Beyond the Rhetoric: Could Afropolitanism Be Useful to the Native African as It Is to the African in the Diaspora?

Background

Frantz Fanon (1988) has argued in “Racism and Culture” that “There is first affirmed the existence of human groups having no culture; then of a hierarchy of cultures; and finally the concept of cultural relativity” (Fanon as cited Eze, 2005:305). This suggests that distinct cultures emerge within a people of any race given that culture arises from “the encounter of man with nature and with his fellow-man” (Fanon as cited in Eze, 2005:305). In post-colonial era, however, the world has rejected any notion of Africa, as a human group, having a hierarchy of cultures and appreciating cultural relativity. By firstly suggesting that Africa had no history and thus, no culture before Africa encountered them, the West has succeeded in unflinchingly imposing an undifferentiated identity on Africa (Eze, 2014:234). For at the core, the answer to the question “are you African?” affirms or rejects a predisposed perception of the questioner given that the African identity has been synonymous to war, conflict and poverty.

In recent times, the urge for Africa to redefine its distinct cultures and reclaim its identity has been unrelenting. Pan-Africanism, for one, was modeled to tag people of African descent with an identity that ties in with a move for solidarity and unity of Africans worldwide. More so, individuals like Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have extensively commented on and drawn the attention of the world to the dangers of the single story about Africa. To this end, the question that arises is whether Africa chooses to compose for itself and its indigenes an identity and a culture that supports multiple cultures and if so, how?

In an attempt to answer the aforementioned question, Taiye Selasi (2005) suggested a roadmap—the notion of Afropolitanism—to Africans in the diaspora through which they could construct their identity. Selasi proposed a framework through which Africans in the Diaspora could find the needle of identity in the haystack of...