from the point of view of Russians. Secondly, right now Russian historians are trying to resume regular cooperation with the historical schools of the countries formed after the collapse of the USSR. And most of them perceive their countries as former colonies, and Russia as a former metropolis-a country that used their resources and suppressed their national cultures. But for any researcher who studies American public life, understanding how black Americans view their African past is key to better understanding the many political, cultural, and religious processes initiated by African Americans.

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http://www.bkfinternational.com/history.htm

http://www.combat4u.com/egyptian african.htm

http://www.martialtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t = 12661

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