This often appears as a marker of status: a way to say I belong here in America but I can do without though I won’t do without. Its a very interesting term, this one. A term to fend off the xenophobes and racists who insist with undertones that you return to your real home, and also a way of garnering legitimacy when faced with American ignorance about all things and places outside the USA, while at the same time functioning as a marker of authentic belonging with the millions in Africa who wish they could leave if only they had such an enabling status to weave through immigration protocols, transit airports, and ports of entry.
In my view, this conflict encapsulates contemporary African existence. Our aspirations set into motion in the 1950s and 1960s have been shattered by a combination of colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial factors, aided by unimaginative, ahistorically informed leadership. The result: we who travel abroad (or those who are birthed abroad by traveling parents) must fight from a fictional position of pride against the barrage of ignorance that is spouted our way while in the west. We find ourselves irredeemably poised to prove ourselves as sophisticated (often with acquired or forced accents, along with essentialist arguments about a place we left and wouldn’t ever want to return to, and buttressed by hefty towers of educational achievements and accolades). But the terms of this sophistication are always those of the westerner who isn’t that concerned with what “the third world” looks like or is about. The westerner does not care, even as we arm ourselves evermore mightily with arguments to raise the case of our own significance: in our longing for visibility before a gaze that is not in the slightest interested in or about us.
It is a crises of the collective soul, this longing is, especially when you realize in the heat of your Africanist presentation how little you yourself are engaged with even the Africans from the neighboring country carved out of a former colony and defined in terms of its colonizing characteristics such as francophone or anglophone: how you have fully fabricated a resistance position to western classificatory powers from the Nigerian, or Ghanaian, or Malawian position, the very positions bequeathed you by the colonial master: yes African nationalism birthed these names but this birth was steeped in the discourse of resistance conjured up by the elite among Africans who aspired to a state just like the colonial one, just provided it was run by them rather than westerners or Europeans.
How you (or we) have imbibed the brutish colony, seeing it as your (our) primary source of resistance. And then we wonder, how are we that different from the nationalist imperialist of the UK or of the US who is also fed to their throat in the myths of their greatness. Is the difference that they have the means to kill or invade or colonize, while we do not? Are my ethics merely a summation of frustrated ambitions — of being sidelined to the peripheries intended for all who like the ability to impose their wills on others?
Who am I really as an African once I cease to engage the westerner for their acknowledgement? Would I be able to live with myself if I stopped?
Just a comment.
