As the African Union (AU) prepares to celebrate its 50th Anniversary at a time when consultations on what will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the post-2015 agenda are gathering pace, leaders and civil society alike are debating and determining future priorities that will shape the next decade of development and beyond.

When children under the age of 18 make up as much as 60% of the population in some African countries, isn’t it imperative they take centre stage in the new development agenda? When such a large and crucial constituency continues to face immense challenges in terms of neglect and exclusion, lack of access to quality basic social services such as health and education, who continue to face violence and abuse, how can we ensure that there is accelerated action and attention given to them?

It is these critical issues that a group of eminent African leaders, experts and thinkers intend to focus on when we meet for a High Level Dialogue on 21 May in Addis Ababa with a simple goal – to ensure the rights and needs of children are front and centre of the post-2015 development agenda.

The MDGs have achieved much for children, galvanizing development efforts and guiding global and national priorities. And since their introduction in 2000, Africa has witnessed much progress - from some impressive reductions in child mortality, to greatly improved primary school enrolment. But there remains an urgent and unfinished agenda for Africa’s children. As long as the number of preventable deaths remain unacceptably high; as long as some 40% of children suffer chronic malnutrition; as long as children are excluded from secondary education, especially girls; as long as a rapidly growing young population lack skills development and employment opportunities; as long as children continue to face daily violence, abuse and exploitation in the home, at school, in their communities and across borders - this is an agenda that requires specific, targeted and comprehensive commitments going forward to not only build on the past progress that has been made but accelerate action.

On the eve of the AU celebrating its 50^th anniversary, and as Heads of State prepare to agree Africa’s Common Position on the post-2015 agenda, as a continent we can look back proudly on its past stewardship. But it must also seize the chance – indeed the imperative – to use this moment to show extraordinary foresight, leadership, vision and commitment to ensure children are front and centre in the post-2015 agenda. It must be an agenda that tackles children’s realities and their potential. So for the sake of development – human, social and economic – it is time to put children and their best interests at the centre of development, nowhere more so than in Africa.

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For further reading around the subject see:

Post-MDGs: It's Time to Listen to the People	Africa is Rising! At Least Its 1% Is	Africa's Two-Speed Education and Classrooms without Walls

The ‘Afropolitan’ jet-setters began the year in a swirl of curious and adoring headlines, their multinational lives embodied in the figure of author Taiye Selasi. Having coined the term – combining ‘African’ and ‘cosmopolitan – in a 2005 essay, Selasi captured the identity and roots of the Afropolitan in her smash debut novel Ghana Must Go, which was received with amphitheatre fanfare just a few months ago.

Afropolitans are the young and restless who have fled Africa since the 1960s in search of work and education. They overcame immigrant crash-landings fraught with prejudice and poverty. They sprouted into authors, musicians, DJs, doctors, lawyers, professors and athletes. When asked “where are you from?”, the Afropolitan smiles and shrugs, too international for quaint ideas of origin and identity.

Now, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie adds to the concept with her third novel, Americanah, which begins and ends as a love story, but spends hundreds of mid-zone pages hacking away at the term’s glamorous gloss. For Adichie’s characters, the Afropolitan experience is not just a story of triumph – and often not at all – but rather an endless subplot of extreme inter- and intra-racial tensions rooted most deeply in the Western cultural epicentre of the United States of America.

Intercontinental love song

When we meet Ifemelu, her class conflict in America is behind her, and, despite her success, she’s preparing for a move back to Nigeria; issues of race, identity and belonging still loom impossibly large. She’s on her way into a hair salon to get what turn out to be some very metaphoric braids, and gradually readers are introduced to the terms of her migration from Nigeria, the humiliating saga of her initial economic survival in America, and the phoenix-like revival of her personality as a caustic and insightful blogger and public speaker.

On the other end of the love affair is Obinze, who, despite his mother’s Anglophilia, grows up with a smouldering interest in America, especially its literature. We first meet him in Nigeria, full-grown as one of the country’s Big Men. But despite his riches, Obinze feels forlorn and unfulfilled, his heart pining for Ifemelu, his adolescent sweetheart. He was supposed to follow her to America after his schooling, but Obinze couldn’t wrangle a visa because of the country’s post-9/11 fear of young, unemployed men with dark complexions. Instead, he goes to England, struggles to eke out a working life under an illegal name, and is ultimately booted out in handcuffs.

By then, his bond with Ifemelu has been severed. Stinging from an episode of sexual exploitation, Ifemelu walled Obinze out while he was still in Nigeria. They embarked on separate romantic journeys, only rediscovering each other when Ifemelu returns to Lagos and brings the plot full circle. Americanah is at its dullest when preoccupied with the yearning between these two, and Adichie relies too often on whole bricks of expository prose and almost mawkish character dynamics to drive her cast to romantic resolution.

Race rage

The middle section of the novel seems imported from another project. Here, we have a livid, often frustrating, and relentlessly compelling examination of racism and prejudice, one that overturns the cheerier message of Afropolitan integration installed in Selasi’s essay and novel.

Ifemelu is the vehicle for much of these revelations. In America, she perceives an almost infinite multitude of tensions and subcategories. Whites – be they rich, poor, or ethnic – swing from the summit of the race ladder. The darkest of the blacks suffer and perish way down at the bottom. The black-skinned world is mottled with distinctions and fault lines, much of those caught up in an individual’s historical distance from Africa. Relationships are thickened by a mess of indicators: accents, education, music, diction, art, diet, first languages, religion, politics, class, fashion. It’s endless. Meanwhile, America works to neutralise the hallmarks of Ifemelu’s identity – her accent, her hair, her taste – allegedly because it can’t tolerate her pronounced Africana.

In England, Obinze experiences a similar racism, though slightly less supercharged; he’s black, and so treated as simply a lesser person. Relationships he had with family and friends in Nigeria are subverted in England, the class and power structures reversed by Obinze’s inability to legitimise his presence in the country by marrying one of its nationals. At the best of times, the majority is cold and indifferent. At the worst of times, it’s predatory. All the while, Africans dig in against other Africans.

Americanah’s meta-defences

Americanah pre-empts criticism against its most obvious faults. Readers bored with the overbearing romantic themes of its opening and closing acts are reminded by certain characters that their tastes have probably been corrupted by the preponderance of the modern American novel, with its supposedly vapid addiction to irony and aesthetic. Don’t care for the sometimes clumsy paragraphs linking the hearts of Ifemelu and Obinze? Then perhaps you’ve read too much David Foster Wallace.

Likewise, white readers who wonder if the Western world really is so ubiquitously racist, racial, and race-obsessed are told by Ifemelu that in fact they wouldn’t know. White people in America simply aren’t reminded of their race, because it’s never used against them. And if young white people remember the persecution of, say, their Irish or Italian grandparents, then they need to also remember that those ancestors had it much better than did the descendants of African slaves.

“You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country”, contends one character. “If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious.”

Unfortunately, there are no redeeming white characters in the novel, and very few black ones who undergo Americanisation and come back uncorrupted. Adichie does illustrate a few whites who come close to decency, but ultimately their characters are lowered by the inherently clumsy or subtly entitled ways they relate to blacks.

On the face of things, that’s perfectly fine. Readers, and not authors, are at fault when they consume individual works of art in search of real-life representations. Characters are imagined to drive story, not appease politics – and anyway fiction isn’t journalism. Adichie’s reductionist characterisations tilt parts of her story into satire, and they’re often done with compelling strokes of humour and absurdity – except that Adichie herself looms over those reductions.

Through lectures, essays and themes in her fiction, she’s politicised herself, and by extension her work. Along with authors such as Binyavanga Wainaina – who, because of his caretaking of Americanah’s early drafts, she thanks in her acknowledgements – Adichie has emerged as something of a narrative nationalist. Her career is increasingly bound up with ideas of ideologically accurate and holistic representations of Africa and Africans. It therefore smacks a little bit of hypocrisy to read constantly of white Westerners who are, without much variation, venal, perverted, arrogant, intolerant, self-obsessed, or ridden with white-liberal-middle-class guilt complexes.

Keep it in the ethnicity?

Numerous times in Americanah, Ifemelu contends that racism doesn’t exist in Nigeria. This is a bit hard to swallow. Racism, at its heart, is discrimination based on difference – real or perceived – and there’s more than enough of that in Nigeria or anywhere else people exist in even moderate diversity. Adichie circumvents Ifemelu’s idealism with the occasional nod to ethnic tensions in Nigeria, in particular a conversation between two characters that interprets the Biafran War. The point may be that in Nigeria, Ifemelu wouldn’t notice racism as she’s majority-coloured.

Either way, for America’s racist conceits, Infemelu prescribes the cure of love, writing in her blog that it’s the only force strong enough to subdue the ubiquity of racial prejudice. But she herself cannot find love with Americans, white or black, and ultimately finds her heart’s requital with Obinze. Both are Nigerian and both are Igbo.

At the end of Ghana Must Go, Selasi riffs on a similar theme, but wraps it up with more auspicious results. One of her main characters – a black African living in America – is able to overcome romantic strife and emotionally double-down with his partner, an Asian woman also living in America. It’s an optimistic pronouncement on the future of Afropolitinism because it imagines a continued and farther reaching arch of multi-racial harmony. Imagine now Afropolitans reconnecting and becoming little more than a subtle distinction of cosmopolitans. Tensions over difference melt away as people are increasingly indistinguishable according to race and origin.

But Adichie – named specifically in Selasi’s essay as an Afropolitan writer – closes her novel with considerably more cynicism. The Afropolitian experiment is over, her characters seem to say, and now it’s time to go back home.

Think Africa Press welcomes inquiries regarding the republication of its articles. If you would like to republish this or any other article for re-print, syndication or educational purposes, please contact: editor@thinkafricapress.com

For further reading around the subject see:

Review – Ghana Must Go	Speaking About Africa: The Danger of a Single Story	Review – There Was a Country by Chinua Achebe