Pitts, Johny. Afropean: Notes from Black Europe. Allen Lane, 2019. 416 pp.
“My skin colour had disguised various facts, such as my grandfather having fought for Britain behind enemy lines in the Second World War and winning a medal for doing so. My skin had disguised my Europeanness; ‘European’ was still being used as a synonym for white” (p. 4). This reflection from Johny Pitts, a mixed-race, black British journalist, is especially poignant now that far-right nationalism is on the rise in Europe and North America, and people of color are the targets of verbal and physical abuse. For white nationalists, there is little room for the descendants of the dark-skinned immigrants who were once subjects of the empires they long for.
Johny Pitts’s Afropean details his quest to understand black Europe, an odyssey which takes him to Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Russia. He catalogues the intersection of gentrification and ghettoization in immigrant communities, showcases the vitality of Afro-European music and art, and layers in the accounts of past journeys undertaken by African American and black European writers and artists. Pitts also highlights the “invisible world” of black porters, security guards, laundry women, janitorial staff, many of whom work in abhorrent conditions for unlivable wages. In all, Afropean is a beautiful ode to the past of black Europe and a damning account of the treatment of black Europeans today.
The genesis of Pitts’s project underscores its necessity within the current political and cultural climate of Europe: Pitts explains that he wanted “to work on a project that connected and presented Afro-Europeans as lead actors in our own story” (p. 2). Pitts is successful in his pursuit and steadfastly illustrates the lives of Afro-Europeans, many of whom are the mixed-race children of African immigrants to Europe. This mixing of race and culture comprises the “Afropean,” a term coined by Belgian-Congolese singer Marie Daulne and David Byrne of the Talking Heads. But it becomes clear that “Afropean” does not just mean hybridization; it is an effort to create a space for black European identity and resist the forces of assimilation.
Though Afropean is not a historical monograph, history is central to its story. Pitts makes clear his distaste for mainstream European history, which since “so much of black Europe had been written out of it, and what had been written often only made me angry” (p. 102). History is the instrument of a continent that celebrates empires while ghettoizing people of color and proclaiming the failure of multiculturalism. This dichotomy is the result of these countries’ ability to ignore and remove the memory of the black and brown bodies that made such imperial success possible. Pitts’s strength is his ability to juxtapose the contemporary erasure of black people in Europe with the sanitization of Europe’s colonial past.1
For example, when Pitts comes across a copy of Tintin in the Congo at a children’s shop, he is taken aback by the book’s colonialist narrative and reflects on “all the similar stories that pierced my childhood and continue to be transmitted to young people in more subtle and refined forms. The Tarzan films, Pochahontas, Dances with Wolves … they all depict white characters with special nuance and black characters as props or objects in need of being saved” (p. 107). Pitts finds that Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa treats black people in a similar way. Despite the audio guide’s claim that “all in all, it’s high time to retell the story of Africa,” the accompanying photo essays project a colonial gaze onto black subjects (p. 110). There is no mention of how, when the museum was originally constructed for the 1897 World’s Fair, it included a human zoo of 267 Congolese people. Pitts wonders what narratives the school children visiting the museum will learn and how that will shape their understanding of Africans in Europe.
The black experience in Russia is what initially drew me to the book. Pitts discusses the history of black travel to the region, including such figures as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, who saw the early Soviet Union as a reprieve from white supremacy and racial oppression. But Pitts finds in contemporary Russia the opposite of that anti-racist utopia. Frankly, I was concerned by his descriptions of walking around Moscow alone at night, since people of color who’ve researched or studied there know that doing so can be dangerous. Pitts only realizes the extent of this danger when a skinhead drives by and accosts him.
Pitts is drawn to the figure of Alexander Pushkin, proclaimed by Russians as the father of modern Russian literature despite his skin color; Pushkin was the great-grandson of Hannibal, an African servant of Peter the Great. “It’s not just that Pushkin wasn’t a slave or a colonial subject,” Pitts writes, “it’s also the fact that it was impossible to reduce him to a two-dimensional figure of fear or victimization” (p. 268). The exceptional nature of Pushkin drives home how rare it is to find multi-dimensional representations of black artists in Europe, where popular historical narratives usually emphasize a bipolar relationship between empire and colonial subject. Indeed, many of the people he encounters, like an African man who draws caricatures of tsars in Red Square for spare rubles, find safety through a performance of blackness which the white majority deems safe and unobtrusive.
Near the end of his short visit to Moscow, Pitts realizes an important difference between himself and African students who refused to speak to him: “When I tried to speak politically, as if to say, I’m black, you’re black, and I want to hear your story, I realized that blackness wasn’t such a huge conundrum to them.” After all, Pitts remembers, “in the country they had come from were politicians, policemen, and teachers who all looked just like they did” (p. 280).
At this point, one sees the primary meaning of Afropean and one of the shortcomings of the book’s framing. While meant to be an exploration of black people in Europe, the book is ultimately an investigation into the experience of mixed-race Europeans. Most of the black people interviewed in the book have at least one European parent and can claim Europeanness in a way that the African immigrants and students Pitts encounters cannot. To his credit, Pitts acknowledges this issue, and the Afropean website he created provides a necessary space for Afropeans of various backgrounds to share their stories.
Many Americans today are surprised that the uprising against police brutality in cities like Minneapolis, Louisville, and New York has spread across the Atlantic. Of course, the current protests in Europe have a deeper endogenous history; police violence and discrimination come up in Pitts’ conversations with Afro-French residents of suburban Paris, and he witnesses a protest against perfumier Jean-Paul Guerlain, who had used racist slurs in a primetime news interview. While American protestors recite the names of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, French protestors shout the name of Adama Traore, a black man killed by the police in Paris in 2016. Black Europeans are demanding visibility and equal rights. They are asserting the very agency denied to them by the dominant cultural and historical narratives of Europe.
Overall, Afropean speaks to how national myths, perpetuated through popular culture, continue to erase and alienate ethnic minorities in Europe. These conversations are beginning in the United States, but they have yet to come to the fore in Europe. Some call for changes to European history curriculums that would address the longstanding erasure of people of color. Historians must ask ourselves, how do our approaches to research and writing continue to make people of color invisible? As black Europeans’ lives and experiences show, we have a considerable amount of work left to do.
- For scholarship that addresses this issue of erasure, see Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Allison Blakely, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1979); and Tina M. Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).