Afropolitan Projects

Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra

Anima Adjepong

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469665207
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Black Studies

Beyond simplistic binaries of "the dark continent" or "Africa Rising, " Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects--cultural, political, and aesthetic expressions of global belonging rooted in African ideals. This ethnographic study examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong's focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives.

CHAPTER ONE

Afropolitan Mentality in Houston

It was a hot Saturday afternoon in late July 2014, and I was headed to a wedding at one of the more than fifteen Ghanaian churches in Houston: Gloryland Assembly of God. Situated in sprawling and ethnically diverse Southwest Houston, the church’s location reflects the neighborhood’s diversity and the communities it makes possible. Shop signs in Spanish and English advertised Thai, Indian, African, and Chinese restaurants, tailors, grocery stores, law firms, and places of worship. According to the 2010 census, the majority of the neighborhood’s one hundred thousand residents are people of color, primarily Latinx, Black, and Asian. Located in a strip mall, Gloryland shares space with a wide range of establishments, including a Vietnamese restaurant, a taco shop, a fast-food burger restaurant, and even a Philippine Baptist church. The wedding invitation was one of several unsolicited invitations I received to partake in various community events. These invitations permitted me to become part of the community and learn about the cultural projects they engaged in to articulate themselves as Ghanaians, Africans, Americans, and middle-class Black people.

My early arrival at the church gave me a chance to chat with Kofi, one of the few people setting up the space. “Are you Ghanaian?” he asked me and seemed surprised by my affirmative response. After introducing himself, Kofi told me that because of my dreadlocks, he assumed I was from the Caribbean. In subsequent conversations, I would learn that Kofi was born in Côte d’Ivoire and identified as an Akan, an Ivorian, and an African. As more people arrived at the church, they greeted one another in Twi or occasionally Ga, the primary language spoken in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana.¹ However, I noticed people greeting the woman who had taken over the role of handing out wedding programs in English. I found the use of English in this context surprising, given that it was only directed toward this woman. Later on, when we had the chance to speak, she told me she was from Liberia. “Liberia is in West Africa,” she added, in case I was unfamiliar with African geography. Like Kofi, this woman had identified me as neither Ghanaian nor African and, as such, did not expect me to know where her country was.

How Kofi and the Liberian woman reacted to my presence reveals some of the ways that individuals in the community police its boundaries and engage those they perceive as not belonging. These modes of engagement are heteronormative, racialized, and classed, and they manifest through individual and collective projects. Through such interactions, community members reproduce the community’s boundaries of belonging as limited to model Black immigrants who are knowledgeable about geography beyond U.S. boundaries, wear their hair respectably (i.e., not in dreadlocks), pursue higher education, attend church, and are economically self-reliant.

In this chapter, I introduce the Ghanaian community in Houston, Texas, and show how the community’s Afropolitan mentality—with its emphasis on connection to some place on the African continent, pursuit of individual and collective uplift, and rejection of African victimhood—shapes its cultural politics. Communities are produced through competing discourses that structure daily interactions. Within our communities, we inherit cultures and produce them anew in our interactions with others. But communities do not just appear out of nowhere; they are a product of conscientious effort, longing, and imagination. Consequently, a community’s dominant narratives encourage conformity and reproduce normative ideas about collective and individual aspirations. Put another way, community discourses constitute a cultural project in themselves that not only orients those within the community’s boundaries but also seeks to inform others of who the community is. The Afropolitan mentality of the Houston Ghanaian community helped fashion an identity that celebrated Ghanaian cultural traditions, postcolonial African and U.S. American values rooted in Christianity, neoliberal capitalism, transnational aid, and discursive celebration of diversity.

I begin by introducing Houston as an African city. The diversity of African nationals in the Ghanaian community in Houston is not unlike other African cities on the continent. After all, most Africans migrate within the continent.² At the wedding, guests came from Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Ghana. When I call Houston an African city, I am locating it not as an ethnic enclave but as an African city in its own right. The presence of African immigrants in the city facilitates an Afropolitan mentality that engages with other diverse Africans and citizens of the world. Next, I narrate the formation of the Houston Ghanaian community, attending to how a privileged core of highly educated, white-collar Ghanaians, mostly men, built the apparatus of immigrant associations that organize the community today. I show how immigrant association events are organized through an Afropolitan mentality that emphasizes the community’s class, gender, and sexual politics, as well as its investment in helping other Ghanaians and Africans attain higher standards of living.

Houston, an African City

The large majority of Africans in the United States live in the U.S. South and Northeast, specifically in Texas and New York.³ After New York, Texas is home to the largest African-born population in the United States. Yet the South remains marginalized as an important geographic location for understanding African immigrant identities and cultural politics. Texas Africans live primarily in the Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth areas. A small number also live in other large Texas cities, such as Austin and San Antonio.⁴ Houston is home to the largest immigrant population in the state of Texas. According to the 2010 census, Houston has nearly twice as many foreign-born residents as the entire state of Texas (30% vs. 16%). Additionally, Houston’s African-born residents account for 4 percent of the total population, the same ratio as in the United States more generally. West Africans are the largest African population in Houston, consisting mostly of Nigerians. After Nigerians (~10,000) are Ethiopians (~2,500), Ghanaians (~1,050), and Kenyans (~1,030).

Houston’s demographics make the city an ideal site for understanding the processes that shape how African communities are taking part in the social, political, and economic projects of a diverse American city and participating in global cultures. Furthermore, its location as a diverse, immigrant-rich South/Southwest U.S. city allows for a place-based analysis that takes into account how local arrangements inform immigrants’ sense of national belonging. Living in Houston shapes how Africans see their relationship not only with the city but also with the United States and the world. It is important and useful to understand Houston as an African city. To be clear, I am not referring to an ethnic enclave, which is an area with a high concentration of people from one ethnicity or race. Chinatowns or Little Italys in the United States are examples of ethnic enclaves. When I refer to Houston as an African city, I am arguing that Houston is an African city in its own right.

On several occasions during my time in Houston, someone would refer to the city as “Little Lagos,” explaining that Nigerians run “this town.” By this comment, my interlocutors were referring to the visible presence of Nigerians in this southern U.S. city. When I asked why folks thought so many Nigerians lived in Houston, the response usually referred to the city’s oil and gas industries. Houston has a major trade with Nigeria for oil. In 2015, mayor Sylvester Turner reported that the annual trade between Houston’s and Nigeria’s oil industry reached $15 billion, up from under $2.5 billion in 2014.⁵ This trade relationship in part explained why United Airlines scheduled daily direct flights from Houston to Lagos in 2011, making it one of only two U.S. airlines to fly directly from the United States to any African city at the time.⁶ United canceled these direct flights in late June 2016, citing weakness in the energy sector. Despite the turbulent oil industry, Houston remains a hub for business with Nigeria, inspiring investment forums and partnerships with organizations in the oil and gas industries as well as those peripheral to them. Likewise, Nollywood—Nigeria’s film industry—frequently features Houston as an extension of Nigeria, recognizing the intimate ties the city has to the national imagination. The cultural and economic ties between Houston and Nigeria help make sense of the name Little Lagos.

Houston’s relatively large African population is a site where Afropolitan mentality and identity coheres because it is an urban city in which many interlocutors told me they felt they could be “African.” Although Ghanaians, most people described themselves to me as African. Being African meant different things to different people. For some, it was because they grew up on the continent doing things that they identified as being African. For example, Lisa—a doctor who had lived in Houston for twenty years—identified growing up with a broad definition of family that included far-flung relatives; living in a compound house with her aunts, uncles, and cousins; and attending three-day-long funeral celebrations as things that made her African. For someone like Lisa, a woman in her mid-fifties who was born and raised in Ghana, being African constituted particular experiences that she imagined others from the continent shared. By contrast, for those who had been born or had grown up in the United States, being African was a different set of experiences—eating foods they identified as African at home, speaking in a Ghanaian language, having parents with so-called African accents, and generally having some cultural identity besides being American. These were experiences they shared with other Black immigrants from the continent, and in Houston, their visibility in the city augmented feelings of being Africans of the world.

When I call Houston an African city, I am also referring to the way the city allows for a kind of hybridity—the opportunity to be both African and American. For example, Cindy, a twenty-nine-year-old marketing manager who had lived in Houston for eleven years, discussed loving the city, because in her words, “I like that I can be an African in Houston.” Cindy described “feeling almost like a specimen” in the small “primarily Caucasian” East Coast town where she had lived before moving to Houston. Because of the significant African and Black population in Houston, she said she felt at home there. Cindy added, “What has made me stay in Houston has just been that I like that there’s a big African community so when I’m at work, I can be American, and when I go home, I can be Ghanaian.” Cindy described an African community, being American, and being Ghanaian, showing the hybridity of her identity. She slipped between an African community and the option to “be Ghanaian” at home, illustrating the ways in which “African” is a description of a community space in which she can be a Ghanaian and also an American.

References to an African community were abundant in my Houston interviews. More than half of Houston interlocutors referred to this feature of the city, telling stories about other towns in which they lived, where, like Cindy, they felt like “specimens.” The fact that Houston felt like home for many affirmed their ties to the city. They were Afropolitans, Africans who felt their Africanness when they shopped at Southwest Market, a major Nigerian-owned grocery store; participated in Ghanaian community events, such as Independence Day celebrations; took part in African community events, including the annual Houston Festival of African Arts; attended concerts that brought popular artists from the continent to the city; and participated in weekly Sunday services, where the sermons affirmed both their cultural identities and their emplacement in the city of Houston.

The articulation of Houston as an African city was important for how Afropolitan projects occurred in the city. For Ghanaians who identified as Africans of the world, Little Lagos provided a landscape on which to be of the world and decidedly African. The city’s diversity, made up of other Africans, immigrants from around the world, and U.S. Americans, offered a rich setting for enacting a transnational cultural politics that was cosmopolitan and rooted in various place-based cultural practices. Little Lagos was a site where Afropolitan mentality blossomed into Afropolitan projects. The city was economically vibrant, and Ghanaians could attain financial success; parlay with other middle-class people from diverse countries; and feel affirmed in their sense of self as Ghanaians, Americans, and Africans of the world. In Little Lagos, the Houston Ghanaian community projected an image of successful Black immigrants, cultured Africans, and respectable Americans.

The Ghanaian Community in Houston

By official counts, Houston is home to fewer than fifteen hundred Ghanaians. This number does not account for those Ghanaians born in the United States who nevertheless identify as Ghanaians or the undocumented people who are also part of the community. Despite its relatively small size, the Ghanaian community in Houston is vibrant and active. It comprises several formal associations, charitable groups, and churches. The Ghana Association of Houston lists thirteen organizations on its website, eight of which are ethnic associations. The others include a group dedicated to Ghanaians (born or raised in the United States) younger than thirty; a Catholic group that meets once a month to worship together because there is not an exclusively Ghanaian or African Catholic church in Houston; a group for the Ghanaians who live in Northside, Houston, far from where the large majority of other Ghanaians live; and two investment groups. In addition to these organizations, the website also lists fifteen Pentecostal/Charismatic churches. No other religious groups are listed on the website.

Over the years, the Ghanaian community in Houston developed an efficient organizational structure that allowed its diverse members to maintain their unique interests while orienting themselves to a larger community identity. This formal structure did not appear out of nowhere. Instead, Ghanaians in Houston intentionally created their community and allowed it to grow to fit members’ needs and interests. When I spoke to people who had lived in Houston for longer than twenty years, the most common reason why they moved to the city was to pursue a postbaccalaureate degree at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Following receipt of their degrees, they stayed and, over time, formed a community with other Ghanaians who had arrived in the city via diverse routes. The community’s origin story reveals its skewed composition toward those with higher education and white-collar employment.

Among the people with whom I spoke, Irene had lived in Houston for the longest time—thirty-eight years at the time of our interview in 2015. Irene and I first met at one of the immigrant association meetings in 2014. Although we saw each other frequently, our first in-depth conversation was at her house in a quiet upper-middle-class neighborhood in Southwest Houston. She agreed to a formal interview on a Wednesday in early August. Warning me that she was “moving things around” because she was “shipping things to Ghana” in preparation for a move, she welcomed me into her cozy, beautifully decorated home. Irene described herself as semiretired. At the time of our interview, she was working part-time as a scientist in a laboratory. Standing at about five feet, eight inches tall, she was a sturdy woman who often wore a curly wig over her short natural hair. When Irene was not dressed formally, often in wax print fabrics, I would see her in yoga pants and a comfortable loose-fitting shirt. In the years that I got to know Irene, I had the pleasure of sharing many meals and celebrations with her, organizing immigrant association events, and learning about her identity as “a U.S. citizen but originally from Ghana” (her emphasis).

We sat in Irene’s living room, where photos of her husband and three adult children were prominently displayed. Irene’s children were all doctors; one held a PhD and the other two had MDs. Her husband also had a PhD, in the physical sciences. The pursuit of higher education is what brought them to Houston. Irene herself has a master’s degree. She explained how she received her first degree at the University of Ghana at Legon. “I actually got three different scholarships and I had to pick one,” she said. At the time, her husband was pursuing his master’s degree at an Ivy League university in the United States, with the intention of continuing on to his PhD. However, when Irene settled on Texas A&M for her master’s, her husband transferred to the University of Houston to complete his PhD. “So, he moved to Houston whilst I was in College Station,” she concluded. When Irene left Ghana in 1977, General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong—a military ruler who had come into power via a coup d’état in 1972—governed the country. The political climate at the time was such that those who could left the country in search of more stable lives. Irene and her husband were among them.

From its inception, the Ghanaian community in Houston was a social space where members came together to share time and affection with one another and to navigate the newness of their city. Irene recalled how easy it was to find other Ghanaians when she first arrived at College Station. She walked into the university student center, and because of what she was wearing, “somebody saw me, and they knew right away that I was Ghanaian.” From this first sighting, Irene explained that she found a community with whom she was still in touch at the time of our interview. Back then, she told me, she and h...