Assumptions About Africa and Africans in North America

Africans are very familiar, in North America, with questions about 'living with lions, giraffes, cheetahs, etc.' or 'how come one speaks English so well' or that 'your English is so good!'

Such questions are usually a surprise, if annoying, when one initially arrives. Undoubtedly, the questions become denigrating, annoying and alienating. However, as one continues to live in North America, the effect of such questions starts to lose power.

Africans start to perceive the questions as born out of ignorance or complacency of people who don't want to know anything about others; or people who see others (and their national origins) as merely objects to be marveled about. These exotic others (people) are 'admired' as beings from places that sound good to be visited. Places of exotica as Chinua Achebe would say!

What's fascinating about the above questions isn't the assumed ‘ignorance’ that motivates them. What's fascinating is how we, as Africans, respond to these questions. What we tend to forget is the proverbialism or inveteratism which informs the normative aspects of given societies. North Americans are informed by a tradition that looks at Africa and Africans in a given light. And this given ‘light’ is the only thing available to them. It’s unrealistic to expect people to know what they don’t know. Annoying as they are, the above questions are informed by a long established pedagogical and scholarly tradition that sees Africa and Africans as objects of virtual and intellectual play.

Even when scholars rationalize Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ as an indictment of colonialism in Africa, his debasing description of Africans played into the hands of those who wanted to put Africans down.  With that in mind, however, it’s good to remember that the only people who can change that eschewed narrative is us!

As long the narrative available to North Americans takes Africans to be the Africans of the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries, then it would be unrealistic to blame North Americans. We need to change the narrative. However, instead of changing the narrative, we tend to either whine without producing and effective countering narrative, or we conform to the negative realities about us. But then we complain when we conform to them.

We use phrases such as Third Word, Black People etc. These terms do nothing but reinforce the available narrative about us. People are not chicken, goats and cattle to be identified by colors! And how do you agree with Martin Luther King that people shouldn’t be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character but then move back to use the same color as people’s identity? This is the eschewed thinking that’s counter-productive.

People have cultures and traditions that inform their societal norms, mores and identities.  But we can’t blame people who have their own societies to protect and self-esteem to elevate. It’s not up to North Americans to change epistemologically into a narrative that’s not offered!

As long as North Americans don’t get formidable counter-narratives to inform them that the African of the 21^st century is not the caricatured African of the 17^th century, we’ll continue to be asked about lions in our backyards! A Zulu asked about Wolof. A Jieeng man asked about Ashanti. This is the very oversimplification (or deadening) of African cultures that’s killing our universal image.

Instead of getting angry at North Americans, we should inform them. Instead of conforming with their narrative, we should dismiss them with respectable alternatives offered. Instead of becoming simply a ‘black man’ in America or Canada, you should remain a Ghanaian.

We turn to help North Americans in their perception of us while whining about the same perception we are helping establish. Blackness was a cultural deconstruction and reconstruction of the African Personhood into a utilizable OBJECT!

A Canadian Citizen but Still a "Refugee"

What it means to be a refugee has either been completely misunderstood in Canada or it has been expropriated for political reasons. Even the federal government seems to have misunderstood what it means to be a refugee. 

The 1951 Geneva Convention defined a ‘refugee’ as “a person who is outside their country of citizenship because they have well-founded grounds for fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, and is unable to obtain sanctuary from their home country or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of that country.”

Essentially, a refugee is someone looking for or is living in a place of refuge. However, when a ‘refugee’ finds a home and becomes a citizen of the country in which she/he had sought refuge then that person ceases to be a refugee. The country of refuge or asylum becomes his/her country of residence or citizenship. They are no longer in such of refuge: they are home! How can you be a refugee in a country in which you are a citizen? You can vote and run for an office yet you are still referred to as a ‘refugee.’  This is simply a refusal to think!

Unfortunately, this refusal to think speaks volume about the way in which North Americans perceive issues that originate from outside their borders. The level of scrutiny given to issues within North America and Europe is not extended to issues outside. Things are taken at face-value or in the way the ‘experts’ see them.

As refugees come to Canada, they acquire the status of ‘Permanent Resident’ and become like other permanent residents. The only difference in Canada between the supposed ‘refugee’ (except of refugee claimants) and other classes of immigrants, is HOW they came to Canada. But this rather becomes a historical subject rather  than a Status-in-Canada issue.

picture: Globe and Mail

I came to Canada as a refugee and I’m now a Canadian citizen so I travel with my Canadian passport. However, some Canadians still refer to me as a “South Sudanese Refugee.” To someone who takes things at face-value, this would sound like an intentional exclusionary politics. However, it’s not! People aren’t excluding me from Canadian citizenship; they are simply saying what they hear being uttered by authority without thinking seriously about it.

The only people who have a status of ‘refugee’ in Canada are refugee claimants in search of refuge in Canada. Even the recent ‘refugees’ from Syria became landed immigrants the moment they enter Canadian airports. They get the same landing paper with the UCI or Client ID numbers and later Permanent Residents (PR) cards. They were refugees before coming to Canada, however, Canada is now their ‘Permanent Home’ unless they choose to leave.

Someone might say that this doesn’t matter as this doesn’t affect these ‘refugees’ in any significant way. Of course it doesn’t, in a way. However, it says something about us as Canadians because it begs this question: How many other issues do we do in that manner? How many political issues do we do without thinking about their semantic realities? Because wording of things affects how people perceive things, it's crucial to put these things into consideration in decision-making.  And it also gives bigoted individual arsenals to continue to see these new Canadians as only here temporarily. Canada isn’t simply their place of REFUGEE; it’s their PERMANENT HOME!

When the experts who advise the Prime Minister (PM) don’t see this fallacy and the PM doesn’t realize it, then this gives me grave concerns about some things he might do in the same way.