Mr. Coffee

One wonders whether his father would approve of his son's African life.

"He would recognize the intent of opening opportunity and developing potential, which was very much the focus of his life," says Robinson during an interview on the Mall at his Folklife Festival display.

"He would be perplexed at why that needed to be done 10,000 miles away, in Africa, rural Africa particularly."

Africa imprinted itself on Robinson's consciousness at the age of 14, during his youthful travels there with his mother, Rachel Robinson.

Five years later, he spent nearly a year roaming the continent following the 1971 death of his big brother, Jackie Jr., who had become addicted to heroin while serving in Vietnam and died in an automobile accident, driving David's car.

His death ripped the family's heart. Rachel Robinson, now 82, wrote in her 1996 memoir, "Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait," "In that moment I felt we had gained so much in life and lost it all when we lost our Jackie." (Jackie Sr. would die a year later.)

"When Jackie Jr. was killed, David spent a year walking the east coast of Africa by himself," Rachel Robinson recalls. "That told me something about where he went for comfort and where he went to deal with the grief."

So when he moved there, she was not altogether surprised. But she has worried, she says, that his life there would become a rejection of America.

Robinson says that wasn't the point.

"I wasn't leaving America," he says. "I never left America forever. I wasn't going to sit up on a mountaintop in Africa or a beach in Africa and just chill and stay there. It was always going to be about how black people in America and Africa need each other."

And it was also, for him, a way to recapture the sense of identity that he feels within the African American community. He compares it to trauma, a kind of psychic branding, passed from generation to generation.

Robinson moved to Tanzania 21 years ago, first settling in the capital, Dar es Salaam. Initially, he tried exporting African art. Then he tried the fish trade. Finally he moved into coffee.