“I’m not Afropolitan — I’m of the Continent”: A conversation with Yewande Omotoso

Abstract

Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has become a new home for many immigrants and refugees from all over the African continent. Engaging with this "new season of migration to the South", 1 South African writers are increasingly including migrants from elsewhere on the continent into their casts of protagonists. Moreover, in autobiographies and works of fiction, African migrants themselves have begun to reflect on their experiences of living in South Africa. In this interview, Yewande Omotoso discusses her emigration from Nigeria to South Africa in the early 1990s. She argues that her family's choice to remain on the African continent, rather than emigrating to the UK or the US, as so many contemporary Nigerian writers did, has given her a distinct diasporic experience. As the interview unfolds, she emphasizes that the notion of Afropolitanism does not capture this experience. She also discusses recent developments in contemporary South African publishing and literature, stressing that the country's literary scene, despite its shortcomings, is vibrant, young, and full of creative energy. Omotoso's comments on her debut novel Bom Boy reveal that she is a writer deeply concerned with questions of migration, displacement, and loneliness.

Afropolitanism, celebrity politics, and iconic imaginations of North–South relations

“…I am not from the West and I don't need anybody translating things for me. 35 In our analysis of the empirical case, we will return to Omotoso's critique of how Afropolitan is primarily useful for opening up Africa for convenient Western consumption through its implicit call for Africans to mediate their experiences.…”

The Afropolitan Idea: New Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism in African Studies

“…33 On the other, her claim that today's diaspora youth were the unique saviours of Africa's image drew the rebuke of many. 34 Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, for example alleged that Selasi's view was fundamentally classist; she reserved modernity exclusively for a population who was wealthy enough to travel around the world. 35 Yet more centrally, what Selasi had argued was that Africa's new modern image should let go of a cultural integrity: instead, the future lay on the shoulders of those 'cultural mutts' with their 'European affect' and 'African ethos'.…”

Literature as a Medium for Social and Political Activism: The Case of Mashingaidze Gomo’s A Fine Madness

“…It is not enough to say we are not victims; we need to go further and ask what that actually means for the majority of Africans who continue to be looked upon and treated as the “other” in the Western imagination, who continue to be denied free mobility in the so-called global village. Perhaps this is the reason that the Barbadian-Nigerian author Yewande Omotosu declared in response to Selasi’s call for an Afropolitan identity, “I am not an Afropolitan, I am of the continent” (quoted in Fasselt 2015: 235).…”