Prelude: Contradictions and Currents

Of course, ideas of “Africa” and the “lower races” were already there (McEachrane 2018, 477). They were present as familiar signs in the visual field, in the vernaculars of speech and song, and the unconscious impulse of a gesture, glance, or touch; animated by feelings of fascination and fraternity and sustained by sentiments of desire and disgust. They were there in the shockingly flagrant acts of malice, but also in the banality of what Stuart Hall (2017, 158) called “the awkward presence of difference.” They were there, too, in the institutions, between the lines of a bureaucratic order of things, but also, in some cases, right there in the lines themselves. And they were even there in the lofty speeches of those who would condemn them, rejecting their irrational and inhumane logic and injurious effects in favor of appeals to basic human decency and a common sense of solidarity—rhetoric that seemed to resound from the core of an open and tolerant society in which, as Olof Palme famously phrased it on Christmas Day in 1965, “foul racial theories have never gained purchase.” This latter sense of moral clarity—and, perhaps, righteousness—indexes yet another set of ideas, nascent but increasingly present at the time, which would subsequently gain significant purchase, raised to the status of a national and international ideal: of Sweden as a moral superpower, a pillar of geopolitical neutrality, and a Third World ally (Lundström and Hübinette 2020), as “a place without race” (Miller 2017).

For the Africans and diasporans who arrived in Sweden in the long wake of the Second World War, stirred by the currents of decolonization and civil rights and drawn in by the swell of a booming welfare modernity, these ideas—about Sweden, Africa, and the relative personhood of their inhabitants and descendants—loomed large. Their currency palpable, their contradictions no less so. In the summer of 1959, the Durban-based music and dance troupe the Golden City Dixies arrived in Sweden while on a tour of Europe. Citing the increasing hostility of South Africa’s racial state, several members sought political asylum.1 Sweden’s status as a stalwart ally of southern African liberation movements and fierce foe of apartheid was still in the making, though by decade’s end support for decolonization and independence throughout Africa (and the colonized world more broadly) had become increasingly focal to Sweden’s foreign policy (Sellström 1999). In December 1959, the mild-mannered but no less ambitious Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld embarked on a whistle-stop tour of the African continent as secretary general of the United Nations. Hammarskjöld visited twenty-one countries on the cusp of independence from European colonial rule (notably avoiding the intransigent white settler colonies in the South). He spoke of the promise of decolonization and the immanent ascendance of Africa in the world, what he called an “African Renaissance.”2 Such were the noble principles and practices of Sweden’s domestic and foreign policy vis-à-vis Africa and its people at the outset of the 1960s.

Yet this ideal of international fellowship coexisted with more provincial and ignoble realities. In the spaces and practices of everyday life in mid-century Sweden, deep-seated stereotypes of Africa, Africans, and Black people more generally abounded, directed more often than not at children.3 On the pages of elementary textbooks and picture books, in the lyrics and melodies of children’s songs, and on candy wrappers and commercial advertisements one encountered images of gollywogs and pickaninnies, infantilized caricatures of a primitive and grotesque blackness; a pejorative lexicon of racialized cultural difference, with references to jungle “kraals,” primitive “Hottentots,” and cheerful “blackies,” always bound to the profoundly othering—and, for many, always and already violent—word n---- (meaning “Negro,” but also, and more often, the more vulgar English variant); and the fanciful sounds, rhythms, and movements of a wild, childish, and playful tribalism.

All these stereotypical signs come together in the tune “Hottentotvisa” (The Hottentot Song), recorded by singer Margareta Kjellberg for a collection of popular children’s songs in 1955.4 The album cover features an image of an African tribesman, bare-chested and wide-eyed, with an unruly tuft of dreadlocked hair and an impossibly broad grin, holding a spear and wearing a colorful loincloth. This picture appears alongside three others, indexing the various songs featured on the album: a fish, a parrot, and a caged monkey. The song’s musical arrangement is simple, easy to follow and sing along to, but no less rich in its sonic symbolism: the bouncing beat of a bongo drum played on floor toms; the swinging gait (or bleating voice) of a cheerful native signaled by a rumbling tuba; and the frolicking dance of a happy “Hottentot” evoked by a flute’s shrill counterpoint. Kjellberg speaks as much as she sings the lyrics, with a saccharine tone and staccato cadence that pronounces its distance from more refined and mellifluous song. Her words tell the story of a “Negro boy” (n----grabb) named “Hoo-ah” who lives in a “Negro hut” (n----kral) by the river “Chi-kah-doo-ah,” way down in “darkest Africa” (mörka Afrika). Indifferent to circumstance, the boy has no need for clothes, “not like us,” Kjellberg explains in a singsong verse, because “he is a real Hottentot.”

“Darkest Africa” and “African renaissance.” A refuge from state-sponsored racism and a torrent of anti-black stereotypes. For a person of African descent in mid-century Sweden, such were the discursive contradictions and currents that characterized what Jacques Derrida (2002) terms, applying one of his signature neologisms, society’s “hostipitality”—denoting the two-faced cosmopolitanism of contemporary European polities that appear, at once, worldly and insular, both hospitable and hostile to those deemed strangers, foreigners, and outsiders. This polarity has strongly shaped the psychosocial conditions of Black life in modern Swedish society, from which a new sense of diasporic community would gradually emerge among African-descended Swedes in the second half of the twentieth century. In this chapter, my purpose is to explore and interrogate these conditions—the hardening constraints as well as the emergent possibilities—in dialogue with a varied cohort of elders who arrived, grew up, came of age, studied, and established lives in Sweden during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

This was a period quite distinct from the diasporic florescence of the 2010s, which has illuminated the “double consciousness” and “in-between-ness” (mellanförskap) of “second-generation” immigrants (andragenerationen) through terms like “Afro-Swedish” (afrosvensk) and “African-Swedish” (afrikansvensk). (The story of this current generation’s struggle for social recognition and new modes of sociolinguistic identification is the subject of chapter 4.) Along with this earlier generation of migrant diasporans came a diverse array of identities, some of them national, ethnic, transnational, and racial, and not all of which registered or were even legible in their new host country. For those born or adopted into Swedish society, learning to value their Africana parentage and interrogate a growing sense of racial difference—without immediate recourse to the language, politics, and social life of a proximate Black and African community—proved formative, and challenging. “Black” and “Pan-African” solidarity certainly existed out there, in the African struggle for self-rule and the African American campaign for civil rights, for example, but the articulation of these people, places, and events to a mid-twentieth-century Swedish location of culture was tenuous at best. Indeed, as the stories related below suggest, to be “African” or “Black” and “Swedish” was (and largely remains) quite simply unthinkable within the majority—and predominantly white—Swedish culture. One was either a “foreigner” (främling) or a Swede ((svensk)), and darker pigmentation was a sure sign of the former, regardless of where one happened to be born.

Toward an Oral History of Afro-Sweden

In what follows, I present the stories of a generation of Black and African Swedes who began to take to task these assumptions of racial difference, national belonging, and the stigma of their phenotype. They did (and continue to do) so in two principal ways: (1) by imagining themselves as part of a broader community that would come to embrace multiple cohorts of Black diasporans, hailing from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas; and (2) by engaging in an increasingly public anti-racist activism as self-consciously “Black” and “African” but also “Swedish” subjects, in which the performing and visual arts would play a significant role. Importantly, these early efforts to foster community and mobilize public culture have left important traces, informing the lives and work of the present—which is to say, their children’s and, in some cases, grandchildren’s—generation of Afro-Swedes.

I begin with the life and work of elder diasporan Madubuko Diakité, a living vessel of African, African American, and Afro-Swedish history who has also produced an abundance of diasporic social history, in both writing (Robinson Diakité 2005, 2008) and film.5 I couple Madubuko’s vocal account of a vital if seldomly recognized Afro-diasporic presence in Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s with a close reading of one of his documentary films, Det osynliga folket (The Invisible People, 1972), which examines the institutional and everyday racism encountered by foreign-born students and residents in the southern Swedish town of Lund. Thinking with Madubuko, through recollections of his life and analysis of work, I develop the guiding conceptual theme of part I of this book: the historically rooted and socially constitutive practice of diasporic “remembering.” I then turn to a gathering Madubuko helped organize on my behalf at his Malmö residence during the summer of 2016, a meeting which included several prominent elders from the African American community in southern Sweden. Their recollections of “diasporic homemaking” (Campt 2012, 52) reveal remembering to be a thoroughly dialogic social practice, a multi-vocal invocation of the people, places, and events that cohere Sweden’s Black and African community. Their voices also signal the existential urgency of remembering diaspora, drawing attention to the forces of historical erasure that threaten to mute, or even silence their formative experiences, as if they never existed.

I deepen and expand my oral historical account of diasporic remembering in dialogue with two prominent African-descended women, Astrid Assefa and Fransesca Quartey, who invite us to consider the specifically gendered dimensions of Blackness in Sweden in the mid-twentieth century. Further, as distinguished actors, directors, and producers of Swedish theater, Assefa and Quartey help us understand the way race and racism have shaped and affected the experience of African-descended Swedes in the performing arts over the past fifty years, setting the stage for a discussion of contemporary Afro-Swedish art worlds in subsequent chapters. I conclude with a reflection on how everyday struggles with race and racism frequently go hand in hand with an insistent nostalgia for “home,” particularly among those African elders who arrived in Sweden as adults. Such generational experiences of adversity and longing in diaspora are artfully rendered in Dani Kouyaté’s 2016 film Medan vi lever (While We Live), which I read and interpret in dialogue with two “second-generation” Afro-Swedish viewers of the film, Maureen Hoppers and Aida Jobarteh. Thinking with the film and its resonance within their community, Hoppers and Jobarteh recall the striving of their parents’ generation, cast as a common effort to home-make in the wake of displacement, labor that coexists with a potent but largely private sorrow. Hoppers’s and Jobarteh’s recollections of the past, animated by a cinematic narrative that feels close to home, remind us that remembering is also, for many, an abiding act of mourning.

An African American in Sweden

On June 9, 2016, a small but eager delegation arrives at Uppsala University’s Engelska Parken campus. They are part of a one-day symposium titled “Historical Reflections on an Afro-Swedish Contemporary,” which I have helped organize with colleagues and staff in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. The group consists of five prominent Afro-Swedish public actors who are there to discuss fifty years of Afro-diasporic history in Sweden. Among them, the social media maven and culture critic Araia Ghirmai Sebhatu, the community organizer and nonprofit culture broker Maureen Hoppers, the spokesperson for Afrosvenskarnas Riksförbund (National Union of Afro-Swedes) Kitimbwa Sabuni, and the anti-racist and feminist politician and public speaker Victoria Kawesa. (I will discuss these individuals and their social and political work elsewhere in this book, but, as people who came of age and established careers in the 1990s and 2000s, they represent a distinct generational cohort from the community I seek to elucidate in this chapter.) The seminar begins with a presentation from the group’s elder representative Madubuko Diakité.

Madubuko Arthur Robinson Diakité (his friends call him Buko) was born in New York City in 1940. He considers Harlem to be “home,” though he has lived and worked in Sweden most of his life. During this period “abroad” (he sometimes uses the word “exile” to describe his long sojourn in Sweden), Madubuko has developed a rich and varied career as a teacher, lawyer, writer, editor, filmmaker, and human rights activist. Most of his professional life has been spent in the small university town of Lund, in southern Sweden, though he now lives in the neighboring city of Malmö, where he is (mostly) retired from a lifetime of study, jurisprudence, art, criticism, and advocacy. Madubuko came to Lund in 1970 to study film, attracted by the prospect of an almost-free university education and the anticipated calm far from the tough, racialized streets of his hometown. There he was, a young Black man from the United States, full of ambition, big ideas, and great expectations, during Sweden’s transformative welfare years (for a popular history of this moment, see Hägg 2007).

With anecdotes and arguments drawn from his own life experience, Madubuko speaks to us of an African American presence in Sweden—a presence, he argues, which has made strong contributions to Swedish civil society and public culture. “We were many,” he says, but exactly how many is difficult to pinpoint. According to the demographic databases assembled by Statistics Sweden (SCB), in 1970 there were 12,646 people living in Sweden who were born in the United States.6 But the Black, African American population—Madubuko’s “we” in this context—disappears from SCB’s myopic emphasis on national origin. But Madubuko has not come to argue about data (or the lack thereof). His presentation emphasizes names and actions. To this end, he interrogates his audience: “Do any of you remember the sculptor Jerry Harris? Or the painter Herbert Gentry? What about the artist Clifford Jackson? He lived and died right here in Stockholm!” His message is simple: We were here, some of us still are, and we have contributed significantly to this—which is also our—country. These people should be memorialized, their influence celebrated, and, Diakité emphasizes, their community’s existence acknowledged. Madubuko calls for, in other words, a remembering of an African American presence in Sweden.

I borrow the concept of “remembering” from the American phenomenologist Edward Casey (2000) and the Kenyan writer and cultural theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2009). From different philosophical, disciplinary, and critical perspectives, Casey and wa Thiong’o explore how and why people gather to recall, recollect, and commemorate. They emphasize the way invocations of past social life serve not only to recognize (to think of, on, or about) a people’s past but also to reassemble narratively and performatively the unique sociality and cultural foundations (what Raymond Williams would poetically call the “structure of feeling”) of the community itself, embodying a public cultural practice through which a remote “they” becomes a proximate “us.” “Whenever commemorating occurs,” Casey (2000, 235) writes, “a community arises.” For wa Thiong’o, such community reformation requires restorative justice. It is the living memory of pan-African solidarity and the struggle with and against what he calls the historical “dismemberment” of African societies (2009, 5), the result of the conjoined centuries-long scourges of slavery and colonialism, that should be preserved and amplified through written and oral testimony, storytelling, and argument. Madubuko’s project is similar. Through film, text, and speech, he seeks to preserve and amplify a sense of Afro-diasporic community in Sweden, emphasizing the efforts and accomplishments of African Americans.

This diasporic project of remembering is part of a broader social struggle. It is consciously and emphatically directed toward and against all forms and manifestations of racism, public and private, from institutional injustice and everyday prejudice to physical violence and microaggression, the roots of which (in Sweden, as elsewhere) may be traced back to the same “dismembering” legacy of anti-blackness wa Thiongo’o identifies. This struggle is also aspirational, animated by an inclusive spirit that vigorously insists on a broader conception of social and cultural belonging and a greater appreciation of “difference” in society, as both an entrenched form of social constraint and a generative source of intersubjective possibility—a desire for what Frantz Fanon ([1952] 2008, 206) once called, in the aspirational conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, “genuine communication.” Further, art is at the heart of this struggle. Speaking to us in Uppsala, Madubuko turns our attention, again and again, to Black artists of all kinds, sculptors, painters, poets, musicians, and filmmakers, like himself; artists whose creative impulses and aesthetic interventions are infused by their transnational roots and routes (as the waves of the Black Atlantic break on North Sea and Baltic shores); artists whose work should not be abstracted away from a common, if variable, politics of decolonization and civil rights. Sweden, Madubuko tell his audience, has much to learn from the perspectives, experiences, knowledge, and creativity born of Africa’s diaspora.

The Invisible People

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” writes Ralph Ellison in the prologue to his 1952 novel Invisible Man. Twenty years later, Diakité, in collaboration with the late journalist Gary Engman, wrote and directed Det osynliga folket. This short film examines the lives of foreign students and other recent immigrants in Lund in the early 1970s, attending to their encounters with everyday prejudice and injustice in Sweden. In particular, Madubuko’s cinematic eye and journalistic narrative is drawn to the experiences of Black diasporans in this small yet bustling Swedish university town. “It was the first of its kind,” Madubuko says, though he struggled mightily (and almost in vain) to get the project funded. He sent over forty letters, soliciting support from various institutions and brokers in Sweden’s media sphere, before Engman, well-known for his in-depth and socially progressive reporting on Swedish television, agreed to produce the film.

The word “people” (folk) in the film’s title extends Ellison’s existential critique. For Madubuko, invisibility cannot be reduced to an individual’s unwillingness or inability to acknowledge or recognize another. Rather, invisibility is always and already a social phenomenon, resulting from institutional myopia built into the structures of society, into its myriad public bureaucracies, community organizations, schools, private clubs, and companies. Such sites of institutional sociality routinely construct an inclusive “us” to which “they,” from an insider’s vantage, do not and in many cases cannot belong. In 1970s Sweden, such an “us” would have still been predominantly male and heterosexual, though the patriarchy such categories presuppose was being challenged by an increasingly vocal feminism; but also white, though few at the time would have acknowledged the latter’s significance, or even existence, drawing our attention to another valence of “invisibility” in Swedish society: the pervasive if discursively absent presence of “race.”7 What Madubuko is pointing toward, in ways quite novel to the Swedish public sphere of the 1970s, is the manifest presence of institutional discrimination and, when animated by skin color, structural racism.

The film’s narrative centers on John, an African American man living in Lund with his Swedish wife and her daughter. (The name is a pseudonym.) Following a heated argument with his ex-wife, John finds himself suddenly expelled from the country. Called in to investigate the domestic dispute, the local police determined John to be “a threat to his surroundings” (ett hot mot sin omgivning), though no formal charges or court proceedings followed from the conflict in question. (The film does not elaborate on the cause or nature of the dispute.) Yet even without such due process the police deemed John’s case to be sufficiently urgent to quickly process his repatriation, which, it should be noted, was also in the purview of their broad authority at the time. To bolster their decision, immigration officials at the police department noted that John lacked a work permit. Because John couldn’t support himself, they argued, his temporary residential status in the country could not be sustained. Given this already tenuous position, all it took, it seems, was a little nudge. Within a span of days, and without any opportunity to defend himself, either in relation to the original dispute or the judgement about his residency status, John was placed on an airplane and deported.

A few months later, John found himself back in Lund with his wife and daughter. How? When John approached the Swedish consulate in New York City, desperate to plead his case, the consular officials informed him that he need only reapply for a residency permit, which he did, and it was granted. But no one in the thick of this bureaucracy could explain to John, his family, or friends exactly what led to the rapid escalation of his case, from a routine municipal investigation to an urgent matter of domestic security. For Madubuko (the documentarian who would later earn an advanced law degree to defend cases like John’s), it is the authorities’ systemic refusal to acknowledge the humanity of people like John, their virtue and dignity as individuals, which reduces them to mere subjects of governance. This makes John, like so many other “foreigners,” invisible, which is to say socially isolated, tainted, and debased—living “precarious lives,” as Judith Butler (2004) describes them. Here, again, Fanon’s words ring true: “If at a certain point in his history, [a man] has been made to ask the question whether he is a man, it’s because his reality as a man has been challenged” ([1952] 2008, 78, my emphasis).

The word “people” (folk) in the title of Det osynliga folket also bears a more specifically Swedish meaning, signaled by a series of questions the film’s case studies raise, which seem as pertinent today as they were a half century ago when the documentary first aired on Swedish television. What place exists for those labeled as “immigrants” ((invandrare)), “foreigners” (utlänningar), and “strangers” ((främlingar)) in that iconic gestalt of social democratic nation-building, “the people’s home” (folkhemmet)? What role (if any) will their histories, experiences, knowledge, artistry, and entrepreneurship play in the country where they live? Are they, in other words, part of “the people” (folket) in Sweden, or will they remain essentially other (“them,” not “us”) to the Swedish body social?

With these questions in mind, it is worth listening again, and more closely, to the much lauded and oft-cited speech about xenophobia (främlingsfientlighet) delivered by the future Swedish prime minister Olof Palme (then governing head of the Department of Communications) in 1965. In a national radio broadcast on Christmas Day, at a time of intensified labor migration to Sweden from southern and eastern Europe, Palme spoke of how easily swayed even the most “tolerant” and “enlightened” society can be when confronted by underlying and unchecked prejudices, one where, in Palme’s words, “foul racial theories have never gained purchase.” Palme continued: “[Such prejudice] is shamefully simple to take on for those who feel set upon,” those for whom “they” (immigrants) are clearly the source of “our” (native-born Swedes) problems. The solution, according to Palme, is a critical awareness of bigotry’s banal but no less fertile origins “in everyday life . . . at the workplace and in the neighborhood.” But what then? Putting Olof Palme’s speech in dialogue with Madubuko Diakité’s film shows just how wide the gap was (and, indeed, still is) between benevolent and didactic rhetoric, on the one hand, and the need for targeted civil action to promote greater inclusion and social justice, on the other (cf. McEachrane 2018, 480).

Madubuko’s lifelong project of remembering an African American and more broadly Afro-diasporic presence in Sweden is partly about narrowing this gap between reality and possibility, aspirations and actions. In this way, he, along with other elders of this “first” generation of diasporans, have laid the groundwork for a flurry of apparently “new” social movements, which have flourished in recent years, including those who give voice to the growing sociocultural rift between “us” and “them” by speaking of “in-betweenness” (mellanförskap); and those who, in the spirit of W. E. B. Du Bois, insist daily on the virtue and value of their “two-ness” when they call themselves “Afro-Swedes” and “African-Swedes.”

It is interesting, I think, to watch Det osynliga folket together with Göran Hugo Olsson’s 2011 documentary film The Black Power Mixtape. Olsson’s film is a collage of archived reports and commentaries, some of them contemporary, portraying “how [the Black Power Movement] was perceived by some Swedish filmmakers” and their interlocutors, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. I frequently use The Black Power Mixtape in my undergraduate courses in African American and African studies as an important collection of source material from the latter phase (post-1968) of the American civil rights movement. But the film is just as interesting for what it says about the Swedish public’s view of Black America’s intensified campaign against racial injustice and oppression at the time. The struggle, out there, beyond the borders of Sweden, was palpably visible.

In the beginning of the film, we encounter a young Stokely Carmichael, on tour in Stockholm in 1967. Just twenty-six years old, Carmichael (who would later change his name to Kwame Ture, during a period of political exile in Guinea, West Africa) had already become a major figure in Black politics globally. He appears at a lectern, giving a speech to a large, packed room about his generation’s more radical take on anti-racist activism. The film captures the giddy enthusiasm of his Swedish audience, most of whom appear to be university students. Carmichael is a rock star. He is swarmed by cameras and microphones on an airport tarmac, and fans line up for a signed copy of his book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. It is a snapshot of Sweden at the time, full of progressive aspiration and solidarity for the oppressed peoples of the world. But let’s pause the film there, keeping this spectacle of politics and culture in our minds. It was during this time, in the late 1960s, when the first significant wave of African Americans began arriving in Sweden, though not as celebrities. They came from many walks of life. The most notable cohort was deserters from the Vietnam War, which had dramatically escalated during both the Johnson and Nixon administrations.8 But there were also newlyweds, artists, bohemians, and students. Madubuko Diakité initially came to Sweden as a tourist in 1968, before he began his studies at Lund University two years later. As I watch Det osynliga folket, I am reminded that the stories these “invisible people” have to tell are no less important than those of individuals who once grabbed the spotlight.

Remembering Diaspora

On June 29, 2016, I am invited to join an informal afternoon gathering, which Madubuko has generously arranged on my behalf at his apartment in downtown Malmö. Along with me, Madubuko, and his partner Monique are four guests who have come to discuss “the old days”: Frank Juniet, Ruffin McKinley, Herb Washington, and Sylvia Robinson. All, except for Monique and myself, are in their seventies and eighties, with long careers in the public service, health care, the arts, teaching, and social activism behind them. And each one of them has a lot to say about what it was like to be an American and Black in Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s. Our conversation unfolds over four hours, but the time flies. The discussion feels urgent and necessary. Things need to be said. Stories need to be told. I have come with questions, circulated to the group before my arrival, but our conversation is already underway before I have a chance to ask any of them. Disparate subjects come up. Everyday life. The Vietnam War. Palme and Nixon. Love and loss. Working and hustling. Black history, art, and what they call “the struggle.” Tying these strands together are three things: names, places, and actions. Recollections of who they were, where they found themselves, and what they did embody, locate, and animate a community: a remembering of an African American presence.9

The stories are multiple and begin to layer and thicken during our conversation. We remember: Renowned filmmaker Jack Jordan, who owned the short-lived Stockholm nightclub called Best of Harlem. Getting “experienced” backstage with soul-singer “King” George Clemons and Jimi Hendrix at Gröna Lund, a popular urban theme park. A lively debate with the deserter-turned-entrepreneur Ray Jones at this apartment in Old Town, Stockholm. The incomparable Quincy Jones, blowing his trumpet: “Anytime he wanted to play, oh Lord, people would line up!” exclaims Frank. Herbert Gentry, who took the visual culture of the Harlem Renaissance with him to Denmark, and then Sweden. Don and Moki Cherry, summering with their kids, Neneh and Eagle-Eye, in a house full of art and sound in southern Sweden. George Jones’s powerful poetry: “An absolutely brilliant writer,” Madubuko says, whose genius was gradually overwhelmed by a growing madness. And Herb Washington taking to the streets with a white American comrade, two ex–service members marching against Cold War imperialism on the streets of Malmö, alongside, they discover, Olof Palme.

More mundane but no less weighty realities and events also preoccupy our discussion. We remember: The hotel in Malmö where American deserters (Black and white) were placed upon arrival, with the bad food and anti-immigrant attitudes at the restaurant around the corner, where they were all told to eat. How difficult it was to get out of this holding pattern, to find a job and a place to live. The refrain, Herb says, went something like “I can’t give this apartment to you, because everyone else will move out!” And “I can’t give you a job, because everyone else will quit!” White Americans’ astonishment and horror when confronted by, apparently for the first time in their lives, xenophobia. “But we were used to it,” says Herb, with a laugh. “We were hardened. . . . We had skin on our noses, as they say.” Getting a haircut: “When I first came to Sweden, there was no one who would cut my hair!” explains Sylvia. Frank turns to Ruffin and asks, “Didn’t you cut hair?” “Yes,” Ruffin replies, nodding. “I did.” Herb chimes in, “He did it! And Morgan did it, too! We were grateful for these guys!”

Most of the African Americans in Sweden and Denmark at that time were young men, at least initially. “When we came here . . . I didn’t see any Black girls on the streets!” observes Madubuko. Frank and Herb agree. But a woman’s and more broadly a diasporic perspective arises when Sylvia raises her voice and retraces a memory. She recalls her close friend Kabunda, who lived with her in the Delphi student housing complex in Lund. Both were married to white Swedish men, whose surnames they took—and it just happened to be the same name. As a result, Sylvia and Kabunda found themselves frequently exchanging their mail, “because the mailman got [our names] wrong!” she says, with a laugh. She remembers: “A wonderful Black woman! Two daughters. A single mother, you know, just struggling. And then there was me. Single mother. Struggling. And it’s like, comparing, talking about our lives. And I’m still here. Still struggling. And she went on to become . . . the minister of education in Zambia!”

Other diasporic connections appear, take shape, and strengthen during the conversation. We remember: Noël Charles, born in Trinidad, who ran the legendary club Alexandra’s in Stockholm. “Everybody knew Noël!” exclaims Frank. “Oh, yeah!” “Mm-hmm!” “That’s right!” the others agree. The West African music and dance troupe Ballet Negro Africain, on tour in southern Sweden in the late 1960s when they were suddenly left in the lurch. “They were cheated to come here,” Herb recalls, “by a Swedish person, who got them up here and ended up taking them, robbing them of all their money!” Since 1973, the group has gone by the name Afro Tiambo, directed by former Ballet member Soryba Touray in Malmö. “And Dallas is still here,” says Frank, referring to Djelymory “Dallas” Diabaté, known to most as a community organizer and hailed as “the king of Rosengård” (a working-class suburb on the outskirts of Malmö known in recent decades for its predominantly foreign-born population). As we talk, I think to myself: How were these postcolonial West African artisans and griots (bards and storytellers), modern musical exponents of a deeply traditional society, perceived by their Swedish audiences? A comment from Herb reminds me that the diaspora creates its own home in the world. “We were all one big melting pot,” he says. “l learned to eat with my hands with them! . . . Cooking their food, and we would eat with our hands. That is what we did! We were more, what do you call it? Homogenous at the time.” In other words, these early Afro-Swedish diasporans found each other, exchanged customs and habits, and, in time, made new lives together.

“Swedish,” with a Difference

The word “foreigner” comes up frequently in my discussion with Madubuko and his friends in Malmö. The connotation the word carries is unambiguously negative, meaning: We are not of this place. People here don’t consider us to be one of them. We are different, always have been, always will be. “Why?” I ask them. Looking around the room, I see people who have lived and worked in Sweden forty or fifty years, raised families here, brought up children here, cared for grandchildren here. “At what point does one cease to be a ‘foreigner’ in this country?” This question triggers an immediate response from all present. “But we are still foreigners!” they exclaim. “I’m going to die a foreigner,” say Herb. “Even our children are foreigners,” adds Madubuko, reminding us that, for much of his adult life in Sweden, this social stigma has also been a legal status, passed down through generations.10 This recurrent and seemingly endemic idea of difference—signaled by terms like utlänning (foreigner), främling (stranger), and (invandrare) (immigrant)—appears throughout my conversations with those who lived through or came of age in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s. Colored by race, the sense of otherness these terms communicate strongly echoes W. E. B. Du Bois’s still relevant depiction of that “peculiar sensation,” which he famously termed “double consciousness”: “[the] sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” ([1903] 2007, 8).

I turn now to the stories of two women, Astrid Assefa and Fransesca Quartey. Like the African American elders in Malmö, this “peculiar sensation” is one Astrid and Fransesca know all too well, though their lives reveal a different facet of the Black experience in Sweden. Both women are born and raised in Sweden. Both are daughters of an African father and a Swedish mother, parentage which set them apart from their peers growing up, but of which they are immensely proud. Both make it clear that they are, among other things, both African and Swedish women. Their “double consciousness” goes hand in hand, in other words, with an emergent sense of “two-ness”: an affirmative claim on a multiply rooted sense of self, born of diaspora. Importantly, both women are also artists, actors, and directors whose work has made them distinguished exponents of Swedish theater and film. Their stories reveal the important—indeed, essential—role the performing arts play in forging and mobilizing new modes of identification, across social and cultural divides wrought by race.

I meet Astrid Assefa at her apartment in Vasastan, a prim and proper middle-class neighborhood in central Stockholm. Her place is what Swedes might call a våning, a well-worn and spacious flat, full of the comforts of home, ornamented with personal effects and professional mementos, signs of a rich and successful life. We drink tea and eat cookies. The fika (coffee or tea and, as my late father-in-law used to say, någonting att tuga på, something to chew on) is both de rigueur and delicious. We exchange pleasantries as I prepare my audio recorder and open my notebook. I explain my presence with a broad theme, posed as a question: What was it like to grow up as a person of African descent in Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s? I punctuate my query with a quote, something I heard Astrid say on the radio, describing her childhood: “a black dot in a white field of snow.” “Well,” she begins, “I was born in 1953. I lived with my mother near the Norwegian border in Värmland” (a region in western Sweden).11 Growing up, Astrid heard stories of Nazis: “My mother hated them.” Her grandfather worked as a customs officer and helped Norwegian refugees during the occupation, a risky affair. “There were still many Nazis in Värmland, when I was growing up,” she explains. Astrid had an Ethiopian father, but he wasn’t in the picture very long. “He went back to Ethiopia, though my mother told me he was dead! Growing up, it was just me and my mom.”

Rumors spread that Astrid had been found in a basket, a poor orphan from far-away Africa. Others thought she must be the love child of a touring musician, a Black American jazz player or one of the Golden City Dixies. “There was a fair amount of myth surrounding me. It was all very odd. People were so ignorant. They couldn’t fathom that my mother had worked abroad and met a man. It had to be someone passing through, a stranger. My mother became furious when people thought I was Roma!”12 When the reality of Astrid’s African roots settled in, another set of assumptions emerged, expressed through what she thought of at the time as “friendly racism.” (Though “I wouldn’t use that term anymore,” she says, implying that there’s nothing friendly about racism.) “I became a representative for the whole African continent.” When neighbors gathered donations for international aid organizations, Astrid stood out as a symbol for all those “poor, miserable African children.” “But my mother raised me to be proud of my heritage,” she insists. “She bought me The Cultural History of Ethiopia from a bookshop in London,” a precious link to a storied African civilization that she learned to proudly claim alongside her small-town roots in Värmland. “I am Swedish,” she says, “and Ethiopian.”

Fransesca Quartey shares that sense of pride, that two-ness. We meet for lunch in the northern town of Skellefteå, where Fransesca serves as the director of the regional theater company Västerbottensteatern. Our time is short. At the moment, Fransesca is on the front lines of an aggressive push to promote and develop the performing arts in northern Sweden, and there is much work to do. An accomplished and ambitious Black woman, her work in the Swedish culture sector has been pathbreaking, a reputation which has brought me to her on this day. Yet, Fransesca is careful to qualify that visibility, as becomes clear when I ask her how she identifies herself. “I usually call myself a Swede with dual origins, with Ghanaian ancestry,” she tells me.13 Then, for emphasis, she adds, “And very proud of my Ghanaian heritage, too!” But she is also emphatic about her Swedish identity: “I am a Swede and very proud to be a Swede!” Still, Fransesca learned early on that this Swedishness came, as fellow diasporic Ghanaian Kwame Anthony Appiah might put it, with a difference. In her words, “I was born in ’64. I was born in an era when . . .” she pauses. “When we were different, but we were different Swedes.” Fransesca did not experience the kind of “stranger in our midst” rhetoric that Astrid describes. “These were the ’70s, you know!” Growing up in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city, Fransesca found herself immersed in the progressive cosmopolitanism of her time: solidarity with Palestine, the women’s movement, the anti-apartheid struggle. “My conflict,” she explains, “has much more to do with moving as a black body in many various white rooms.” In Appiah’s (1997, 618) terms, Fransesca’s “rooted cosmopolitan” as a Swedish woman of African descent, and in a time and place of worldly interest and activism, coexists with a pervasive and hegemonic whiteness, in which her “black body” becomes visible—and visibly different—and, in that way, overdetermining: reduced to skin color and stereotype.

Still, Fransesca is careful, here too, about how she qualifies this experience of color-coded difference. “I have been fortunate,” she says, “not to be subjugated to open racism.” Once more I find it useful to consider the Anglo-Ghanaian Appiah’s kindred thoughts on this matter. In his own autobiographical reflections on race, Appiah (1992) identifies two principal forms through which racism manifests in the world today. The first he calls “extrinsic,” akin to what Fransesca has in mind when she speaks of “open racism”: the public and quotidian, often verbal, and sometimes physical insults and injuries that many associate with the unadorned term “racism.” The second form Appiah calls “intrinsic,” which he associates with a moral preference for those in one’s own racial cohort, a “family feeling” of race-based kinship and community (his example is late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Pan-Africanism in the United States). The intersubjective expression of intrinsic racial solidarity is more often than not subtler than its extrinsic counterpart, manifest in nonverbal expressions of shared affect and an intangible sense of a common “culture”—something you just feel and know. But we might also read this “intrinsic” racism differently, together with Fransesca when she speaks of “moving as a black body in many various white rooms.” There is, in other words, something intrinsically racist about social spaces that structure how and to what extent we move through and operate in society, and how we are perceived by others therein. This is the ambivalence of Fransesca’s double consciousness: an affirmative two-ness (proudly Ghanaian and Swedish) obscured by the shadow cast by an unmarked but no less present white society.

For Astrid, her ability to navigate and confront Sweden’s many “white rooms” had everything to do with the discovery, as a young woman, of her Blackness, together with her emergent career as an actor. On television Astrid could see the American civil rights movement dramatically unfold from afar, but it felt close to her: “It was so good, wonderful. I identified with it directly.” In 1969, she received a scholarship to study in the United States. “I became Black as soon as I stepped off the plane!” The memory of this newfound identity is still fresh: “There was a boy [at the college in New York where the exchange students gathered upon arrival]. He didn’t belong to our group, but he came up to me and said, ‘Hey girl, are you Black?’ ‘Mm-hmm, yes I am,’ I told him. He said, ‘I have to teach you something.’ And he took me, well basically kidnapped me, to a Black studies class!” From this rogue gentleman–educator, Astrid received a copy of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, a Black Power companion to her Cultural History of Ethiopia. There is a shade of Appiah’s “intrinsic” solidarity in this early encounter with Blackness, which quickly deepened. When Astrid arrived in Poughkeepsie, where she was to attend a local high school, she “became Blacker than Black.” Smiling, she adds, “It was such a pleasure to move among other Black people, at a purely physical level. . . . No one believed I was Swedish!” Returning to Sweden in 1970 was “tough,” she says, adding “I was now a modern person. I was a Black person. There was a touch of Angela Davis in me. It was exciting to be Black!”

In 2013, an article in the Swedish press, reflecting on Astrid’s storied theatrical career, referred to her as “the first black student accepted into a Swedish theater school, in 1980” (Wreede). “We’re a little behind here,” Astrid notes sardonically. At the time, though, the question on everyone’s mind was “Would she get a job?” At her entrance audition, Astrid remembers the school jury telling her “Astrid, you are so talented, and we really do want to accept you into our program, but you are so dark! We’re afraid that you might not get roles!” Despite this “concern,” Astrid was accepted into the school, and, eventually, the roles did come. But this experience brought the pronounced racism of the theater world—a profoundly “white room,” as Fransesca might say—into sharp focus: “I was speaking recently with a fellow Black actor, and she said, ‘[Swedish] directors can’t imagine a Black actor playing a typical role.’ And then added, ‘In what line of work can you openly say that you can’t get the job because of your skin color?’” On stage and behind the curtain, then, racism is as intrinsic as it is extrinsic, both in “the order of things” and in your face. In the Swedish theater, Astrid explains, in words that are as blunt as they are brutal, “the ideal human is white.” Thirty years after her theater school audition, in 2010, Astrid would help launch the group Tryck, meaning “Push,” a separatist organization for Black performing artists in Sweden (tryck.org). Tryck is one of several recently conceived Afro-diasporic associations (about which more in chapter 5) that are actively calling out and confronting the pervasive whiteness—the intrinsic preferences, structural exclusions, and overt abuses—of the Swedish public sphere, while also affirming a clearly present and intensely creative Black community. This movement has been decades in the making, born of the struggle of those, like Astrid, who have produced and performed on the margins of the Swedish art world. In the interim, “we were so very alone,” she says.

In comparable but different ways, Fransesca’s political awakening was also shaped by a nascent “diasporic intimacy” (Boym 1998), nurtured by her family and, later, the realization that theater could be mobilized as a tool of cultural criticism and social transformation. We’re talking about the 1970s in Sweden. “It seems like there was an awareness at home [in Sweden],” I observe, “about civil rights, about Black consciousness, about decolonization. I’m wondering how that translated into your everyday life, if at all?” In answering, Fransesca turns directly to the memory of her Ghanaian father, who, she notes, did experience a fair amount of “open racism” during his fifty-seven-year sojourn in Europe. Her remembrance, which describes what Brent Hayes Edwards (2003) might call the mid-century “Black internationalism” of a (post)colonial African migrant, is worth citing at length:

My dad came very young to Europe. He was a stowaway. And he came from the Gold Coast, which was a colony at the time. He was born in 1927. He came to the “Queen’s England,” which had been perceived in a certain way in Ghana, only to find a postwar traumatized city, blackened with soot all over; people with bad teeth, with no possibility for a proper cleaning; and it was a shock! People stunk! He missed out on the whole independence thing in Ghana. He was in Scandinavia then, when Nkrumah took power [in 1957]. But he wanted to know about these things, and he could do it by reading. Nkrumah Speaks was a book that stood in our library. And The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a book that stood in our library. Those were the books of the day.

Fransesca’s father wasn’t an intellectual, she explains, “but he could talk!” Her recollection of his journey testifies to the oral history that a “good talker” performs and preserves (Cruikshank 1998). And much like Astrid’s books about Ethiopia and Black Power, invocations of Nkrumah and Malcolm X reveal how important these circulating texts—articulating struggles for decolonization and civil rights across the African world—were in cultivating a consciousness of a transnational Black and African public sphere. Lingering on this topic, and gesturing toward an emergent diasporic community in Sweden, Fransesca makes still other connections: “Africa was a continent on the rise, you know. I remember Daddy’s Ghanaian friends coming home and reading these magazines with a different quality of paper; and seeing drawings of happy Black people drinking Star Beer. I’m thinking about the consciousness question. When I was growing up, then later on, they tried to involve me. There was a union [förening] that was formed called PASS in Gothenburg. The Pan-African Association Society in Sweden.” There is a palpable, sensuous quality to Fransesca’s memories (“a different quality of paper” and “happy Black people drinking Star Beer”), reminiscent of Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s (2014) lucid account of urban Africans’ feelingful engagement with popular print and recorded media—what Jaji calls “sheen reading”—in the mid-twentieth century. These perceptions also point to what Ashon Crawely (2016) might term the “otherwise possibilities” of a rich and tangible African world beyond the “white rooms” of everyday life in Sweden, an African public culture you could feel in your hands and see with your eyes. Fransesca connects these affective memories with early diasporic social organization in Sweden (Gothenburg’s Pan-African Association Society of Sweden), of which she was brought into the fold, again, through the transnational circulation of Black popular media. “They used to subscribe to Ebony Jr. for me,” she says.

From an early age, the theater attracted Fransesca. Through drama, she witnessed how social movements could be brought to life and mobilized in novel ways. A formative moment, for her and many others of her generation, came with the production of Tältprojektet (The Tent Project). The play toured Denmark and Sweden in 1977, when Fransesca was fourteen years old, and staged the history of the Swedish labor movement. “I had this friend who asked me, ‘Do you want to go and see this play?’ [We went,] and it changed me. It showed me what theater can be, as an all-involving, all-encompassing form of art. That was the first time that I saw the stories of working-class people [performed on stage].” Nine years later, Fransesca was enrolled in the College of Theater at the University of Gothenburg, graduating with a B.F.A. in 1989. She then spent three years with the renowned children’s theater company Unga Klara (1990–93) and two years with the Swedish Royal Theater (Dramaten, 1993–95).

During this latter period, Fransesca began brainstorming an idea for a new variety show. The production would include four women, all of them Black and raised in Sweden. They would sing, dance, and speak about “what it’s like to be normal and abnormal at the same time.” It would be about coming of age in the 1970s and not fitting in, about being Swedish but treated like an outsider because of one’s skin color. The show was called Hot n’ Tot. “It was a bit like, ‘We’re Afro, and we’re hot,’” Fransesca explains. “And then, it was funny because [in the advertisement for the show] it said Alla talar svenska [Everyone speaks Swedish]!” Of course, this is “funny” because of the skewed presumption the line both implies and provocatively critiques: that it is notable, even remarkable, that a group of Black people would speak Swedish! Further, playing on still another a pair of stereotypes about Blackness and its intersection with gender, an advertisement for the show at the China Theater in Stockholm read, “Am I a dangerous black skull [svartskalle] or a sumptuous negress?”14 This line captures the masculine and feminine polarity of “danger” and “attraction” that frames popular perceptions and representations of black bodies, in Sweden as elsewhere (Hall 1997b). “There were many tongue-in-cheek things that, today, I wouldn’t be willing to do in the same way,” Fransesca says.

One of those things was the show’s closing number, a playful rendition of the popular mid-century children’s tune “Hottentotvisa” (Hottentot Song)—yet another point of reference for the show’s provocative title (which I analyzed at the outset of this chapter). “Hottentotvisa,” recorded and popularized in the late 1950s, and likely still in the mix of tunes these Afro-Swedish performers would have heard growing up in 1960s and 1970s, features lyrics that portray a simple and playful life “deep down in darkest Africa.” “It was supposed to be an irony, a satire,” Fransesca explains. Of course, their audience would have also known, or at least been familiar with, the song, but the performers’ “tongue-in-cheek” rendition—four Black women singing a blatantly racist and exoticizing kids’ song—did not always register the way they expected: “Some people didn’t get it! They thought it was just for fun and entertainment.” In this way, we must imagine the theater’s “white room” extending to its public as well. Though Fransesca did see evidence of a small but notable change beyond the stage. “Were your audiences predominantly white?” I ask her. “Yes,” she says, “but there was a large group of Black people that came too, and, for many of them, it was a revelation.”

Coda: Remembering “Home”

On a pleasant midsummer day in 2017, I sit down with culture broker and media consultant Maureen Hoppers at her office in downtown Stockholm. Among other topics (to which I return in chapter 3), we are discussing the meaning and impact of the film Medan vi lever (While We Live), which had its premiere in Sweden in the fall of 2016. Maureen is a Swedish woman of Ugandan parentage, who first came to Sweden with her family as an adolescent in the 1990s. Over the past decade, she has distinguished herself as a vocal advocate for more robust and sensitive minority cultural representation in the Swedish public sphere, particularly in children’s and youth literature. Medan vi lever is African-born, French-trained, and Sweden-based filmmaker Dani Kouyaté’s fifth feature film and first Swedish production. At the narrative center of Medan vi lever is the story of Kandia (played by actor Josette Bushell-Mingo, whose artistic career I will consider further in chapter 6), a fifty-something Afro-Swedish woman who, after three decades living and working in Sweden, decides to leave her adopted home and resettle in her native Gambia. Kandia’s journey strikes a powerful and personal chord with Maureen, who attended the film’s debut screening in Stockholm. As Maureen’s reflections make clear, the film offers an important perspective on the lives and labors of Afro-Sweden’s migrant forebears, by emphasizing their existentially complex relationship to “home.”

“None of our parents came here because they wanted to go on vacation,” Maureen tells me. “They came here to create better opportunities for their children, in the hopes that things would get better, so they could return home.”15 These “things,” of course, have taken multiple forms in the many places African diasporans call “home” in the world: from entrenched social injustice and war to oppressive dictatorships and chronic underemployment, or just a generalized lack of opportunity. For those displaced by such worldly things, there emerges a common refrain: “When justice and peace return, when we have good governance and decent jobs, then we’ll go home.” At the premiere of Medan vi lever, Maureen felt this shared diasporic sentiment resonate among those in attendance, most of them Swedes with roots in the African continent—many of them with family ties to the Gambia in particular, the country featured in the film. “I don’t think I have ever gone to the movies and seen a Swedish film, where people speak Swedish in a Swedish context, that reflects a part of my reality [as a Swede of African descent]. And it’s as simple as that. It was very, very powerful, and I was in a room where others felt the same way. That was huge.” I will have more to say about Medan vi lever and writer–director Dani Kouyaté later in the book, in terms of the controversy its initial release provoked (chapter 5) and to exemplify what I am calling an “Afro-Swedish renaissance” in the performing, literary, and visual arts (chapter 6). Here, to conclude this chapter, I want to remember Kandia’s story, and the specific generational reality the film’s narrative represents for many Afro-Swedes.

In Medan vi lever, viewers first encounter Kandia going about her morning routine (making breakfast, going to work) during the film’s opening credits. Right from the start, we witness her everyday isolation and estrangement from Swedish society, where she has spent most of her adult life and raised her son, Ibbe (played by Tanzanian-Swedish hip-hop artist Adam Kanyama), as a single mom. Hurrying to catch a bus, which is already quite full amid the morning rush, Kandia proceeds down the aisle to an empty seat but moves aside to allow an older woman to sit. The woman, who is white, does not acknowledge Kandia’s gesture; indeed, she does not acknowledge Kandia at all. Later, in a scene at the hospital where Kandia works as a nurse practitioner, a male patient, who is also white, asks her where she comes from and what language she speaks with her son. “Gambianish” (gambianska), he assumes, then gets red in the face when Kandia’s white, middle-aged friend and colleague, Eva, informs the man that no such language exists. “Well, he must speak something!” the man bellows. Kandia’s quiet demeanor suggests just how habitual this type of interaction is for her. She goes about her business with the man, working in silence, though she is obviously perturbed. When Kandia has finished drawing his blood, she stands up, extends a hand, and offers a curt tack (thank you). She shares a laugh with Eva after he leaves, dispelling the tension with a bit of humor, though the wound of yet another microaggression is still fresh.

Estrangement meets exasperation following yet another argument between Kandia and her son, who still lives at home but is clearly not a kid anymore. Ibbe’s ambition to become a hip-hop artist clashes with Kandia’s desire for him to get a job and embark on a “real career.” “Maybe you could be a music teacher?” she asks him hopefully, if pleadingly, with a smile. Angered by his mother’s inability to appreciate his dreams (this is clearly an argument they’ve had many times before), Ibbe pushes Kandia to the ground, an act of violence he immediately regrets, though he fails to see the deeper sorrow it awakens within her. At first, she doesn’t seem to notice either. When Kandia’s Swedish in-laws call to check in on her, Kandia has little patience for their sympathy. “Everything’s fine,” she tells them. A lingering tension persists between Kandia and Ibbe’s grandparents, stilting conversation and maintaining distance. Their son, Ibbe’s father, has long since passed, though exactly when and how is left unsaid. “I need to understand who I am, in order to know what I want,” Kandia tearfully explains to Eva over dinner, after yet another long day at work. She feels profoundly alone, alienated from her son and the society in which she has brought him up: “Like an elephant without a herd.” Kandia’s decision to travel to the Gambia, without any plans to return, is, in this way, an act of self-care, but it is difficult for those around her to fathom her choice. Her adoptive brother and fellow Gambian Swede Sékou (played by Ugandan-Swedish actor Richard Sseruwagi, about whom more in chapter 5) wonders why she would leave a comfortable and secure life in Sweden for an uncertain and improvised future back home. Ibbe, her son, is incredulous and angry, and figures that he must be to blame. “This is not about you,” she tells him. “It’s about me.”

“It’s such a powerful story that affects so many people in Sweden,” Maureen explains to me, as we recall what it was like to see the film for the first time, in a movie theater filled with Afro-Swedish spectators, many of them, like her, with roots in Africa. The recollections the film inspire—of Maureen’s youth and the difficult choices her parents, like so many other African diasporans in Sweden, had to make—is worth citing at length:

My family moved here, to Sweden, temporarily. No one said, ‘I’m moving to Sweden because it’s so much fun in the winter!’ Or “because I love skiing!” Or “because I need to go to the forest for a walk!” No! None of our parents came here for those reasons. All of us who are born here bear the story of how our parents would eventually go back home [to Africa]. We bear the story and the sadness of how the house, back home, would be built one day; of the money they would send to support our cousins in school; of the social benefits [barnbidraget] our friends used to get directly as pocket money, while ours was sent home [to Africa]. All of us share the same story.

Kandia’s sadness is also the sadness of Maureen’s parents, which is the sadness of a whole generation of migrant Africans in Sweden—a sadness that many of their children, like Maureen, now bear as well. Kandia’s desire to return home is another version of the “same story” told by a broad cohort of Afro-Swedish elders, particularly those who have sojourned from Africa over the past forty years. “One day, eventually, we will go home,” they say. It is a story fraught with histories of struggle, of fighting over the long term for social justice and the possibility of a better life and wrestling daily with the incomprehension and needs of those near and dear, both here and there. Kandia’s friends and family in Sweden can’t understand her decision to leave. Meanwhile, in towns and cities across Africa, nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers anticipate much-needed support from their kin abroad. Kandia’s pained effort to affirm her choice to return home, to Africa, reflects the desire—and the sorrow—shared by so many whose lives have been doubled by the displacement of migration, caught between the twin burdens of alienation and necessity.

But “home” is, well, complicated. Despite the misgivings and misapprehensions of her friends and family, Kandia does return to the Gambia. Following an initially warm welcome from her family (who did not expect to see her), Kandia finds herself quickly embroiled in a domestic drama. Kandia’s niece, Soukeina (played by the late Zimbabwean Swedish actor Kudzai Chimbaira), is engaged to a musician, Ismael (played by Gambian artist Suntou Susso), whom her brother refuses to meet or even recognize, stubbornly insisting on a tradition of clan-based endogamy. “Nobles don’t mix with artists,” say the elders of this western African society, a practice that strikes Kandia as “old-fashioned” and wrongheaded. Soukeina, it turns out, is also pregnant with Ismael’s child, further complicating matters. And then, suddenly, Ibbe shows up. Despondent when his dreams of hip-hop stardom run aground on criticism he wasn’t prepared to take, Ibbe is urged by his uncle Sékou to join his mother in Africa, hoping the trip will mend their strained relationship and begin to set things right. For Ibbe, the Gambia is still mostly a foreign place. “Sweden is your country, not mine,” his mother tells him in an earlier scene. The Gambia becomes, however, a space where Ibbe finds himself anew, embraced by his extended family and a new group of friends. He makes a strong musical connection with his cousin’s fiancé, Ismael, creating a fusion of hip-hop and Afropop that rekindles his creative energy—a spark of something new, a reason to stay. Kandia, meanwhile, unable to reconcile herself to the patriarchal dictates of her family, yearns, once again, for a return, this time to Sweden. She leaves. He remains. In the end, both are “home.”

Watching this drama unfold onscreen, Maureen remembers the trials, tribulations, intimacies, and idiosyncrasies of this complicated sense of place: “home.” Others do, too. “I was touched,” Aida Jobarteh, an Afro-Scandinavian arts entrepreneur, tells me after viewing the film: “I can relate to the longing of this mixed kid [Ibbe].”16 Aida’s father hails from the Gambia. Her mother is Norwegian. “And I can see the struggle of an African parent.” Aida, who now lives in Stockholm, is also the mother of a pair of Afro-Swedish children. “Our parents, my father and Ibbe’s mother, they are somehow lost,” she explains. “And they want to go back home. But they go back home, and they realize that home is actually back in Sweden, or in Norway.” Considering the nature of this condition, Aida offers a further reflection:

This is because of practical responsibilities and financial ties, in the case of my father. But also, as the film shows, because traditional social normative values no longer fit how our parents see themselves or look at the world. It becomes an inner conflict. For my father, this has something to do with the way others perceive him in the Gambia: that he is not a traditional Gambian man, a practicing Muslim, married to a Gambian woman, et cetera. He is someone who comes “home from Europe,” someone who comes and goes, whose values have changed. There is a sense of no longer fitting in, which can seem like an identity crisis.17

“Home” for these elders at large is, in other words, as allusive as it is elusive. “At the same time,” Aida explains, “my father’s alienation from Gambia, due to not fitting the traditional ways of living, cannot be compared to the alienation and ‘otherness’ he feels in Norway.”

Ibbe’s story resonates strongly with Aida as well, signaling, perhaps, a sense of “second-generation” solidarity. “I think it’s very important that you also know your other half. So, I’m happy that [Ibbe], as a young man, decided to stay [in the Gambia]. I really hope for him, that he will make his music but also know his history.” Aida’s sense of “hope” for Ibbe narrows the gap between the apparent fiction of his character and the dual-heritage, Afro-Swedish subjectivity he represents, an identity to which Aida, like many others, can profoundly relate. For her, Ibbe’s bicultural struggle is not abstract but palpably real, something to root for and take pride in. “So, I was really happy and proud of Ibbe,” Aida explains, “that he decided to stay.”

“Afterwards,” Maureen tells me, still remembering the film’s premiere, “there were standing ovations. People were incredibly moved. . . . I thought, ‘This is such an important story for the diaspora to share.’” In this community, as “African” as it is “Swedish,” to remember “home”—as a location of culture and a structure of feeling, always doubled and already split between an immediate here and a more distant elsewhere—is to re-member diaspora. “All of us share the same story,” Maureen says. It is this story that brings Kandia to tears when she says, “I need to understand who I am, in order to know what I want.” In her words, we hear the solemn but no less fervent striving of an entire generation, long invisible to their host society, now asserting their right to recollect the past and close ranks—to remember their Afro-Swedish community, while they live.

In this chapter, I have elaborated a practice of diasporic remembering anchored in the way Afro-Swedes give voice to their past, to the practice of an everyday oral history that animates memory and engenders community; to moments of recollection that insist on a multigenerational African and Black presence in Sweden today. In chapter 2, I turn to an account of remembering as a principally archival encounter, engaging with disparate documents and mediated echoes of an “idea of Africa” (Mudimbe 1988) that congeals around the literal and figurative central African territory of the Congo. Remembering the way Swedish and Congolese history intersects—from the imperialism of the late nineteenth century, through the decolonial struggles of the mid-twentieth century, to public reckonings with the legacies of Sweden’s colonial complicity at the outset of the twenty-first century—critically reimagines the archive of modern Swedish history to reveal a formative proximity and intimacy with an ostensibly distant and divergent African idea: “The Congo.”