The Diaspora's Role in Africa

Transculturalism, Challenges, and Development

Stella-Monica N. Mpande

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351031646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Africans living in the diaspora have a unique position as potential agents of change in helping to address Africa's political and socioeconomic challenges. In addition to sending financial remittances, their multiple, hybrid identities in and out of geographical and psychocultural spaces allow them to play a role as cultural and political ambassadors to foster social change and sustainable development back in their African homelands. However, this hybrid position is not without challenges, and this book reflects some of the conundrums faced by members of the diaspora as they negotiate their relationships with their home countries.

The author uses her lived experiences and empirical research to ask: are members of the diaspora conduits of Western cultural hegemony at the cost of their traditional preservation and meaningful development in Africa? How does the Western media's portrayal of Africa as the "Dark Continent" in the 21st century influence their decision-making process to invest back home? How could African nations' governments manage their relationships with citizens abroad to motivate them to invest in their home countries? How do some citizen-residents in Africa and African Diaspora communities perceive each other in the context of Africa's development? How could the African Diaspora collaborate with citizen-residents across growth sectors to impact Africa's development? The book hopes to inspire agents of change within the diaspora and features diverse African entrepreneurs' success stories and their experiences of tackling these challenges.

The book will be of interest to aspiring entrepreneurs, researchers across African studies, and the expanding and vibrant field of diaspora research.

Unit 1

DOI: 10.4324/9781351031660-1

This unit introduces the complex dimensions of cultural diasporic identities with focus on the African diaspora. In Chapter 1, I introduce some of the debates surrounding some normative cultural and diasporic identity theories and concepts, as well as illustrating how alternative paradigms such as Southern theory—particularly decoloniality—exemplify a useful approach to exploring African diasporic identities and other complex, transnational experiences of minority ethnic, racial and cultural groups. I argue that alternative paradigms may innovatively integrate transdisciplinary fields, relating to citizenry, nationhood, identity, and socioeconomic, political, and cultural development.

In Chapter 2, I explore how some scholars, philosophers, and African political thought leaders have conceptualized the African identity, or African Personality, and acknowledged its vitality in developing Africa. I draw connections between the African Personality and its relevance for the African diaspora’s role in contributing towards Africa’s development, particularly when applied towards a human development paradigm.

In Chapter 3, I explore how the African diaspora may effectively leverage various forms of cultural capital in their pursuit of development opportunities in their African homeland as a result of their diasporic identities that grant them a laissez-passer between their host countries and African homelands.

1 Diaspora’s identity “crises”

War of the paradigms

DOI: 10.4324/9781351031660-2

Migrations of Africans within and outside of Africa—particularly in the 21st century—have resulted in newly formed communities and newer cultural and political identifications with their new, host countries. Meanwhile, the consequent emergence of multiple and hybrid identities of Africans continue to reconfigure the face and identity of Africa and her descendants. These reconfigurations may impact their ties to Africa and connectivity to issues central to Africa’s development. While buzzword concepts and theories like “multiculturalism,” “interculturalism,” and “superdiversity” have dominated much of the field of global and cultural studies for decades, they have been contested for being prescriptive and failing to articulate the unique, complex transnational experiences of underrepresented, “minority” diasporic ethnic, racial, and cultural groups.

This chapter will introduce some of the debates surrounding some normative cultural and diasporic identity theories and concepts and will offer an alternative theoretical approach towards characterizing African diasporic identities. It is important to identify new alternative paradigms and theories that speak to the unique ontological frameworks and epistemologies of people of African descent. New knowledge systems that support new frameworks, models, research designs, and methods may lead us closer to predicting, explaining, and understanding complex behaviors of diverse ethnic and racial cultural groups of African descent in various contexts, including development.

Triggered by an internal struggle

I will never forget that day in 1995 when on summer vacation in Uganda when a few strangers on the street fondly told me that I look like a “nigger.” I immediately learned that their use of the term “nigger” was equivalent to “nigga,” which I learned that they equated to “Black American.” But why was I taken aback? After all, they had offered me a compliment and form of praise. Someone eventually explained to me: I did not come across as a Ugandan because of my alleged American accent and “look”—despite the fact that I was born in Uganda to Ugandan parents. I realized that some Africans back home did not distinguish between “nigger” and “nigga,” as the term “nigga” had become embraced, acknowledged, and understood as a term of endearment and self-acceptance and a communal identifier by some African-Americans, which was also prevalent and shared amongst masses across media platforms, including music, and TV/ film. For some who appropriated the word and did not acknowledge the history of the term, or who were unaware of the controversial debate of who was permitted to use “nigga” versus “nigger,” it was a term that was supposed to be endearing to me in that context. Why? Because I was an outsider—a foreigner, and specifically an “American”—which apparently carried valuable social capital in that particular locale. In their minds, they complimented me. But I remember thinking in that moment, their casual reference to me as a “nigger” had insulted me—and themselves. And how ironic that my African community had called me a “nigger.”

Fast forward to my freshman year of college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was assigned a “minority” advisor—in addition to the undergraduate “general” advisor. At first, I jokingly concluded that my “minority” label was attributed to my status as a freshman—a label that I believed I would discard by my sophomore year—at latest, my junior year. Hence, I misunderstood the hesitation of my Caucasian suitemates when I suggested they also “adopt” my minority advisor as theirs because she was pretty cool. Finally, a suitemate exasperatedly told me, “Stella-Monica, we can’t have minority advisors. The reason you have a minority advisor is because you’re Black.” And just like that, my “Blackness” hit me like a ton of bricks. In typical Spike Lee film style, an imaginary camera zoomed into my face and I was officially baptized, “Black in America.” Now, don’t get me wrong—I always knew I was Black. But somehow, being Black as it was pronounced for me in America reflected a different texture and shade from what I already knew my Blackness to be in Africa.

And then, a third significant Black pronouncement and self-identification hit me again during my first Masters program. This time an Asian international student tried to compliment me for being “different from most Black people.” She found comfort in that I was “articulate,” “proper,” and “relatable,” and she appreciated feeling that she could “talk to me.” Again, another compliment attempt gone sour.

Over the years, I have come to acknowledge that my identity carried various connotations that required context. Little did I know that every year in America would further enrich my knowledge of my complex identity and present me with diverse shades, hues, and saturations of the terms “Black,” “transculturalism,” and “diaspora” over the next 20 years. I am proudly Black because of the pigment of my skin. I am proudly Black because I share many experiences that accompany the rich history of my skin color with others globally who share the same Black melanin. But which variable I chose to first identify with varied, depending on who I was around. Sometimes I do not identify as “Black” first. I may self-identify first as “African.” For most of my life, I self-identified as “Ugandan-Ivorian.” Honestly, depending on my locale or mood, I would also just identify as being from the last state or city in the USA I lived in, e.g. “New York” or “Los Angeles”—which also spared me lengthy chit chats with inquisitive minds if I was moody! But technically, it was always more accurate to just identify as “foreigner.” Despite having lived in America for 20 years, I only more recently started to self-define as “African/African-American” or “American”—only because I still feel like a foreigner in a country that I have spent the majority of my life in. And I accepted that no matter what country I travel or return to, I will always be a foreigner. But yet, I felt that America was my home. As was anywhere in Africa. And when I travel around the world in Europe, Asia, or South America, I also quickly feel a sense of “home” because there is an immediate nostalgic familiarity in the language, expressions, or culture that mirrored how I grew up and the international networks that are my family. When I meet anyone in the world from any walk in life, we connect quickly—there is a part of “me” I see in their world and they in my world.

Because I am foreigner everywhere, the world is my home anywhere … and Africa is my heart …

The clash of diasporic identity theories

An overview of “classic” diasporic identity theories and concepts

As Africans are further “removed” from their homelands of origin and gravitate towards the diaspora, there is a sense that their African identity becomes more “diluted.” Apparently, their identity becomes increasingly “concentrated” with more other cultural influences. This reinforces the debate that the impact of globalization further results in serious personality and identity crises for the individual and the collective people of a region. These crises, arguably, aggravate the ability for a diasporic African to develop a political, economic, or social consciousness about his or her African home country. In so doing, some admit to or are accused of losing their “African card” or “Black card” and are perceived to be no different from foreigners who have their own personal and business agenda when seeking to contribute towards, or invest in, our African home countries.

Over the past decades, scholars, researchers, policymakers, and political institutions have developed different paradigms, theoretical frameworks, and concepts across different subjects and fields to predict, explain, or understand diasporic identity formations of populations’ migration patterns. Evidently, migrations of Africans within the continent, and especially overseas, have led to newly formed communities and newer cultural and political identifications with our new, host countries. Stuart Hall recognized that globalization has resulted in two contradictory, or competitive, trends: (i) the trend towards assimilation and homogenization of cultures, as well as (ii) the reassertion of identities, e.g., national, ethnic, and religious, that center around localism. Hall also recognized that in the era of globalization, diasporic communication refers increasingly to those of “cultural hybrid identities,” especially as identities become increasingly blurred. Cultural identity regards hybrid identities as the source of diasporic communication, as identities no longer subscribe to Edward Said’s binary divisions of Occidentalism (Western worlds) or Orientalism (Eastern worlds). Shome and Hegde (2002) are amongst the postcolonial scholars who also critique this notion. They argue that the “West–East, North–South divide … does not work as well in contemporary times, in which the lines separating the East from the West, and the North from the South, are increasingly becoming porous under conditions of globalization” (Shome and Hegde, 2002, p. 257). These porous boundaries redefine the geographical spaces and result in newer cultural and hybrid identities (Shome & Hegde, 2002, p. 257). Homi Bhabha also recognized the emergence of a third space—an interstitial space between the first space of the colonized, and the second space of the colonizer. Shome and Hegde (2002) add that fourth, fifth, and additional spaces are just as reasonable as postcolonial migrations further blur points of origin, as newer hybrid identities are further separated from their original homelands.

As newer hybrid identities emerge and form, they require new theoretical frameworks to support their analyses. Hence, different scholars still grapple with identifying the most accurate concepts and theoretical frameworks that optimally describe the nuances of a diaspora member’s cultural identity, nationhood, and citizenship. Cultural identity refers to how someone defines themselves through the different cultural lenses and experiences that have influenced them. Therefore, it should not be shocking that problems may arise when the cultural lenses that a person uses to define themselves or others are questioned. Different ideologies would shape and filter the lenses and experiences through which one identifies another and self-identifies.

The following section presents an overview of some debates and discussions that critically acclaim and highly contest popular theories and concepts of cultural identities. These discussions ground the argument for new, uncharted conceptual frameworks of diaspora identity formations to be explored.

Multiculturalism, interculturalism, transculturalism, and superdiversity: Praise and critiques

Associated with normative theories, multiculturalism and interculturalism continue to undergo historically rooted debates, resulting in no universally agreed definition at present. These terms were originally develo...