Our 21st prompt comes from medyusah. She asks:
Thoughts on Afropolitanism aka Nyama Mama’s ugali fries, muratina mojitos etc?
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medyusah,
Great question. Afropolitanism is a portmanteau, coined from the combination of “African” and “cosmopolitanism.” In the same way, Afropolitan is a portmanteau of African and cosmopolitan. A cosmopolitan person is one who is a citizen of the world – cosmopolitanism idealizes the formation of an identity greater than one’s country; greater than what one is familiar with. It celebrates social, political and cultural differences, and is thought of as the “progressive” person’s answer to patriotism. The cosmopolitan is a global citizen, not a local one.
He/she aims to be “truly global” through travel, interactions with people who are unlike him/her, eating of foreign cuisine and so on. Thus, the Afropolitan is a global citizen from Africa. But what is “Africa” in this term? It depicts the continent and its inhabitants, as well as its diaspora, as has existed in the world’s imagination. Africa has been called the heart of darkness by Joseph Conrad, and continues to be imagined as a place of strife, poverty, disease and corruption. A place where few good things happen.
However, a few years ago, The Economist (and other publications) told us that Africa was rising. With it came a new class of Africans – the Afropolitans. People who were both African and cosmopolitan, nothing like the Africans the world had come to know/imagine.
Afropolitans are global citizens. They represent “the best” of Africa – they can go toe to toe with people from metropolises such as London, New York, Singapore and Hong Kong. They are well travelled, well educated, stylish, are multilingual (they don’t just speak their local tongues, but English/French/Spanish/German/Mandarin or whatever else), and most of all, they wear Africa with pride.
They are proud of their kente, dashiki and kitenge. They wear earrings made of bone, and t-shirts that represent where they’re from. They love fusion music that is a mix of their traditional music and western sounds. They are proud of their “natural” hair, and love organic products that are sourced from their homelands. They are proud of “the motherland.”
In this way, Afropolitanism is either a label, an identity, or a movement. One could label themselves an Afropolitan if they feel they meet the criteria; they could consider it a key part of their identity. They could also be part of a larger movement to repackage/re-imagine Africa in the eyes of the world, because after all, to be cosmopolitan is to be global. But what does that mean? It leads to the packaging of multiple identities and ways of being into something that is easily consumed/understood by the rest of the world. To package “being African” in this way means to commodify it. And to commodify it requires us to reduce it.
Afropolitanism becomes yet another stereotype, and in the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. They exclude. What happens to the Africa that we had rather not present? The one that we are embarrassed of? The one that does not meet cosmopolitan standards? The one that is impoverished, hungry, uneducated and painfully local? It is conveniently pushed aside; hidden away from sight. Instead, we celebrate Silicon Africa – the startups, the fusion restaurants, the fashionable bars, the hubs and incubators, the trending topics on Twitter.
Which leads me to the gentrification of food as you have mentioned. Suddenly, to fill this void that has been created – to occupy this class – we must rise and commodify elements of our culture. Which is where fusion restaurants come in. Muratina, which is a relatively cheap drink to make, is made part of a cocktail which then becomes unaffordable to the average Kikuyu who considers it a staple. The enamel cups our grandmothers served us porridge in suddenly sell for KES 500. Ugali is fried and sold for more than a poor man’s daily wages, yet it is the poor man’s staple. Food becomes gentrified. It does not stop at food, it extends to everyday aspects of our culture – kikoys, khangas, sayings, Maasai blankets – you name it.
Which is where dissenters come in and say “The same has happened to pizza. To paella. To jollof rice. To soul food. To noodles.” Then, we are alerted to a larger problem. A systemic one. One that prioritizes aesthetic over long term fixes. One that will take from oppressed persons without compensating them. Without any form of restorative justice. One in which anything can and will be sold. It’s easy to say that the same has happened worldwide, and it is merely our turn. Our turn to experience the capitalist machine’s extraction and revisionism of our culture.
Yet we have a long history of dissent, and must not let it be our turn. We have already had so much taken away from us, we cannot just reduce and package our identities into a small, neat package for consumption with a smile. In the words of Audre Lorde, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. This movement does not address our pain, our struggle. We have merely assimilated it. It merely attempts to fight the symptoms and not the disease. The disease, as Toni Morrison would put it, is greed and the struggle for power. This movement attempts to fit us into a box, and does not radically question this system that runs on greed, or shift power. As Kimberly Wilkins would say, ain’t nobody got time for that.
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This post is part of a daily writing experiment that I’m running for a year. I’d love it if you took part! ?