Musings from Anja
“In order for Black Lives to Matter,
Africa Must Matter.”
What does this statement mean to me, a middle-aged white woman, albeit one who has spent decades living in all corners of the African continent.
I have known that Africa didn’t matter I suppose as long ago as 1983 when I resigned from my first post-university job as a management trainee at Mercedes Benz UK in London. I told the Personnel Manager – as HR was called then, that sadly I had to resign from this job as I was moving to northern Uganda in East Africa with my fiancé. The look on his face went from surprise, to shock, to disgust and then to pitying humour, as in you poor deranged woman.
I didn’t feel it as viscerally as this again until about 30 years later when we moved to Atlanta, Georgia and I looked for a job with a resume filled with interesting professional experiences but all gathered on the African continent. When I met with expert resume writers and HR specialists, I was repeatedly told to remove ‘all that African stuff.’ Of course, there would be nothing left, if I removed all that and I didn’t.
I have never felt it in a more painful way than experienced through the eyes of our youngest child, who was 12 when we moved to Atlanta. To say she floundered is the biggest understatement, she contorted, twisted, and ultimately shrank herself into that reductive box which is labeled black in America. It is airtight, rigid, predictive, and very seldom allowing for nuance. This box tells the normative dominant culture viewer everything about its occupant at the very first glance as they busy themselves installing the guard rails ensuring that there is very limited escape from this black box.
I am beginning to think more and more that at the origin of that reductive glance is the dismissal of an entire continent, thousands of civilizations, peoples, cultures, achievements and histories. And because of the toxic effects of what Ibram X Kendi calls dueling consciousness the most tragic aspect of this, is the dismissal of that entire continent by black people themselves in the Americas.
Yes it is a complicated relationship, fraught with repeated betrayals and promise and again betrayals. But repeatedly training a lens on the African continent to potentially refract the reductive gaze, is so important. The perceived monolith has to be shattered and it is heartening to see the hunger with which an awakening interest is demanding, consuming and loving cultural production from the continent.
During these four months of COVID lockdown many of us had time to delve more deeply into that cultural output and I have personally had some really memorable hours participating in these virtual events hosted and produced by artists from across the African diaspora.
I am attracted to those spaces that showcase both the versatile uniqueness of artists from the African Diaspora who are at the same time also anchored in that richness of being entirely of and from the African Continent.
The Atlanta artist Dr. Fahamu Pecou prefaces his weekly ADAMATL art salon by stating:
“everywhere we go -
there we are”
He then proceeds to take his viewers into the living and working spaces of artists and curators anchored in innovative spaces across the Africa Diaspora. To be very honest I have often felt uninvited and almost voyeuristic in my participation but that is my issue to resolve. I have been told that ‘white people are welcome but not in the middle of the room as it is not about them.’ Even though I am struggling to understand my place in these spaces, it should not take away from my enthusiasm about what ADAMATL is trying to do and to shout it from the rooftops to all kinds of people who might be interested as the reductive gaze about things African has to shift from all eyes.
I spent many late nights at the height of the initial stage of COVID-19 being transported into the three poles of the francophone African Diaspora with Maryse Conde as my guide. The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana plays out in three archetypal settings of the black francophone world: Guadaloupe, the banlieue of Paris and the ancient West African country of Mali. The protagonists alternately struggle, thrive and are stunted by the forces at work for and against their African bodies and soul and with the catastrophic foreshadowing fast paced narrative, the reader is immersed until they have to come up for air before continuing on to what is certain to happen.
And finally when my longing for my pre-Atlanta life becomes too much and I can’t distract myself, I watch episodes from Afripedia. These films crystallize the dynamism of the new African artists busy creating in the crazy but rich rich soil of Africa’s mega cities. They dream and then bring to life absolutely new realities and single handedly shatter that straitjacketing reductive gaze of white people, Europeans, and other global elite taste-makers, who are increasingly taking note.
