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26/7/05
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Page 53
Drum: ENTERPRISE 53
Sudanese born Alek Wek arrived
in Britain in 1991 and was
discovered at an outdoor market
in 1995. Alek quickly became one
of fashion’s hottest supermodels.
Alem Hailu left Ethiopia at the age
of 8 and has lived in North Korea,
India, Sweden and England. These
cultural influences are strongly
reflected in her fashion design.
David Adjaye was born in 1966
in Tanzania. David studied
Architecture at the Royal College
of Art and now lives and works
in London.
Out of Africa
“ Often unconsciously, and over time, we choose which bits of a national
identity (from passport to pronunciation) we internalise as central to our
personalities.”
having last names linked to countries suffering lack,
and corruption. Few of us escaped those nasty
‘booty-scratcher’ epithets and fewer still that sense
of shame when visiting paternal villages. Whether
we were ashamed of ourselves for not being more
familiar with our parents’ culture, or ashamed of
that culture for not being more ‘advanced’ can be
unclear. What is manifest is the extent to which the
modern adolescent African is tasked to forge a sense
of self from wildly disparate sources. You’d never
know it looking at those dapper lawyers in global
firms, but most were once supremely self-conscious
of being so ‘in between’. Brown-skinned without a
bedrock sense of ‘blackness,’ on the one hand; and
often teased by African family members for ‘acting
white’ on the other – the baby-Afropolitan can get
what I call ‘lost in transnation’.
Ultimately, the Afropolitan must form an identity
along three dimensions: national, racial, cultural –
with subtle tensions in between. While our parents
can claim single countries as home, we must define
our relationship to the places we live; how British or
American we are (or act) is in part a matter of affect.
Often unconsciously, and over time, we choose
which bits of a national identity (from passport to
pronunciation) we internalise as central to our
personalities. So, too, the way we see our race – »