They range from surgeons and scholars to illiterate refugees from some of the world’s worst hellholes — a dizzyingly varied stream of African immigrants to the United States. More than one million strong and growing, they are enlivening American cities and altering how the nation confronts its racial identity.
Some nurture dreams of returning to Africa one day. But many are casting their lot permanently in the US, trying to assimilate even as they and their children struggle to learn where they fit in a country where black-white relations are a perpetual work in progress.
”To white people, we are all black,” says Wanjiru Kamau, a Kenyan-born community activist in Washington, DC. ”But as soon as you open your mouth to some African-Americans, they look at you and wonder why you are even here.
”Except for the skin, which is just a facade, there is very little in common between Africans and African-Americans. We need to sit down and listen to each other’s story.”
The 2000 census recorded 881 300 US residents who were born in Africa. By 2005, the number had reached 1,25-million, according to Brookings Institution researcher Jill Wilson.
Since 1990, the African population has more than tripled in places as far-flung as Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis, where Africans now constitute more than 15% of the black population. The biggest magnets are New York City and Washington, including its Maryland and Virginia suburbs.
Frustration
As director of the African Immigrant and Refugee Foundation, Kamau deals with some of the most hard-off newcomers — dispossessed refugees from war-ravaged countries such as Somalia, Sudan, Liberia and Sierra Leone. They have been arriving at a pace of roughly 20 000 a year. Many of those from rural areas have never used modern appliances, and some can’t read or write their native languages, let alone English, she says.
”I cry a lot when I see the people being settled here,” Kamau says. ”Some are very frustrated, because the culture is so different from what they know.”
The flip side of the refugee influx is a wave of sophisticated professionals. Census data from 2000 shows 43% of Africans in the US have college degrees, higher than the adult population as a whole. Compared with African-Americans, the immigrants’ average household income is higher and their jobless rate lower.
They include hardworking couples such as Tigist Mengesha and her husband, Girum — Ethiopians trying to achieve the American dream in the mostly black suburb of Suitland, Maryland. Girum (36) was granted asylum in the US in 2002 because of political tensions in Ethiopia. Tigist came two years later with their sons Biniyam and Fitsum, now seven and six.
The family had lived comfortably in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, with their own walled home and servants to look after the children while Girum worked as a bank manager and Tigist as an executive secretary.
In Washington, Girum resumed his banking career at the bottom, as a teller, but has worked his way up to assistant manager and is pursuing a master’s degree in business.
Tigist is a family counsellor at a child development centre, advising many Ethiopians and a few African-American parents. ”In some ways, life is harder here,” she says. ”But we have hope — we are adjusting ourselves to the new situation.”
She notes that they can’t afford hired help and scramble to raise their sons while working full-time. On the bright side, however, they recently bought a townhouse.
Tigist says her relations with African-Americans have mostly been amicable, though sometimes she senses ill-feelings. ”Some people, they treat you as if you don’t know anything,” she says, ”as if you’re from the jungle.”
Racial tension
Lack of knowledge can cut both ways. Tigist is gradually learning details of the US’s troubled racial history.
”I feel bad about that racism — but when I come here now, I didn’t feel it at all. I would never think someone would discriminate against me,” she says. ”I don’t have any bad feelings for black Americans, but I am not one of them … I’m not a black American, I’m not a white American. I’m an Ethiopian.”
Jacqueline Copeland-Carson, an African-American scholar at the University of Minnesota, is optimistic that African immigrants and African-Americans will outgrow any strains, which she blames partly on stereotypes.
”Some Africans view African-Americans as violent, lazy, intellectually inferior — US blacks are taught that the Africans are less civilised, not as capable,” she says. But ”they’re beginning to realise they’ve been taught lies about each other. They’re starting to understand they share many things in common.”
In the District of Columbia and some other cities, friction has arisen between recently arrived Africans and the entrenched, politically powerful black American community. Civic leaders have noted some working-class African-Americans resent the newcomers, fearing threats to their jobs in such fields as healthcare, civil service and hotel work.
”Sometimes it’s very overwhelming to the African-American community,” says Abdulaziz Kamus, an Ethiopian-born activist on immigrant issues. ”They feel threatened that we are coming here and demanding jobs. If I were an African-American, I would feel the same thing.”
In an overture to the newcomers, the Washington city government last year formed an office of African affairs. But even this gesture upset some people — not all black American leaders felt it
was needed, and some Africans were disappointed by a lack of dynamism in the office.
Bobby Austin, a vice-president at the University of the District of Columbia, is among a few prominent African-Americans in Washington to delve deeply into the tensions and misunderstandings. He and Kamus have promoted public dialogues between two communities.
”We will have to learn to work with them, and they will have to learn to work with us,” Austin says.
Influx
While African-Americans’ presence in the US goes back to slavery days in the 1600s, the modern surge of Africans arose in the post-independence era in the 1960s and then persisted, driven by war and corrupt government. In the 1990s, the surge increased due to the Diversity Visa Lottery, a federal programme boosting immigration from countries that traditionally sent few people.
The largest groups of Africans in the US are from Nigeria, Ethiopia and Ghana, but the influx is diverse. The refugee programme, for example, accepts people from roughly two dozen African countries each year; more than 200 000 African refugees have been taken in since 1980.
Some Americans, black and white, assume Africans share a common culture with one another, when in fact they may feel no bond with another ethnic group from their own country, let alone with others from distant corners of the continent.
There have been cultural clashes — some serious, some bemusing — as the new Africans fan out across the country. Some polygamous families have settled in the US, despite laws forbidding that.
Women’s rights activists and health officials have been on the lookout for cases of female circumcision — illegal in the US, but common in some African regions.
Wanjiru Kamau, the Kenyan activist, says many new arrivals find American culture bewildering. She tells them not to look down, but into the eyes of a person they’re speaking to; she has fielded
complaints that African nurses, accustomed to noisy hospitals back home, talk too loudly on the job.
Brain drain
Nurses and doctors are among the well-trained Africans settling in the US — contributing to concerns that a brain drain to Europe and here is depriving Africa of talent. Some expatriates say they are doing more good in the US — African immigrants earn enough to send an estimated $3-billion a year to relatives back home.
”The conditions at home often make it difficult to go back,” says Nigerian native Ike Udogu, a professor in North Carolina who immigrated 36 years ago. ”Here, there are great facilities. You simply want to do your work in a society where your life is not in danger.”
Udogu has a thoroughly Americanised son who just finished college, but in greater Washington the Ethiopian and Nigerian communities are large enough so that immigrants can isolate themselves and minimise contact with American culture.
”For me, that’s not healthy,” says Abdulaziz Kamus, who has tried to encourage African taxi drivers and other immigrants to become politically engaged.
”You could be here 20 years, but if you don’t start participating, you’re not part of America,” he says. ”What excites me every day is that I could go protest without fear of deportation or being sent to prison … I could lobby, jump up and down, start my own business, and nobody could question me. The country I was not even born in is allowing me to dream.” — Sapa-AP