Oppression and Resistance in Africa and the Diaspora

Kenneth Kalu, Toyin Falola, Kenneth Kalu, Toyin Falola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367732028
• eBook ISBN: 9780429015144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia africana

Africa's modern history is replete with different forms of encounters and conflicts. From the fifteenth century when millions of Africans were forcefully taken away as slaves during the infamous Atlantic slave trade; to the colonial conquests of the nineteenth century where European countries conquered and subsequently balkanized Africa and shared the continent to European powers; and to the postcolonial era where many African leaders have maintained several instruments of exploitation, the continent has seen different forms of encounters, exploitations and oppressions. These encounters and exploitations have equally been met with resistance in different forms and at different times. The mode of Africa's encounters with the rest of the world have in several ways, shaped and continue to shape the continent's social, political and economic development trajectories. Essays in this volume have addressed different aspects of these phases of encounters and resistance by Africa and the African Diaspora.

While the volume document different phases of oppression and conflict, it also contains some accounts of Africa's resistance to external and internal oppressions and exploitations. From the physical guerilla resistance of the Mau Mau group against British colonial exploitation in Kenya and its aftermath, to efforts of the Kayble group to preserve their language and culture in modern Algeria; and from the innovative ways in which the Tuareg are using guitar and music as forms of expression and resistance, to the modern ways in which contemporary African immigrants in North America are coping with oppressive structures and racism, the chapters in this volume have examined different phases of oppressions and suppressions of Africa and its people, as well as acts of resistance put up by Africans.

1 Emerging African women writing the diaspora

Delphine Fongang

Writing about the diaspora is an artistic endeavor undertaken by emerging postcolonial African writers. The concept of displacement and the construction of identity in far off lands shape the artistic, cultural and literary productions of women writers beyond the continent. Diasporic African women writers reveal how African subjects struggle to adjust to the demands of metropolitan countries, systems of structural inequalities, gender/racial hierarchies and patriarchy that oppress Africans in metropolitan spaces of the West. African migrant subjects must struggle to adapt to the demands of their new cultural environment. Such diasporic encounters are constructed in various artistic genres: from autobiographies, novels, short stories to personal narratives. I will focus on Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah and Noviolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, showing how narratives of living in the diaspora fuel their artistic creations, as African subjects must grapple with the challenges of fully belonging in new spaces of the West.

Background

The writings of emerging African women writers such as Adichie’s Americanah, Noviolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sister Street, Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, among others, represent the third generation of postcolonial African women writers moving away from the often disillusioned representation of women’s lives in first generation women’s writings (like Flora Nwapa’s Efuru) resulting from traditional practices, cultural obedience, acute gender roles, and the unkind hand of patriarchy to capturing other categories of oppression relating to global issues of migration and relocation, gender/racial hierarchies, structural inequalities and patriarchal ideologies, and even professional successes. This shift shows how women’s circumstances in the twenty-first century are shifting and shaped by global interconnected migration that is the result of the movement of subjects, crisscrossing transnational borders and coming in contact with new cultures as they search for better opportunities in far off metropolitan spaces. Therefore, for the new African women writers, such movement and relocation reveal how African migrants struggle for cultural inclusion in new global communities.

African women writing about the diasporic encounter can be traced back to the works of second generation writers like Buchi Emecheta in In the Ditch, Second Class Citizen, Head Above Water, The Family, and Kehinde as well as Ama Ata Aidoo’s Sister Killjoy. Emecheta’s immigrant narratives become the material condition that allows her to reflect on her life as a migrant subject in Britain. Her diasporic encounter forces her to grapple with multilayered systems of oppression (such as patriarchy, racism, gender, classism, sexism, and nationality) that often complicate the identity of diasporic subjects. Emecheta’s intersectional identity shows the fluidity and ever shifting subjectivities of her positionality as a migrant subject who must constantly negotiate the myriad forces of domination as she searches for space and place in the metropolis of the West. Aidoo, on the other hand, focuses on the life of the protagonist Sissie who travels aboard to Germany in search of economic opportunities. Sissie comes to the realization that life in the diaspora is an illusion, exemplified by the frustrations and unrootedness that characterized migrant identity. She laments the cultural isolation of migrant subjects and desires to connect with her roots and homeland. It is evident that Emecheta and Aidoo paved the way for the representation of African subjects in global spaces. Unlike third generation women writers, they see migration as a gendered phenomenon and how gender relations are complicated in transnational spaces.

I will focus on Adichie’s Americanah and Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, and show how their texts exemplify the new direction of African women’s writings. These writers clearly show the shift in the appreciation of African women’s writing that must take into account the internationalization of women’s experiences. I argue that the diaspora becomes the material condition that fuels the artistic creations of emerging African women writers like Adichie and Bulawayo. They use writing to showcase the myriad systems of oppression resulting from race, nationality, ethnicity, gender, class, age, and language that continue to thwart the aspirations of many African migrants. Therefore, their texts testify to the challenges African migrants must grapple with in their search for better opportunities in various metropolises of the West.

Situating diasporic perspectives in emerging African women’s writing

The recent boom of African migrants to the West has become a major subject of discourse in the writings of emerging African women writers. They show that failed economic opportunities and corrupt governments make any attempt at self-definition and empowerment futile for most Africans. Africans have no other option but to involuntarily leave for greener pastures in the West. Immigrants find relative comfort from the fact that with hard work and determination they can earn a living for themselves, even when such opportunities come with unwanted cultural constraints and a sense of “unbelonging” in the host country. Pauline Uwakweh, Jerono Rotich and Comfort Okpala allude to this fact: “the challenge of reconfiguring self and identity implicates the immigrant’s culture, gender, and class as they are reshaped by interaction with new cultures.”¹ African migrants’ way of life and social interactions as customary practices are shattered as they must reinvent themselves in a new community of individual principles, structural inequalities and reconfigured gender roles and relations. Thus, the diasporic encounter complicates African migrant identity, their philosophical beliefs and the desire for cultural inclusion.

As a result of foreign contact, African migrants find themselves in a dilemma; staying true to their way of life back home is not realistically possible, and adjusting to new cultural norms in the diaspora risks alienating them from their tradition and identity. Such ambiguity leads to the development of hybrid, fragmented identities as they attempt to be citizens of both worlds (Africa and the West), which leaves them being neither. African subjects therefore develop transnational identities, which know no fixed national boundaries. Stephen Castles and Mark Miller emphasize this point as they opine that international migration complicates the construction of identity within specific national boundaries as “migrants develop transnational identities which question traditional notions of distinct national belonging.”² Consequently, migrant subjects remain outsiders of two worlds, not fully belonging anywhere. They are constantly at a threshold; searching for a sense of self, and yet, detached and perplexed by circumstances that reinforce their transnational being.

Examining the works of emerging African women writers, it will be an overstatement to suggest that all African migrants do not fully adapt to their new environment, find some level of global success in the diaspora, or even balance the challenges of being a dual citizen. Such success stories are few, but worth mentioning as it represents the untold narrative of the diaspora that has recently been the topic of scholarly debate. Although the diasporic experience might be seen by some as universally pathetic, there are individual stories that reverberate glamorous ways of life and professional successes. Some scholars refer to such African global success as being an Afropolitan, where young women and men in urban and cosmopolitan spaces are striving in various walks of life. They represent the positive outlook on the often gloomy diasporic encounter as they live the global dream of navigating multiple worlds, through travels crisscrossing national borders, successfully interacting with multiple cultures without fear of losing oneself, and above all, being a global citizen, not being restrained by fixed notions of geographically and nationally bound categories of identities. Taiye Selasi in “Bye Bye, Babar” defines such Afropolitans as:

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, 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.³

Selasi’s position reveals that an Afropolitan is a well-travelled African, living on the continent or the diaspora, with glamorous success not just in academics, but also in fashion and lifestyle.

An Afropolitan is an individual fully merged into the consumerist culture of the West; effectively navigating two worlds as a sophisticated hybrid and postmodern subject; enjoying the privileges of being a global citizen, navigating cosmopolitan and urban spaces around the world. It therefore goes without saying that an Afropolitan must be well off, have the ability to travel and be in contact with Western culture and fashion. This reveals an elitist and exclusionary dimension of Afropolitanism because the downtrodden and lower class who are not privileged enough to travel to the West are left out in the definition of this new African identity. The periphery models that have long defined African identity have become inadequate for analyzing global cultural flows, and in which African identity can no longer fit into the neat historical Pan-African uniformity that defined the collective African personality.⁴ Therefore, the collective African identity based on universal oppression as a raced population has given way to an inherent individual identity politics that represent the racialized lives of subjects in metropolitan spaces.

It will be appropriate to therefore say that emerging women writers (such as Adichie, Bulawayo, and Selasi) present Afropolitan migrant subjects who successfully navigate both the West and urban spaces of Africa. Although African subjects might experience challenges initially in the diaspora, they emerge as successful, well-educated global citizens. The loss most often experienced by hybrid subjects has been replaced by a new configuration and consideration of identity contradictions. The ability to live between cultures has become an important way to cope with contradictory identity in geographically vast spaces. Simon Gikandi describes this new kind of Afropolitan identity:

… a [Afropolitanism] way of being African in the world. Afropolitanism may sound awkward as a term, but there is no doubting that it has been prompted by the desire to think of African identities as both rooted in specific local geographies but also transcendental of them. To be Afropolitan is to be connected to knowable African communities, nations, and traditions, but it is also to live a life divided across cultures, languages, and states. It is to embrace and celebrate a state of cultural hybridity – to be of Africa and of other worlds at the same time.⁵

Gikandi reaffirms the notion that an Afropolitan has the ability not only to navigate multiple worlds and cultures, but also to celebrate their hybridity as empowered agents of the world. It is this new identity that emerging African women writers construct in their texts; representing subjects moving away from cultural anxieties and ambiguities towards a recognition and embrace of their multiplicity and plurality as culturally complex subjects.

Whether to the United States or other Western locales, diasporic African women writers construct migration as the agency linking Africans not only to global diasporic spaces, but also to their country of origin. These writers show how African émigrés who have left the continent to pursue their dreams and aspirations abroad cannot shake off the desire to reconnect with their ancestral homeland. Such connection is achieved through physical movement back-and-forth to the homeland or through recreating African traditional and cultural identities in the diaspora. John Arthur emphasizes this unique connection: “When they [African immigrants] arrive in the United States, Africans tend to maintain their unique national identities, continental identities, ethnic, clan, or tribal identities, their linguistic, religious, and class characteristics …”⁶ I share Arthur’s point that Africans in the diaspora do not want to lose touch with who they are in culturally different environments. They cling to their national and linguistic identities as a way to feel at home away from home. Although such reconnections are fulfilling, some African migrants still remain outsiders as they fail to fully integrate themselves in their home communities of origin. Their estranged relationship to the homeland is the result of long lost ties or inability to maintain famil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of content
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Phases of oppression and resistance
• 1. Emerging African women writing the diaspora
• 2. Acts of culture: Similarities between Amílcar Cabral’s Unity and Struggle and Walter Rodney’s The Groundings with my Brothers
• 3. Ali Mazrui’s analytical penchant for the dialectics: Intellectual creativity and the explanatory potency of Mazruiana
• 4. Heroes are usually honored: Hip hop’s revival of Dedan Kimathi
• 5. The lasting cultural impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Spanish Caribbean
• 6. Emerging trajectories in the Niger Delta struggle
• 7. Kabyle resistance and Berber oppression
• 8. From gun to guitar: The performance of Tuareg nationalism
• 9. African reconstruction (or reinvention) in confederate and neo-colonial landscapes of the twenty-first century
• 10. Transcending violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo through art
• 11. Faith-based and African traditional perspectives in conflict transformation and resolution
• 12. African “communal” ritual as a tool for conflict transformation
• Conclusion
• Index