It's mostly for my children.
When reviewing my life as a black father living abroad, I simply look at my children. I see how they are growing into their own being, I see their confidence, I see they aren’t exposed to the harsh realities of their skin color and I say to myself, at
this stage of their lives, living abroad is what’s
best for them.
With that being said, there are a number of positives, negatives and largely unknown qualities about being a black father abroad. To provide a bit of background, my initial global experience was as a study abroad student in the Fall of 2000 in the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya. My interactions with a local family lead me to revisit the city a number of times until 2004, in which I became engaged and subsequently married a Swahili woman who was from the area.
By 2005, and as the proud father of a young baby girl, my voyage into being a black father abroad began. Needless to say, the first few years were atypical of the average American, but fairly normal for a good number of international families as we alternated our time between the Gulf, East Africa and the United States.
Yet, the notion of actually being an African American father of children didn’t become a conscious reality until my 3rd child Ismail arrived and within the same span, my two eldest children, Shamsa and Harun began to attend the local schools in Kenya and also in the Sultanate of Oman where we lived for a few years. This is important because as an adult, your life experience is a natural filter for what you consider to be relevant and essential to your own self identity.
I was soon to learn Black American children abroad don’t necessarily have those tools to recognize their own true identity. With each person being their own life story, my family was unique in that I’m Black American and my wife is Swahili Kenyan. I’d regularly been in and out of Kenya for a few years, and we were living in the city to which I originally went to study abroad. What made this important is my children could have the comfort of growing into one aspect of their being, the Swahili-Kenyan-African side, while simultaneously learning about who they were as Black Americans.
The first was easy, as their interactions with local kids, their cousins, school and the daily life conformed to their identity. In addition, with Mombasa and Kenya itself being a city rich in diversity, there was no notion of being the “other” as a good deal of people in general, were from some form of mixed background. To a certain extent, I felt the American side of their identity would slowly emerge and one day evolve because…..they were American. I’m not sure what form of magic or instantaneous thoughts I was expecting to drop into their brains, but as my children began to get older, their idea of what being American wasn’t wholly accurate.
For one, while they recognized their father was American and they knew there was something intrinsically different about them, nothing about their daily lives suggested it was anything “special”. Besides the fact they had spent very little time in the States, their Swahili identity was strong enough to essentially overshadow anything else of significance. And while I was happy to see they were growing a certain level of comfort in who they were, a significant aspect of me didn’t want them to lose some of the American qualities and even more specific, Black American characteristics which also shaped my life.
Fatherhood Abroad:
Raising Culturally Diverse Children