DA505 main
50
26/7/05
7:04 pm
Page 50
Drum: ENTERPRISE
A study done in 1999* estimated that between
1960 and 1975 about 27,000 highly skilled
Africans left the Continent for the West.
Between 1975 and 1984, the number shot
to 40,000 and then doubled again by 1987,
representing about 30% of Africa’s highly
skilled work force.
extensions can conjure an image of the African
immigrant with only the slightest of pop culture
promptings: Eddie Murphy’s Hello, Babar.
But somewhere bet ween the 1988 release of Coming
to America and the 2001 crowning of a Nigerian Miss
World, the general image of young Africans in the
West transmorphed from goofy to gorgeous. Leaving
off the painful question of cultural condescension in
that beloved film, one wonders what happened in the
years between Prince Akeem and Queen Agbani. One
answer is: adolescence. The Africans who left Africa
between 1960 and 1975 had children, and most over-
seas. Some of us were bred on African shores then
shipped to the West for higher education; others born
in much colder climates and sent home for cultural
re-indoctrination. Either way, we spent the 1980s
chasing after accolades, eating fufu at family parties,
and listening to adults argue politics. By the turn of
the century (the recent one), we were matching our
parents in number of degrees, and achieving things
our ‘people’, in the grand sense, only dreamed of.
This new demographic – dispersed across places like
Brixton, Bethesda, Boston and Berlin – has come of age
in the 21st Century, redefining what it means to be