Were you to ask any of these beautiful, brown-skinned people that basic question – ‘where are you from?’ – you’d get no single answer from a single smiling dancer. This one lives in London but was raised in Toronto and born in Accra; that one works in Lagos but grew up in Houston, Texas. ‘Home’ for this lot is many things: where their parents are from; where they go for vacation; where they went to school; where they see old friends; where they live (or live this year). Like so many African young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many.

They (read: we) are Afropolitans – the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon or collected already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you. You’ll know us by our funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes. Some of us are ethnic mixes, e.g. Ghanaian and Canadian, Nigerian and Swiss; others merely cultural mutts: American accent, European affect, African ethos. Most of us are multilingual: in addition to English and a Romantic or two, we understand some indigenous tongue and speak a few urban vernaculars. There is at least one place on The African Continent to which we tie our sense of self: be it a nation-state (Ethiopia), a city (Ibadan), or an auntie’s kitchen. Then there’s the G8 city or two (or three) that we know like the backs of our hands, and the various institutions that know us for our famed focus. We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world.

It isn’t hard to trace our genealogy. Starting in the 60’s, the young, gifted and broke left Africa in pursuit of higher education and happiness abroad. A study conducted in 1999 estimated that between 1960 and 1975 around 27,000 highly skilled Africans left the Continent for the West. Between 1975 and 1984, the number shot to 40,000 and then doubled again by 1987, representing about 30% of Africa’s highly skilled manpower. Unsurprisingly, the most popular destinations for these emigrants included Canada, Britain, and the United States; but Cold War politics produced unlikely scholarship opportunities in Eastern Bloc countries like Poland, as well.

Some three decades later this scattered tribe of pharmacists, physicists, physicians (and the odd polygamist) has set up camp around the globe. The caricatures are familiar. The Nigerian physics professor with faux-Coogi sweater; the Kenyan marathonist with long legs and rolled r’s; the heavyset Gambian braiding hair in a house that smells of burnt Kanekalon. Even those unacquainted with synthetic extensions can conjure an image of the African immigrant with only the slightest of pop culture promptings: Eddie Murphy’s ‘Hello, Babar.’ But somewhere between the 1988 release of Coming to America and the 2001 crowning of a Nigerian Miss World, the general image of young Africans in the West transmorphed from goofy to gorgeous. Leaving off the painful question of cultural condescenscion in that beloved film, one wonders what happened in the years between Prince Akeem and Queen Agbani?

One answer is: adolescence. The Africans that left Africa between 1960 and 1975 had children, and most overseas. Some of us were bred on African shores then shipped to the West for higher education; others born in much colder climates and sent home for cultural re-indoctrination. Either way, we spent the 80’s chasing after accolades, eating fufu at family parties, and listening to adults argue politics. By the turn of the century (the recent one), we were matching our parents in number of degrees, and/or achieving things our ‘people’ in the grand sense only dreamed of. This new demographic – dispersed across Brixton, Bethesda, Boston, Berlin – has come of age in the 21st century, redefining what it means to be African. Where our parents sought safety in traditional professions like doctoring, lawyering, banking, engineering, we are branching into fields like media, politics, music, venture capital, design. Nor are we shy about expressing our African influences (such as they are) in our work. Artists such as Keziah Jones, Trace founder and editor Claude Gruzintsky, architect David Adjaye, novelist Chimamanda Achidie – all exemplify what Gruzintsky calls the ‘21st century African.’

What distinguishes this lot and its like (in the West and at home) is a willingness to complicate Africa – namely, to engage with, critique, and celebrate the parts of Africa that mean most to them. Perhaps what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is the refusal to oversimplify; the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honor what is wonderful, unique. Rather than essentialising the geographical entity, we seek to comprehend the cultural complexity; to honor the intellectual and spiritual legacy; and to sustain our parents’ cultures.

For us, being African must mean something. The media’s portrayals (war, hunger) won’t do. Neither will the New World trope of bumbling, blue-black doctor. Most of us grew up aware of ‘being from’ a blighted place, of having last names from to countries which are linked to lack, corruption. Few of us escaped those nasty ‘booty-scratcher’ epithets, and fewer still that sense of shame when visting paternal villages. Whether we were ashamed of ourselves for not knowing more about our parents’ culture, or ashamed of that culture for not being more ‘advanced’ can be unclear. What is manifest is the extent to which the modern adolescent African is tasked to forge a sense of self from wildly disparate sources. You’d never know it looking at those dapper lawyers in global firms, but most were once supremely self-conscious of being so ‘in between’. Brown-skinned without a bedrock sense of ‘blackness,’ on the one hand; and often teased by African family members for ‘acting white’ on the other – the baby-Afropolitan can get what I call ‘lost in transnation’.

Ultimately, the Afropolitan must form an identity along at least three dimensions: national, racial, cultural – with subtle tensions in between. While our parents can claim one country as home, we must define our relationship to the places we live; how British or American we are (or act) is in part a matter of affect. Often unconsciously, and over time, we choose which bits of a national identity (from passport to pronunciation) we internalize as central to our personalities. So, too, the way we see our race – whether black or biracial or none of the above – is a question of politics, rather than pigment; not all of us claim to be black. Often this relates to the way we were raised, whether proximate to other brown people (e.g. black Americans) or removed. Finally, how we conceive of race will accord with where we locate ourselves in the history that produced ‘blackness’ and the political processes that continue to shape it.

Then there is that deep abyss of Culture, ill-defined at best. One must decide what comprises ‘African culture’ beyond pepper soup and filial piety. The project can be utterly baffling – whether one lives in an African country or not. But the process is enriching, in that it expands one’s basic perspective on nation and selfhood. If nothing else, the Afropolitan knows that nothing is neatly black or white; that to ‘be’ anything is a matter of being sure of who you are uniquely. To ‘be’ Nigerian is to belong to a passionate nation; to be Yoruba, to be heir to a spiritual depth; to be American, to ascribe to a cultural breadth; to be British, to pass customs quickly. That is, this is what it means for me – and that is the Afropolitan privilege. The acceptance of complexity common to most African cultures is not lost on her prodigals. Without that intrinsically multi-dimensional thinking, we could not make sense of ourselves.

And if it all sounds a little self-congratulatory, a little ‘aren’t-we-the-coolest-damn-people-on-earth?’ – I say: yes it is, necessarily. It is high time the African stood up. There is nothing perfect in this formulation; for all our Adjayes and Achidies, there is a brain drain back home. Most Afropolitans could serve Africa better in Africa than at Medicine Bar on Thursdays. To be fair, a fair number of African professionals are returning; and there is consciousness among the ones who remain, an acute awareness among this brood of too-cool-for-schools that there’s work to be done. There are those among us who wonder to the point of weeping: where next, Africa? When will the scattered tribes return? When will the talent repatriate? What lifestyles await young professionals at home? How to invest in Africa’s future? The prospects can seem grim at times. The answers aren’t forthcoming. But if there was ever a group who could figure it out, it is this one, unafraid of the questions.

Jess is a girl who is struggling to find her own identity in the hyphenated world in which she lives; half Yoruba and half English, she is torn between two cultures and finds herself occupying a world made up of dichotomies. TillyTilly who is at once a comforting friend and a disruptive demon is the embodiment of Jessamy’s struggle to discover her own identity – ‘My name is Jessamy. I am eight years old… She felt she needed to be saying this so that it would be real.’

Jess’ behaviour at home and school is disruptive, smashing her mother’s computer, cutting pictures out of books in the classroom, breaking the mirror in the bathroom – blamed in an eight year old’s plaintive tones on the mysterious, invisible, TillyTilly, ‘You have to believe me. I didn’t do it!’ The help of a psychologist is employed, though it is TillyTilly who reveals to Jessamy the true roots of her disturbance – the death of her baby twin sister, Fern.

Helen’s prose style is varied and vital. A lively spirit, as energetic as TillyTilly herself, weaves its way through the narrative which manages to recall both the naïveté of childhood, and to capture the uncertainty Jess faces as she firms her grip on reality. Her difficulties are compounded by the apparent contradictions between the tradition of her Nigerian roots and the British society in which she lives – in one world a wooden carving or ibeji must be made to lay to rest the soul of the dead twin, in the other world, sensitive if misguided psychologists probe with questions, ‘I know that things can be real in different ways’, offers Dr McKenzie by way of an explanation. Neither solution makes sense to Jess whose vulnerable childishness underscores the novel with tender pathos, ‘I’m tired and you’re confusing me,’ she responds.

The LIP: Do you consider yourself to be an ‘African novelist’? J.M Coetzee has said some interesting things about assuming such a title – does the African novelist have more responsibilities than the European novelist?

HO: Though I’m clearly influenced by a tradition of writers dealing with African consciousness, I think it’s more likely that I’d be placed on a different rung on the post-colonial writing ladder (if indeed I was going to get placed anywhere…) – basically it’s to do with uncertainties of language – I think and dream in English, and any words that I reach for in describing Nigeria are automatically and inextricably loaded with a sense of foreignness – ‘vibrant’, ‘colourful’, ‘hot’ – it’s so close to cliché that it’s embarrassing, and it almost suggests that I don’t even know what I’m describing anymore. A book coming from someone who thought in, say, Yoruba, would take all those adjectives as a given and either get past them and unravel new descriptions or just get right to whatever point they’re making. It’s that hesitancy and circling around the point that stops me from being qualitatively similar to the African greats like Soyinka, Emecheta, Achebe, Ola Rotimi.

I seem to have begun in a halfway niche that maybe writers like Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri, though they handle it better, wouldn’t scoff at. Though social commentary of some form is integral to the dynamic of almost every novel, I don’t think novelists have any responsibilities outside of the honing of their craft; they obviously have responsibilities and concerns as people, but if these come above storytelling, it doesn’t work. ‘Concept’ novels are only interesting up until the point where the concept becomes clear – a major gripe I have with Dostoevsky’s blatant focus on morality and the mechanisms of psychological health in Crime and Punishment is that after Raskolnikov murders the old lady, which fulfils the concept, ‘what if a student entered into the act of murdering an old lady?’, I lose interest and have to struggle to finish. So, mostly I say, ‘If you’re writing about politics or sociology, kindly call it a politics or sociology book and not a novel.’ Arundhati Roy, whom I greatly admire as a writer, has made that distinction and is concentrating on using her writing skill to draw non-fictional attention to issues in India. ‘Concept’ novels really seem to interfere.

The LIP: Has your age been a help or a hindrance in getting published and/or getting people to take your work seriously?

HO: My age did become a somewhat cynical bonus selling point, and with good reason – a crazy number of books are being published every year. Couple this with the fact that readership inevitably decreases when films, plays and video-games are becoming stronger and stronger as industries, and it’s starting to seem like you need some kind of kooky trademark just to keep your head above water. Since there’s nothing else kooky about me, I guess age helped with Alexandra Pringle, my editor at Bloomsbury, who wanted to know what an eighteen year old would have to say. If you’re looking for a new and distinctive writing voice, it must be tempting to try and plumb our generation, who are (if they’re into that sort of thing) growing up with both filmic and literary imaginations in equal effect. In terms of general readership and critics, though, yes, the book is almost guaranteed attention, but people are bound to be more unpleasant about it than gracious. They question quality, (What has she read? How sophisticated is this going to be?) and they are more than likely to get horribly cynical and paint your publishers as monochrome ogres who’ve chained you to your desk and forced you to write like a bitch when you could be getting healthy, real-life material. Someone who interviewed me for a radio show told me that they’d been dreading reading The Icarus Girl because they thought they were going to have to contemplate the musings of a precocious brat. Luckily, they changed their mind a third of the way in, but obviously not everyone coming to the book will.

The LIP: What does multiculturalism mean to you? Jess struggles to get comfortable in a hyphenated world, do you think many ‘half and half’ children (TillyTilly’s words, not mine) feel that same pressure?

HO: Multiculturalism doesn’t really mean anything to me. I guess as a term it means embracing and integrating what was formerly ‘foreign’ into an eclectic framework that can then be identified as national culture, but I think at bottom it is very difficult to truly understand that someone from another culture, who dresses differently, may have a different skin colour and may speak a different language, is the same as you. It’s a big old fallacy.

The LIP: Where is Africa now?

HO: Africa is in a place where, alongside the urgent need for humanitarian aid to be found in Africa as a continent, people are beginning to recognise the immense talent that’s emerging from that intensely prideful, unembarrassed place.

The LIP: Where is Africa Now?

Jasmine: It’s difficult for me to answer the question from a personal perspective. I know the reality of South Africa now and I know the history of South Africa then and tidbits about the rest of the continent from books, television and friends who, like me, were children taking it all in as uncritical observers. I ventured to the Wild Coast region of South Africa once in 2002 on a pilot research trip with a tourist camera and open mind. The trip changed my life.

On one school tour, I walked into a dilapidated classroom and witnessed a group of children, none older than 10, huddled over a self-made fire of broken school desks and chairs. While my research trip took me to South Africa’s most cosmopolitan cities, as Countee Cullen notes in Incident, “Of all the things that happened there / That’s all that I remember.” I could not stop thinking about the rural school.

My experience of Africa was of an unequal and bifurcated place with opulent haves and desperate have nots. When I returned in 2003, I was armed with a research agenda, a professional camera and a discerning eye. Little had changed. Within one week, I was listening to women crying about not having food and two days later I was careening up a mountain side on a motorbike to a million rand mansion in Hout Bay. But when I had my camera, I saw another side, beyond the binary of Black and White, beyond the binaries of colour (ngaphaya kwebala), and beyond the binary of rich and poor. When I aimed at my subjects they shot back with tenacity and uncompromising hope. I can say that my experience of Africa now is one of a people pushing to break free of the chains of history. Through my camera lens, I saw a powerfully hopeful future waiting to happen.

1. The Ilitha Project aims to infuse resources into the under-served rural Ilitha Junior School. The project leaders are looking for partners and new fundraising opprtunities.
2. Jasmine Waddell is currently seeking a publisher for her collection, ‘Explorations and Connections: Reflections of a Black American in Post-Apartheid South Africa.’ If you believe you can help her in any way please contact editor@theLIP.org for more information.

French citizens fled Abidjan, refugees languished in Al Fasher, and allegations mounted of Rwandan incursions in the eastern DRC.

In Naivasha, Kenya, the Sudanese government and southern SPLA rebels signed peace deals on New Year’s Eve that hold out new hope for an end to Africa’s most stubborn civil war. In January, the African Union, successor to the much-maligned Organisation of African Unity, prepared to intervene in Haiti, and South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki negotiated with warring parties in both Côte d’Ivoire and the DRC, backed by mandates from the AU.

There was progress at the ballot box too. Fairly orderly elections last year in Algeria, Botswana, Cameroon, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger and Tunisia showed that the ‘wave’ of democratisation sweeping Africa in the early 1990s was often followed by attempts to consolidate democratic rule and improve political governance. To this effect, the 13 member countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) adopted in August a set of ‘principles and guidelines governing democratic elections’, vowing to monitor compliance. Zimbabwe was a notable if problematic signatory.

Africa’s resolve to find negotiated solutions to long-standing conflicts, send its own troops to enforce peace, and institutionalise norms of democracy and good governance is born out of both negative and positive imperatives. Western donors have for decades called for reform in terms of notorious ‘political conditionality’ regimes. Today, the force that drives reform in Africa has gone beyond the fear of an external penalty. Instead, it revolves around a grand ideology of renewal that is indigenously engineered – the African Renaissance.

This idea of African rebirth has roots that stretch back a century. Its optimism about Africa’s future and its commitment to independence, progress and continental solidarity echo some of the central messages of Pan-African thought, and the words of men such as Marcus Garvey and Dr. W.E.B. du Bois.

Today, however, the primary prophet of renewal ideology is the South African president, Thabo Mbeki. As deputy to Nelson Mandela in 1997, Thabo articulated a vision of an African Renaissance and adopted it as a South African foreign policy doctrine. A year earlier, notes Eddy Maloka of South Africa’s Africa Institute, a conference was held in Dakar, Senegal, honouring the late Senegalese intellectual Sheik anta Diop, with the theme: ‘An African Renaissance at the Dawn of the Third Millennium.’

It was Thabo who sold the African Renaissance to a wider international audience by spearheading the design of a concrete development plan based on the ‘values’ of the African Renaissance – the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad). Adopted by all Africa’s leaders in October 2001 in Abuja, Nigeria, Nepad is a quid pro quo between Africa and the West: a ‘new’ commitment to good governance and democracy in exchange for increased capital flows and a renegotiation of Africa’s marginal position in the world economy.

Nepad quickly won the backing of the Group of Eight industrialised countries (G8), who promised ‘enhanced partnerships’ with those African countries that commit to its values of democratic reform, and sign up to a system of political and economic ‘peer review’ based loosely on the review regime of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Europe.

Today, under the Nepad banner, bridges, dams and electricity grids are being built and 24 countries have signed up to be ‘reviewed’ (it remains to be seen whether rogue governments like Zimbabwe’s will sign up and, if they do, whether African peers will have the guts to criticize their transgressions openly and honestly).

Nepad is part of a bigger movement, which draws sustenance from Thabo Mbeki’s vision for the continent. His former political adviser, Vusi Mavimbela, wrote in 1997 that whereas decolonisation and the 1990s ‘wave’ of democratisation represent the ‘first and second moments’ of Africa’s post-colonial history, the African Renaissance is the ‘third moment.’ The Renaissance will be significant not only if it can be shown to lead to rapid change and wealth creation; it is already significant because it has redirected political discourse in Africa.

The first racially inclusive elections in 1994, which saw Mandela elected, came about through the initiatives set out by President F.W. de Klerk, following on from the previous year when both men were awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for their work in the peaceful dismantling of the apartheid segregation. It all seems fairly straightforward: a clear-cut struggle between good and bad, right and wrong, past and future. But in reality it is not that simple. Indeed, the old saying ‘if you’re not confused, then you don’t really understand the question’ seems particularly apt.

Frederick Willem De Klerk is a puzzling character. Only a year into his presidency, in February 1990, he lifted the ban on the ANC and released its supporters from prison. Yet his political career up to that point reflects quite a different attitude. First elected to Parliament in 1969, and entering the cabinet in 1978, Frederick had a reputation as a stalwart conservative – an avid proponent of the apartheid policy that the National Party, of which he was a member, euphemistically dubbed ‘separate development’. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has criticised him for his central role within the notorious State Security Council in the 1970s and 1980s – accusing him of being ‘partially responsible’ for racial violence.

It is poignant that the question Frederick chose to tackle in his speech at the Oxford Union was how we are to know whether what we are doing is right or wrong. In his case, it seems that hindsight has become a useful gauge. ‘Justice through partition had failed; it resulted in manifest injustice. It was morally unjustifiable, irreconcilable with religion or any pragmatic principles. What we were doing was not only wrong, it was doomed to failure.’

Yet F.W. should not be treated with blind cynicism. He is not putting himself forward as a sinner looking to do penance for crimes; accepting the problems of apartheid is not a process of self-atonement for him. Eight years after leaving party politics, he knows the questions that are likely to be put to him, and he has answers for all of them. He maintains that the decision to go about ending apartheid was a process and not an opinion that changed overnight. He rejects the criticism that segregation was brought to an end on purely economic grounds, as opposed to any humanitarian sentiment. Yes, ending the regime did have economic motives, but it was not economic motives alone that ended apartheid. It came about as a result of a pragmatic political response to the circumstances of the times.

In a letter sent in 1992, Nelson Mandela appealed for President de Klerk to ‘look inside [him]self for a change of heart’. Yet Frederick maintains that he was not pushed into his decision to end apartheid by such appeals alone: ‘Long before Mandela said it, in the ‘80s we in the National Party spent more time and energy looking into ourselves than in anything else. The quantum leaps that I was able to make were facilitated by this self-analysis and this struggle with our conscience of what is right and what is wrong. What facilitated the change in South Africa was our own reassessment of what is right and what is wrong. I think the same process quietly took place in the ANC.’

‘Africa? A book one thumbs
Listlessly, till slumber comes.’
COUNTEE CULLEN

Africa as a book is an appropriate image – the continent is crammed with stories and multiple meanings. Africa’s tales, their impact and their relevancy to modern African awareness are what I set out to discuss here. Unarguably, Africans share similar characteristics that stretch beyond the physical. Proximity brings about contagion if shared ancestry doesn’t complete the job – we share the same consciousness, and yet we don’t seem to realise it, properly realise it in a way that helps. By ‘consciousness’ I mean value systems, dreams so bright it’s as if they sprang out of the hot earth and sang down from the sun at the same time as the first humans were loved into existence. It hardly needs to be said that we dream of life, success, and the peace and prosperity of those who share our bloodlines. And stories are my only way into this world, because I can look and look at modern Africa for hours, years, my whole life, saw open my head and cram it with rolls of printed-off statistics, death rates, birth rates, Gross National Products and still not know where it is that I come from, what its problems are and have been, and how they will be resolved. These aren’t the words of somebody who is familiar with the colourful emergencies of Africa, the necessities of trudging to the well and back, swaying under the weight of clean, bucketed water in the absence of the tap variety. Rather, this is the muddled, tangential thought of someone who is ‘in’ a Nigerian cultural framework but not ‘of’ it, being carried along by a culture at a distance from its source and its pervading influence.

Let’s define a mythology as a story system, a belief system. In an archetypal sense, the stories contained in the mythology are just as true as the world we see around us today. And a story that fits snugly into a mythology is ideally a series of images and symbols that have the power to reveal how people really relate to the world they live in.

As a mix of first and second generation – that is, born ‘back home’, feeling more comfortable in my skin ‘back home’, but embarrassed and often baffled by the Nigerian tendency to over-God things, to over-expect things, to be over-frank, I find Africa in the weirdest places, with the startlement of someone waking up in the middle of the night and catching a glimpse of themselves in the mirror across the room. I have sat mortified as a couple of Jamaican girls decided to call me ‘jungle bunny’ in primary school, all three of us knowing that there was something temptingly wrong, actually hateful, in the name yet none of us knowing exactly why. I’ve sat slit-eyed and exchanged glances of mixed embarrassment and defensiveness with another African whilst other classmates earnestly express their wishes to ‘help feed the Africans.’ I’ve nearly reeled with longing at the smell of camphor on folded traditional attire, wishing that I was back at my cousin’s house, sitting on the veranda watching the heat chase lizards across the mosquito netting.

My Africa are so personal that I can only replace them in my mind with my country, Nigeria, with its various leadership crises and its new hope under a non-military president who seems determined to battle the structure of corruption and bribery. Yet this narrowing of the field of patriotic concern is indicative of a mindset found amongst most of the second generation Africans that I know – specificity is all. If I meet someone whose parents are Nigerian, too, I’ll eagerly enquire what parts they’re from, and be philosophical if they turn out to be an Ibo (‘Never trust an Ibo!’ a Yoruba friend of mine often says, half-jokingly. ‘They won’t even think twice about killing you whilst you sleep…) and ecstatic if they are Yoruba. Even an Ibo, however, is better than, say, a Ghanaian, with whom there is little or no point of contact. Word on the street is, we Nigerians stole jollof rice from Ghana. But do Ghanaians eat moin moin and eko? Have they had to put up with the flabby, sandy taste of eba until they got to an age where they could safely proclaim that actually they’d prefer a risotto? At times it feels dangerously as if there isn’t a sufficient common culture. We all feel somehow that we will never be purely African enough for our parents at the same time as accepting that it’s not our fault. But some divider exists between us, because our search for fellow Africans in our situation is selective – we’re running around looking to see ourselves. We need our stories back.

It is possible that Africa has reached a point where it can chiefly be thought of as a collection of countries rather than as a continent. Each country seems compartmentalised in its own challenges – South Africa’s box is still layered with the thin fissures left over from apartheid, the shadow of preternaturally fierce children-made-soldiers starkly overlays the image of Sierra Leone, and Somalia and Ethiopia’s names are ever twinned with starvation and poverty. And Nigeria. In Nigeria, respect for ‘traditional’ beliefs runs alongside exuberant Christianity. The country may be a rich tapestry of beliefs, but the 80s and 90s saw the bleakness of rule by military junta – first Ibrahim Babangida, then his successor, Sani Abacha, led the country in a state of fear and internal violence, from the execution of the environmentalist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight fellow protestors for speaking out against the pollution of Ogoni land by petrol companies such as Shell, to the death in custody of Moshood Abiola, the President-Elect who was to have helped turn Nigeria around under an ideology of representative democracy. Wole Soyinka, one of Nigeria’s most phenomenal talents, escaped the turmoil of those times with his life – Wole was fast assuming the role of a Cassandra of Troy, cursed not to be disbelieved but to be suppressed in his own country, unable to keep from warning of future peril.

In her novel, The Secret History, Donna Tartt observes that one of the most heartbreaking things about the development of a sense of ‘self’ and ‘other’ is the realisation that you are alone inside your head, that you are a sealed unit, and no one can fully understand what happens inside you. For a while, it felt like this when I was being pumped with information about what seemed like the imminent collapse of my country. One of my friends was a Kenyan and another was from Zaire, and I couldn’t talk about what was going on because the doubt and anxiety seemed so painfully unique – my parents were sick with fear over what their country was becoming. I didn’t want to see what was happening to a county that I had forgotten how to belong to. Nigeria had been wounded, and it was bleeding people – Nigerians were leaving for Europe, and not just for ambitious educational purposes like my parents did. They were leaving behind weak life chances and coming to England, to a place where, according to a recent poll, 60% of the population would ‘prefer not’ to live next door to a member of an ethnic minority. To leave their homes for this veiled hostility suggested a huge problem – the Kafkaesque unease of it, the following of a niggling problem out of the corner of one’s eye is excellently captured by writers who specialise in cataloguing Nigeria’s blood flow, it’s spillage into other countries. Writers such as Emecheta in Second Class Citizen and The Bride Price ask what’s happening, and whether it’s better away from Nigeria. The things I wanted to hear about Nigeria when I was eleven or so were not: ‘we are living under a terrible military junta who are doing dodgy deals with what oil we have, and people are dying’. I wanted to hear that:

I press R20 into the hands of the driver to let me sit up front and pick his brains. Normally these places are occupied by good-looking women, ushered there like display items by the conductor, the crier, the… what is the correct term for his vocal assistant?

‘Slide Door Operator,’ says the man at the wheel with gold teeth, adjusting the rear view mirror that has a decal over it reading SEXUAL. Many of the vehicles have warlike designs stencilled their fuselage, names tattooed on the back window in garish neon: HOT STEPPER, DREAM LOVER, MIND BLOWING BASS. The S.D.O is running a very tight ship, sucking at lollipops and officiously shuffling long distance passengers to the back. He charms large women to manoeuvre into tight spaces, apologising profusely, then simply crams in schoolchildren on the floor between seats where they hunch and flinch as the door slams. Students, servants, shoppers, businessmen, backpackers – all kinds of South Africans and even the odd intrepid tourist are herded in and asked for money, and in this way taxis constitute a rare link, or at least point of contact, between the split personalities of Cape Town – the First World city centre, a tourist and property agent paradise cradled by the mountain behind us, and the planned grids of the Flats, still illuminated in the dawn haze by massive floodlights.

When the vehicle fills up we filter out of the rank, then turn left onto Main below the flattened remains of District Six, the site of one of apartheid’s most infamous forced removals, like a scar on the slopes. Where Main Road crosses under the city bypass there is a scuffed billboard showing the Toyota Hi-Ace minibus juxtaposed with London and New York cabs, with the slogan: ‘To be a world famous taxi you have to outrun the competition.’

In fact South African minibuses have nothing to do with the quiet, insulated backseat tours of a city offered by metered cabs. They are part of the much larger transport networks that serve the rapidly urbanising metropolises of the developing world: matatus in Kenya, bakassi in Khartoum or the publicos in Puerto Rico, a ragged fleet of small buses and open back trucks stretching from Cairo to Kuala Lumpur. For the majority of the population they are a fact of life – 65% of all passenger journeys here happen in a minibus – but to economists and Inland Revenue, taxis are part of the ‘informal’ sector; there are no receipts or financial audits, and the industry is entirely cash propelled. All around me people are counting out their coins, doing the maths to work out their change, handing the money forward. I drop my fare into the cupped hand of the conductor and his arm snakes back.

A fearless champion of the oppressed, he was an outspoken critic of the corruption and repressive policies that left millions of Nigerians without basic human rights. He held despotic leaders up to intense scrutiny and identified the societal problems not only of his native Nigeria but also of the world, revealing them boldly in his performances and recordings. Fela paid the price for his truculent critiques through frequent police harassment, beatings, and incarceration; military raids of Kalakuta in 1974 and1977 destroyed his compound, brutalized its inhabitants, and left Fela hospitalized and imprisoned. An alleged currency-smuggling violation while trying to board a plane for his 1984 American tour led to his arrest and imprisonment for over eighteen months.

Despite numerous attacks on his body, compound and character, Fela remained undeterred in spreading his music and message. He recorded more than seventy albums and delivered several electrifying performances a week at his nightclub in Lagos, the Afrika Shrine. It was not only the hottest club with the funkiest music in Africa, but a place of political empowerment and spiritual uplift where the Yoruba Orisha (gods) and heroes of the African Diaspora such as Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, and Fela’s mother, Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the leader of the Nigerian national and feminist movements, were venerated.

But Fela was much more than a rock star and political dissident. He was also a pan-African philosopher and utopian visionary. Fela proclaimed his compound, where he resided with his extended family, band mates and street toughs, an independent nation for the marginalized masses, free from the laws and jurisdiction of the Nigerian government. He called this counterculture haven the Kalakuta Republic, named after a prison cell he once occupied, meaning ‘rascal’ in Swahili. Physically, Fela marked his political turf by installing a barbed-wire fence around the compound, but conceptually, he created an alternate universe where diversity and rascality prevailed and radical ideas flowed freely. It was a safe refuge for the marginalized masses and disenchanted youth, and a revolutionary haven of political empowerment, spliff smoking, sex, and some of the funkiest music around. But Fela’s concept of a revolutionary community was more than a symbolic form of dissent; for many, this pan-African utopia was a way of life as well as a state of mind.

At the height of his popularity in the mid-1970s, Fela took to calling himself the ‘Black President,’ a moniker worthy of his pan-African appeal and political ambitions. When he passed away at the age of fifty-eight following a prolonged battle with AIDS, more than a million people attended his processional funeral through the streets of Lagos. Fela has since achieved an iconic status that situates him alongside such counter-cultural figures as Bob Marley and Che Guevara. His music has been sampled, covered, and paid tribute to by an unbelievable array of artists and he is cherished by such diverse musicians as Brian Eno, Sir Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Gilberto Gil and Mos Def.

Today, Fela’s significance is being experienced musically, politically, and culturally, building an Afrobeat community around the world. Fela’s music has become a new vehicle of identity and change as people move both physically and virtually through the Diaspora. His legacy has opened new spaces for artists to bolster political resistance, yet it is also a complicated one, open to multiple interpretations. Fela’s life was one of excess: he lived in a commune, smoked copious amounts of ganja, travelled with an entourage, had twenty-eight wives and a following of millions. He was Africa’s most notorious rock star and one of the continent’s most outspoken and dedicated political critics. In many ways Fela’s legacy is both sobering and inspirational, but despite the controversies surrounding him, no one can deny his bravery in the face of government brutality or the fact that he created some of the best dance music ever recorded. His life and struggles are truly as relevant today as ever.

An historical figure as rich in complexity as Fela necessitated investigation through a wide range of voices and creative media. So, back in 1999 I started to research and organize what came to be called The Fela Project, consisting of the art exhibition Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the published collection of essays, interviews and memoirs, entitled, Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway, an informational website and a series of related events and programmes.

Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was the first museum exhibition of its kind, with largely new work from thirty-four contemporary visual artists, documentary photography and video, a major catalogue and an extensive exploration in sound of Fela’s musical history and legacy. The selection of music in the listening programme was compiled by myself and my colleague and friend, Piotr Orlov and was unprecedented both in terms of examining Fela’s music, and also in its inclusion in an art exhibition. It was represented in a timeline from the 1950s to 2003, providing a context for the cultural and political environment in which Fela’s Afrobeat was created and developed, with synergistic music of the eras during which Fela composed and the musical realms in which his legacy has been disseminated.

Much has been written about the exhibition, so I will say little more except that the artists and venues were truly wonderful, as was the public response. It opened to the largest crowd ever recorded at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in July 2003 and brought in similar numbers throughout its tenures at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Barbican in London and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. While the critical and popular press was very positive, I am most proud of the way in which the exhibition proved to be accessible, relevant and interesting to new audiences who rarely, or in some cases, never had been to a museum before. To turn new people on to Fela and to help break down some of the walls of elitism of today’s art institutions was more than I and the artists who created work for the exhibition could have asked for.

The book, Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway, published by Palgrave Macmillan, has been somewhat overlooked amidst all of the hype and press that the exhibition and musical concerts generated. But it and the exhibition catalogue are what will endure and I strongly urge people to take a look at this compendium of essays, memoirs and interviews that attempt to balance personal reflection with critical exploration and scholarly analysis. The writers who contributed to Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway comprise a collection of incredibly diverse voices, and through their many perspectives you will experience Fela’s legacy and meet the man – a man of the people, a political gadfly, a musical revolutionary, a spiritual leader, a distant father, a loyal son, a husband to 28, and a lover to more. You will hear how he challenged dictators, composed more than 77 hit albums, and was king of a commune. You will hear how he was a leader to millions and yet was led astray. You will hear about Nigeria, the tales of Fela’s life and the diasporic reverberations of his actions and music. In the end it is up to you to listen with an open mind and let in the politico-sonic explosion that was Fela Kuti. In a world of largely negative images, Fela shines brightly as a positive force. I urge you to learn more.

1. Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway is published by Palgrave Macmillan
2. More information on Twrvor’s project can be found at http://www.felaproject.net

The pictures of Moussa Doumbia show an emaciated seventeen-year-old. He has wounds from being struck across his back, big scars. He looks at the camera, exhausted, humiliated. He is wearing worn-out jeans much too big for him. There is a bandage over a wound on one shoulder. The surface of his skin has been worn away from carrying heavy weights. This is how he looked when he came home from the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast, where much of the cocoa comes from for the chocolate we eat in Europe.

Moussa’s story began when he ran away from his home in Zantiebougou in Mali when he was sixteen. He found work in Sikasso, and there met people who were recruiting workers for a year’s employment in Ivory Coast. The pay was to be around £100 per annum – a good deal, higher than he might expect to earn in Mali. Moussa was to receive his salary after his first year of work. He seized the offer and headed across the border to a town called Korhogo in Ivory Coast. After resting for a day he was put to work, carrying heavy loads, and clearing the cocoa fields with a macheté. At night, he and his work mates were locked in. The work became heavier and heavier, and the treatment worse. Finally, Moussa tried to run away. It wasn’t long before he was discovered, brought back and beaten. One of his work-mates managed to escape and tell his fellow countrymen of the ill-treatment and imprisonment endured by the young workers on the cocoa farm. A Mali rescue effort was launched, and the majority of workers were able to return home. This is when the pictures (right) of Moussa were taken.

Three years on I met Moussa again, now a serious twenty-year-old. He recounted in detail the experiences he had endured while he worked in the cocoa fields. Sitting beside him were others who had been exploited in the same manner. In all, we interviewed eleven young men with similar stories to tell. We sat together over a couple of evenings, listening to story after story watching the night draw in and the sun slowly sink out of sight. Almost all of the young men had run away from home when they were in their teens, dreaming of escaping from poverty and trying their luck elsewhere. ‘I did it because I wanted to get myself some clothes,’ said Madou Diarra, who had left when he was fifteen.

‘Youngsters from the villages around here dream about going to Ivory Coast,’ Yaya Berthé explained. There are better job opportunities in Ivory Coast, especially in the cocoa sector. Annually this country produces about forty percent of the world’s cocoa, and a strong tradition of labour migration between the two countries is now established.

A significant problem arises in the workers actually getting their hands on the wage promised. Traditionally, nothing is paid out until the completion of one year’s work. When the year is up, the workers demand their wages, but cocoa prices fluctuate annually, the margins are small, and the farmers do not always have money on hand. When they try to persuade the young workers to stay for a further year, many end up locked into conflict. ‘When I had worked for a year I went and demanded my pay, but instead of getting my wages, I was beaten,’ recalled Madou Diarra.

During the last four years the media have exposed a multitude of stories from cocoa workers suffering similar fates and such press attention has led to action by human rights organisations. Western consumers boycotted particular products and politicians prepared legislation. The result was the Harkin-Engel Protocol. This voluntary agreement, signed by the world’s largest chocolate producers, involved organizations such as the International Labour Organization and Free the Slaves. One of the initiatives in the agreement was the establishment of a basic investigation charting the extent of child labour in the cocoa industry to be carried out by The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), a UN organization. They revealed that roughly 625,000 children under the age of eighteen work in the cocoa plantations of Ivory Coast. Almost a quarter of these children were between six and nine years of age. What researchers found most disturbing, however, was that 30% of the children had never been to school. A great number of workers were doing jobs that could be considered dangerous to their health and wellbeing – approximately 129,400 children took part in the spraying of crops with poisonous insecticides and chemical fertilizers and a large number carried out other dangerous tasks, such as clearing away the undergrowth with machetes and transporting very heavy loads.

The report paid special attention to young workers who were in work situations that had ‘special risks for children’ and could ‘put at risk their [personal] human development.’ A great many of these had travelled a long way to the Ivory Coast, most from the poor neighbouring country of Burkina Faso. The study estimated that 1,485 youngsters were unable to leave their workplaces even it they wanted to. This required the permission either of their parents – in the event that the parents could be contacted – or from a middleman who represented the family. When workers were questioned as to how they had been recruited, most explained that they had been promised a better life.

IITA’s researchers concluded that ‘The picture that emerges is of a [cocoa] sector with stagnating technology, poor crop yields, and an increasing need for unskilled workers who are locked into a spiral of poverty. Child wage-labourers are those most clearly locked into a vicious circle. Most of these children have never gone to school, they earn subsistence wages and are forced into the work for economic reasons. […] Due to the weakness of the raw material market since the end of the 1980s, the farmers have been forced to cut costs by reducing expenses and increasing the use of their own domestic labour, including that of children. This, for its part, compromises human development and the future productivity of this maturing generation of workers.’ More recently, conditions have deteriorated even further. Only a month after IITA published its report, civil war broke out in Ivory Coast.

1. A Bitter Little Chocolate Book is so far only available in Norwegian, but an English edition will be available soon.
2. The author, Simen Sætre, is a Norwegian journalist with a background in international relations.
3. IITA website

Africa 05 aims to add a cultural component to the political momentum and focus that will be placed on Africa when the UK takes over the presidency and chairmanship of the European Union and the G8 this year. Notable African artists, scholars and thinkers, including Yinka Shonibare, El Anatsui, Baaba Maal, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka will also be contributing to the programme.

Events will include African contemporary art at the Hayward Gallery, MC Solaar at the Royal Festival Hall, Fashion at the V&A and a display of the oldest humanly made objects in the world at the British Museum (two million year old stone tools from Tanzania). These major institutions of British cultural life are all partners in the initiative, along with the BBC and Arts Council England – each institution doing what they know best, with the theme of showcasing the rich diversity of African culture.

The programme will also involve events from 50 smaller organisations (including the LIP magazine), ranging through film, dance, music, literature, drama, fashion, radio, television and crafts.

The legacy of Africa 05 is intended to be a permanent improvement in the diversity of the museums and galleries sector, both in creating new fellowships for curators of African origin, and developing new audiences amongst the ethnic minority communities of London. The programme could also change the way things are collected and interpreted.

Mark Grimmer talked to Programme Director Dr Augustus Casely-Hayford about the inspiration behind the programme of events and his hopes for the future representation of African culture in the UK…

The LIP: What prompted you to put Africa 05 together?

Augustus Casely-Hayford: It has been a long time since the last big celebration of African culture in 1995 and since then most mainstream venues have done very little to build upon that fantastic platform. Africa O5 will be a long overdue focus on Africa, and will hopefully be the beginning of a more sustained delivery of African programming by cultural institutions.

The LIP: The ‘Tree of Life’ project sounds fascinating – how can art help shift the focus away from Africa’s violent past?

AC-H: The Tree of life – a life size tree made from weapons that were collected after the Civil war in Mozambique – is an arresting image. It is meant to be provocative, to make us think about how Africa can work through the most devastating periods and thrive. The two Mozambique Government and opposition leaders came together under the tree to reflect, yes upon their countries violent history, but also on their hopes for the future. The tree is now in the Great Court of the British Museum.

The LIP: Does the African artist who claims to represent his or her country have added responsibility?

AC-H: I would hope that no artist should have to take on that responsibility unless they wish to. I hope that during Africa 05 we will be able to see the work of hundreds of African artists, most of whom have never been seen in Britain before. I hope we will begin to get a sense of the huge complexity of African arts practise and to emancipate African artists from the responsibility of feeling that they have to represent anyone but themselves.

The LIP: Why has African culture been neglected on the British scene until now?

AC-H: I think that there has been an unfortunate history of collecting African material culture and placing it in an ethnographic context. This has meant that most of the African material in the National collection has been collected by museums who are interested in material culture. The recent move by the galleries to begin to collect African work will begin to change how and where African art is seen. Hopefully if the Nationals take a lead the commercial sector will follow.

The LIP: In the past, large-scale cultural events such as Band Aid have been linked with a negative image of Africa as a starving continent. Is Africa 05 deliberately moving away from that?

AC-H: Africa 05 is all about celebrating Africa. In a year when we may see African debt cancelled, and a sustainable AIDS policy. It is time to be optimistic and celebrate Africa.

The LIP: What was the African input into the curation of the project?

AC-H: Africa 05 is a celebration, not just of Africa, but also its Diaspora. The whole Africa 05 team are of African descent and we have worked with the Arts Council to begin new curatorial development schemes for BME (Black Minority Ethnic) curators.

The LIP: Can we really talk about ‘Africa’ as a homogenous unit? The art and the artists’ Africanness is both a unifying and differentiating factor – how is this manifested in the project?

AC-H: Possibly not – but the problems of under representation have affected the people of the continent as a whole, hence it is easy to market ‘Africa’ to get people through doors, bums on seats, watching TV – then we can explode the myths and stereotypes. All the artists are here as individuals, and the platforms they have been given respect their individual talents.

The LIP: How will the African presence be maintained on the British cultural scene in 2006 and beyond?

AC-H: We have developed a number of programmes with the Arts Council that will make a sustainable change to the way that African art is delivered in Britain.

The LIP: What does multiculturalism mean to you?

AC-H: I think it means respecting and valuing difference, whilst seeking common bonds.

The LIP: There has been talk lately of an African Renaissance – how important is it for these innovative individuals to channel their talents back into Africa?

AC-H: I would encourage anyone to invest their energies in Africa, whoever they might be.

The LIP: What political decisions were involved in putting the scheme together – is Zimbabwe represented in the project?

There are a number of Zimbabwean artists involved in Africa 05 – the programme has attempted to be as inclusive as possible and not make any judgements that are not aesthetic. I think you have to scream political messages louder and louder, as people get bored of hearing the same thing. Art by its very definition is unique and offers a refreshing take on a number of otherwise unpalatable truths.

The LIP: Where is Africa now?

AC-H: Here in London! Come and see it during 2005.