Creating Africa in America. Jacqueline Copeland-Carson
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in America, he still claimed that. I think it’s only among the African Americans that this is not common. The Germans, they say, “We’re from Germany,” even though they were born here. Even you see people living essentially within proximities. That’s an area is known to be German area, that’s an area that is known in America to be Scandinavian areas, Irish areas. The city of Milwaukee, they said is a German city … So that’s the way I look at things. As a matter of fact, I look at people from the Caribbean as African. Let me expand a little bit. The difference between nations, nationality, and the origin is different to me because it’s just like an English person—it could be in Canada, it could be in Switzerland, it could be anywhere—that’s their nationality. Africans in Cuba, their nationality is Cuban. Those that are in Brazil, their nationality is Brazil. But their origin is Africa. That’s the way that I look at it.
I first met Akin in a meeting with the CWC director about a new project and state contract that he had to provide culturally appropriate family planning counseling to women of African descent. He was exploring how to collaborate with the CWC in providing these services. Akin was also very active in Ẹgbé Ọmọ Odùduwà,25 a Twin Cities-based mutual aid society for Yorùbá immigrants. Akin identified strongly as Yorùbá but also identified as African. In a less formal conversation than the interview session excerpted above, he said that he would describe himself in some contexts as a “Nigerian,” but for him Nigeria was a political artifice created by the British that was no longer tenable. He supported Yorùbá efforts to secede from Nigeria and form an independent country because the “Yorùbá can make it on their own and will never get their due in Nigeria because it’s dominated by the North.”
Interestingly, as implied in the interview citations above, continental Africans, even those who like Akin, above, insisted that “African Americans are African,” in everyday conversation made a classificatory distinction between “African American” and “Africans.” However, the fact that a terminological distinction was made by continental Africans between “African” and “African American” did not mean that CWC African immigrant participants did not consider African Americans “Africans” in some sense. The semantic distinction between “African” and “African American” seemed to be more a statement about the specific place of origin rather than cultural identity. Interestingly, the term “African American” as used by both continental Africans and “Africans born in America” never referred to African immigrants who had American citizenship. Such individuals still referred to themselves as “African” or in reference to their country of origin or African ethnic origin, for example, “Somali,” “Liberian,” “Yorùbá” and so forth. Even if they had American citizenship, no CWC continental African participant described himself or herself as, for example, Somali-American, Yorùbá-American, or Liberian-American. CWC African immigrants seem to reserve the term “African American” to distinguish between people of African heritage—those who Akin also called “African descendants” or “African descents”—who were born here, particularly those whose ancestors arrived in North America through the seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade, and those who were born in Africa and emigrated to the United States more recently.
As indicated by Haidia above, depending upon the degree of specificity required for a particular conversation, continental Africans may have also described themselves by their country of origin or ethnic group; she was both “African” and “Somali.” Similarly for Akin, he strongly identified as “African” and “Yorùbá.” The identity that was most prominently expressed or acted upon depended on the context. When speaking about Nigerian national politics, whether he was in Nigeria or at a Minneapolis meeting of Ẹgbé Ọmọ Odùduwà, Akin most strongly identified as Yorùbá. However, in most American social and political contexts, he most strongly identified as “African” in contradistinction to Europeans, Asians, or other non-African-derived American ethnic groupings. For CWC continental Africans, there was no apparent conceptual conflict between an “African” and “tribal” identity.26 They identified as both, although how they described themselves varied according to the particular social or political context. Indeed, much of the CWC’s work can be seen as providing African diasporan participants, both American- and African-born, a conceptual model for defining and positioning their translocal identities: for example, what it means and how to be African, Yorùbá, and American all at the same time.
African immigrant participants, who maintained relationships with family members living throughout the world, made a subtle distinction between “political” and “cultural” identity that was more prominent than among those CWC participants who defined themselves as “Africans born in America.” For African immigrant CWC participants, the correspondence of blood origins and place of birth with ancestry was incidental; place was not the primary determinant of African cultural identity, but it was for political identity.
Both CWC participants who defined themselves as “Africans born in America” (African Americans) and African immigrants—who generally referred to themselves as “Africans”—saw African identity primarily as a matter of ancestry. However, for “Africans born in America,” equal emphasis was given to physical indicators of “Africanness” based on notions of “Blackness” as sometimes externally indicated by skin color.27 While African immigrant participants also had a sense of physical indicators of Africanness based in part on skin, primary emphasis was given to ancestry as determined by blood or biological relation or ancestry. However, as will be described below, physical indicators of “Africanness” were given more importance among those CWC Africans who have experienced racial discrimination in North American or European countries.
African immigrant CWC participants tended to have a stronger sense that people of African ancestry should make a conscious decision to define themselves as African to be considered such, although there was significant variation on this point. Those who had worked with the CWC’s “African born in America” leadership the longest (for example Akin, quoted above) seemed to share the view that an African ancestral origin, even if unknown and unacknowledged, made an individual “African.”
Those African immigrants who were newer to the CWC had the sense that self-identification as “African” was a necessary prerequisite for African identity. One could not be “African” unless one perceived and described oneself as such. Because of the strong emphasis placed on the combined notions of “Blackness” and ancestry, participants who described themselves as “Africans born in America” tended to believe that people of African heritage were still African even if they actively rejected or denied an African ancestry. Continental African participants, almost unanimously, maintained that people born and raised in Africa who did not have an African biological ancestry, regardless of level of acculturation—for example, White Kenyans or White South Africans—were not African in terms of cultural identity, either attributed or self-ascribed. However, because of the African immigrant distinction between political and cultural identity, people of European ancestry could be politically African in terms of their nationality. Most African American participants who described themselves as “Africans born in America” maintained that such individuals were not African by any definition—they were “Whites” or “Europeans” living in Africa. The participants of African heritage who did not define themselves as “African” and instead defined themselves as “African American” or “Black American” placed more