The Good Immigrant by Nikesh Shukla

Author:Nikesh Shukla
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-08-26T14:38:54+00:00

Cutting Through (On Black Barbershops and Masculinity)

Inua Ellams

If Africa was a bar, what would your country be drinking/doing?

– @SiyandaWrites

Last year, Botswanan writer Siyanda Moutsiwa tweeted a ‘classic writing prompt’ designed for workshops on character interaction. 50,000 tweets later, #IfAfricaWasABar was trending. The answers came in thick, fast, vicious, tragic, insightful, insulting and illuminating. It shed an unashamed light on African geopolitics, on what Africans thought of other Africans, what they thought about Europeans and finally, on a project I had started two years before.

#IfAfricaWasABar Europeans would spike all the drinks then sell antidotes to everyone at a later date.

– @ChetoManji

When I became an immigrant and left Nigeria aged 12, my father and I began cutting each other’s hair. We lived in Dublin, where whenever I followed my white Irish friends to get their haircuts, I’d see panic cross the faces of their barbers who had little or no experience of cutting African hair. I learned not to ask. I’d sit, watching the business conducted in almost absolute silence. Everything changed when we moved to Peckham in London and I came across the familiar bastions of masculinity that are African and Caribbean barbershops. Late into the night, light would pour out of glass-fronted shops stuffed full of Afro/Caribbean men holding court and I dived back into that world. I discovered conversation of the broadest nature, from football to parenting, Creole languages to nutrition and I started writing ‘Barbershop Chronicles’ – a play about what African men inside them talked about. A month into it and I wanted to go bigger, to see if conversation on the continent mirrored conversation here, to see what indigenous Africans thought about us in the diaspora, and what Africans thought of other Africans. I left England and travelled to South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana and #IfAfricaWasABar brought my findings into sharp focus.

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