“Too foreign for home, too foreign for here”. When I first read this poem by Ijeoma Umebinyo, an immediate feeling of recognition resonated so deeply in my belly, a feeling I’ve been familiar with my entire life.
As a backstory, a somewhat unconventional love story between my resilient Oshiwambo mother and smooth Portuguese/Angolan father brought about the person I am today. I was born and raised in Namibia which ironically enough is described as the country where the ocean meets the desert – a metaphor of two dissimilar entities coming together.
This notion has always been very much prevalent in my life and I’ve always questioned my identity as an African with a part European heritage. I couldn’t help but wonder whether my narrative would have been different if I was born in Europe. What would it then mean to be African? Having had the opportunity to be exposed and immersed in a variety of different cultures around the world, I have a clear understanding for how testing it can be to show up as yourself when people attribute so much of who you are to where you are from. It’s almost as if Africa is seen as one country. So, even though I’m from one country (out of 54) with a population of approximately 2,600 million, I suddenly need to speak for the 1,6 billion others who live on the continent.
I’ve found that there is a tremendous amount of responsibility that comes with being an African in the diaspora. It is difficult to represent a collective that is so full of history and sheer value. The western world often paints my ‘home’ as nothing more than poverty-stricken faces, a playground for political misconduct and a primitive land filled with unsophisticated cultural practices; this is a narrative that was given to us as Africans, not one we chose. “The Hopeless Continent”, they called us.
The challenge of being able to adapt and not conform is so incredibly heavy. To hold insurmountable respect for the struggles my parents faced during the oppressive times of Apartheid and the afflictions passed down to my mother by German colonialism – never having directly experienced any of it first-hand, but constantly living in the tension of the past – is taxing. The tale of suppression and exploitation is one our continent knows far too well. How does one carry such a weighty history that still cripples your existence even though it was your forefathers who suffered directly at the hands of the oppressor?
As if being raised in a multicultural household wasn’t perplexing enough, growing up in a country that had been scathed by so many foreign hands and then going on to attend schools with international peers and pursue a career that exposed me to several global cultures really gave me a different perspective on what it meant to be African.
In my struggle to understand my identity and positionality in the world, I realised being African isn’t necessarily about your geographical position, the tribe you belong to, your cultural attire or the language you speak because while defining African identity this way paints a really vivid picture of the intricate and colourful splendours of the African continent in all its diversity – it is also incredibly nuanced and becomes too complex to standardise and unify. Instead, I wanted to understand what it meant to be African irrespective of individual upbringing, privilege, social disadvantages, skin colour or tribal belonging.
Political analyst, Imad Mesdoua, perfectly highlighted that what links us together and defines us collectively as Africans are the very things that unified our parents and grandparents. A shared history of anti-colonial resistance and values of solidarity and sacrifice. The links to the past are so incredibly profound and while we can characterise part of our African identity by reflecting the past, what does it mean to be African in the future?
To be African today means that we have a great responsibility to take back the narrative that should’ve been ours to establish in the first place. We’ve got the fundamental links to the past that have shaped our identity collectively as an African nation which monumentally paved the way for progress but it is time build on that foundation. I am a product of progress and while my experience as an African woman in the diaspora may not speak for all of us, our shared destiny does. The events of the past made it possible to reclaim the destiny that was stolen from us as the original bearers. The dispersal and connectivity of Africans in the world today indicates something deeper than the capability to travel or to connect to twitter – we have reach, we have access and we have a louder voice. We are more than our challenges.
So, what does it mean to be African? Unified and linked by our past, we now have the opportunity to answer that question – together.
