A Tide Turned - African Returnees

Their parents and / or grandparents left their African homes in search of a more secure and prosperous life.  Now their children and grandchildren are coming back.  They are returning for all kinds of reasons.  It isn't necessarily easy, and it certainly is expensive.  Yet, for instance, a woman wrote this article concerning the reverse migration.  She includes this:

[ " "Who needs the glass ceiling when you could be running your own business in one of the world's fastest-growing economies, enjoying the warm weather and surrounded by your own people?" one returnee to Ghana told me. "There is no contest." " ]

Women have traditionally been the market, run the market in so many African cultures.  In business they are plugging right back into that status when they come back to their family's country.  I hadn't thought of that until reading this article.

The article is long and tries to cover all the aspects, negative as well as positive.  Being a returnee herself, she focuses on an area that in this country, with our current confusion outright bigotry to racialist disputes that debate cultural appropriation and cultural appropriateness, we could do well to consider deeply -- because, you know, not everywhere does it the way we're doing it here:

[ " The battle for the image of Africa – helpless and underdeveloped versus rapidly emerging economic giant – often gets personal. Journalists frequently, and rightly, draw criticism for describing a continent of 54 nations and breathtaking diversity as one country. But some commentators are quick to employ a definition of what it means to be African that excludes returnees like me for being too fair-skinned, too British or too westernised.

But being African is an increasingly complex identity. As someone who has been told she is too black to be British, and too British to be African, I am strongly against the notion that identity can be policed by some external standard. And I am not alone. The term "Afropolitan" is beginning to enter the mainstream; one definition describes it as: "An African from the continent of dual nationality, an African born in the diaspora, or an African who identifies with their African and European heritage and mixed culture.

"It doesn't matter whether they are born abroad or not; the important thing is their global perspective on issues, as well as their mixed cultural identity."
The enthusiasm with which people of African heritage around the world are embracing their roots has reached the level of a cultural resurgence. In stark contrast to my teenage Africa-denial, a significant number of international cultural icons are now African. The black British music scene is dominated by rappers with Ghanaian heritage – Tinchy Stryder, Dizzee Rascal and Sway. Azonto, a popular Ghanaian dance, has begun colonising clubs in London, a growing number of which now include Afrobeat on regular rotation.

This is not to dismiss the inequalities that still exist between Africa's increasingly visible international, urban elite – a category many returnees fall into – and the vast majority of Africans.

The reality is that, on so many levels, access to the west is still a fault line for determining privilege. For example, entrepreneurs in west Africa currently find that borrowing money for their businesses typically comes with interest rates of up to 30%, an unrealistic burden by any standard. Returnees, on the other hand, who have access to loans from foreign banks, can enjoy single-digit interest rates, effectively dominating local markets. " ]

You see all that she speaks of in this article in the large cities all around the world, including right here in NYC.