Excellent article
Bye-Bye Barbar
by Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu
It's moments to midnight on Thursday night at Medicine Bar in London.
Zak, boy-genius DJ, is spinning a Fela Kuti remix. The little downstairs
dancefloor swells with smiling, sweating men and women fusing hip-hop
dance moves with a funky sort of djembe. The women show off enormous
afros, tiny t-shirts, gaps in teeth; the men those incredible torsos
unique to and common on African coastlines. The whole scene speaks of
the Cultural Hybrid: kente cloth worn over low-waisted jeans; 'African
Lady' over Ludacris bass lines; London meets Lagos meets Durban meets Dakar.
Even the DJ is an ethnic fusion: Nigerian and Romanian; fair, fearless
leader; bobbing his head as the crowd reacts to a sample of 'Sweet
Mother'.
Were you to ask any of these beautiful, brown-skinned people that basic
question - 'where are you from?' - you'd get no single answer from a
single smiling dancer. This one lives in London but was raised in
Toronto and born in Accra; that one works in Lagos but grew up in Houston,
Texas.
'Home' for this lot is many things: where their parents are from; where
they go for vacation; where they went to school; where they see old
friends; where they live (or live this year). Like so many African
young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no
single geography, but feel at home in many.
They (read: we) are Afropolitans - the newest generation of African
emigrants, coming soon or collected already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz
lounge near you. You'll know us by our funny blend of London fashion,
New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes. Some of us are
ethnic mixes, e.g. Ghanaian and Canadian, Nigerian and Swiss; others merely
cultural mutts: American accent, European affect, African ethos. Most
of us are multilingual: in addition to English and a Romantic or two, we
understand some indigenous tongue and speak a few urban vernaculars.
There is at least one place on The African Continent to which we tie our
sense of self: be it a nation-state (Ethiopia), a city (Ibadan), or an
auntie's kitchen. Then there's the G8 city or two (or three) that we know like
the backs of our hands, and the various institutions that know us for our
famed focus. We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the
world.
It isn't hard to trace our genealogy. Starting in the 60's, the young,
gifted and broke left Africa in pursuit of higher education and
happiness abroad. A study conducted in 1999 estimated that between 1960 and 1975
around 27,000 highly skilled Africans left the Continent for the West.
Between 1975 and 1984, the number shot to 40,000 and then doubled again
by 1987, representing about 30% of Africa's highly skilled manpower.
Unsurprisingly, the most popular destinations for these emigrants
included Canada, Britain, and the United States; but Cold War politics produced
unlikely scholarship opportunities in Eastern Bloc countries like
Poland, as well.
Some three decades later this scattered tribe of pharmacists,
physicists, physicians (and the odd polygamist) has set up camp around the globe.
The caricatures are familiar. The Nigerian physics professor with
faux-Coogi sweater; the Kenyan marathonist with long legs and rolled r's; the
heavyset Gambian braiding hair in a house that smells of burnt
Kanekalon.
Even those unacquainted with synthetic extensions can conjure an image
of the African immigrant with only the slightest of pop culture
promptings: Eddie Murphy's 'Hello, Barbar.' But somewhere between the 1988 release
of Coming to America and the 2001 crowning of a Nigerian Miss World, the
general image of young Africans in the West transmorphed from goofy to
gorgeous. Leaving off the painful question of cultural condescenscion
in that beloved film, one wonders what happened in the years between
Prince Akeem and Queen Agbani?
One answer is: adolescence. The Africans that left Africa between 1960
and 1975 had children, and most overseas. Some of us were bred on African
shores then shipped to the West for higher education; others born in
much colder climates and sent home for cultural re-indoctrination. Either
way, we spent the 80's chasing after accolades, eating fufu at family
parties, and listening to adults argue politics. By the turn of the century (the
recent one), we were matching our parents in number of degrees, and/or
achieving things our 'people' in the grand sense only dreamed of. This
new demographic - dispersed across Brixton, Bethesda, Boston, Berlin - has
come of age in the 21st century, redefining what it means to be
African.
Where our parents sought safety in traditional professions like
doctoring, lawyering, banking, engineering, we are branching into fields like
media, politics, music, venture capital, design. Nor are we shy about
expressing our African influences (such as they are) in our work. Artists such as
Keziah Jones, Trace founder and editor Claude Gruzintsky, architect
David Adjaye, novelist Chimamanda Achidie - all exemplify what Gruzintsky
calls the '21st century African.'
What distinguishes this lot and its like (in the West and at home) is a
willingness to complicate Africa - namely, to engage with, critique,
and celebrate the parts of Africa that mean most to them. Perhaps what most
typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is the refusal to oversimplify;
the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to
honor what is wonderful, unique. Rather than essentialising the
geographical entity, we seek to comprehend the cultural complexity; to
honor the intellectual and spiritual legacy; and to sustain our
parents' cultures.
For us, being African must mean something. The media's portrayals (war,
hunger) won't do. Neither will the New World trope of bumbling,
blue-black doctor. Most of us grew up aware of 'being from' a blighted place, of
having last names from countries which are linked to lack,
corruption.
Few of us escaped those nasty 'booty-scratcher' epithets, and fewer
still that sense of shame when visting paternal villages. Whether we were
ashamed of ourselves for not knowing more about our parents' culture,
or ashamed of that culture for not being more 'advanced' can be unclear.
What is manifest is the extent to which the modern adolescent African is
tasked to forge a sense of self from wildly disparate sources. You'd never
know it looking at those dapper lawyers in global firms, but most were once
supremely self-conscious of being so 'in between'. Brown-skinned
without a bedrock sense of 'blackness,' on the one hand; and often teased by
African family members for 'acting white' on the other - the baby-Afropolitan
can get what I call 'lost in transnation'.
Ultimately, the Afropolitan must form an identity along at least three
dimensions: national, racial, cultural - with subtle tensions in
between.
While our parents can claim one country as home, we must define our
relationship to the places we live; how British or American we are (or
act) is in part a matter of affect. Often unconsciously, and over time,
we choose which bits of a national identity (from passport to
pronunciation) we internalize as central to our personalities. So, too, the way we see
our race - whether black or biracial or none of the above - is a
question of politics, rather than pigment; not all of us claim to be black.
Often this relates to the way we were raised, whether proximate to other
brown people (e.g. black Americans) or removed. Finally, how we conceive of
race will accord with where we locate ourselves in the history that produced
'blackness' and the political processes that continue to shape it.
Then there is that deep abyss of Culture, ill-defined at best. One must
decide what comprises 'African culture' beyond pepper soup and filial
piety. The project can be utterly baffling - whether one lives in an
African country or not. But the process is enriching, in that it
expands one's basic perspective on nation and selfhood. If nothing else, the
Afropolitan knows that nothing is neatly black or white; that to 'be'
anything is a matter of being sure of who you are uniquely. To 'be'
Nigerian is to belong to a passionate nation; to be Yoruba, to be heir
to a spiritual depth; to be American, to ascribe to a cultural breadth; to
be British, to pass customs quickly. That is, this is what it means for me
-
and that is the Afropolitan privilege. The acceptance of complexity
common to most African cultures is not lost on her prodigals. Without that
intrinsically multi-dimensional thinking, we could not make sense of
ourselves.
And if it all sounds a little self-congratulatory, a little
'aren't-we-the-coolest-damn-people-on-earth?' - I say: yes it is,
necessarily. It is high time the African stood up. There is nothing
perfect in this formulation; for all our Adjayes and Achidies, there is
a brain drain back home. Most Afropolitans could serve Africa better in
Africa than at Medicine Bar on Thursdays. To be fair, a fair number of
African professionals are returning; and there is consciousness among
the ones who remain, an acute awareness among this brood of
too-cool-for-schools that there's work to be done. There are those
among us who wonder to the point of weeping: where next, Africa? When will
the scattered tribes return? When will the talent repatriate? What
lifestyles await young professionals at home? How to invest in Africa's future?
The prospects can seem grim at times. The answers aren't forthcoming. But
if there was ever a group who could figure it out, it is this one,
unafraid of the questions.
Posted in LIP#5 Africa, Features on 3rd March 2005
