Introduction
Is there really a Global Africa? And, if there is, who belongs to it, who are the stakeholders? What work is this concept performing, or hoped to perform? In this discussion I am approaching the question of Global Africa and African futures with an Afropolitan, optimistic view and seek to identify forces and trends that in my view are organic, and not always intentional. Drawing on Edouard Glissant’s discussions of relationality, nature, and the poetics of self-creation, this essay engages questions regarding the Black world’s continuous project of constructing and reconstructing self, context, and the uses of history. With a focus on youth mobility this I pay particular attention to Youtube as a site of creative self-representations of blackness and Africanity and attention to the effects of travel on African millennial views of the world. As such I argue that this movement of bodies, intersecting and coincident with the movement of information (including cultural practice as information) is creating new African/African diaspora debates, identities and communities that are dynamic and intensely creative as an inherent function of their mobile character.
Global Africa, perhaps a contested term, is first of all located in people. As framed here, it connotes populations of New and Old Diasporas. It necessarily refers to the African continent which is a place of creative potential, of creative production, of ancestors, of contested resources, and of imagined futures. Glissant’s term ‘errantry’ is especially relevant here as it connotes movement, encounter, discovery and transformation. Global Africa occurs in the circular nomadism that Glissant wrote about, in sprit and in physicality. In tandem with the new discourses on concepts of Global Africa, the idea of ‘pan-africanism’ is in many ways experiencing an all-time low. It is in question on the continent and in the diaspora, particularly among youth. It is seen as an ideological framework that has run its course in the light of twenty-first challenges of nation-building and sovereignty, and though appreciated as a twentieth-century movement of political importance on the continent and among diaspora communities, it is seldom evoked today as a solution or goal in Africa or beyond. It is a point of reference, but no longer speaks to concerns of contemporary youth. But this does not mean that the constituent ideas of pan-Africanism no longer hold sway. It may be that some of its goals have been attained, or are in the process of examination by African and diaspora actors.
Intellectuals, the Arts, Mobility, and Media
On a global scale, music, the plastic arts, video and literature have increased in importance as points of encounter where African immigrants and people of the Old African Diaspora engage each other, and aspirations for a different political and social future are shared. These conversations are taking place in the context of a rise of social media and internet access that allows youth of the diaspora, and on the continent, to see, listen to, and watch, videos of individuals and communities of diverse African descent. Over the last several years, there has been a lively discussion regarding an “African Renaissance.” In this conversation, I read Wakandu as a symbol of this, a metaphor of desired resolution, healing, redemption, and wholeness. Indeed, these spontaneous expressions of being and place can be seen as emanating from what Glissant called the echo-monde.
These trends are not un-related, and though not all intentionally pursued as pan-Africanist or humanist strategies, we can still analyze their impacts as factors in an increasing world awareness of Africans, black cultures, and cultural transformation. For example, I frame YouTube as a distributor of cultural artifacts which document cultural expression and pressing political arguments. In using YouTube as a research field, self-identified black diasporans and youth on the continent constitute a body of social actors I can observe whose utterances are not affected by my ‘ethnographic’ presence. I can watch speakers as actors in a digital world where I am a distant participant observer, observing after the fact.
Previously unimaginable actions on the periphery: learning by doing?
One very good example of youth engagement in these processes is the YouTube show that was popular in 2019, “The Grapevine,” with host Ashley Akunna, an Nigerian-American of Igbo descent.
The panel participants in The Grapevine consider themselves Black Millenials who, in their words, are like “Power Rangers” for the cause of African descendent community healing. The panels include people of Haitian, historic Black American, Jamaican, Nigerian, Gambian, Ghanaian, and other origins. My intention here is not to descend into identity politics, but to demonstrate the different streams of experience and knowing that encounter each other in 21st century spaces of public intellectual discourse and artistic production. One participant, Chika Uchechi, observes (series 2, Episode 63) that the participants are bridge builders (9:05). She challenges standard identity frameworks, and voices her opinion that for some conversations, one might separate “American” from being Black, in order to clarify certain intellectual, and perhaps political, positions. Panelists state that ‘We [Africans] need to take advantage of the lure of Africa.” (27:00) The speakers on The Grapevine identify Afrobeat as an important unifier of global black communities, providing recognition of shared cultural affinities. Their ideas and concerns suggest a new struggle with identity, social meaning, belonging, inclusion and nationality that is happening in relative obscurity, perhaps the best place for it to flourish. These activists have found ‘relatable themes’ that allow robust discussion and exploration. Such gatherings, though occurring among small groups to limited audiences, remind us of what Glissand speaks of as “the non-futility of small actions,” and what Rolph-Trouillot referred to when speaking of the Haitian Revolution (I am paraphrasing here): the occurrence of “unimaginable actions of the periphery that impact the center.”
Mobility
Students on the continent are more mobile than they have ever been, and since the turn of the twenty-first century, Africa is developing its own poles of migration. South Africa, Morocco, Kenya, Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria now attract students and migrants from their home regions and beyond (as once only Egypt did). Through a combination of factors such as the rise of private universities, the creation of technical schools, and outside support from such donors as Soros, Rockefeller, and the Ford Foundation, young African thinkers have access to each other in ways that can best be compared to the early days of African higher education when Fourah Bay College in Freetown, the Ecole Normale Superieure William Ponty at Sebikotane in Senegal, Ibadan University in Nigeria, and Makerere University (University of East Africa) matriculated students from their respective colonial and post-colonial territories. Then, as now, the incoming and up-and-coming intellectual elite from different countries met each other and forged new ideas. In South Africa today, which is attracting scholars from around the world, visions of an African future are fomenting and a kind of renaissance seems to be underway as African and Black diaspora intellectuals exchange ideas and arguments. The organic nature of these encounters gives birth to new and changing iterations of the meaning of Africa, and the troublesome meanings of Blackness. They exhibit the movement and volatility that Achilles Mbembe describes in his Critique of Black Reason.
Mbembe’s discussions of the problematic nature of blackness as a category are useful for distinguishing the turbulent paths of the concept of blackness. It is a transnational condition by experience and by design. On the other hand, it is also a folk nomenclature that has come to define an ethnic group in the United States, ie Black American. The two meanings are linked, but not the same. Here, I refer to that universal, transnational and vaguely ascribed meaning of ‘black’ connected to the idea of physical or cultural African descent. As Mbembe describes it, blackness is both an artifact and a qualifier of the modern era. To what extent can African and diaspora leaders exploit the ubiquity of this idea, and the fast-growing networks of African descended youth towards the development of the continent and its states towards an African agenda?
The level of contact between old and new African diasporas, and between Africa’s new Diaspora and the continent, has created possibilities of communication and self-interrogation among thousands of people of diverse class, national, and ethnic backgrounds that never existed previously (Facebook, Face-to-face-Africa, OK Africa, Afrique Media, Africa is a Country, and other platforms such as BlueSky, and Instagram). This type of communication was impossible twenty years ago. In this light, we might need to revisit current critiques of social media, and ask ourselves how Global Africa benefits or does not. Emphasis on white nationalism and other spurious uses of internet are important security concerns, but as Mareme Gueye discussed at a conference at Rutgers almost a decade ago, the internet also facilitates critical black solidarities.
In tandem to the increasing movement of students and workers we are seeing within Africa, we observe that African youth were, a decade ago, the most mobile student population in the world today. This phenomenon has significant secondary impacts that those concerned with the future of Africa and Africans should be following closely, and to my mind it represents a kind of de-facto pan-Africanism that is experiential rather than ideological. New intellectual networks are emerging concurrently with twenty-first century labor networks spawned by Structural Adjustment, responses to the rise in xenophobia in Europe and the United States, and the re-emergence of racism as a substantial security issue for people of color globally. Due to these and other factors such as the growth of digital technology, one might suggest that African culture is experiencing a new 21st century global visibility and impact that follows the 20th century explosion of black American cultural expression, that was pushed by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and later greatly co-opted by United States media corporations. Like the scholar Chika Uchechi, I would like to be able to separate out what in this is the result of American empire and how much can be sustained in other networks, and if not, what does that mean? Empires, they say, come and go.
Global Contexts
African countries are struggling with governance at a time when there is serious global debate about the viability of the modern nation-state. This questioning of the modern state is occurring while, in response to forces of globalization, populist and nationalist movements are growing throughout the west. There is now a recalcitrant public in Europe and the United States who resist the immigration of non-European Others. One notes the rise of a frightened public who reject colonialism’s patronage and “savior” pretensions vis a vis migrants from the south.
Yet, this tension contributes to a growing sense of common cause among youth. In some white circles this has meant creativity and vibrant cultural transformation, even if for others it has been the source of increasing paranoia. In such a setting white feelings of displacement collide with black sentiments of possibility. Part of the possibility released by the creative nexus born of migration is marking and making spaces of re-generation. This action provides a locus for de-racialized intellectual production, including for European and white American youth who repudiate racism and exclusivity. In this case, excitement, creativity and cultural re-invention emerge in response to the presence of black and brown people in everyday white lives.
African descended populations in the Maghreb and in Asia are also seeing access to Africa-based networks, and beginning to employ those resources to renegotiate their positions at home. Tiniwaren, the Tuareg group, are now internationally known, have YouTube followers, and perform in Europe and the U.S. The rise of the music of the Gnawa of Morocco, as well as scholarship on them and the Stambouli in Tunisia (Ismael Montana), are surely part of the echo-monde. Scholarship on these communities, Sidis in India and immigrant groups in Shanghai, are all reverberations from the global factors of physical mobility, information circulation, and internet communication that have not existed before. This cacophony of new expressions and fraught positionalities represent a serious challenge and opportunity to scholars of Africa.
Africa is making a global imprint on the digital world in spite of the rather low anf uneven access of its populations’ internet infrasructures. Most importantly, Africa is increasingly visible to Africans across regions and diasporans abroad. Exciting new websites, blogs and vlogs populate the digital world that allow global Africa choices in how people represent themselves and their experiences. African descended youth do not appear to feel obligated to one identity, whether national or cultural. By this I mean that a cursory visit to YouTube, for example, will evince a multitude of videos where people move in and out of African national and African diaspora identities, often in the same clip. In addition to digital presence, the public image of Africa is richer and more complex than in previous eras. Much of this is due to the arts, where globally known figures belie the earlier prejudices about savagery and ignorance that survived the nineteenth century and prevailed through much of the twentieth.
If politicians and government leaders are hesitant to cultivate alliances with people of the old diaspora, the field of music continues to be a site of dialogue between the continent and its many diasporas. Music styles are circulating around the continent and elsewhere, as we can see in the popularity of Davido, Burna Boy, Ayra Starr, Phelimuncasi of South Africa and other Afropop artists, who are favorites on American campuses as much as they are in francophone and anglophone settings on the continent.
Foremost among these dynamic phenomena of encounter and re-creation are music videos, and the appearance of African youth in multi-vocal narratives that describe diaspora and an imagined African homeland. Even hard-core rapper Cheikh West had a YouTube Video about his return home to rejuvenate and regain his spiritual and cultural moorings. The African Diasporas of Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil, France, Martinique, Britain and the United States have long been in dialogue with the continent. In fact, given the history of the Aku Creole, the Maroons of Sierra Leone, the Newfoundland emigres, black American sailors in Cape Town and the Brazilians of the West African coast, it is more difficult to identify a time when these musics and cultures were not in conversation. Conceptually and expressively, Black musicians create spaces of creativity and ebullience. In that space of connection and choice, there is also joy and self-claiming, social commentary, memory and optimism. This is a function of the periphery constituting an outside discourse that circulates in transnational and trans-ethnic ways, always inventing. These are also new kinds of ‘entanglements’ in the sense that Mbembe uses the word (2016). In those encounters there is that point where people go “beyond assenting to their linear drive alone and consent to global dynamics-practicing a self-break and a reconnection,” as Glissant talked about in the Poetics of Relation. (33)
The aspirations evident in the show The Grapevine present a discourse of choice, and the very fact that participants believe they have agency is important and valuable. Yes, Wakanda happened, presenting a fantasy of history and geography that is both past and future, but youth seem more inclined to focus on the now and how to get to spaces of security and abundance that they can imagine themselves. Likewise, the questions faced by many current musics from the diaspora or on the continent is how to integrate historic, ‘traditional’ values with new preoccupations of equity, social justice, a better material life and opportunities for intellectual freedom and internet access. And how do emerging artistic, hybrid expressions that confront questions of social justice, freedom of speech, gender categories and so on, fare on the continent itself?
Notably, there is an emerging strain of nihilism in the new Afropunk sounds – but there is also social critique (for example, Death Grip). This is a music form that screams out against power and convention, perhaps the furthest from the more mainstream African and Afrodiaspora musics, but an important element of Afro-Futurism. The hip hop scene remains a place of contestation in the United States, its distribution and production are constantly maneuvered by those with investment in the U.S. market, and much has been said about the difficulties new artists face in that sector. At the same time we find Sid the Kid (of Ethiopian origin) who engages issues of gender and challenges homophobia, there is Earl Sweatshirt, the son of the internationally acclaimed South African poet Willie Khgositsile, and earlier, Mos Def who attempted to reach beyond commercial frameworks and constraints for black transnational artistic messages. Meanwhile, Afropop has become an African and Diaspora sound that travels all geographies, much like Congolese music did a generation ago, like Reggaeton today. The transnational sounds of Dr. Nico, Dr. Franco, Papa Wemba, Sam Mwangana and Manu Dibango of Cameroun, were followed by artists such as Koffi Olumide and created space for musicians like Ayra Starr. Music circulates geographic and historical messages; Wizkid and Beyonce referenced Mami Wata in their popular hits, both creating and reflecting community. Afrobeat, with artists like Davido, Wandecoal, and Yemi Olade, now attains greater international popularity, following the lead of Fela Kuti.
Tijan Fakoly, in his song ”Foly” reminded us almost two decades ago of how we can see the world. If the forums for discussing new and historic values are not available in formal structures on the home scene, the artistic world of Global Africa is in many ways filling the void, and being used to create new venues.
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