Afropolitanism: Reboot

Carli Coetzee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367143152
• eBook ISBN: 9781315458830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection comprises an original and activist group of contributions on that much maligned figure, the Afropolitan. The contributors do not aim to define or fix the term anew; the reboot is, instead, the beginnings of an activist scholarly agenda in which 'the Afropolitan' is reimagined to include the stealthy figure crossing the Mediterranean by boat, and the Somali shopkeeper in a South African township. In their pieces included here, the authors insist on the need to ask questions about the inclusion of such globally mobile Africans in any theorisations of the transnational circuits we call Afropolitan. This collection, from some of the foremost voices on Afropolitanism, invigorates anew the debate, and reboots understandings of who the Afropolitan is, the many places he calls his origin, and the multiple places she comes to call home in the world. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of African Cultural Studies.

Rethinking African culture and identity: the Afropolitan model

Chielozona Eze

Since the end of the Cold War and, in particular, the demise of apartheid in South Africa, there has been a sustained debate about African identity. There seems to be a consensus among scholars of African culture that the conventional notion of African identity that was conceived in opposition to the West is anachronistic. But what then constitutes the new African? Scholars have suggested concepts such as contamination, cultural hybridity, cultural mutt, conviviality, and most recently Afropolitanism, as means to understand the complex modern African identity. This article takes a critical examination of Afropolitanism and argues that it is an enunciation of the ideas of contamination, hybridity, hyperculturality and other postmodernist terms that disrupt essentialist and oppositional notions of African culture and identity. I hope to achieve two things in this article: situate Afropolitanism within a larger philosophical tradition of cosmopolitanism and examine the moral implications of expanding the notion of African identity beyond the oppositional model.

Introduction

In her famous report on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country Of My Skull, Antjie Krog (1998) wrote a moving poem in which she asks, as an Afrikaner, the group most responsible for the crimes of apartheid, if the victims can accept her as an African. She asks for ‘a new skin’. In her mythopoetic narrative, Begging to Be Black (2009), she makes this request even more explicit, arguing for relation rather than opposition, interrelatedness rather than separateness. What exactly does her desire for a new skin imply for our understanding of Africa? Is she committing identity suicide as Max du Preez alleges (2009)? In the same post-apartheid spirit, Thabo Mbeki defined himself as one in whose veins flows African, Asian, and European blood. A few years later, Taiye Selasi, a British-born child of Nigerian and Ghanaian parents, distanced herself from ‘African’ as a tag of identity; she defined herself instead as ‘Afropolitan’. The notions of identity adopted by these and other African writers, authors, and statesmen indicate a subtle but persistent shift in African self-perception. Africa, to be sure, has always been a complex, diverse continent, and Africans have never shared an undifferentiated identity even though the West has sought to impose one on them. It is, however, a welcome development that black Africans increasingly define themselves no longer in opposition to the people of European ancestry, and that the people of European ancestry in Africa – Antjie Krog for one – see themselves as Africans. This shift in self-perceptions is evidently part of the post-Cold War global development in identity construction owing to cultural and economic consequences of globalization. Identity is no longer shaped exclusively by geography or blood, or culture understood in oppositional terms. On the contrary, identity is now relational.

In the recent past, literary works such as Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flame (2007), Taiye Selasi’s (2013) Ghana Must Go and NoViolet Bulawayo’s (2013) We Need New Names, among others, reveal changes in self-perception within Africa and among peoples of African ancestry outside of Africa. In interviews or memoirs, these writers employ their background to call for a re-examination of the notion of African identity. Their narratives show an intermeshing of relationships across ethnic, religious, and racial lines, thus blurring cheap dichotomous categorizations of persons. Unlike in the age of Achebe, the age that produced Things Fall Apart, it is no longer strange to find within Igbo, Yoruba, Zulu, or Shona families persons of European and Asian ancestry. Quite the contrary, many African families are now increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-racial, transcultural; they are now polychromatic. They live in Lagos, Johannesburg, Berlin, New York, Hong Kong … They are African, or Afri-hyphenated, and because their identities are constituted by relation rather than opposition, they present good examples of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s concept of ‘elective affinities’ – (Wahlverwandtschaften) – contributing in complex ways to the fluid definition of ‘African’ in the twenty-first century. In short, African identities, like in most other parts of the world, are now shaped by elective affinities due to cultural and racial intermixing. It is a welcome development that more Africans are acknowledging this fact; they are questioning what it means to be African. To be sure, challenging the operational definition of Africa does not imply rejecting the continent or even the concept; it means calling for a new, more nuanced understanding of identity.

But the intermixing of ethnicities and races, or elective affinities, is just the most obvious form of the negation of the oppositional, rigid identity construction in Africa. Globalization has shrunk the world to the size of one’s palms in the forms of cell phones or iPads. It is now possible to experience in most African villages lifestyles hitherto unknown to them thanks to these modern means of mass communication. As Byung-Chul Han (2005) has argued, reality is now hyperlinked and therefore hypercultural. Culture is delocalized. And so is identity. But does this mean that in matters of culture and identity anything goes? Does this imply that there is no longer anything recognizable, or even stable in persons? A quick answer to this doubt, I think, lies in the claim to be African. To claim to be something is to admit that there is something that could be recognized at a certain point in time. What then is that? Is it something immutable, exclusive, or inclusive? What does it mean to be African? In order to examine the complex nature of African identity in a somewhat dialectical form, I will first sketch a conventional notion of African identity. Second, I will explore concepts that ostensibly oppose this initial. Finally, I will take a critical examination of Afropolitanism, highlight its weakness, and suggest its moral potential by situating it within a larger philosophical tradition of cosmopolitanism.

African culture and the oppositional model of identity

For those of us who grew up in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, and who loved Bob Marley’s and Peter Tosh’s songs, there was no escaping the Afrocentric ideology of their lyrics. We all sang with Bob Marley, ‘Africa unite/Cause we’re moving right out of Babylon’, and with Peter Tosh, ‘Don’t care where you come from/As long as you’re a black man, you’re an African/No mind your nationality/You have got the identity of an African.’ We used Marcus Garvey’s nativist slogan, ‘Africa for Africans’, to underscore our pan-African sentiments. Back then, to be truly African was to abjure any obvious cultural identification with the West, which for us embodied oppression against Africans; in contrast, we were trying to imagine a common identity for all people with dark skins.

The idea of Africans being united by a common cause or self-understanding, of course, goes as far back as the mid-nineteenth century when scholars like Alexander Crummell and Edward Wilmot Blyden felt the necessity to conceive of a common African culture and identity in order to combat the racist philosophies of their time (Appiah, 1992; Mudimbe, 1988, 1994). The African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois revived the idea on a larger political stage when he convened the first Pan African Congress in 1919, in Paris (Adeleke, 1998, 505–536). Resistance against the colonizer and what he stood for was a necessary stage in African liberation.

V.Y. Mudimbe (1988) has argued that Africa is an invention of the West, and Kandiatu Kanneh (1998) has demonstrated that Africa has been reinvented by peoples of African descent. On the African continent, writers and poets such as Leopold Sedar Senghor and Chinua Achebe have greatly contributed to the reinvention of Africa. Simon Gikandi has argued that Achebe invented the postcolonial African culture, which is to say, African culture as discoursed in the institutions of high learning (2001, 3–8). The postcolonial African culture, from an Achebean perspective, is understood as challenging the colonial narrative about Africa and reasserting the true African identity. Gikandi’s idea is supported by Abiola Irele’s observation that Things Fall Apart gave form to ‘the sense of new beginnings registered’ by writers such as Camara Laye and Amos Tutuola, among others (2001, 2). Achebe (2000) has said that he conceived Things Fall Apart as a response to the racist images of Africa in Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad. In his essay, ‘An Image of Africa: racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ (Achebe 1990), he made his attack of Western misrepresentation of the African image more explicit. In an interview granted to Kwame Anthony Appiah, he explained his understanding of African identity thus:

It is, of course true that the African identity is still in the making. There isn’t a final identity that is African. But, at the same time, there is an identity coming into existence. And it has a certain context and a certain meaning. If somebody meets me, say, in a shop in Cambridge [England], he says ‘Are you African?’ Which means that Africa means something to some people. Each of these tags has a meaning, and a penalty and a responsibility. All these tags, unfortunately for the black man, are tags of disability … I think it is part of the writer’s role to encourage the creation of an African identity. (1992, 73–74)

Achebe’s primordialist self-identification as a black man in Cambridge is rooted in the history of Africans being perceived as the ultimate Other in the European imagination (Eze 1997; Mills 1998). Africa is a product of the Western political and philosophical imagination. But that product, Achebe argues, is flawed. He saw himself supplying a supposedly authentic African identity, which is understandably a contrast to what the European has constructed.

I bring a sympathetic understanding to the efforts of earlier generations of African and African diaspora thinkers who had to fight their overwhelmingly racist world. Thus their recourse to nativist, relativist, and autochthonous arguments were employed as a means to fight erasure. I understand that nativism has a political relevance as a stage in the liberatory process of a people. Marcus Garvey’s ‘Africa for Africans’, considered to be the theoretical source of African nationalism, was expedient at the time it was propounded. The issue with this ideology, however, is that it does not have within it the means to extend the vision of the world beyond the essentialist enclave of African pristine villages. In most African countries there have been local or tribal versions of ‘Africa for Africans’. I think of the many instances of genocide and ethnic cleansing that have taken place after independence in many African countries. But even in our times, the attraction of African nativism for Africans remains strong because it is inextricably linked to heroic sacrifices for African liberation, democracy, and anti-colonial movements. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni has discussed the attraction and dangers of nationalist and nativist movements in Zimbabwe and South Africa; he drew attention to the origins and teleology of the ideology of African nationalism (2009, 61–78). One of the greatest challenges facing African societies is how to go beyond the vestiges of relativism associated with the anticolonial struggles and which have become embedded in parochial ethnic and tribal loyalties. The challenge is to weave a more universal solidarity that can accord individuals anywhere in Africa their rights and dignities regardless of their gender or ancestry.

Much has happened in the world since the conception of Africanness by Achebe and Peter Tosh: The Berlin Wall has fallen; rigid cultural and ideological boundaries between the first, second, and third worlds have been questioned; apartheid is legally defunct. There is an increased movement of people, goods, and ideas between nations. As Anthony Giddens suggests, we now live in a runaway world. By runaway world he means that the world grows smaller every day due to changes brought about by the forces of globalization. These changes affect our culture, our traditions, our families, and our politics. We literally ‘live in one world’ (2003, 7).

I do not ignore the fact that as much as globalization has shrunk the world it has also increased the gap between the haves and the have-nots. In many instances, it has indirectly encouraged fundamentalist thinking and behaviour as people seek to protect their cultural heritage that is at the risk of being destroyed by external influences. In her book, Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid, Carli Coetzee argues that apartheid is not truly dead in South Africa, and urges an awareness of how its legacies continue to impact people’s lives in ways that are as inimical as apartheid (2013, x).

These, however, do not negate the fact that there has been a profound change in the ways we understand the culture, identity, and citizenship of countries. It would be a mistake to think that there is no difference, in self-reading, between the men of my father’s (or Achebe’s) generation, who never left their African villages and their grandchildren, some of whom were born in Lagos or Cape Town, but who still identify with their ancestral villages elsewhere. This drastic change is even captured in Things Fall Apart, when Nwoye defected from tradition towards the new way of life. While there may not be biological differences between these generations (Okonkwo and Nwoye’s generations for example), the same cannot be said of their cultures and worldviews, or even moral topographies.

African culture and the relational model of identity

Jean and John Comaroff observe that the global south is rarely seen as a source of theory and explanation for world historical events; they argue that the enormous historical transformations taking place there provide unique opportunities to theorize about our world. ‘In the face of the structural violence perpetrated in the name of neoliberalism, as this suggests, the global south is producing and exporting some ingenious, highly imaginative modes of survival – and more’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 18). By imaginative modes of survival, the Comaroffs are r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Rethinking African culture and identity: the Afropolitan model
• 2. Cosmopolitanism with African roots: Afropolitanism’s ambivalent mobilities
• 3. The politics of Afropolitanism
• 4. Afropolitanism as critical consciousness: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s and Teju Cole’s internet presence
• 5. Exorcising the future: Afropolitanism’s spectral origins
• 6. ‘Why I am (still) not an Afropolitan’
• 7. Part-Time Africans, Europolitans and ‘Africa lite’
• 8. ‘We, Afropolitans’
• 9. Being-in-the-world: the Afropolitan Moroccan author’s worldview in the new millennium
• 10. Naija boy remix: Afroexploitation and the new media creative economies of cosmopolitan African youth
• Index