The 2008 documentary film, “Blacks Without Borders: Chasing the American Dream on Foreign Soil,” tells the story of a group of African-American professionals who immigrate to South Africa right after the end of legal Apartheid. You can now watch the full film on YouTube.  Anyway, when the film first came out, I was asked to review it. This is what I wrote then. Despite its faults, the film is a useful entry in the debate about “return to Africa,” about the relationships of Africans and African Americans, the politics of the Black Atlantic, and broader pan-African consciousness.

This film, made by the husband and wife team directorial team of Stafford U. Bailey and Judy Thayer-Bailey, follows twelve African-American entrepreneurs who decided to settle in South Africa in the early 1990s. The tone is upbeat, and the film’s subjects all have similar-sounding stories.

Cora Vaughn is an attorney from Chicago who started a guesthouse (“bed and breakfast”) in Houghton, a few blocks away from now-retired President Nelson Mandela’s house. There is also Charles Henderson, who grew up poor in Harlem and was briefly a drug addict. He later graduated from Harvard University and now runs a company that provides “services in leadership, emotional intelligence, and customer service” to South Africans. Henderson’s businesses include a counseling service for victims of human rights abuses under the apartheid regime. James Prevost, a promoter and real estate developer, is the youngest of the group. He first traveled to South Africa in 1995 when then-Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell visited the country with a business delegation of African Americans. Prevost later returned to Johannesburg, opening a nightclub and a booking agency for local and visiting comedians, mainly African-American ones. For Prevost, business has gone up by 2,000% in four years. Now, he is buying up dilapidated buildings in Johannesburg’s abandoned downtown: “Here in Africa, everything is possible,” Prevost tells the filmmakers. Others are Karen Vundla, who with her South African husband owns one of the country’s biggest television production companies, and Eugene Robinson, a former Atlanta-based entrepreneur whose individual investments in South Africa total $30 million — in dairy farming, real estate development, and telecommunications.  Jose Bright is a soft-spoken, middle-aged former aide to the mayor of Washington, D.C., who served as liaison for South African trade missions to the US capital. He eventually moved to South Africa, where he started a non-governmental organization, Teboho’s Trust, working with young people in Soweto (average income R1,000 or about $100 per month) to help them prepare for college.

The film’s main subjects briefly mention the high divorce rate among their group, but it appears the filmmakers did not want to explore this, rather choosing to engage with positive topics. Some among them marvel at how relatively inexpensive things are in South Africa; Hamilton, for example, paid cash for his suburban house (“If I am going to live in Africa, I am not going to live in the projects”).

Cora Vaughn estimates that her $300,000 guesthouse would have cost her at least $3 million in Chicago. Occasionally, the group strikes a discordant note. Darrel West, who owns a brokerage, talks about how he had to “deal” with the fact that employees’ rights are protected. In contrast, Jarman Hollard, a key player in the private health insurance business in South Africa (only 7 million South Africans have some health insurance) proclaims: “I’m a capitalist. I am truly here to make … business.”

Not everyone keeps an eye on the bottom line only.

Jose Bright’s story is the first time the film’s narrative ventures into the townships, giving glimpses into the racial and class inequalities. Otherwise, the film spends most of its time in Johannesburg’s wealthier suburbs and corporate offices, where its subjects are more at home.

“Blacks without Borders” gives little sense of the historical contexts of African-American immigration to South Africa in relation to the longer history of African-Americans’ settlement in Africa and that group’s relation to modern South African history.

In 1859, two free descendants of African slaves brought to the Americas—Robert Campbell, a chemist from Jamaica, and Martin Delaney, a medical doctor from the United States—traveled to Nigeria to investigate possibilities of settling in Africa. Their trip included signing agreements with Yoruba authorities to settle African Americans in exchange for using their skills as tradesmen and entrepreneurs for the betterment of their new host countries. Both men returned to the Americas, but Campbell later returned and settled in Lagos with his family in 1862. He established one of the British colony’s first black-owned newspapers.

Though freed slaves established the West African country of Liberia in 1822 and settled in Sierra Leone in the mid-19th century, Campbell and Delaney were the first to popularize returning to Africa among black Americans. Later, Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement garnered a solid following among urban black Americans during the first half of the twentieth century.

It was only in the late 1950s, however, with the advent of political independence for many sub-Saharan African countries, that emigrating to Africa became an attractive (and feasible) option for large numbers of African Americans tired of American racial segregation. In 1957, when the Gold Coast attained its independence, Kwame Nkrumah—who had a long association with American blacks and studied outside Philadelphia—invited African Americans to come and live in the newly independent Ghana. Many of these—including Maya Angelou and Shirley Du Bois, who started Ghana’s television service—would perform key roles in Ghana’s new government, business classes, and civil society.

However, as early romantic enthusiasm for independence tapered off (Nkrumah, for one, was removed by a military coup in 1966), many of these immigrants returned to the United States or moved elsewhere in the world.

By the mid-1970s, only a few scattered committed individuals—former Black Panthers in Tanzania, Kwame Toure in Guinea, development workers, and academics scattered over Southern African frontline states—remained. Despite persistent racism and inequality, blacks in the United States were making some headway in political and economic life. Several blacks were elected to public office, and private entities were under pressure to hire more minorities. For most Americans—in its media at least—the continent was increasingly associated with political and economic crises. African Americans were not exempt. Not surprisingly, by 1997, black journalist Keith Richburg, who had worked as a foreign correspondent covering civil wars in Somalia and Rwanda in the early 1990s, wrote in his memoir: “Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers, and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose into the images of the rotting flesh.” Richburg added that he was happy that his ancestors had escaped Africa, even through slavery.

One country, however, is sustained in the African-American imagination: South Africa. African-Americans had played some role in that country’s history since the mid-nineteenth century, especially in educating some of its nationalist leadership (among others, ANC leader John Dube, who studied at Oberlin College, Charlotte Maxeke, who started the ANC Women’s League and was educated at Wilberforce College, also in Ohio, and Alfred B. Xuma, educated at Tuskegee, the University of Minnesota, and Northwestern). African-American missionaries started one of the largest black independent churches in South Africa, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Later, when the ANC was outlawed in South Africa, African Americans were some of the early and most vocal supporters of the South African struggle (while mainstream US opinion sided mainly with the apartheid regime until the 1980s). The mid-twentieth-century South African system of apartheid mirrored the US Jim Crow system of racial violence and racial discrimination. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X both singled out apartheid for criticism.

In 1990, when Nelson Mandela, the symbol of the South African freedom struggle, was freed after 27 years in prison, he immediately traveled to the United States. Visiting eight cities in 11 days and addressing the US Congress as the first African and only the third private citizen to do so, Mandela helped cement Americans’ popular associations with South Africa. Port Elizabeth-born academic Rob Nixon described this at the time as South Africa’s “idiom and psychology of redemptive politics”: deliverance from bondage, divine election, promised lands, and the destiny of humanity. South Africa’s transition resonated with African-Americans; some began to look to South Africa as an emigration option.

Blacks without Borders feels, at times, like an infomercial for an immigration firm. It shows, for example, some group members taking the director on “tours” of their houses in a way that reminds them of the popular US television show, “MTV Cribs.” The filmmakers hint at the tensions between the African-American immigrants and black South Africans, but the film glosses over this. In a brief scene where African Americans and black South Africans discussed “misunderstandings,” African Americans are said to be “arrogant.”

There is also evidence of competition for business between the two groups: South Africans and Americans. There is little mention, either, of the toxic xenophobia of South Africans, especially towards black immigrants, or of what this means for African Americans in South Africa. In February 2008, such xenophobia resulted in widespread violence: 42 African immigrants and refugees were killed, and thousands were left homeless by black South African demonstrators. In the filmmakers’ defense, Blacks Without Borders was completed before the violence broke out, and some may argue that African Americans are not subject to the same anomie reserved for continental black Africans. That should be enough reason for the film to explore these relationships. Other flaws include the fact that, to illustrate the history of apartheid, the filmmakers present footage of Australian Aboriginals or Polynesians to stand in for nineteenth-century black South Africans. At the same time, images of Cape Town are used to represent Johannesburg.