15

The Pitfalls and Promises of Afropolitanism

EMMA DABIRI

It was with something of a sense of trepidation that I delivered a version of what would become “Why I’m Not an Afropolitan.”1 during the 2013 Africa Writes Festival. I never anticipated the response that my intervention would receive, nor did I foresee the ripple effects that would be generated in the then as yet burgeoning Afropolitan discourse.

My sense of trepidation stemmed from the fact that I had encountered next to nothing voicing concern about the particular direction in which Afropolitanism seemed to be developing. At that time there was little written about it beyond the celebratory. Notable exceptions were the art historian Okwunodu Ogbechi’s (2008) “Afropolitanism—Africa without Africans”2 and Bosch Santana’s (2013) “Exorcizing Afropolitanism,”3 an account of Binyavanga Wainaina’s (tragically) unrecorded 2012 keynote speech delivered to the African Studies Association U.K. conference in Leeds, U.K. While both these reassured me that there existed at least some small minority who, like myself, remained unseduced by the veneer of sophistication, but also by the promise of African “progress,” which the Afropolitan peddled, it is worth noting that they were written five years apart. There was as yet nothing that could be conceived of as a sustained critique of Afropolitanism. However, the ideas circulating in 2013 appeared to signal something of a watershed. My trepidation apparently had been unwarranted. Post Africa Writes I was overwhelmed by responses both from the audience and the online discussions that followed. It was immensely encouraging to see how many people shared my reservations about the term, but had felt silenced by the hype, by the expectation that we were all grateful for this seemingly celebratory way of approaching African identities. By late 2013 the voices of dissent had swelled in volume and frequency: from the insightful “Is Afropolitanism Africa’s New Single Story?”4 in which Brian Bwesigye reads Helon Habila’s review of No Violet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names through the truncated version of Afropolitanism that he argues Habila represents, to Marta Tveit’s “The Afropolitan Must Go,”5 in which Tviet focuses on critiquing the term and its relationship to identity politics, while sidelining the issue of commodification that I develop as one of the central challenges to Afropolitanism. In January 2014, Africa is a Country republished the piece that had appeared on my blog the previous summer. Carli Coetzee discusses the genesis of the term during this period:

While it is not a definitive source, it is instructive to see that Google trend cites 0 references of the term Afropolitanism in print and online in February 2012; by April 2012 there is a definite spike with 72 references logged. By mid-2014, the graph shows that uses of the word Afropolitanism reached an all-time peak.6

The critiques that emerged invited varied responses. In regards to my own a small number of commentators seemed to have misinterpreted my argument as some kind of attack on Selasi’s attempt at forging an identity within the complexities of Diaspora, or as an outright refutation of the potentiality of Afropolitanism altogether. I would urge such commentators to a more considered reading of the essay. “Why I Am Not an Afropolitan” does indeed subject Afropolitanism to analysis within the framework of a Fanonian ethics, and is undoubtedly a critique on what I believe to be a particularly unhealthy streak of neoliberal ideology running throughout much of that which is billed Afropolitan. However, I remain bone-achingly intimate with the “stranded place”7 (2015) from which Selasi explains she wrote “Bye-Bye Babar.”8 The pursuit of “belonging” and “home” have been central themes throughout my life. Which is why, as I explain, the concept of “Afropolitan” first excited me. I am always looking for spaces that can accommodate my position as an Irish/Nigerian woman who remains deeply connected to her Nigerianness, but who was raised first in the United States and then Ireland, and has spent her entire adult life as an immigrant. I would rather refrain from describing myself as half anything, and I detest the word “mixed-race.” I thought perhaps “Afropolitan” presented an alternative to this terminology and, interestingly, positioned me with others through a shared cultural and aesthetic leaning rather than a perceived racial classification. Moreover, the term suggested that one could be black or African without having to subscribe to the depressingly limited identities widely perceived as being authentic.

In addressing claims that I am simply dismissing Afropolitanism, I would highlight the considerable attention I pay to Achille Mbembe’s articulation of Afropolitanism. The enduring insights of Afropolitanism as interpreted by Mbembe should be its promise of vacating the seduction of pernicious racialized thinking, its recognition of African identities as fluid, and the notion that the African past is characterized by “mixing, blending, and superimposing.” In opposition to custom, Mbembe insists that the idea of “tradition” never really existed and reminds us that there is a “pre-colonial African modernity that has not been taken into account in contemporary creativity.”9 Minna “Ms Afropolitan” Salami and founder of the eponymous MsAfropolitan blog writes that Africans should be as free as anybody else to have multiple subcultures.10 This goes without saying. For me the problem with Afropolitanism isn’t some aversion to subculture, but rather that the insights on race, modernity, and identity appeared to be increasingly ignored in favor of the consumerism Mbembe also identifies as part of the Afropolitan assemblage. The dominance of fashion, luxury, and lifestyle in Afropolitanism—at the expense of some of its other components—is noteworthy due to the relationship between these industries, consumption, and consumerism.

The rapacious consumerism of the African elites who claimed to make up the ranks of the Afropolitans is well documented. Frantz Fanon’s prophetic words once again resonate. In the foreword to the 2004 edition of Wretched of the Earth, Homi Bhabha asks: “[W]hat might be saved from Fanon’s ethics and politics of decolonization to help us reflect on contemporary manifestations of globalization?”11 He reminds us that the economic landscape engineered by the IMF and the World Bank continues to support the compartmentalized societies identified by Fanon. No matter how much wealth exists in pockets, “a dual economy is not a developed economy,” writes Fanon. The pockets of the mobile Afropolitan class hold much of the wealth.

I want to ask: in what way does Afropolitanism go about challenging the enduring problematics of duality and compartmentalized society identified by Fanon as one of the major stumbling blocks to African postcolonial independence? To be honest, when I look at the launch of OK Magazine Nigeria (although I don’t know whether Afropolitans would claim OK magazine—I’m not sure it’s chic enough), or hear about palm wine mojitos and fashion shows at the Afropolitan V&A event, it leaves me feeling somewhat depressed. Our value is not determined by our ability to produce African-flavored versions of Western convention and form. Such an approach will surely only leave us forever playing catch-up in a game the rules of which we did not write. The whole lifestyle of Sex and the City feminism, cocktails, designer clothes, handbags, and shoes is not particularly liberating in an Anglo-American context, so I see no reason why we should transfer such models to Africa and declare it progress. I’m not saying there is no place for such activities in the African context, but that it represents less of a departure from the behavior of postcolonial elites than a repetition of the same behavior.

In an era such as ours, characterized by the chilling commodification of all walks of life—including the commodification of dissent—we should be especially vigilant about any movement that embraces commodification to the extent that Afropolitanism does. In her eloquent piece “Exorcizing Afropolitanism,” Bosch Santana outlines Binyavanga Wainaina’s “attempt to rid African literary and cultural studies of the ghost of Afropolitanism.” Bosch Santana explores the way in which Afropolitanism has become “a phenomenon increasingly product driven, design focused, and potentially funded by the West.” She recognizes that “style, in and of itself, is not really the issue,” but fears rather that it is “the attempt to begin with style, and then infuse it with substantive political consciousness that is problematic.” In an online response to “Exorcizing Afropolitanism,” Salami argued that Bosch Santana was taking umbrage at African agency. Salami framed the debate as a choice between African victimization and Afropolitanism, asking ironically, “[H]ow dare Africans not simply be victims, but also shapers of globalisation and all its inherent contestations? How dare we market our cultures as well as our political transformations?”12

This was the context in which I stepped into the debate, accompanied by my sense of aforementioned trepidation. I argued that our options are not reduced to one or the other (nor does Bosch Santana suggest they are). In countering Salami’s interpretation of the debate, I challenged the position that defining ourselves as Afropolitan was the only alternative to the Afro-pessimism narrative. Furthermore, then as now, I continue to harbor serious reservations that the duality identified by Fanon is challenged by a small group of Africans who are in a position to be able to “market their cultures.” Salami herself admits that Afropolitanism possibly goes “overboard in commodifying African culture.” This statement is not one from which we can glibly turn. Rather it remains a continuing cause of concern. In 2013 I wrote that the centrality of capitalism and the importance of commodification are confirmed when one searches for “Afropolitan” on Google. Back then it was all online shops and aspirational luxury lifestyle magazines. In addition to these, the Internet is now littered with any number of “think pieces.” Unfortunately a number of these seem to frame the debate according to the very binaries my vision of Afropolitanism, drawing on Mbembe, would seek to subvert. You are either for or against. Such reductive analysis fails to engage with the spaces in between, the fact that you can be critical of the direction a movement is taking while also acknowledging that it is possible to imagine alternative possibilities for it.

Providing the backdrop for these online discussions, the links to “African” art, jewelry, and ankara toys still remain. These items too are recognizable from Fanon, who writes: “The bourgeoisie’s idea of a national economy is one based on what we can call local products. Grandiloquent speeches are made about local crafts.” With the exception of a few well-positioned individuals of African origin, who now have a larger market to which they can “sell” this image of Africa, who are the real beneficiaries of this commodification?

Paul Gilroy has argued that commodity culture has resulted in the loss—to the advantage of corporate interests—of much of what was wonderful about black culture.13 Afropolitanism can be seen as the latest manifestation of planetary commerce in blackness, or can be read as a type of “sanctioned blackness” (Dabiri and Gabay, forthcoming).14 It seems as though after the consumption of so much black American culture, there is now a consumer demand for more authentic, virgin black culture. That demand turns to the continent as a fresh source ripe for the picking. Then as now, I still need to position myself with a more radical countercultural movement. For me Afropolitanism is too polite, corporate, glossy—it reeks of sponsorship and big business, with all the attendant limitations of such a culture. Should we be taking comfort in the fact that the world’s eyes are again on Africa? Headlines declare, “Africa is the world’s fastest growing continent” and the “hottest frontier” for investments. Time Magazine’s cover of “Africa Rising” announces, “[I]t is the world’s next economic powerhouse,” while the Wall Street Journal dubs it “a new gold rush.” Here’s a headline of my own: “The Scramble for Africa.”

It’s no surprise that Western media are supportive of Afropolitanism. As Fanon reminds us, “In its decadent aspect the national bourgeoisie gets considerable help from the Western bourgeoisie who happen to be tourists enamoured with exoticism.”15Afropolitanism is the handmaiden of the “Africa Rising” narrative and I suspect its championing by Western media runs the risk of leading us ever further astray from the “disreputable, angry places” noted by Gilroy, “where the political interests of racialized minorities might be identified and worked upon without being encumbered by an affected liberal innocence.”16 “Africa Rising” and its cohorts should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Africa has lost $1.2 to 1.4 trillion in illicit financial outflows—more than three times the total amount of foreign aid received. Africa gives more to the rest of the world than it receives and is in fact a net creditor through illicit means.

The term Afropolitan continues to be used in the art world. Okwunodu Ogbechi was one of the first to flag the problematics of Afropolitan art. In a 2008 blog post he questioned the art world’s championing of Afropolitanism, arguing that it supported a bias that only views African artists working in the west as relevant, while the artists living and working on the continent are largely ignored. He reminded us that despite the international lifestyle enjoyed by the Afropolitan, most Africans have almost absolute immobility in a contemporary global world that works very hard to keep Africans in their place on the African continent. He points out there is no immigration policy anywhere in the Western world that welcomes Africans and a major bias against African global mobility abounds in international media. Most African-based artists would find it difficult if not impossible to get a visa to visit Western museums or to show their works abroad!17As Europe experiences what is being referred to as the “worst refugee crises since World War II,” stories of African migration could hardly be timelier. Those attempting to access Fortress Europe share chilling parallels with the Afropolitan: like the Afropolitan these Africans too cross continents, but in contrast to the Afropolitan narrative centered on an Africa rising, these Africans are all too often drowning. Meanwhile, the Afropolitan comes and goes, continent hopping at leisure. Yet this disparity is not reflected in the Afropolitan narrative, characterized as it is by an international lifestyle of access and privilege.

Our provocations have, I think, forestalled the danger of an uncontested version of Afropolitanism becoming the single story of Africa. But we must remain alert to the dangers such a development would pose. The limits of the Afropolitan voice might be compared with those of second-wave feminism, where white middle-class women failed to identify their privilege while claiming to speak for all women. While we may all be Africans, there is a huge gap between my African experience and that of my father’s houseboys. It is great that there are a minority of Africans whose family backgrounds and connections insure that they can traverse the world with ease (and again this is not a new development) but it is crucial that this not disguise the fact that there is a global system very much committed to keeping the vast majority of Africans in their place. We are now well versed in the danger of the single story. While Afropolitanism may appear to offer an alternative to the single story, we must remain vigilant against this becoming the dominant narrative for African success. The traditional Afro-pessimistic narratives, while obsessed with poverty, denied the poor any voice. While Afropolitanism may go some way toward redressing the balance concerning Africans speaking for themselves, the problem lies in the fact that we still don’t hear the narratives of Africans who are not privileged. The problem is not that Afropolitans are privileged per se—rather it is that at a time when poverty remains endemic for millions, the narratives of a privileged few telling us how great everything is, how much opportunity and potential is available, may drown out the voices of a majority who continue to be denied basic life chances. While Afropolitans talk and talk about what it means to be young, cool, and African, how many of them are concerned with addressing the world beyond their own social realities, the issues that concern other Africans?

Perhaps we need to have more consensus on what constitutes Afropolitanism. Salami says in the comments section of her response to “Exorcizing Afropolitanism” that Afropolitanism means “being African without detouring through whiteness,” which seems somewhat at odds with Mbembe’s vision. For him Afropolitanism is a way of being African that is “open to difference” and transcending race. In a 2013 Guardian interview, Taiye Selasi, who popularized the term “Afropolitan” in her 2005 essay “Bye-Bye Babar or What Is an Afropolitan?” presented an image of an Instagram-friendly Africa. Her interpretation of Afropolitanism seemingly went beyond being “open to difference” to something resembling African versions of American or European cities. Afropolitanism, it appears, is grounded in the ability to engage in the same pastimes one could expect to enjoy in a Western capital. In Burkina Faso she danced until 5:00 a.m. in a Western-themed club and watched movies at a feminist film festival. Adama, her charming host, was an “Afropolitan of the highest order” by virtue of his Viennese wife and the fact that he was studying German at the Goethe Institute. To her Togo was a seaside treat which she likens to Malibu with motorini. Later she gushes about hanging out on the beach with hundreds of supercool Togolese hipsters.18 Such an itinerary would be acceptable to any self-respecting inhabitant of hipster capitals like Hackney or Williamsburg and it’s wonderful that one can now have the Hipster Africa Experience, but I fail to see how this represents anything particularly progressive. It seems that again African progress is being measured by the extent to which it can reproduce a Western lifestyle, now without having to physically be in the West. This doesn’t appear to signal any particular departure from the elites’ enduring love affair with achieving the lifestyles of their former masters. As a result, in my first version of Why I’m not an Afropolitan I mused that many of those who defined themselves as Afropolitan had evacuated much of the rich potential the term may once have suggested.

Whether devotee, detractor, critic, or convert, the furore generated around Afropolitanism demonstrates how emotive and necessary discourse around black identities continues to be. The reality is that many of Africa’s children—dispersed throughout the world by the twin agents of history and economics—continue to grapple with the negotiation of our identities and the search for home.

Regularly included in academic conferences, with a growing number of books and journal editions dedicated to it, as well as becoming an emergent literary troupe, Afropolitanism seems set to establish its place within the canon of black social movements and the seemingly perennial search for a black aesthetic, spanning negritude, Pan-Africanism ,and Afrocentricity. The heated debate evoked by Afropolitanism demonstrates that for many of us, the concept of home remains complex. Afropolitanism reflects the conditions of our times. In this moment it proves tricky for a social movement—although this can be applied to almost anything—to establish itself before it is seized upon by forces committed to selling something to someone. If Afropolitanism can develop in a space beyond marketing, aspirational living, and consumerism what might be achieved? Perhaps instead of online shops, glossy magazines, and consumable products, revisiting ideas about African tradition might represent a renewed Afropolitanism. Let us really consider the precolonial modernity Mbembe names. Uncover it, allow its spirit to guide our work. When contemporary African innovation is credited to the old adage “necessity is the mother of invention,” or the idea, common in many circles, that African creativity is some sort of by-product of poverty born out of desperation to survive, let it be known that Africans were creative long before they were (made) poor. So-called “illiterate” cultures that disavowed the written word, did so not out of some sort of cultural deficiency but because of the existence of alternative epistemologies that allowed them to conceive of reality in ways unimaginable to us, and which, by organizing the very concept of time, past, present and future, so differently from us, expanded the scope of human imagination in ways inconceivable within the limits of our “positivist,” “empirical,” and “historical” fantasies. Let us consider the human condition beyond and before binaries, acknowledging the fact that:

In pre-colonial Africa far from the existence of single “tribal” identities, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment as the subject of a particular chief or initiate of a religious society while at yet another moment as a member of a certain professional guild.19

Moreover:

The ethnic paradigm thus reconfigured becomes less a matter of restrictive labelling and more of choosing between various semantic classifications dependent on the particular contexts and identities involved.20

In addition to broadening our understanding of how identity operated before European meddling, this is an Afropolitanism that can be more inclusive of life on the continent—engaging with cosmopolitan processes often neglected in the public imagination—those that occurred in African countries themselves rather than those that are the result of migration outside the continent. This in turn addresses concerns that Afropolitanism is a resource mainly for those of African descent in the Diaspora.

If we can salvage some of these other constituent elements from the Afropolitan assemblage, there remains much that could prove of value to our twenty-first century understandings of Africa and what it once meant, means, and might yet mean, to be black, to be African, in all its glorious, messy complexity. Moreover, let us think about what it might look like to organize society beyond the rigid binaries bequeathed us as our Enlightenment legacy. These metaphysical African resources might prove of far greater value to civilization than those other—far more fabled African resources—so violently fought over by the forces of global capital.

NOTES

  1  E. Dabiri (2015), “Afro-Rebel (or Why I Am Not an Afropolitan)” [online]. Available at: http://thediasporadiva.tumblr.com; E. Dabiri (2014), “Why I’m Not an Afropolitan” [online], Africa Is a Country. Available at: http://africasacountry.com.

  2  S. Ogbechie (2008), “Afropolitanism: Africa without Africans (II)” [online]. AACHRONYM. Available at: http://aachronym.blogspot.co.uk.

  3  S. Bosch Santana (2013), “Exorcizing Afropolitanism: Binyavanga Wainaina Explains Why “ ‘I Am a Pan-Africanist, Not an Afropolitan,’ ” at ASAUK 2012 [online]. Available at: http://africainwords.com.

  4  B. Bwesigye (2013), “Is Afropolitanism Africa’s New Single Story? Reading Helon Habila’s Review of “ ‘We Need New Names’ by Brian Bwesigye,” Aster(ix) Journal [online]. Available at: http://asterixjournal.com.

  5  M. Tveit (2013), “The Afropolitan Must Go” [online], Africa Is a Country. Available at: http://africasacountry.com.

  6  Carli Coetzee (2015), “Introduction,” Journal of African Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2015.1105129.

  7  Aaron Bady and Taiye Selasi “New African Fiction,” Transition, No. 117 (2015), 148–65, DOI: 10.2979/transition.117.148.

  8  Taiye Selasi, “Bye-Bye Babar” [online], The Lip. Available at: http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk.

  9  T. Makhetha (2007), Africa Remix [Johannesburg, South Africa], Johannesburg Art Gallery.

10  M. Salami (2013), Can Africans Have Multiple Subcultures? A Response to “Exorcising Afropolitanism” [online], MsAfropolitan. Available at: http://www.msafropolitan.com.

11  F. Fanon and R. Philcox, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004).

12  Salami, Can Africans Have Multiple Subcultures?

13  P. Gilroy, After Empire (London: Routledge: 2004).

14  E. Dabiri and C. Gabay, Sanctioned Blackness (forthcoming, 2017).

15  Fanon and Philcox, The Wretched of the Earth.

16  Gilroy, After Empire.

17  Ogbechie, “Afropolitanism: Africa without Africans (II)” [online].

18  T. Selasi, “Taiye Selasi on Discovering Her Pride in Her African Roots.” Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/books.

19  E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 249.

20  David C. Conrad and Barbara E. Frank, Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 11–12.