Some years ago, during my visit to Liberia, my elder brother Mohammed made a remark that stayed with me. He had been observing me for nearly a week by then, since travelling with me from the capital Monrovia to the north of the country, to our birthplace Kolahun. ‘You know, you’ve changed so much, Vamba,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.
I knew what my brother meant, but I wanted to hear him confirm my fears, or contradict them. For since my arrival in Liberia, I had been doing my best to belong, to speak the languages, Mandingo, Gbandi and Mendi, as I had been taught as a child to speak them. I did not want to eat European food while in Liberia, no continental breakfast for me, no French salade, no potatoes. I wanted to taste the dishes for which Liberia is famous: the potato greens, the cassava leaves, the palaver sauce, the collard greens, and the most famous dish of them all, Torborgee, that popular dish of tiny brown beans that nowhere in the world is made so deliciously as in Liberia. I wanted to belong.
‘You’ve become a European,’ my brother said.
That’s what becomes of you, you changed, you get lost and you do not belong
I caught a whiff of sadness in his voice, an acceptance of things, as if I had become a hopeless case and beyond redemption. He sounded as if that was the way of things, the inevitable outcome of migration, the result of one leaving home and settling elsewhere: that’s what becomes of you, you changed, you get lost and you do not belong.
What my brother was saying was this: as a result of all these changes in me, this migration during my childhood, he could not feel completely at ease with me. In his eyes, some aspects of me have become European, which meant not African enough, not Liberian enough.
My initial reaction was to be angry with my brother, because he had touched on something that I’ve been struggling with since my arrival in the Netherlands nearly three decades ago, the struggle to remain African while trying to belong to European society, in this case Dutch society. Halfway through writing my first novel Land of My Fathers, which I was writing in English, a European language, and after nearly four years as a refugee in the Netherlands, I decided to switch to Dutch when a Dutch publisher expressed enthusiasm for the novel. Although my Dutch in that second half of the novel was, what a Dutch reviewer would later call houterig – wooden - I decided to do it anyway, because I wanted to belong to this place, to feel at ease by all means. I would go on to write other novels, some in Dutch and others in English, but what I did not know was that the more I was giving to this place in order to belong, the more I was being altered by this giving, by this attempt to belong. This was what my brother perhaps saw: the Vamba Sherif he’d known as a child had returned as an adult and spoke his mother tongue as if he was learning it for the first time. Vamba’s struggle with the tropical heat, his avoidance of pepper and his drinking of bottled water, all of these things made him look different in the eyes of his brother. But a deeper difference was perhaps noticed by my brother, it was perhaps a change in my mentality, in my behavior, a change so profound that my brother was afraid of mentioning it, for fear of giving shape and permanence to his fears.
This is the challenge that defines what it means to be an Afro-European, to be an Afropean: the constant struggle to belong to the European world but at the same time to make constant claims to belong to the African world.
The novel Ambiguous Adventure (1961) is as though it were written today
I was thinking about Samba Diallo of the Diallobe people in the seminal novel Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane while I stood facing my brother. The novel was published in 1961 but it is as relevant to our world as though it were written today. It’s funny that the main character of the novel is called Samba, a slight variation of my name Vamba. Samba is the hope of his people, the Diallobe in northern Senegal, and in the novel he sets out, like I did during my childhood, to gain solid Islamic learning. Later, like me, after acquiring education in the Western schools, Samba goes abroad. I went to Kuwait to pursue my secondary school studies, and Samba to France to study philosophy, where he excelled and where, in the words of my brother in Liberia, he became a European. But fear of going astray and losing touch with his past and his role as heir to the leadership of his people, forced Samba to return home, just as I would do years later. But Samba finds on returning that he does not belong to his people, and he’s cast adrift like a piece of wood in an ocean of contradictions.
Is that what being an Afropean means? A person caught between the African and the European worlds, belonging to neither completely?
For centuries Africans have been present in Europe. We have only to think of Othello, the black man who fell in love with a Venetian beauty in Shakespeare’s play. Long before slavery, there were stories of black people on this continent. We know that the black Pharoah Sesostris, whose conquests led him deep into Europe, founded a settlement in the heart of this continent, and a result black people were found and lived for centuries ago in Europe. And of course there’s the famous story of the Russian Pushkin, whose ancestry is found in present day Cameroun. Pushkin was the one who founded the modern Russian literature and thereby influenced European literature and world literature.
It was Pushkin who sang:
“It’s time to drop astern the shape
of the dull shores of my disfavor,
and there, beneath your noonday sky,
my Africa, where waves break high,
to mourn for Russia’s gloomy savor,
land where I learned to love and weep,
land where my heart is buried deep.”
But the history of these people, Othello, Sesostris and Pushkin, but to name a few, must have been the history of struggles to belong. There are instances, for example, of Pushkin who, faced with racism, would begin to hate the colour of his skin, his curly hair, and he would break out into a poem which would affirm his blackness and his love for Africa. In his response to racism, you can see here the foundation of a movement that would later be called Negritude, Black Pride.
Pan-Africanism
Black people of the past century and of present day have always tried to define themselves, perhaps because of their past as a people who were enslaved and colonized. During slavery, black people gathered under the umbrella of Pan-Africanism, a movement that tried to unite black people of the world. Faced with constant racism in Europe, like Pushkin in Russia, they founded Negritude, a movement that celebrated everything African and black.
It was the Négritude poet Bernard Binlin Dadié who sang:
I thank you almighty God for having created me black
For having made of me
The total of all sorrows,
and for having set upon my head
The World.
I wear the livery of the Centaur
And I carry the World upon my head since the first morning.
And it was Senghor, another great name in the Négritude movement, whose wife was a white French woman and who celebrated the beauty of the French language who extolled Shaka the Zulu for sacrificing his beloved wife Noliwe to the gods in order to defeat the English.
Senghor sang:
But these long years, this breaking on the wheel of the years, this carcan strangling every act
This long night without sleep I wandered like a
mare from the Zambezi, running and rushing at the stars
Gnawed by a nameless suffering, like the leopards in the trap.
I would not have killed her if I had loved her less.
I had to escape from doubt
From the intoxication of the milk of her mouth, from the throbbing drum of the night of my blood.
From my bowels of fervent lava, from the uranium mines of my heart in the depths of my Blackness
From love of Noliwe
From the love of my black skinned People.
The constant struggle to belong, to affirm their humanity to the Europeans
This is what Afropean meant to these great men, the constant struggle to belong, to affirm their humanity to the Europeans, the ones to whom they were trying to belong.
But belonging, as I once said in my Tedtalk, was not a one way street. If I fight, like Pushkin and Othello did before, like Senghor and Dadie before me, if I fight to belong to Europe, what are the people to whom I’m trying to belong doing to deserve my efforts? What steps a country like the Netherlands is taking, where nowadays you have parliamentarians bent on creating a phantom asylum crisis to satisfy their xenophobic tendencies?
I find in times like these that the straddling of the two worlds, the African and the European, is a struggle that is tiresome and exhausting. Sometimes, such as in these times, I feel unwelcome, I feel I don’t belong to this European world. And I find myself singing like Pushkin before me and longing for that Africa where waves break high.
