Being and Becoming African in a Nimble-Footed World

By Francis B. Nyamnjoh*

Good morning, everyone.

In a world where borders blur and identities constantly evolve, what truly defines who we are?

How do we navigate a sense of belonging when our lives are increasingly lived across multiple geographies and cultures?

It’s a profound privilege to address the 2025 ECAS conference here in Prague, on a theme as vital and dynamic as “African, Afropolitan, and Afropean Belongings”.

Today, I invite us to fundamentally rethink our understanding of identity in this “nimble-footed” world. For too long, our notions of Africanness, and indeed belonging itself, have been confined by static, nation-state-centric paradigms.

This morning, I propose we liberate our thinking by embracing a powerful, yet often overlooked, framework: the universality of “incompleteness and motion”.

This concept, inspired by African philosophies, doesn’t see flexibility or adaptability as a flaw, but as the very essence of how identities are formed and reformed, enabling profound interconnections and endless possibilities.

Let us explore together how this perspective can challenge our assumptions, redefine “home,” and illuminate the vibrant, ever-changing fabric of African identity in a truly globalised era.

Challenging Static Notions of African Identity

Since colonial times, African identity has been confined by the artificial boundaries of the nation-state. But in our increasingly “nimble-footed” world, characterised by constant movement and fluidity, this static view is simply inadequate.

How does recognising inherent incompleteness reshape our understanding of African identity?

How does mobility, both within and beyond the continent, contribute to the ongoing construction of Africanness?

And how can we analyse diasporic cultural production through this framework of “incompleteness and motion”?

African identity is a vibrant, ever-changing tapestry woven from daily interactions and global influences. It’s a dynamic mix shaped by race, ethnicity, geography, culture, history, economics, and politics. Thabo Mbeki’s 1996 “I Am an African” speech eloquently captured this notion, portraying Africa as an inclusive “melting pot” celebrating diversity and interconnectedness. His vision challenges rigid definitions of belonging, advocating for a fluid, interconnected identity.

However, the reality often diverges from this ideal. Interactions between nation-states frequently reveal a fragmented landscape marked by exclusion and marginalisation, with Africans facing xenophobia and limited access to rights, even within the continent. This highlights the flexible and situational nature of African identity, underscoring concepts like Afropolitan and Afropean. The alternative is a zero-sum unravelling in the elusive quest for autochthony and nativism, deliciously captured in a popular advertisement by Nandos, a prominent fast-food outlet in South Africa.

Embracing Incompleteness and Motion

The concept of incompleteness I employ here, inspired by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, suggests that incompleteness is not a flaw, but something to recognise and embrace, activating it productively through mobility, encounters, relationships, compositeness and mutual indebtedness.

We live in a world defined by constant movement and inherent incompleteness, yet we are conditioned to chase an illusion of completeness, often leading to the policing of borders and restriction of movement. But the history of Africa reveals a powerful counter-narrative: a story of resistance against confinement, a deep-rooted yearning for connection, and a rejection of imposed limitations.

Embracing mobility means acknowledging a world of complexities and “crooked lines,” rejecting the illusion of straight paths, and instead embracing interconnectedness, adaptability and mutual indebtedness. This challenges exclusionary practices and paves the way for a more just and equitable world. The traditional framework for understanding diasporas often takes interconnections and interdependencies as an exception, presenting cultures and identities as bounded and essentialised. It often imbues those who straddle identity margins with guilt or a sense of identity crisis.

Yet, mobilisation and consciousness as a dynamic reality is central to the making, unmaking and remaking of diasporas as incompleteness in motion.

Acknowledging incompleteness means admitting that our world is imperfect and that we are part of this imperfection. It encourages us to avoid defining and confining others and to make room for difference. Recognising our unfinished nature fosters humility, doubt, and compassion. Incompleteness, as a framework, leaves no room for self-hate or hatred towards others; it helps us feel needed without being needy.

Incompleteness in motion values impermanence as a process of creative renewal in connection with others. It is courageous and humbling to recognise our interdependence and delusions of grandeur. It speaks to the reality of being interdependent. Incompleteness acknowledges the ongoing nature of being and becoming in relationship with others.

Redefining Home and Belonging: The Kojo Annan Example

Kojo Annan’s personal account of his evolving sense of home and belonging beautifully illustrates the idea of home and belonging as a permanent work in progress. Born in Geneva to a Ghanaian father and Nigerian mother, and holding British citizenship, he has lived in multiple global cities. His family is a “mini-UN”. Kojo Annan states that “being a global citizen, is about completely embracing the common humanity of all the world’s citizens”. For him, “home is not where you are from or where you live. Home is being seen, being accepted for who you are, being encouraged, being comforted… being loved, being supported and being in access to opportunity”. This challenges us to rethink how we understand belonging in an interconnected world in motion.

As the Cameroonian Grassfields saying goes, “One person’s child is only in the womb.” We can adapt this wisdom to suggest that “one nation’s citizen or belonging is a figment of the imagination,” highlighting the fluid and expansive nature of identity in the 21st century.

The idea of belonging configured around the nation-state is challenged by many a similar personal story to Kojo Annan’s and by fictionalised accounts such as Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go. If belonging is based on a fixed home-nation-state relationship, it becomes exclusionary, fostering racism, xenophobia, and nativism. It becomes like compelling Tutuola’s “complete gentleman” of borrowed body parts and fineries, in The Palm-Wine Drinkard, to completely unravel in the elusive quest for authenticity and autochthony. Rather, Kojo Annan’s story is an invitation to embrace a global citizenship informed by flexible mobility and an idea of home as a composite and permanent work in progress.

Diaspora Beyond the Nation-State: Local Loyalties and Global Connections

The term “diaspora” requires a broader, more inclusive understanding that extends beyond individuals dispersed from their native nation-states. Archaeology and deep history show that the modern world is a product of dispersals dating back to Africa. Often, primary loyalty for those in diaspora is to their home regions, hometowns, and villages, rather than the nation-state, especially when the nation-state is perceived as a colonial invention or corrupt.

Consider Kemi Badenoch, the British Conservative Party leader, who openly identifies more with her Yoruba ethnicity than with Nigeria, which she views as corrupt and poorly governed. She has explicitly stated, “I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba]. That’s what I really am”.

This highlights how identities are often articulated around ethnic communities with shared cultures and geographies, rather than solely the nation-state, particularly in postcolonial African contexts. In fact, few Africans in the diaspora would disagree with prioritising identification with their home village, hometown, home region, and ethnic heritage – what Peter Geschiere and Joseph Gugler have termed “Primary Patriotism” – over loyalty to a nation-state often seen as a hollow pretence of unity. Solidarities, associational life, and development initiatives are more likely to be tailored to and articulated around these local places of origin, and these are often the places community members in the diaspora desire to be buried.

This framework allows us to envision ethnic diasporas that perfectly illustrate Mahmood Mamdani’s keen observation of “ethnic citizens” and “ethnic strangers” coexisting within the same nation-state.

Internal Diasporas and the “Diasporaisation of Ethnicities”

Consider South Africa, for instance: internal migration can strikingly mirror the diaspora experience. Imagine a Xhosa individual moving from the Eastern Cape to KwaZulu-Natal, potentially facing treatment as an ethnic outsider and thus becoming part of a Xhosa diaspora within their own borders. This instructive idea of the “diasporaisation of ethnicities” also extends to labour migrants in the mining industry, drawn from various regions across and beyond South Africa.

Forced Migration and Pan-African Consciousness

Moreover, the transatlantic slave trade undeniably forged the African diasporic experience, creating harrowing “victim diasporas” through forced displacement and dehumanisation. This demands a Pan-African consciousness that pushes beyond just “Blackness” and “Africanness,” compelling us to acknowledge “humanitarian diasporas” as well. Thabo Mbeki alluded to this in his 1996 speech when he declared: “I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign, who taught me that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition for that human existence.” It makes room for composites in motion such as Zohran Kwame Mamdani – the Uganda born-Indian-American-Muslim –, who has just won the New York mayoral primaries for the Democratic party.

Migration, Mobility, and Belonging

Some questions:

In the diasporic stories we tell, are we emphasising migration or mobility?

How do writers articulate the place of borders, belonging, and citizenship in how humans seek to productively mobilise their incompleteness?

How do they grapple with the tendency of nation-states to define and confine through insisting on total allegiance, even when a person is culturally composite and dispersed in their loyalties, as Kojo Annan so aptly illustrates?

The Afropolitan Prism: Hybridity and Global Interconnectedness

The concept of Afropolitanism focuses on Africans navigating interconnecting local and global hierarchies, with a strong emphasis on African cosmopolitanism. Manu Dibango, the acclaimed Cameroonian musician, embodied this, describing himself as “Négropolitain” – “African and European at one and the same time”. He insisted on being seen as “a man between two cultures, two environments,” whose music transcended confinement. His legacy is one of “Afropolitan musical genius of truly global magnitude”.

Taiye Selasi further popularised Afropolitan to describe globally mobile Africans who seamlessly blend their heritage with global influences. This celebration of hybridity and flexible belonging resonates with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s cosmopolitanism, suggesting individuals should be free to embrace multiple identities without rigid definitions of authenticity. Afropolitanism thrives on agency and creativity, with mobility as its defining characteristic. Chinua Achebe’s proverb, “No condition is permanent,” and his comparison of the world to a “dancing masquerade,” perfectly capture the nimble, evolving nature of African identities.

Literary works like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names insightfully illustrate “diaspora as incompleteness in motion”. These novels depict the constant negotiation of identity, the challenges of belonging, and the ongoing search for selfhood and home in a world marked by displacement and cultural hybridity.

Embracing incompleteness means shedding the tendency to limit Afropolitanism to a select, consumerist elite of frequent flyers. It’s crucial to instead infuse this concept with the rich and diverse cosmopolitanism actively created and lived by Africans on the move – physically, mentally and culturally – across the continent and globally.

Expanding the Afropean Concept and Addressing Shared Vulnerabilities

I also propose expanding the term Afropean beyond Black Africans in Europe to include individuals of European descent with deep and primary connections to Africa or a specific African nation, such as Afrikaners in Southern Africa. This broadened definition can foster a more inclusive dialogue about hybrid identities and belonging on the continent, echoing Thabo Mbeki’s sentiment: “I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me”. This allows us to understand Afrikaners not simply as “Europeans” but as mobile Africans within the continent and also as diasporic Africans elsewhere.

The surging interest among African Americans in tracing their African ancestry through DNA technology further demonstrates the potential of Afropolitanism as a framework for understanding how descendants of the enslaved reconstruct and celebrate their African identity, negotiating between imposed or transactional citizenship and a much more complex yearning for belonging. This framework illuminates the shared vulnerabilities faced by all people of African descent, irrespective of their self-defined identities or nationalities. It helps explain the persistent racist attacks endured by Black footballers in Europe – players such as Kylian Mbappé and Vinicius Jr., who, despite their ethnically (thanks to DNA)’Cameroonian’ (Sawa and Tikar) heritage, are identified as French and Brazilian, respectively.

This phenomenon underscores how deeply ingrained racialised thinking transcends personal narratives and national borders, targeting individuals based on their perceived racial identity rather than their nationality or self-identification. It would be profoundly enriching for identification with Africa to draw inspiration from such defiant racism, or from events like the Covid-19 pandemic, to challenge containment by narrow nationalism and its rigid borders.

Conclusion: Embracing Incompleteness in Motion

A limited view of diaspora simply can’t grasp the complex, multi-layered identities and sense of belonging many people experience today. When a nation-state tries to assert absolute power over these evolving identities, it often just highlights its own limitations.

We must therefore release the concept of diaspora from its rigid ties to the nation-state. This allows us to acknowledge the many “homes” and diverse experiences of displacement in our modern world. In this fast-moving, interconnected era of countless dispersions, static ideas about diaspora simply won’t suffice.

Instead, we need bold new scholarship that explores how individuals and communities construct, manage, and envision their connections between homelands and their dispersed communities. But this call extends beyond academia. It is an urgent invitation for policymakers, educators, and societies at large to embrace the profound truth that incompleteness and motion are deeply intertwined, enabling interconnection, interchange, and the creation of rich possibilities through multiple, flexible belongings. By doing so, we can dismantle exclusionary practices and cultivate truly inclusive spaces where diverse forms of “African, Afropolitan, and Afropean belongings” are not just tolerated, but celebrated. As we move forward, let us champion a world where the answer to “How do you think our understanding of ‘home’ is changing in today’s globalised society?” is met with a resounding affirmation of nimbleness, interconnectedness, and shared humanity.

Thank you.

*Keynote Lecture European Conference on African Studies (ECAS), “African, Afropolitan, and Afropean Belongings.” At Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, Prague, June 25-26, 2025.Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Department of Anthropology, University of Cape Town.Email: Francis.nyamnjoh@uct.ac.za, Nyamnjoh@gmail.com . Full presentation can be viewed here