Afropolitan Travels: ‘Discovering Home’ and the World in Africa

Abstract

Arguing that ‘the cultural history of the [African] continent can hardly be understood outside of the framework of itinerance, mobility and displacement’, the Cameroonian scholar and public intellectual Achille Mbembe has proposed the concept of Afropolitanism as an ethos, a ‘way of being in the world’ and also as an aesthetic, a poetics and a ‘politico-intellectual paradigm’ for the twenty-first century.¹ Analogous, in some respects, to Kwame Anthony Appiah’s notion of a ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism in its combination of a mobile worldliness and an attachment to place, Afropolitanism offers a specifically African iteration of cosmopolitanism.² To date, the concept has been taken up primarily with reference to visual art and literature; I propose, however, that Afropolitanism may also fruitfully be debated in connection with an emergent body of travel narratives about Africa produced predominantly by Africans who reside on the continent.³ Travel narratives have long mediated forms of mobility and displacement, offering an ambivalent oscillation between a consolidation of the travelling consciousness or its dissolution, between the pleasures and the dangers to be derived from distant places and encounters with strangers. Africa has long served as a key site for such ambivalent journeying, more often conducted by outsiders to the continent and frequently by those who thought themselves to be travelling away from modernity, even as colonial modernity made that travel possible.⁴