of new African identities is my most recent leg is an almost twenty-year journey as a practitioner-scholar in the nonprofit sector. During this time, mostly in Nigeria and several North American cities, I have had vexing encounters that blur the lines between what would be considered African and American, or European. In many ways this work is a meditation on the multiple intellectual and personal epiphanies I had along the way. It chronicles the experiences of Twin Cities residents who shared with me their transformative insights as they struggled to adjust to American society on their own cultural terms. It represents a new phase of my understanding of the impact of the global flow of culture through African peoples.10 It is next to impossible to understand contemporary Africa outside of this flow, and the influences manifest themselves in ways that anthropologists are just beginning to acknowledge and understand. Not only are African peoples mixing the constituent parts of cultures, such as American music, dance, and aesthetics and other influences, to create new practices and identities; this creativity also occurs at a metacultural level. The very theories and models of identity such as culture, race, and ethnicity employed by anthropologists and other social scientists are often also being studied and deliberately reconstructed by everyday African people in this culture-building enterprise.
One of my first experiences of the impact of global cultural dynamics on Africa was as an undergraduate student in African studies at Georgetown University in the early 1980s. I did my first anthropological study from 1982 to 1983 as an exchange student at Ọbáfémi Awólọ́wọ́ University in Ilé Ifẹ̀, Nigeria.11 The study concerned the Aladura Church, a religious revitalization movement that began in Nigeria (see Peel 1968). My most striking experience doing this research was learning that the Aladura Movement had been transplanted to the United States by Yorùbá immigrants. Indeed, Washington, D.C. had, at the time, become an important center for the Aladura Movement, drawing together African American, Caribbean, Nigerian, and other West African adherents. I completed my fieldwork for my senior thesis in African studies on the Aladura Movement not in Nigeria but in Washington, D.C. at an Aladura church founded by a Yorùbá man and his Gullah wife from South Carolina.
My experience in Nigeria, as well as early career experiences in community development efforts back in the United States, led to an interest in the ways in which academic anthropology could be applied to nonprofit sector issues and to the ethnographic research opportunities presented by the community development field. My next African study that underscored the importance of global cultural forces to African societies was ethnoaesthetic research on contemporary Yorùbá architecture in Ilé-Ifẹ̀. In my anthropology and urban planning master’s theses I presented an alternative conceptual model and research method for understanding how contemporary sociocultural, class, and identity issues were reflected in Yorùbá housing design. An important lesson in how transnational cultural flows influence local cultural production was the evolution of the “Brazilian” house, introduced to Nigeria by repatriated Brazilian slaves in the nineteenth century, as the prototype of the “modern” Yorùbá house (Vlach 1984, 1986). This Nigerian project further sensitized me to the limitations of conventional categories such as “traditional” and “modern,” as well as notions such as “ethnicity,” “history,” and even “culture” itself, for capturing the nuances of indigenous cultural dynamics.
My exploration of indigenous models for conceptualizing sociocultural complexity was enhanced by the emerging critical anthropology literature (Said 1978; Fabian 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Marcus and Fisher 1999). In particular, Said’s notion of orientalism (1978); Cohn’s studies of the role of the British census on the construction of South Asian identities (1987a); Fabian’s analysis of the impact of conventional anthropology (1983); comparative studies of historicity; and various analyses of the limits of essentially Western models of nation, ethnicity, and culture (see Barth 1984 and 1989; Depres 1984; Worsley 1984; Harvey 1989; Fardon 1987; Moore 1987; Handler 1988; Appadurai 1990) were instrumental in my still evolving eclectic blend of conventional and critical perspectives in both academic and applied anthropology.
During this period, I became particularly interested in the Nupe of central Nigeria, who were key intermediaries in trans-Saharan trade with the medieval and late nineteenth-century West African forest kingdoms and who built an expansive empire lasting from about the sixteenth century until the British conquest. Additionally since Nadel’s (1942) classic work, there had been little anthropological attention paid to Nupe history and culture. It seemed to me that the study of indigenous Nupe models for organizing and managing cultural diversity would be a base from which to initiate an ongoing original contribution to the field. I decided to do an ethnohistorical study of Nupe identity formation focused on the medieval through early colonial period. In preparation for fieldwork I spent almost a year working with a Nupe immigrant living in Philadelphia who tutored me in the language, using a Nupe grammar guide and dictionary devised by an early twentieth-century British missionary (Banfield 1969). I defined my research problem as an effort to reconstruct indigenous models for the organization of cultural diversity and their transformation through the contemporary period. After completing my Ilé-Ifẹ̀ fieldwork for my master’s theses, I started preliminary fieldwork for this project and was based at the University of Ìllọrin in the summer and fall of 1988 for several months. During this period, I collected and reviewed primary historical records archived in Kaduna and conducted exploratory ethnohistorical interviews in several Nupe villages and towns. This fieldwork was a watershed in my understanding of ethnohistory and identity formation.
Alhaji Aliyu Idress, a scholar of Nupe history then at the University of Ìllọrin and a member of the Nupe royal family, was my guide and interpreter during this visit. Among the several Nupe towns, villages, and cities we visited was Patigi, which prior to the British conquest was an important, cosmopolitan trading center. In Patigi, I interviewed a group of chiefs about the process of a ze Nupe, that is, becoming Nupe. I was particularly interested in following up a notion raised in Nadel’s ethnography that there were “hyphenated” Nupe—people who had emigrated to the Nupe empire from other mostly western Africa polities and were described as Fulani-Nupe, Yorùbá-Nupe, Hausa-Nupe, and so on.
After an astonished and extended commentary on my physical appearance—the shadings of my skin color (which was described as “very black like Hausas”); my facial features, particularly my nose (which was described as “Fulani”); whether my original people were actually “real Nupe” or actually Yorùbá or Fulani; and promising me that “if I found out that my ancestors were Nupe I could return”—one chief explained the a ze Nupe process to me this way:
| NUPE CHIEF | Daughter, let me help you understand. You know in America, they call you “Negro.” |
| JCC | Yes, that is an old term, but that is a term that some people still use. |
| NUPE CHIEF | Now, Daughter, why do you think they call you Negro? |
[Uncomfortable silence.]
| NUPE CHIEF | Well let me tell you. Now you think that you are American. They think you are something else and the other people—the Europeans—are really American. That’s how it is with us. Those people that come from outside, they can become Nupe—speak the language and everything—but they are not real Nupe!! Just like you are not a real American!! |
I was too shocked by the chief’s unexpectedly insightful analysis of contemporary North American identity politics to present the various possible standard counterpoints to such arguments: America—except for native peoples—was a country of immigrants, so I was as American as anyone else, and so forth. However, for a relatively new initiate to ethnography, this encounter offered several critical and practical lessons that fundamentally influence this study’s orientation toward African diasporan identity formation.
Indigenous notions of identity are not easily disaggregated from the influence of contemporary sociopolitical issues, derived from both local
