Maintaining our African Heritage while in the Diaspora

Dear African Reader,

Real beauty lies in diversity, but cultural originality is more important than anything especially if you are a foreigner living in another man’s land.

The best definition there is for diversity is one learnt from a Leadership Academy in South Africa. The institution defines diversity as having respect for all people and believing that differences should be celebrated. If the world celebrated everyone’s differences, we wouldn't be where we are today. We say this due to experiences across different countries. The experience with diversity is weird at times. “Diversity” can be said to have brought higher levels of insecurity, anxiety and poor representation to the world due to ideologies behind globalization. 

Living in South Africa was thrilling, but until we left the African continent, we never thought we’d be insecure about our skin color. Our blackness poured over us like the winter snow every time we left the residence buildings and walked to classes. The average class size for prerequisite courses in the first year ranged between 250-400 students per classroom. In layman terms, the classes were diverse but a thinker will ask, “how diverse?”

The form of “diversity” we were introduced to in classrooms was ‘dangerous’: the makeup of the average class has about 60% white individuals and 40% minority races. In that 40%, 25% of them are Asian while the remaining 15% are made up of Blacks and Arabs. These numbers are not exact but any international student can attest to these ratios. These insecurities about our skin color led to poor academic performance in the first year. Here’s how:

We brought our ‘diverse’ perspectives into the classroom, and challenged a lot of beliefs and ideologies around us. Soon, it began to seem like everyone around targeted us anytime we tried to ask a question in class. We had terrible relationships with professors. At some point, we began to feel like we were the only ‘woke’ people around but what hurt us the most, was how other African students chose to conform instead of building up and advocating for their perspectives. It was a lot safer to try to assimilate into a foreign culture than to be truly African in the very-foreign classrooms, and that holds for much of the larger diaspora.

Our big question to you -- if you are an African reader -- is do you maintain your African Heritage as an African studying abroad? 

A major challenge Africans in the diaspora face is keeping up with multiple cultures as we attempt to integrate into societies. A tool best-used by Africans in the diaspora is code-switching. 

Code-switching is a term first encountered in a Sociology lecture. This term might have come across to other students as just another academic word but it resonated with us deeply. As Global Citizens, we have learnt to never change the way we speak to accommodate another person, culture or society. We must maintain the originality of our culture and belief system as neocolonialism seeps into the very fabric of who we are every second spent away from home.

As young kids, we were opportuned to travel. In 2012, a part of our summer plans was to go shopping like the typical African when abroad. We visited Macy’s in Maryland, USA. While trying out shoes, the store attendant heard one of us speak and was extremely excited about the accent in which we uttered our words. She immediately began to express how much she wished she could speak in that manner — a white lady. We were lost for words. Why is/was the accent nice? We spoke like every other Nigerian we knew, but here we were, in America, having a white lady compliment the way our words sounded. If we tried to Americanize our Nigerian accent, would she have even noticed we were there?

That experience solidified itself in our brains as the years went by and we grew older. We interacted with different people from all over the world and noticed a pattern: aspects of our African identity were singled out, sometimes positively. Our accents were called “nice,” or our traditional dressing was “cool”. We subconsciously began to adapt to their cultures while slowly leaving ours behind — culture appropriation. This in turn leads to a slow weathering that causes us Africans to leave our cultural identities behind.

Dear African, if you are reading this, the blood that runs through our veins carries the weight of our ancestors’ struggles for our liberation. Mistakes might have been made in the past in terms of colonialism but we can change that today only by uplifting our heritage wherever we go. Rock those dashikis in confidence, go for parties in your ankaras and show them off with an unquestionable swagger, go to churches/mosques/shrines in your iro and bubas and praise your lord. 

Be who you are. Be African wherever you go. 

We’ll ask you again. “How important is your heritage to you? Still not enough?”