>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
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>> Ted Widmer: Good afternoon, everyone.  My name is Ted Widmer.  I'm the brand new director of the Kluge Center and really happy to welcome all of you here.  Some of you came a great distance.  And it's an honor to host this important event today organized by Toyin Falola.  I came from not all that far away.  I came from the city of Providence, Rhode Island where there is a small but thriving Liberian community and a growing abundance of African restaurants, which one of my sorrows at moving to Washington is I don't know the local restaurants as well as I did where I come from.  But in our old northeastern city, this new immigrant population constituted a really important source of vitality.  So we're all looking forward to this conference today.  And I want to thank Toyin Falola for organizing it.  I also want to pause briefly to acknowledge my-- I joked yesterday, my predecessor's predecessor's predecessor's predecessor, Carolyn Brown who is here with us as well.  The Kluge Center was created with a gift in the year 2000 from John W. Kluge to the Library of Congress.  It's still the largest gift that ever has come to the Library of Congress and it is a center for scholars doing research and for public events such as this one.  And we're so grateful to have Toyin in our community which he is deeply in.  He serves the Kluge Center in many ways.  He's on the Scholars Council which is a very distinguished board appointed by the librarian of congress to give advice on a range of scholarly issues to the librarian.  But he's also very much among us on a daily basis.  He has an office down the hall.  He comes to all of our events and we're really grateful to him personally, as well as professionally for all that he brings to us.  Toyin is a professor at University of Texas and specifically he's the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at UT Austin.  He's also a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, a fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria, the author of numerous books including "Violence in Nigeria: The Crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies", "the Power of African Cultures", and "Nationalism and African Intellectuals".  He's also the series editor of "Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora" and the series editor of "Global Africa" by Routledge, and also series editor of "African Histories and Modernities" by Palgrave Macmillan.  Actually as I continue to read, I see he's series editors of a few more.  "Carolina Studies on Africa and the Black World" and "African Identities" with Cambridge University Press and he's the co-editor of the "Journal of African Economic History" and the "Yoruba Studies Review".  And he is well known to all of you here today and he has personally invited you here.  So he is the person you really should listen to to get things underway.  But I'm personally very happy to introduce him and to thank him for all he does for the Kluge Center.  So please welcome Toyin Falola.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Toyin Falola: It's a pleasure for me to be here.  We've agreed as to how we are going to divide the short time that we have, five people, encouraging each one to speak for 25 minutes.  Although Ken Harrow said he will speak for 30 minutes.  So that we can manage our time efficiently, we will take questions at the end because if we stop paper by paper, we will run out of time.  I have to follow the convention.  As you can see, I am wearing some of my tight shoes.  And usually I'm supposed to bring greetings to some of the kings that I represent and greetings from three of them as I usually do so as not to violate the convention.  The long introduction of the speakers is in the piece that I took, so I'll be very brief.  Starting with Ken Harrow who has done a lot of work on African cinema, he has been teaching at Michigan State for a long, long time.  And he's done so many major books, including the latest one by Indiana University Press on "Trash: The History of African Cinemas Viewed From Below".  He's very well known in the academy.  And then we have Abdul Bangura who speaks close to 20 languages and is currently-- had in Arabic, Hebrew, and hieroglyphics.  He is extremely prolific in languages and he serve as a special envoy of the African Union Peace and Security Council.  He is current successor in this role.  I'm involved in the South Sudan Peace Mission myself at the moment.  And he's done so many books, so many articles, and he's at the moment researcher-in-residence at the American University.  Then we have Nemata Blyden who is in the History Department, International Affairs and Director of the Women's Program at George Washington University.  She's done a lot of work on women in Liberia, African and African diaspora.  She's lived in the Africa, the Soviet Union and in the US as she brings all these locations into bearing as she reflects on a wide range of topics.  And then we have Moses Ochonu who is a noted public intellectual.  He writes op-ed pieces on a very regular basis at The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Time Magazine, Global Post and many others.  And he's done three major books, all very well respected, including the finalist for the Herskovits and is at the moment working on what Nigerian Muslims think about Imperial Britain in the first half of the 20th century.  Please join me in welcoming all of them.  You want to take a seat?
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[ Applause ]
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Please come and take your seat.  Let me start.  And my PowerPoint is there but my interest in this topic has expanded very widely.  And last year, when I gave the usual presidential speech of the African Studies Association-- By the way, those of you who are involved with the association, one of the reasons why people don't want to serve is because of that speech, because it's so difficult to write.  What I did was to map out how a new discipline can emerge arising from this topic.  I was taking a lot of risk because for that discipline to be created, we have to fragment what is called Black Studies or fragment African-American Studies and either drew an insertion of the new field that I proposed which was very well received.  Turn it into a separate self-field on its own in the academy.  And I have been-- like an onion, I've been peeling this project in various dimensions.  And I ran into one of the Kluge staff in the train one day when I was going for an interview.  And since September, I've been doing a lot of interviews in three states, in Virginia, Baltimore and DC.  I thought I'll be able to report on this but they're crunching all this data for me in Austin.  But I've been able to cover associations.  I'm now on comfortable ground talking about immigrant associations.  
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Unlike the big state of Texas, it's so much easier to do research here because of the density and the nearness of all of the spaces.  And I'll be reporting on this data in due course.  Is there a way I can control it from here, sir?
>> The thing right next to you.
>> Toyin Falola: Where is it?  Oh, this one?
>> Right.  
>> Toyin Falola: OK.  So, I've been preceded in this by a variety of scholars.  The trouble is that many of them are based on conjectures, in which they do personal reflections.  And the reason is the options for quantitative data, the options are very limited.  We can rely on the limited census data by the federal government that exists.  And then we can do sample data which we can collect from specific places like in Western campuses which I've done.  We can-- And for instance we have figures to say how many Africans scholars at yield?  That is available.  That's not a problem.  Or how many, you know, students that are white?  That one we can do.  Or we can do specific research and we can just take a narrow topic and then they answer specific questions.  That we can do.  And then you have a variety of official categorization that we can follow up on.  So, I've gone beyond those to do what is called snowballing samples.  I've interviewed various locations, Houston, Dallas, Chicago.  I was to go to Minnesota this summer but it didn't work out because if-- I do not know how many of you are following this story which a number of people from Somalia, some young people, there are four of them, who are arrested for joining ISIS.  And the community became very angry that some members reveal the identity of these kids, and there's a lot of tension on that to cancel that project.  So in doing snowballing samples, there's no time for me to explain these limitations but it has been very effective in trying to see how a new set of data can compliment existing ones.  Here are the problems.  We have double counting, double counting in which children born in the US and children born in Africa, parent's identification of children's nationality are very complicated.  And double counting in so many snowballing samples, the percentage is very high, and also self-identification.  By self-identification I mean that somebody can say she's American but she's also Nigerian.  And accounting for that self-identification is very difficult.  Even universities, it has been very difficult.  Part of the complication is issues around dual citizenship, in which a person like me, I carry two passports.  When I'm leaving the US I use Nigerian passport, when I'm coming back I use the US passport.  And sometimes I have a third one which is a diplomatic passport.  So, that notion of dual citizenship, whether it's a federal census or the ACLS, has created its own complications.  Then you have the tendency for naturalized Americans to also call themselves Africans so that this-- it disconnect both in the official figures.  I know that figures between citizenship by birth, citizenship by naturalization, and what people see.  Then you have how ethnicities define itself.  In many African ethnicities, you claim the birth place of your dad.  So if you are to go to an American campus and you run to a negro person who has never left the US, the student may tell you he or she is evil but he has never-- he or she may not have left the country.  That's not uncommon.  And those complications make it extremely difficult to use many of these samples.  In Dallas this summer, I was looking at kids who got into drug problems, and parents who are trying to adjust the citizenship definition based on another variable of shame.  So, then you have-- which you have for all immigrant populations undocumented labor.  So if we go by official figures, this is the US figures now.  And they tend to be lower than what alternative sources tell us.  In 1960, 33,000 Africans, in 1970, 80,000, we need to put that 1% of the total population, and in 2007, 1.4 million.  The figure expanded in the '70s for two reasons.  First, preference expanded as people began to come to the US.  People who used to come to the US do so because they can speak English.  And they tend to go to former colonial masters.  People in Angola will go to Portugal.  People in Senegal will go to France.  That's very common because if language is a problem in migration, if you can't speak the language, it's difficult-- adjustments become difficult and insertion becomes difficult.  But as European economy enters into this problem, they began to come here in large number.  So today, for instance, at Harlem, there were a large number of Senegalese.  They've created a Senegalese colony.  And then you have the crisis in the '80s in Liberia, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan, special category of asylum.  And in this special category of asylum, more Africans came, and in this asylum, they changed the dynamics of location.  We know those who come voluntarily, where they stay in the US.  But with respect to asylum, the federal government dictates where they go.  So that's why you now find Africans in Dakota.  On their own they won't go to Dakota.  It's just not going to work for them.  So by 2022, according to the US federal figures, there'll be 3 million Africans living in the country.  Is that a big number?  Well, some people would say it's a small number relative to the rest of them, foreign bond.  We've been able also to break distance down into where people come from.  With West Africa, having almost 29%, Northern Africa 17, Eastern Africa following and then North Africa.  And the largest populations are from Nigeria and Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and East Africa and Egypt.  We're able to know where people come from and the various numbers in terms of-- And we're also able to know where they go to, New York, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Minneapolis-Saint Paul.  These have the highest numbers of people.  And then you have them Columbus, Ohio, Baltimore, Providence, Rhode Island.  And we can discuss what this means in terms of what they do.  There are variations in some of these numbers, as you find the higher number of Ethiopians in Dallas.  And you have a large number of Ghanaians in Chicago, Columbus and New York.  Then we have the Cape Verdeans in Providence.  And you have a lot of, in DC, a lot of Ethiopians and Nigerians.  And in Minneapolis you have Somalian, Egyptian.  LA and San Francisco, they were from Egypt, Nigeria and Ethiopia and then when-- This population is highly educated, extremely highly educated.
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When we draw in the asylum seekers, we-- you find them in North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.  And the advantage of this is that it makes research much easier and it makes snowballing easier.  As we do some of this research, we begin to find how-- My eyes is not very good.  I can't see the PowerPoint.  We begin to find how there's a lot of disconnect in the literature.  The reason why people migrate is similar to why Italians migrates to what are the-- why the people migrate, but we have a 3% that does not conform to any of this data.  In other words, they are not migrating for political reasons, they are not political exiles and they're not spending money that they make in the US.  Rather, they are spending the money that they made abroad.  So that represent doesn't plug into the narratives.  As of today we have tremendous data to support to our broad topics.  We now have solid data or movements of a time between Africa and the West, including Europe, and most recently Eritrea.  Not the tie is pretty well established.  And the European Union is also very good in giving us a new set of data.  And then we have data about adjustment on political exiles, ethnic and religious associations.  We now have close ties on Pentecostalism.  As a rising force, we now have solid data on Pentecostalism, on Islam, which Abdul will be talking about.  Occupations and entrepreneurship and how immigrants call us are trying to frame a variety of topics.  Then we have data that do not conform to what we find in established literature.  One of the data that doesn't conform is I believe in immigration literature that it's poor people who migrate.  The data from Western and Central Africa is telling us the opposite, that it's people with resources who migrate.  That's not what we teach in schools.  It is the children of parents with money, or people with money who actually tend to migrate.  And we also are beginning to have data on education and it's frightening in terms of how US figure and sample data in Baltimore by federal government officials conclude that African immigrants are the highest educated.  That's what the data is saying.  Well there's a disconnect between job satisfaction and education.  And almost 40% say that they are not very happy.  And the reason has to do with the fact that many cannot relate their diplomas to the jobs they do.  So there's a disconnect, and a very large percentage.  When as you take Uber or you take a taxi, you will notice that for many of those African immigrants, they already have degrees, PhD statistics, MA chemistry, and that disconnect is well in a wide range of our society and complain that although they are educated they are not happy.  Then you have what we did not expect to find in snowballing samples, which is that migration is framed as an alternative to home conditions.  But a large percentage says that they made a mistake.  We're not expecting to find that.  We're expecting to say that they're happy that they've left Ghana or Sierra Leone, but that's not what we've been able to find.  And we've been asking the questions, why are they sad, why are they not very happy with this issue?  And there are so many answers, but two of which are very important issues around what I call cultural capital.  What is it that you have before you come here?  And issues are on social prestige.  Values of social prestige are not universal.  For instance, it was when I got to the US that I washed a car for the first time in my life.  A professor doesn't wash cars where I come from.  Nobody does that, because of the higher social prestige of the professor.  What you call a business card, I can write a note at the back of it and it will give you a job.  Not here.  That's why I don't carry one anymore because I quickly realize that it's just an address.  It's just to say I'm in Austin.  It's not tied to issues around prestige.  And you find and later in Dallas and Houston how they've been trying to recreate those notions of social prestige.  I once attended a party as part of this research and with the celebrant came into the hall with a white horse.  So, we find that that is problematic in terms of what the host think about them and what they think about themselves.  And then you find the bigger issue, do you want to go back and-- I'm skipping because I'm running out of time.  And we have the percentage of those who go back.  Very quickly, here's what is going on.  We've been able to track those who go back and been able to track them to where they go to.  But the percentages who comes back, and there's a distinction which is very clearly reflected between men and women.  More men want to go back to Africa.  Most women don't want to go back.  And the decisive answer is tied to patriarchy.  Because in many times laws and divorce regulations, they are very different, although some countries in South Africa and Kenya are beginning to revise many of these regulations.  But for most of Africa, the women don't want to go back, which is very clear.  When we collect all these data, there are a number of theoretical paradigms that we have to reflect upon and shift some of the existing arguments.  For many of you who have read for instance "Things Fall Apart", "Ambiguous Adventure", and many of the classics in the African writing series, the trope is that of alienation.  And it's very well established, but that has to be modified, because this trope of alienation is no longer useful.  There is a-- we have to look for another explanation because that longstanding literature-- and I'm sure maybe Ken Harrow is going to disagree with this-- is no longer working with this set of African immigrants.  Today, you can live in DC and not watch American television for the rest of your life.  You can watch Nigerian television station.  You don't have to watch Hollywood.  You can watch Nollywood.  So you don't have to put hamburger in your mouth for the rest of your life.  You can just eat your food as a Ghanaian.  They sell them here.  Just as the director said about restaurants, there's so many restaurants, African restaurants here, Cameroonian restaurant, Ghanaian restaurants, Nigerian restaurants.  So you can get your cassava and yam and you can communicate rapidly.  So, we have to change our concept.  What do we call them?  I think they are more like transnationalists because of the heavy traffic.  You still can go to Ghana tonight if you have the money.  And because they are transnationalists, we have to find a way to reframe some of the arguments on the table.  Then you have two contentions, one back to the [inaudible] on cosmopolitanism and it's been advancing this project.  And [inaudible] has connected more with people in this part of the world and his argument is don't walk with people in Africa.
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His cosmopolitan argument has been very problematic on the African side.  And then you have issues around Afropolitanism in which a new generation is now working within the paradigm of nationalism of Du Bois [inaudible].  They're working with another set of nationalism, [inaudible] and others, [inaudible] the musician, redefining the notion of Africa based on the space that they occupy here.  So we are at the frontier of a new topic and I'm sure my colleagues was-- I've just done some small introduction to it and there was plus some of these in greater detail.  Let me call on our second speaker.  Nemata, yeah, you're next, right?  Yes.  Is it?
>> Moses Ochonu: Moses.
>> Toyin Falola: It's Moses.  OK, Moses.
>> Moses Ochonu: Thank you.
>> Toyin Falola: Thank you.
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[ Applause ]
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Yes.  And do you have a PowerPoint?
>> Moses Ochonu: Yes, I have.
>> Toyin Falola: OK.  I couldn't see.  My eyes are bad.  I can't see.
>> Moses Ochonu: I want to thank Professor Falola for inviting me to this event.  And I want to also thank the Library of Congress, the Board of Scholars for extending this invitation.  And I want to thank you guys for taking time out of your busy schedules to be part of this event.  I am deeply implicated in what we are here to discuss, obviously.  I'm an immigrant myself.  And as Professor Falola was going through his slides, I could see myself in some of those slides.  I could see myself in some of those slides, so it'll be really interesting to sit up here and try to reflect.  It's almost like what they used to call self-study, right, in those days.  And, you know, when I was in grad school they said, my professors warned me, don't do self-study.  Don't study yourself.  So, but I'm here this-- to talk about why Africans come to America.  It's a pretty self-explanatory title for the talk.  I don't have all the answers but my aim is to raise some questions, some of which actually I think piggyback on the points that Professor Falola raised earlier.  So I'm going to raise those questions with regards to motivations, what motivates Africans to come to migrate to the United States.  And I'll raise those questions and I'll put on the table some tentative answers that we can talk about in the Q&A.  All right.  So, the classic African migration story has been told in the idiom of economic [inaudible] and of destitution and displacement.  Many scholars and observers advance economic pressure and other involuntary factors as the primary drivers of African migratory itineraries, especially when the migration is from Africa to Euro-America.  In this spring, African migrants in America are economic refugees.  Voluntary strategic migration to America is often buried under this paradigm of forced exile and escape from imminent death or destitution.  This overarching motive of economic and personal danger is extended to African professionals who relocates to America as part of what's called as-- have lamentably called the African brain drain.  It is also applied to an increasingly strategic and voluntary group of African migrants to America, Africans whose migration stories hardly conform or fitting to the familiar paradigm of escape and economic desperation.  On the line that notion that Africans are migrating away from their continent for economic refuge in America is an understanding of Africa-- African migration as a novel phenomenon, or as a new phenomenon, a modern event threatening the demographic and economic fates of both the origin and destination of such migration.  It is sustained-- This idea is-- This belief or this argument is sustained by illusion of Africans as traditionally on adventures, and people who can only be separated from their homelands by existential pressures.  The truth, however, is that much as African migration to America and other countries of the global note has accelerated in recent times and has indeed been affected or induced by economic collapse, dysfunction and crisis, voluntary migration to far-flung lands has always been a defining social characteristic of African societies.  And I'm a historian.  I should know this, and we can talk about this more in the Q&A.  This voluntary strategic migration has often occurred alongside involuntary ones.  But it has often been overshadowed by stories of dramatic and violent removal or escape from Africa.  Given this backdrop, I would like to introduce and argue and alternative thesis of African migration to American.  One that will I argue become even more relevant in the coming decades as the mobility of skilled and talented workers increasingly defy international borders.  This thesis may not explain the majority of cases of African migration to America but it is increasingly proven useful as a way to understand newer generations of migrants.  My thesis here is quite simple.  There is a motivational shift occurring in the familiar story of African migration to America.  It shift away from the economic refugee paradigm.  African migrations to America are not always attributable to economic reasons.  An increasing number of African immigrants resist this category of economic refugee.  They resist the category of economic refugee.  More and more Africans self-- more and more Africans, self-selected and well-educated are relocating to America from their homelands in Africa not to escape poverty or danger, but for adventure and the pursuit of intangible psychosocial conveniences.  This migratory process outside the refugee paradigm has been going on for a long time and has been growing in proportion to the overall growth in African migration to America in recent decades.  Yet, it has gone unrecognized because of the long terms on the part of Americans and Africans alike to highlight migratory motivations outside of the refugee frame work.  These were long terms to see the African migrant outside of the refugee narrative stems from multiple factors, I would argue.  The trope of refuge and induced exile sustains for many Americans the avuncular humanitarian gaze on Africans.  It enables them to assume that self-defining position of helper, nurturer and savior.  Americans' sense of their paternal mission works only by imagining the African migrant as someone in need of American paternal attention.  Paternalistic American attitudes towards African immigrants walk better when the migrant is theorized as a refugee and as a displaced hopeless and helpless basket case needing the help of good natured Americans.  For Africans, including migrants, sustaining the refugee narrative and suppressing migratory stories outside of it is a strategic effort to leverage the humanitarian "White savior complex" of Americans to obtain empathy, legalization and access to resources in America.  The logical endpoint of my argument about recognizing the importance of psychosocial motivations is simple.  Africans are not very different from other peoples of the world, and this is a point that Professor Falola made earlier.  Like Europeans, Americans, Asians, and others, Africans do not migrate only because of poverty, hardship destitution and helplessness.  They also migrate because migrations sometimes make you feel better about yourself.  Sometimes migration is, to put it quite simply, its own justification, its own reward.  It satisfies an innate human psychosocial desire to explore the unfamiliar, the other, the distant, and the different.  For those who could afford to migrate or those who can afford migration, spend in a lifetime in one corner of the world is unappealing.  Many Africans are in this category and their story is quite important.  Well, this story goes untold because there's little appetite for it in the West, in America.  To advance an alternative thesis of African migration to America, especially one that embraces a more universal generic motivation for migration is to make a larger argument about racial essentialism. 
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It is to argue against the notion that biological and genetic signatures confer innate, inescapable socio-behavioral propensities that differentiate Africans from Euro-Americans in a fundamental way and make their migration stories different.  To be sure, my thesis is not a disavowal of the obvious economic and existential stimuli driving African migration to the United States.  Rather, I'm trying here to synthesize the economic push factors on the idea that migration is also a quest for psychosocial relief.  If we must account for the range of motivations for African migration to America in the 21st century, we have to embrace an explanatory model that recognizes the obvious economic motivations, as well as the increasingly significant factor of convenient relocation.  One does not have to discount one factor in order to stress the other.  The psychosocial factors that influence some African migratory decisions are not removed from issues of poverty and economic alienation either.  In fact, I would argue that there is a symbiotic relationship between the economy of suffering and the psychosocial quest that I am trying to enunciate in this paper.  Psychosocial longings are sometimes coextensive, I would argue, with poverty, although, albeit a different kind of poverty.  And I'll talk about this different kind of poverty shortly.  It is obvious that poverty and economic destitution make people want to move to places of perceived economic opportunity.  This is quite obvious.  It doesn't have to be explained.  But if we define poverty and hardship, not only in starkly economic terms but also in terms of what one may call the quality of life poverty, then it is possible to see how an economically successful African professional in Africa could be poor in terms of the quality of his or her life.  For analytical convenience, let me call this kind of poverty psychosocial poverty.  OK?  This kind of poverty is also an impetus for migration out of Africa, for migration to America.  What I am positing here is what one may call vicarious poverty, a situation in which there will be migrant, migrant African does not experience poverty directly but indirectly through the trauma of living in the midst of grinding poverty and of being assaulted daily by the reminders and images of poverty, economic collapse, infrastructural deficits, and so forth.  The psychological torture and burden of such an environment of poverty can be as depressing as actual personal poverty itself.  There are two aspects to this phenomenon.  The first one revolves around the fact that no matter how successful one is in Africa, one still has to depend to various degrees on state-provided social services, among them; electricity, water, sewage, roads and security.  As we know or as we should know, these services are poor in many African countries.  So, one is forced to participate in the broader experience of poverty and underdevelopment.  One's economic success cannot insulate one from this.  Your quality of life will therefore be poor and may motivate you to migrate to America or another country in the Global North where social services are delivered more efficiently.  In other words, there is a limit to the amount of comfort and material-- that material success can confer on you in Africa.  The second aspect has to do with the ironic psychosocial trauma of being successful in Africa.  In Africa, more so than in the West, the successful professional is confronted daily by sights, sounds, and smells of acute poverty.  He is surrounded and tortured by this poverty.  He sees it in his employees or colleagues, junior colleagues, neighbors, relatives, friends, and coreligionists, as well as kinsmen.  On his daily commute to work, his sense of accomplishments is diluted and deflated by disturbing and haunting images of destitution and economic hopelessness.  These images nibble at his edifice of-- at this edifice of success, filling him at once with guilt and anxieties, and about what might have been and what might still be.  The images erode the joys of economic success and make lofty economic and professional perches seem less secure than they actually are.  Insecurities, anxieties, guilt, alienation, dissatisfaction, and depression take a toll on the quality of one's life.  I would argue that not a few successful Africans, economically successful Africans, have migrated to America to escape this quality of life conundrum, this unspoken existential turmoil that hunts successful professionals in Africa.  The paradox of being psychologically miserable even while being materially successful allows the African professional to migrate to America, not to escape poverty, I would argue, or to survive economically but to escape mentally and improve his quality of life in the psychosocial sense of the word.  What the migrant is escaping is a kind of poverty, a different kind of poverty.  Not the poverty portrayed by CNN or National Geographic or in Hollywood movies, right?  So, increasingly, we are talking about strategic migrants and strategic migration.  Many of today's African migrants to America are most strategic migrants than they are economic refugees, I would argue.  This is a not radical statement to make actually since African migrants are generally well-educated, even though the findings from Professor Falola's work is-- complicates that argument a little bit.  But generally, they are very well-educated.  There are arguments that they are also self-selected, right?  And strategically mobile, people who are chosen to be strategically mobile.  Whether they are beneficiaries of the US Visa Lottery program or students who came here to study, like myself, or professionals who came here to take up positions in US firms and institutions, many African migrants to the United States increasingly do not fit into the refugee-- the refuge and exile paradigm.  Instead, they are a pre-selected, relatively privileged and prepared collection of people who, for the most part, were already set apart to varying degrees in their home countries prior to their migration to America.  There are people who are not representative of the general populations of their countries.  Their migrant itineraries and biographies undermine the concept which so many of you have heard, the concept of model minority, right?  This prior preparation and privilege rarely makes it into the scholarly and popular discussions of African migration to America.  Studies on African migration to the United States rarely acknowledge, let alone illuminate this growing phenomenon of psychosocial strategic migrants.  This phenomenon has grown and will continue to account for more African migration to America in the coming years given the continued growth of the African middle class in the midst of expanding populations of poor people on crumbling infrastructure.  This dynamic of middle class expansion, deepening poverty and deteriorating infrastructure, I would argue, is key to understanding the rise of strategic African migration to America.  This migratory flow caused by psychosocial alienation and yearning for-- yearning, as well as a systemic-- systematic-- systemic poverty and infrastructural collapse, is likely to continue as corporations and institutions in the United States aggressively seek out talent without regard to the north-south dichotomies of old.  We already see that African professionals in multiple fields, some of them with experience in multinational corporations on the African side are take-- increasingly taking positions in the global note and relocating with their families.  I have-- actually I have friends who used to work in these-- some of these multinational companies back home who have-- who are doing very well, much better than I am doing in America but who nonetheless chose to migrate with their families to America.  This is happening increasingly.  So, my argument is then that we need a new vocabulary, a new conceptual idiom to explain the migratory choices of these new African migrants and to tell-- to be able to tell their stories alongside the other stories as well.  In the African immigrant's journey to-- If the African immigrant's journey to America is a manifestation of his efforts to make-- to take control of his life and destiny while escaping the conditions that diminish the quality of his life in Africa, the processes that make the journey possible are shaped by forces and narratives beyond his or her control in America.  The African-- beyond his or her control in America.  But these forces are also available to him to manipulate.  Furthermore, once he is situated in America, the African immigrant's life and choices are no longer his own.
^M00:50:06
Rather, they are shaped by the circumstances and ideological positions produced by the political dynamics and the politics of self-fashioning in American society.  Both the migratory process and the way the migrant narrates his experience are then constrained and reshaped by preexisting discursive regimes in America, which perhaps explains why in spite of the increase in professional migrations, strategic migrations from Africa, the migration as economic escape paradigm continues to dominate perspective and discussions on African migration to the United States.  This dissonance between the complexity of the African story of migration to America and its simplistic reduction to story of suffering and rescue should be explained.  So, I return now to my earlier question.  Why is the economic refugee exile paradigm so persistent?  Why does it seem to overshadow the increasing phenomenon of African strategic migration to the United States?  I want to conclude by offering a few tentative answers to these questions.  The paternalistic racial attitude of Western Liberals construct and legitimize certain migratory stereotypes, I would argue.  It also privileges and silences certain migratory narratives and cause African migrants to become active participants in this process of silencing in a myth-making.  Liberal America's appetite for dramatic African immigration stories of escape, heroic, self-redemption and exile confers validity on immigrant narratives that confirm these same stereotypes.  These stories reaffirm America's fate in the foundational reputation of their country as a land of refuge and compassionate to rescue, and of Africa as a land of poverty and misery.  Other narratives of migration and other migratory experiences and trajectories are marginalized when stories of poverty and suffering-induced migration are privileged.  The refugee is also a trope of the conservative American view of African migration to America.  And migrant stories and realities that depart from the figure of the refugee are unintelligible to American conservative sensibilities.  Americans of the conservative bend buy into the narrative of African economic dysfunction and therefore imagine Africans largely as objects of American humanitarian intervention.  This means that they cannot imagine Africans that are economically successful in their homelands.  This in turn makes it easy for them to discount stories of successful, talented African migrants to America.  It also makes it easy for them to believe that Africans are desperate to escape the horrors of their homelands to come to America.  Here too, the gaze is self-assuring because it works to reaffirm the belief that America is a generous, compassionate and humanitarian country.  One that is receptive to African refugees.  The template seems clear and it's summed by its simplicity.  Africa is a land that perennially produces refugees and America is a country that motivated by Christian compassion takes them in and nurtures them back to socioeconomic stability.  The power of this idiom of exile and escape has in turn shaped how African immigrants themselves narrate their own experiences for the consumption of American interlocutors.  Examples of this genre includes Ishmael Beah's-- this book right here, some of you know about it, Ishmael Beah's "A Long Way Gone" and Chris Abani's autobiographical and semi-biographical works, in which, you know, I kind of-- it goes into all this lurid quite frankly untenable, you know, quite frankly fantastical tales about what he went through, what-- how he escaped and how he was detained.  And we're talking about penises being nailed to tables.  These are stories that just simply never happened, nobody can remember any of these things happening, but there's an appetite for these kinds of stories.  These are the kinds of stories that play well with this paradigm of the refugee, right?  The more dramatic, the more dramatic you are in telling the stories, the greater the market for it.  So we have this genre, this genre that is growing.  So-- And we can talk more about this later.  This entails-- So you have sometimes the narrative basically, the narrative pressures placed on African immigrant, immigrant autobiographers like Chris Abani.  This is just a sampling of-- There are so many works in this genre.  These narratives ponder to Western audiences' hunger for dramatic migrations stories of African suffering and American humanitarian heroism.  They cause these migrant storytellers to make up events and scenarios to fit certain prepackaged Western aesthetic expectations.  This entails suppressing stories of migration to America that lack this elements of desperation and rescue.  The resulting stories of exile penned by Africans-- African migrants in America perpetuates the stereotypes of helpless, displaced migrants seeking refuge in America and displaced alternative stories of African migration where the motives are less familiar and less sensational.  African immigrants themselves become unwittingly active participants in a particular Western trope of validating and rewarding personal narratives of African migration that conforms to a certain valued template.  And I'll close by just-- This is just a screen grab.  If you go-- If you just-- and just Google the name Chris Abani, this is one of the first few pages you will see.  And in this short piece-- I don't know if you can read it-- it tells about his suffering, how [inaudible] was detained and tortured.  And a lot of Nigerian sleuths have done research, people who lived in those places, people who lived through those times who were involved in the pro-democracy struggle in the time that he claimed.  Nobody remembered him.  Nobody even remembered him on the campus where he claimed to have been an activist, where he claimed to have been arrested.  But this-- If you go to his website, to his personal website, these stories persist.  He has this website, widely displayed.  Wherever he's invited to talk about his-- He's a great novelist, don't get me wrong, fantastic novelist, fantastic writer.  But, you know, he gets in the door in most cases with these kinds of biographical narrative of how he suffered and how ultimately he escaped to America, right?  So that becomes the catch.  That becomes a way to get people interested in his stories, even in his literature, brilliant, he writes as is.  You know, he cannot stand on the merit of his literary works.  He has to kind of come up with a story.  Everywhere you go, when it's been introduced, when his biographies are being written, you know, they'd always talk about how he was detained for so many days, how his penis was nailed to some-- the floor, and how he was hung up on a ceiling and left.  You know, all kinds of fantastical stories.  So, that's what I'm trying to get at, this appetite on this pressure on the part of Africans to tell the stories to validate the stereotypes.  And I'll leave it at that.  Thank you so much.
^M00:57:32
[ Applause ]
^M00:57:37
>> Toyin Falola: And let me-- had to weigh in.  For those folks who call upon by immigration services, immigration attorneys, you find many of these fantastic stories.  And Western feminists have also contributed to it.  There was a [inaudible] for instance, a [inaudible] of 10 years when you can see-- because they want to avoid female circumcision, they should-- left [inaudible].  Even in regions where those practices have stopped since the 1940s.  I come from a part of Nigeria where the Christian community have abolished female circumcision before I was born.  Or stories of witchcrafts which are made up.  Look, I don't want to leave Uganda because of witchcraft.  Stories of senior wives.  My father is married to four wives, the first wife is about to kill me.  So as Moses is saying, these stories connect to some kind of ideological template in this part of the world that validates some-- a number of issues.  Then there are how scholars also frame Africa, a project that I'm doing.  And there is a way I'm putting up this project, that we have a generation of scholars who have been writing about Africa when they're in Africa.  And then, when they're relocated here, they begin to write Africa differently from how they are doing before.  In other words, the audience changes and the presentation of Africa changes.  I used to think that it's theories that drew this because any time, you think out a theory, the narrative automatically will shift.  But locations also begin to shift the conception of Africa depending on the signals they are given.
^M01:00:02
And part of what we want to do is also to see how migrations do change the presentation, not just by great scholars like Chimamanda.  The Nigerian Civil War is 50 years old next year.  But to find a generation of writers who are not even born, they are born after the war but they talk about the war as if they really, really experienced it.  And how many of the things that Moses has said plug in to a bigger narrative outside the frame of Africa.  Let me now call on Nemata Blyden.  And I want to use her last name, Blyden.  Any of you must have heard about Wilmot Blyden.  She-- Wilmot was Africa's-- arguably the most distinguished intellectual of the 19th century, who left the West to go back to West Africa.  And he began to frame a different set of arguments around Islam, around the recovery of Africa.  And she comes from the lineage of the Blyden family, three greats or two greats?
>> Nemata Blyden: Two.
>> Toyin Falola: Two greats.
>> Nemata Blyden: Actually one.
>> Toyin Falola: One.  And her dad was a professor of political science at Nsukka in Nigeria and work in very many places.  We are grateful for this long line of African intellectuals.  Thank you.
>> Nemata Blyden: Thank you.
>> Toyin Falola: Yeah.
^M01:01:46
[ Applause ]
^M01:01:50
>> Nemata Blyden: Thank you for that.  He always embarrasses me like that.
>> Toyin Falola: Sorry, excuse me.
>> Nemata Blyden: And I'd like to thank Dr. Falola for including me in this event as well as the Library of Congress.  I'm going to take license in defining contemporary by going back to the 19th, late 19th and early 20th century to take a historical approach to the subject matter by looking at a few individuals that I characterize as immigrants from that period.  And what I'm trying to do with this in a larger study is to problematize how immigrants and immigration are constructed in American history, typically privileging European immigrants.  So Africans are not black people in general but for our purposes, Africans are not considered immigrants in some ways in this country before the 1960s.  And I'm going to try and play with that a little bit in my talk.  And I have these wonderful slides which I'm not going to use all of them.  And I forgot to include one of them so I'm going to skip to-- Let me skip to this for now, I'll come back to the others if I have time.  In a January 1915 letter to the Washington Post, the African-American Booker T. Washington, head of Tuskegee Institute made an appeal to the American Congress and to the people of the United States in favor of fair play and justice in connection with the immigration bill now pending before the United States Senate, which by amendment excludes from coming into this country any person of African descent.  He went on to empathically state that the bill was "unjust, unreasonable and unnecessary."  It is unnecessary, he proclaimed, because only a few thousand people of African descent enter this country annually.  Practically, all of these that do come are mainly from the West Indies and almost none from the continent of Africa.  Washington went on to cite the 1910 census pointing out that only 40,319 blacks in the United States were foreign born, and only 473 of those were from Africa.  He further noted that the immigration bill puts an unnecessary slight upon colored people by classing them with alien criminals.  Booker T. Washington argued that the bill put unnecessary hardship on countries like Liberia, Cuba and Haiti by restricting the entry of citizens from those countries.  Blacks from the Caribbean and Africa, he said, had proved as a whole to be a law-abiding, intelligent, industrious class.  Recent narratives exploring the relationship between blacks from Africa and native-born black Americans have constructed it as fraught with friction, tension, rivalries and sometimes hostility.  Characterized as a recent phenomenon, this new African diaspora has been highlighted in sometimes sensational ways.  "More Africans Enter US Than in Days of Slavery", a 2005 New York Times' headline read.  While another article from the same paper opined that the one million Africans that had immigrated in the last 30 years provided a "New Interpretation of African American History".  Yet Africans had been arriving as immigrants to the United States long before Washington commented on their presence in 1950.  And though not in the drill suggested by the times, they made a mark on American society.  Although the large African presence in the United States resulted from the involuntary migration of men and women and slave on the continent since the 17th century, beginning in the 19th century, Africans from the continent came to the United States in small numbers.  And the most studied group of African immigrants in that period are probably the Cape Verdeans.  Most people know about that group.  Throughout the late 19th century, Africans trickled into the United States largely interacting with African-Americans.  In the late 19th and early 20th century, many came as students attending black institutions of higher learning and frequently interacted with black Americans, allowing for exchanges on various levels.  Africans often came to study in the United States with hopes of returning to their homeland upon completion of their studies.  At institutions like Fisk, Howard, Lincoln and Livingston College, African students interacted with their native-born American-- black American counterparts.  These interactions were often guided by prevailing stereotypes of Africa held by Americans in general.  The predominant view held by most Americans was, of course, of Africa as the Dark Continent.  Largely negative portraying the continent as savage, barbaric, needing uplift from those more civilized.  Because of the difficulties adjusting to the African climate, like their white counterparts, black churches and black missionaries start to train Native Africans to serve as missionaries in their own native land, so black missionaries would encourage Africans to come to the United States.  And these students came to the United States a lot of times under the auspices of these African-American missions.  They offered African-Americans the first opportunities to see that the prevailing stereotypes about Africa and Africans were wrong.  Most Africans coming to the United States in that era would have been educated within colonial systems, missionary schools particularly those who came and they mainly came from the British colonies in the earlier years.  They were westernized, largely Christian, with some knowledge of the society they were entering.  In fact, in 1899, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church noted, "Everybody appears to be amazed at their learning refinement and general intelligence.  So many of our people in this country believe all Africans are mere heathens, that they are paralyzed with surprise to find such boys coming."  And I'm sorry the slide I left out is on the next section.  James Aggrey was perhaps the most famous African to arrive in the United States in that era, and might well be deemed one of the first African immigrants in the United States, although he isn't often thought of as such.  Now, I grew up listening to stories about James Aggrey at the dinner table.  My father hero worships James Aggrey.  But in anything that he said or in anything that I ever read about James Aggrey, he's never mentioned as an African immigrant in the United States and I construct him as such.  Born in the Gold Coast, later Ghana, Aggrey attended mission and colonial schools in the British colony excelling in his studies.  He soon came to the notice of missionaries and colonial officials.  And in 1898, he was sponsored by Bishop Bryan Small of the AME Zion Church.  And he came to-- was brought by Bishop Small to the United States in 1898 to study at Livingston College in North Carolina.  Aggrey completed his studies at Livingston, later becoming a member of faculty and an administrator.  He remained in the United States until his death in 1927 marrying Rose Douglas, an African-American woman from Virginia and raising his family in North Carolina.  Although he continued to highlight his African heritage expressing his love and devotion to his homeland, he dedicated himself to the improvement and uplift of African-Americans.  He was popular with students and had a great reputation, a classmate of his noted.  WJ Trent, this classmate also observed that Aggrey's influence was "very precious and had a great deal to do with the improvement of the moral and spiritual conditions of the whole college life."  Having been ordained in the AME Zion Church, Aggrey preached in black churches all over North Carolina.  
^M01:10:03
He pastored two African American churches in rural communities in that state as well.  His parishioners were mostly poor, illiterate, rural people, mainly farmers and laborers.  Working with these communities was one of the most fulfilling aspects of Aggrey's work in the United States.  His biographer tells us, "it took him out of an academic atmosphere and introduced him to the actualities of life led by the American Negro."  Clearly, his relationship with African-Americans was characterized by mutual respect as is evident from the many outpourings of grief from African-Americans after his death.  The bibliophile Arthur Schomburg, in remembering Aggrey, pointed out his influence and legacy in the United States, describing his contributions to black Americans.  "At a Native American school, Livingston College, set in the panoramic mountains of Salisbury, North Carolina," Schomburg said, "he received the milk of kindness and remained with his own people.  Later his loved joined that of an American Rose and made his stay permanent among us."  Yet Aggrey also felt his difference.  And there are signs that he was not fully accepted as an American despite his citizenship and Aggrey actually was naturalized.  He felt the strain of being excluded from the larger white society, but he also felt slighted by African-Americans.  His biographer writes that Aggrey was accepted by whites more easily than native-born blacks, making it harder for him to get along with some African-Americans.  He gained the respect and ardent affection of a number of these but in the minds of not a few, the old prejudice persisted.  In 1917, Aggrey was up for the position of president of Livingston College.  He was not offered the position and believed it was because he was not a native-born black American.  Though he later was offered the position, he declined it at that time.  He appears to have been passed up for other positions which he attributed to his foreign status rather than his race.  In a letter to his wife he wrote, "I am convinced that being a foreigner," and he puts foreigner in quotes, "I could never command in any sort of place the decent kind of a job in this country that would keep me to take care of you and give the children the education they deserve.  That is the way I see it.  You may not see it that way.  I am resigned to my fate."  He went on to tell Rose of another African, one Norman Wilson from Sierra Leone, living in New York who faced the same sort of discrimination, "Thwarted at every turn in his desire for advancement," Aggrey noted, "that Wilson was considering a return to Africa because he tells me his brother priest have been fighting him because he's a foreigner.  He has had to go to the bishop.  He says he's getting tired of it.  They acknowledged his work and his influence but they fight him in an underhand way because he is a foreigner.  Too bad for our race, too bad.  He has finished his work for his BA degree.  He tells me he hopes this will be his last year at this working under such stress, the everlasting foreigner nag."  No doubt their foreign status was significant.  But in the 1920s when Aggrey wrote their race was surely just as important to their inability to advance.  Like Aggrey-- And I do have the slide for this, if I can get back to it.  Like Aggrey, Orishatukeh Faduma came to the United States as a student and stayed becoming an immigrant.  Born William Davis in Sierra Leone, Faduma came to the United States in 1890-- sorry, a slide one back.  Here we go, sorry.  OK, I should stop touching it.  Faduma came to the United States in 1890 to study at Yale-- It's doing it on its own.  Am I pressing it too hard?  It's not that important.  OK.
>> Toyin Falola: Very sensitive.
>> Nemata Blyden: Is it looping?  He came to study at the Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut.  After completing his degree in 1894, he took a position in the American South.  Like Aggrey, he married an African-American woman Henrietta Adams from Georgia, and taught at the Peabody Academy, a black institution in Troy, North Carolina for 17 years.  Served as a missionary and educator to African-Americans in North Carolina for 50 years until he died in 1946.  In 1913, Faduma worked closely with the African-American Chief Alfred Sam and his Back to Africa movement, encouraging black Americans to return to Africa.  Though he himself never returned becoming naturalized in 1902, he spent the rest of his life in the United States living among African-Americans.  Both Faduma and Aggrey, like many Africans in that era, lived in a segregated south and operated within a world in which by virtue of the color of their skin, they were thought to be inferior.  Both men adapted to their lives as black men in a racially segregated nation, at a time when discrimination and racism were leveled at men and women of African descent.  Both lived and worked among the less privileged African-Americans and saw it as their responsibility and duty to enhance their lives and improve their condition, which was kind of a reverse, right, with Faduma referring to African-Americans as his kith and kin.  His contributions were recognized in the 1904 publication.  In an article profiling him, he was lauded for his contributions to African-Americans and for his missionary work among them.  The article noted, "We question if this Native African could have made a better investment of his powers had he remained in Africa.  Africa is here."  Although Aggrey and Faduma settled in the south, a few Africans lived in northern cities like New York.  And over the years, blacks from Africa continued to migrate to the United States for various reasons.  While relations with African-Americans were not always positive, Africans found more commonalities with African-Americans than with the larger white society.  For the most part in these early years, Africans faced the same discrimination from white Americans as their native-born counterparts.  Although some highlighted their difference and distinctiveness from black Americans, what white Americans often saw was their black skin.  On the other hand, African-Americans frequently welcome them as brethren.  In a 1971 interview, Bishop William Jacob Walls, an African alumnus of Livingston College where Aggrey had attended remembered that Africans were not looked down upon us inferior by this campus.  For many Africans, the issues facing African-Americans came to be theirs.  In the period before the 1960s, perhaps because their numbers were small and because of the hostile environment in which they often found themselves, Africans living in the United States lived alongside and among black Americans.  Although they may have held particular views and stereotypes of African-Americans-- of Africans before arriving as they lived in the United States for extended periods, they relied on African-Americans for an understanding of the society into which they had come.  The 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Bill would change the size, composition and demographic profile of the African population in the United States.  This act, liberalizing American immigration laws, would change to some extent too the nature of the relationship between African-Americans and Africans.  Coming at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Africans studying in American colleges often found themselves in the midst of agitation, civil rights protests and marches, sit-ins and other attempts by African-Americans to desegregate public spaces and institutions.  Africans sometimes were mistaken for black Americans and face the same racial profiling.  As the United States increasingly became a desegregated society and one that was more open to foreigners, Africans continue to arrive on its shores in larger numbers now finding themselves with more options and opportunities.  Coming from newly African-- newly independent African nations, many saw a little need to settle among black Americans.  As the number and composition of African immigrants has grown, so have the perceptions that they, like other immigrants, are different from African-Americans.  While during the era of segregation, black immigrants were often forced to live alongside black Americans, the new liberal and relatively tolerable post-civil rights America has given more recent immigrants the opportunity to live apart from and distance themselves from African-American populations.  These black immigrants are no longer settling in traditional gateway cities like New York or Miami but more and more attracted to suburban areas or as in the case of Somalis in Maine to rural areas.  Despite the racial stereotypes, some black immigrants prefer settling among mixed or largely white populations believing that assimilating with African-Americans would hinder their socioeconomic advancement.  African immigrants also fear the loss of ethnic identity and they highlight their distinctive heritage.  As immigrants, they have sometimes lacked an understanding of and do not identify with post-slavery issues affecting native-born American blacks.  As one young African immigrant interviewed for an Arizona news article stated, "I don't associate myself with slavery."  The article notes that these new African-Americans lack ties to American slavery and the inner city culture frequently associated with black America.
^M01:20:05
Many grew up in middle-class, two-parent families and have access to social networks that include doctors, nurses, engineers, professors and business executive.  Nonetheless, urban areas remain important destinations for some African immigrants who choose or are forced by economic circumstances to settle in areas with significant black American populations.  These immigrants recognize their status as a minority and understand the consequences of ethnicity and race in the United States.  African immigrants increasingly recognize the struggles of African-Americans in providing the world into which they came.  One immigrant remarked, "We feel that those African-Americans who were here before were the pioneers.  If it wasn't for Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, we wouldn't be here in the first place."  And as one scholar has noted, black migrants, unlike light-skinned migrants, also face an entirely different set of issues directly related to fitting in with American society.  They must reconstruct and redefine their identity in terms of the American society's system of race relations and hierarchy.  This, they sometimes find difficult to do.  As one immigrant noted, African immigrants sometimes struggle to fit into black American culture that has been shaped by civil disobedience and peaceful protest.  Many hesitate to speak out on race issues because they fear deportation or showing disrespect to their adopted homeland.  They have, largely, not integrated themselves into African-American institutions and organizations often creating separate ethnic, hometown or country associations.  This reluctance to identify fully with the African-Americans has sometimes led to tensions between the two groups.  For example, at the turn of the 21st century, several incidents highlighted the differences between the two groups.  In 2005, an Ivorian street vendor in Harlem frequently harassed by black Americans lashed out in return, resulting in a street brawl.  While these incidents are infrequent, they nevertheless point at continued misunderstandings between African-Americans and black immigrants.  Stereotypical views and representations of Africa continue to be shown in mainstream media.  Negative images and ideas about Africa still persist among African-Americans, largely because African Americans students still are not taught much about Africa, and when exposed to Africans fall back on old stereotypes of Africa as the "Dark Continent".  Also at the heart of African-American suspicion of black immigrants is the belief that they are competing for jobs and other opportunities and resources with them.  As the scholar John Bracey observed of the Harlem incident, Africans are seen as another immigrant group that is pushing past African-Americans.  This is particular issue of black immigrants who some African Americans believe are given preference for employment by white employees-- employers.  Louis Chude-Sokei points out that "whites have historically tended to regard black immigrants as a model minority within a troublesome native-born black population.  A good proportion of immigrants, tend to be better educated than African-Americans, don't have the chip or racial resentment on their shoulder and exhibit the classic immigrant optimism about assimilation into the mainstream culture," he argues.  On the other hand, misconceptions about African-Americans persist among Africans as well.  The belief perpetuated by the media and other sources that African-Americans are not hard working and frequently fall back on the history of racism to make excuses still persists among some Africans.  As Bill Fletcher, president of TransAfrica Forum commented, "Many African-Americans are embarrassed or ambivalent about Africa.  And many Africans have misconceptions about the opportunities available to African-Americans.  They often fail to appreciate what the African-Americans have gone through."  African immigrant attempts to maintain a distinct identity from African-Americans, allows them the hope of protecting their children from racialization in American society.  Nonetheless, while African immigrants in their attempt to cope with the racial hierarchy in the United States have frequently claimed a foreign status, they find it hard to insulate themselves from white-- racial stereotypes and discrimination.  Africans settling in urban areas are more likely to closer to the African-Americans resulting in some tensions but also providing the opportunity for the group to learn about each other and in some instances to work together in both social and political causes and on an individual level.  Though misunderstanding persists, in recent years, as in past years, these groups have cooperated with each other rather than highlighting their differences.  And in most major metropolitan areas and even in smaller suburbs, African businesses and organizations can now be found as established institutions.  Whether they're hair braiding salons or Senegalese restaurants in Harlem, or the many African grocery stores in Woodbridge, Virginia, these businesses have become a familiar part of the landscape.  They are patronized not only by other Africans but also African-Americans.  Likewise, the many African churches springing up in cities and suburbs all over the country are drawing African American congregants.  In other words, the relationship between black immigrants and American-born blacks is not always characterized by tension.  Like Aggrey and Faduma, black immigrants are also intermarrying in greater numbers with the African-Americans.  The children of these unions frequently identify with both parts of their heritage.  Furthermore, children of black immigrants born in the United States or brought here as young children, more often than not, think of themselves as African-Americans in different context.  Identifying with that-- Sometimes identifying with that culture often with some resistance from their parents.  However, the American-born children of African immigrants have often been most successful at understanding American society than their parents have as evident in their increased participation in civic and political issues.  Recent events have highlighted these commonalities and of course, the most high profile one was the 1999 shooting of the Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo where African-Americans-- activists rallied around African immigrants.  And more recently, many African immigrants, particularly of the younger generation have been involved in the Black Lives Matter movement.  More formal ties and connections are also being created between African-Americans and black immigrants.  Just as Booker T. Washington spoke out against the 1915 immigration bill, in 2006, a group of black American and black African immigrants came together in Oakland, California to form the Black Alliance for Just Immigration to "support the demands of the immigrant rights movement and to engage African-Americans in a dialog about the underlying issues of race and economic status that frame US immigration policy."  The relationship between blacks and-- from Africa and African-Americans has been long and continuous.  Since the late 19th and early 20th century, black immigrants have been arriving in the United States.  Although at times they may have seem invisible to the largest society, black immigrants were never invisible to African-Americans among whom they settled, worked, married, and who were often their entry point into the society.  Although in adjusting to American society they have experienced difficulty in assimilating, the presence of an established native-born black population has been beneficial to black immigrants.  As more black immigrants arrive in the United States, the definition of African American will expand as black immigrants and native-born blacks find common cause.  Thank you.
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[ Applause ]
^M01:28:05
Did I run overtime?  Oh no, I have 11 seconds left.
^M01:28:09
^M01:28:12
>> Toyin Falola: Thank you very much for locating this subject, in terms of historical evolution and contemporary tension.  For those of you who follow the recent politics, the recent election, and even through Africa [inaudible], many of you will be shocked there is a lot of support for Trump in Africa.  I would try to Moses, for instance, was-- wrote a piece on why that massive support.  And issues that you-- for those of you who has come in to America, a theme that was done over 20 years ago, some of what Nemata is saying is captured in that.  But there are issues that we have to-- First of all, we need a long book on this subject because it's used to be from last kinship.  And then they're reframing.  And if you look at how we define Africa today, how we teach Africa, the person we hold the most is Du Bois because he's the one who actually framed it in a way that we now accept.  If you look at the-- We've rejected the Arab framing of it as the land of the black.  We rejected the European framing of it.
^M01:30:00
And Washington, DC takes the earlier European framing in which they lumped part of North Africa with the Middle East and it is Du Bois in that generation who said, "No, we are going to frame-- We are now going to disconnect Africa from Egypt from North Africa."  And that is what that state in Africa itself and the way in which we teach.  And you'll find when we go into the academic understanding of Africa--
>> The restroom is this way, yes.
>> Toyin Falola: -- part of what you'd find in literature is that it was created in London in the '40s, whereas African-Americans have actually created many of this discipline long, long time before this.  It is true that contemporary immigrants are not connected with the civil rights movement.  Many of them are beneficiaries of the struggles but they did not contribute to the struggle and it shapes some of what they see and some of what they do.  But fundamentally, since the fall of apartheid, we've been struggling to create one common-- one reason, one common cause that will unite blacks on both sides of the Atlantic.  So, anti-colonial struggles, domestic US politics and civil rights united them, anti-apartheid struggles united them.  But today, there has been not a single one cause.  And until we get that one cause, it's a little bit of challenge to bring people together.  And we're searching for that one common cause.  Maybe struggles against poverty may be adapted.  But what the African Union has done is to join Africa into six regions.  The older definition, it's a continent of five regions.  But now, officially, Africa has six regions in which they now include the African diaspora as an official sixth region.  And how this will be connected to textbook writings, on politics, on policies are things we have to pay attention to.  Let me now call on Ken, right, you're next.  Is it Ken?  Where is Abdul?  OK.  But Ken is next, right?  Yeah.
>> Kenneth Harrow: Yeah.
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[ Applause ]
^M01:32:52
OK.  I'd like to start my presentation again by thanking-- Yeah.  [Inaudible] so wait another minute?  OK.  Thanking Professor Falola for the invitation and thanking Edward Widmer, the director of the Kluge Center and for bringing me to this gorgeous, gorgeous building in this cold, cold day.  So, hello everyone.  I gave my presentation-- I had lost, is this thing here.  Here we go, with the title "What is African Literature or Cinema Today?"  Where do we look for African literature?  Is there a-- Does that look funny on the screen?  No?  OK.  I made Ama Ata Aidoo with brown a couple of years ago.  It is quite emotional.  She was warm and greeting me and I expatiated on how much I love to work and had written about it.  When I told her I was interested in the question of the production of African culture by Africans living outside the continent, she got so upset, she got up to leave.  And I had to beg her to stay.  She thought I was going to accuse those living outside of the continent of not being authentic in their work.  And so the only way to answer the question, what is an African author would have to be someone who grew up in Africa and who lives there.  Such an answer today would disqualify a very large number of those considered major African authors or filmmakers.  True, we are all made into something different when we travel, and especially live abroad.  True, the notion of authenticity or autochthony is an anthropological and political term grounded in outsider points of view.  That is those on the outside trying to define who is an insider and where the inside and outside begins where it ends.  This is, as Johannes Fabian puts it, a colonial anthropological understanding.  I detest authenticity, the word and concept, the police who tried to define it and especially those in Africa for whom it is the test of genuineness or not.  So I was embarrassed that she took my question so hard and I made every effort to reassure her I meant something different.  Well, what did I mean?  These days, I see large swathes of African culture as being created by those living abroad, from Elach Nusani [assumed spelling] to Chris Abani to Pius Adesanmi, Aminatta Forna, Chimamanda Adichie, just as I may-- might have listed-- might have listed Achebe in past years, not to mention, Teju Cole or Binyavanga Wainaina and our own Toyin Falola.  This is not to say that an even greater contribution to African cultural production is not being created on the continent.  But those whose works are likely to enter onto the stage of world literature or cinema are largely living abroad.  And this is not new.  But it's testimony to a changing context.  And I would argue now that the literature of Taiye Selasi, of Helen Oyeyemi, or NoViolet Bulawayo, to mention three of the most prominent women authors is radically different from that of women publishing on the continent and especially women authors of the past, like Flora Nwapa, Mariama Ba, or even Buchi Emecheta whose own life had been marked by beginning her career as an expat in London before returning to Nigeria.  From the outset, the great Cameroonian author Ferdinand Oyono was living in France and writing Une vie de boy, when Camara Laye was writing L'Enfant noir in Paris and when Senghor and Sedar were composing their poems in Paris, it was common for African authors to have traveled and lived abroad where they pen much of their early works.  But that was a different time.  Their crafts were marked by an upbringing in a world radically different from today's.  Marked by colonial or neocolonial culture and milieu, today's African authors and [inaudible] often live in Paris and London and New York.  Life and culture abroad remains radically different from what is accessible to Africans living at home.  It isn't that African culture isn't being diffused abroad but the flows are highly uneven.  Some like Abani turned to totally new directions of expression.  Abani now calls himself a writer, not an African writer.  And his writing shares little with those writing on the continent.  Others can live in New York's little Senegal or London's Peckham Rye, eat their thieboudienne or poulet yassa every night.  Youssou N'Dour's concert in Bercy is completely unlike the one in his home club in Thiossane, Dakar.  The food abroad for all of us doesn't taste the same as it does at home.  The music depends on its audience for the performance to acquire its full flavor.  What is ordinary at home becomes exotic abroad.  And even when the name is the same, the ingredients can never be identical.  All of these presupposes a static culture which is never the case.  The cook in New York might wind up getting all the right flavors of pepper soup, only to learn that the chefs in Lagos have found a better way to make the fish taste spicy.  Something new is happening.  There are new conditions of production, new times, new people on the scene.  We are three generations away from the early writers of the '50s.  Try to imagine what the Biafran war meant for Achebe.  In his memoir, there was a country, a personal history of Biafra.  He takes, which he wrote in 2012, he takes us back to a late British colonial period before independence.  In a radical revision of his early fiction, he tells us the British rule is a lot better than we imagined it to have been.  Readers raised on "Things Fall Apart" and its truths must have been astonished to read this, Achebe with age turning more indulgent had done so much to shape our thinking about those early missionaries and administrators as arrogant and small minded and had given generations a clear understanding of Eurocentric colonial thought.  The adjustment is difficult.  Many of today's African writers are in fact mixed race.  When Achebe and Emecheta and [inaudible] wrote about Biafra, none of them could have imagined a heroine like Kainene in Adichie's "Half Yellow Sun" whose elegance and standoffishness redefined the image of the African urban sophisticate.  It's Kainene I'm talking about.  You could say that about Adichie too if you want.  She didn't care a whit.  That is Kainene now.  Did not care a whit for something called evil cultural politics and the character in the novel.  Instead she gave herself to a struggle despite her wealthy and privileged upbringing.  She married a white man, a character the likes of whom it would be impossible to find in the first two generations of African literature.
^M01:40:05
If there is a single story of the African which Europeans have been constructing for centuries, simultaneously there is a single story of the European which Africans have also constructed.  That construction dissolves as Adichie creates characters like the Englishman Richard whose engagement with Nigerian Kainene somehow led him to embrace a new form of commitment.  One not at all like what have been required for those engaged in the original struggle for national liberation as it had been during the period of imperialism.  Now, the struggle entailed a new configuration of national economy like that of Eritrea, South Sudan or Biafra, for whom seeking independent freedom from the autocratic sometimes brutal state whose by politics have reshaped what's used to be called [foreign language] commitment.  Biafra was in fact the harbinger.  The language of the new freedom fighter, not only the new African but the new Afro-European comes with Richard whose encounter with other white foreigners discombobulates their binary notions of "us" and "them" as he plays his role as official spokesperson for Biafra.  Here's a fragment of the novelist's depiction of Richard's encounter with two white American journalists who come to Port Harcourt for their story.  "Richard was not sure how long they had waited before boarding their flight at Lisbon, but the wait at Sao Tome for a relief flight to Biafra had stretched 17 hours.  They needed a bath.  When the plump one, sitting next to Richard, began to talk about his first visit to Biafra at the beginning of the war, Richard thought he needed a mouthwash too."  As we get the back story of Richard's role in escorting them, we're provided more and more material that signifies their difference where Richard has become one of us and less of them.  "Richard disliked him.  He disliked his washed-out green eyes and his red-freckled face.  When he had met them at the airport and handed them their passes and told them he would be their guide and that the Biafran government welcomed them, he had disliked the redhead's expression of scornful amusement.  It was as if he was saying, 'You are speaking for the Biafrans?'"  We need to remember how Cesaire problematized his own youthful arrogance in thinking he could speak for his people in Fort-de-France and set that against this reinvented global figure of a spokesperson in a post-colonial age.  Richard's whiteness changes with his [foreign language] but [foreign language] too has changed radically into something that we now express in terms of the globally complex.  It's to be found not in the white American journalist scornful retort "you" speaking for the Biafrans but rather than narrative itself that prepares us to accept Richard's reflective self-awareness as he judges the failures of the two American's paltry understandings of his situation.  This self-awareness translates into his ability to put himself in their position so as to judge its inadequacies.  This is mirrored in Adichie's ability to put herself into her white roommate's shoes in her famous TED Talk on the single story.  Or, in the shoes of her white character, Richard, who can also see and judge the perspective of his fellow white racist journalists.  Does the skin color still function to create compatriots?  Not so much in Adichie's constructions.  Other wonderfully constructed white characters appear in recent fiction like, Aminatta Forna's "Memories of Love".  Where the British Dr. Adrian has become an inverted Bintou, one who Sierra Leone has generated and prolonged the longer he stays in Africa, in love with Mamakay.  His and Richard's discourses are new.  Their complexity more compelling than the more one-sided representation of white expat experts seen in Soyinka's early novel, "The Interpreters", or Achebe's white characters in "Anthills of the Savannah", Dick with Mad Medico, who still quotes Lord Acton in establishing his difference from colonials of the past.  For me, he's part of another single story like the white stereotype figures of Mr. Brown and Reverend Smith in "Things Fall Apart".  In the Adichie and Forna novels, the native guy now takes the form of enamored white men like Richard who are positioned as "us" and "them" as figures who are more than hybrid but now double.  They simultaneously are us and them or at least partly so for as we all, in fact, inhabit multiple subjectivities.  In "The Thing around My Neck", Adichie writes a story about a Nigerian wife who joins her husband in New Jersey.  Nkem raises the kids in the states while Obiora commutes back and forth to home in Africa and has a second bureau as they call it in Lagos.  Nkem meanwhile has become Americanized.  This is how Adichie puts it.  "She really belonged to this county now, this country of curiosities and crudities, this country where you could drive at night and not fear armed robbers, where restaurants serve one person enough food for three."  Still, she missed home.  Home is conveyed through the familiar ties of family and friends of language and the music of speech.  But it's the immediacy of the physical environment that brings her home to her this difference.  "And when the snow covers the yellow fire hydrant on the street, she misses the Lagos sun that glares down even when it rains.  She has sometimes thought about moving back home but never seriously, never concretely.  She goes to a Pilates class twice a week in Philly with her neighbor.  She bakes cookies for her children's classes and hers are always the favorites.  She expects banks to have drive-ins.  America has grown on her, snaked its roots under her skin."  I like that last sentence a lot.  Adichie is sensitive to the registers of accent, culture, food, gender relations, taste, and contemporary styles that constitute the American presence.  And her language records them in her double consciousness at times with ironic tones, but more often in sheep pastures and idiomatic turnings of the phrase that render the perfect-- the portrait so perfectly as to suture the native-born American reader into the African narrator's perspective occluding the non-narrative position, excuse me, occluding the nonnative position of the narrative subjectivity.  I'm using the cinematic term suture to signify the identification of the spectator with the character on the screen as specifically with the character's point of view.  This is accomplished in film by positioning the camera in the place of the actor so that we can experience what the character feels, fears, loves and especially sees or doesn't see.  The techniques for moving that suture from one character to another involve camera placement and movement as in the shot, counter shot where two characters speaking to each other are viewed from the position of their interlocutors with whose perspective we come to identify.  Who are we at that moment of suture when we let go of our own real position in the theaters?  We pass in the moment of suture into what Lacan calls meconnaissance or misrecognition.  Because it constitutes us as gathering together the fragmented pieces of knowledge that we hold of ourselves, especially those pieces reflected back to us in the eyes of others, whose name for us we might wish to accept as our own and thus to identify with.  These moments of fragile and fraud with the perils of being disrupted by a name calling, we might not wish to acknowledge.  It's most telling for the immigrant who goes so far as to change, not only her homeland but also her home, her home boys, her girlfriends, family, language, status and ultimately name itself.  Call me John, not John Pierre, Jack, not jackamo, Joe not Juso, or Feller not fella.  What is retained here is the new identity which then obscures what's responsible for making that identity in giving it reality.  This is the ultimate goal of the suture.  Its act of violence in accomplishing the act of identification for those who take themselves to be American, Nigerian, Senegalese or French, to be the holder of the green card while occluding the presence of the camera that captures the eye of the spectator or that of the narrative that enchants the ear of the rear.  The violence that springs from this assumption of oneness in the suture consists in forgetting the violence involved in the act of constituting oneself as one, as authentic.  The suturing of the subject in the Caine awardee Binyavanga Wainaina's "One Day I Will Write About This Place" is complicated by the radical violence that marks the narrator's conflictual diaspora sites of enunciation.  At one moment in the text, he describes taking the Hudson Line train into the city while Togo is playing in the World Cup.  Eyadema's corrupt family has been put in the limelight while stealing from the cookie jar.  Wainaina's writing speaks of the new Africa in a new global style that captures the still existent old world of politics with the old autocracies emerging in the icy waters of new journalistic instant texting.
^M01:50:02
He's created a new story not because of the scandal of the west preoccupation with Afro pessimistic plucking but because of how we now desuture ourselves from what we thought to be African literature and resuture the identification with the reportage.  "International correspondents with their long Dictaphones, and dirty jeans, and 500 words before whiskey, are slouched over the red velvet chairs, in the VIP section of the front, looking for the story, the Most Macheteing Deathest, Most Treasury Corruptest, Most Entrail-Eating Civil Warest, Most Crocodile-Grinning Dictatorest, Most Heart-Wrenching and Genociding Pulitzerest, Most Black Big-Eyed Oxfam Child Starvingest, Most Wild African Savages Having AIDS-Ridden Sexest with Genetically Mutilatedest Girls.  The most authentic real black Africanest story they can find for Reuters or AP or Agence France."  Wainana invites us to occupy cosmopolitan spaces of language and geography.  In this third generation of African literature prose, clearly a new language that is complete-- that was completely inaccessible to Ngugi when he imagined an authentic cultural vehicle only in African languages.  The new generation of African women writers, particularly those living abroad have redrawn the landscape of contemporary African literature living and writing globally their works offering the remarks by the occupation of multiple spaces and militant gender politics.  But these perspectives have been translated into their writing styles with global settings in Afropolitan postures.  Fatou Diome and Chimamanda Adichie addressed gender issues in ways very similar to those employed by Aminatta Forna, Doris Baingana, Helen Oyeyemi, Sefi Atta; they articulate subject positions that speak directly to doubleness.  Fiction like Forna's "Memories of Love" and Adichie's "The Thing around My Neck", create epistemologies with dual standpoints both in terms of the past and the present, in terms of the global north and south.  They have abolished old-school hybridity.  Often it's through the evocation of family memories that the subjective locations of immigrants today are defined but at home and abroad.  This can be seen in Forna's "Ancestor Stones", Oyeyemi's "Icarus Girl", and Diome's "Belly of the Atlantic".  In the latter, Diome creates a telling portrait of the dual locations and double subjectivities of the immigrant/emigrant.  She writes of her homeland in Senegal, seen from the dark of the night in Strasbourg where she's watching a football match which she will have to recount in detail later to her brother who has no TV in Casamance.  She too feels the pull of here and there, the tension of the writer's pen that seeks to put it all into place while there are two different places, inside here and outside there.  Here is how she puts it.  "It's late at night.  Strasbourg has lowered its eyes to sleep or demurely to avoid watching the intimacy of lovers and the nocturnal sorrow of others.  It's always at this time that my memory chooses to project films shown elsewhere, under different skies, stories buried deep down inside me like ancient mosaics in a city's subterranean tunnels.  Then she speaks of her homesickness, guilt, absence, and sadness whose lacunae she attempts to bridge with words, her words, especially where it's connoting travel and distance which she calls suitcase words, words too limited to convey the miseries of exile, words too fragile to break open the sarcophagus that absence has cast around me, words too narrow to serve as a bridge between here and there.  Words, then, always used in place of absent words, definitively drowned at the font of the tears to which they lend their taste.  And finally, suitcase words whose contents are contraband, whose meaning, despite the detours, leads to a double life, the me from here and the me from over there."  We can read this passage as that of a shot, reverse shot, where two figures are in dialogue and confront each other.  Here, Fatou abroad, there Fatou home, the two sides of Fatou Diome simultaneously occupying the different locations of the traveler's suitcase, the suitcase words, the suitcase images, the suitcase lives.  In 1994, Homi Bhabha wanted to play subjectivity in the interstitial space of hybridity.  In the present world of globalized traveling, the time for hybridity, for mixing, for mixing in, is no longer available.  And doubling has replaced the interplay of otherness himself.  As in a fugue, where traveling is a flight from oneself, there's a crossing, the occupancy of a space that separates two worlds while belonging, paradoxically, in both and in neither.  An immigrant/emigrant always occupies two subject locations but the sense of belonging in one comes to be supplanted by the physical location of the other.  Traveling shots in cinema carry us from one location to another in order that the vision of a traveling subjectivity could be normalized.  It smooths over the bumps in the road.  Fatou says she feels free.  "I want to write into everything that-- everything that my mother didn't dare say and do.  Identity papers, all the folds of the earth, they didn't place a birth here and now.  Identity papers, my memory is my identity."  Together with her sense of being a foreigner and stranger, her subject position returns and splits her into a double identity of the newly constructed subjectivity for the global frame.  "An outsider everywhere, I carry an invisible theater inside me teaming with ghosts."  Her subject location like that which Gilroy defines in "Black Atlantic" is marked by the spaces she traverses where immigration and emigration cross with each voyage.  "To leave is to die of absence.  You return, of course, but you return a different person.  On going back, you seek but never find those you left behind.  Tears in your eyes, you resign yourself to noticing that the masks you'd made for them no longer fit.  Who are these people I call my brother and my sister?  Who am I to them?  The intruder who carries insider her the woman they're waiting for, whom they despair of ever finding again?  The stranger who turns up?  The sister who leaves?  My dance between the two continents is fraught with these questions."  In the story "Imitation", Adichie similarly constructs a dance between two continents.  As Obiora leaves Nkem in the US, making frequent trips home to Lagos, her world becomes divided and split into two homes that she cannot not occupy.  Nkem describes how her neighbors try to understand their situation as a divided couple but their points of reference aren't adequate.  They would ask, "'Where was her husband?  Was something wrong?'  Nkem said everything is fine.  He lived in Nigeria and America; they had two homes.  She saw the doubt in their eyes, knew they were thinking of other couples with second homes in places like Florida and Montreal, couples who inhabited each home at the same time, together.  When Nkem speaks to the wife of another big man about how she managed with a similar arrangement, and whether she planned on returning home to Nigeria, she has asked, as the woman turned, her eyes round, as though Nkem had just betrayed here.  'But how can I live in Nigeria again?'  The woman then explains that this change was beyond her control.  'When you've been here so long, you're not the same, you're not like the people there.'  'How can my children blend in?'  And Nkem, although she disliked the woman's severely shaved eyebrows, had understood."  In the works of these African women writers, there's a strong undercurrent of loss that draws attention to their double subjectivity.  The pain of this loss creates accounts for the world of this-- for the work of the suture and the melodramatic effect to stitch over loss through the doubling of the subject's position.  In this new age, doubling is the condition for traveling subjectivities.  The African labor force travels often dangerously between Africa and the west, as the same time as the wealthy, highly educated Afropolitans jet set between and in their adopted and original homes.  For the immigrant, the original homeland becomes a ghostly presence while the adopted one remains a continually moving target.  The homeland is changed, it shifts, they wear strange hats, red on one side, black on the other.  That deluded think they could recognize the owner of the house.  Where on earth is this new-old homeland?  For Teju Cole, it is a moving target.  According to the 2011 "Open City", which is Cole's famous novel, "Open City", the random house blurb, he was raised in Nigeria and came to the US in 1992.  Notice the hat.  And he lives in New York City.  His public persona now embellished with his New York Times column on photography is close to what we imagined the protagonist of the novel, Julius, to be.
^M02:00:07
Cole publishes for the New Yorker, he is hipness, come to the center.  On the jacket of an earlier novel, his earlier novel, "Every Day Is for the Thief", we learned something astonishing.  Namely, that the Cole who came to the US in '92 had already been born there in 1975.  So that when the Cole of "Open City" is presented to the reader as essentially a Nigerian who immigrated to New York City like his hero Julius, we are being instructed to read the novel as that of an outsider who has refashioned himself as a New York sophisticate, whereas in truth, Cole was always already that insider-outsider born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places.  I see that as a spark.  Moreover, his website stipulates he was born to Nigerian parents and raised in Nigeria.  So the question might really be, depending on where one stands, is he an Oyinbo or not.  In "Open City", Julius' people on the father side are Yoruba.  And we know that in the best of ways since his father is buried in Lagos.  On his mother side, it's German, the side where the loss appears most to mark him.  In New York, Belgium, or Lagos, he remains distant, never [inaudible].  At one point in "Every Day Is for the Thief", he goes to the city market.  The essence of the city where he is in search of himself, or as he states, "If he'll refuse to go to market, how would you know the existence of others?  How would you know of your own existence?"  But the answer in the market comes quickly, depending on whether you were there to buy tomatoes or garri or masks.  In this case, it was the latter.  And the distance this implied came back to him immediately, "When I started speaking Yoruba, the man I've been haggling with over some carved masks laughs nervously.  Ah oga, he says, 'I didn't know you knew the language, I took you for an oyinbo, or an Ibo man."  Teju, narrated, is irritated.  Not at the man's mistaken attribution, who would want to be taken for an outsider in one's own home, but rather at his relatively correct automatic perception, "'What subtle tells of dress or body language have again given me a way,' he asks.  This kind of thing didn't happen when I lived here, when I used to pass through this very market on the way to my exam preparation lessons."  Some subtle shift in the direction of the west has now tainted his skin color as the words for outsider, white man, other, rich man coalesce around him in the very heart of home.  He is subject to the same treatment according to Saidiya Hartman whose return home is to Ghana, where her ancestors come from.  Life of Teju, Julius narrated, Saidiya also an academic is somehow betrayed by her absence of local color.  And when approaching Cape Coast Castle for the ultimate homecoming tourist experience, she is treated with Oburoni, which she glosses as outsider.  Of course, she's mistranslating.  Not willing to confess to herself much less to us that she's being called the same thing as Oyinbo.  The urban dictionary on Oburoni is astute.  Oburoni is the tree word for a white person but sometimes used to refer to foreigners in general.  The words often used by Ghanaians in the diaspora, when speaking amongst themselves as a code word for white man.  Despite the relatively widespread and casual use of the word, its origins are not entirely benign, the word Oburoni derives from the word aburofo which means trickster.  In "Every Day Is for the Thief", the text self-translates, giving us the authenticating terms like oga while at the same time not only glossing but interpreting the usage.  "The masks are beautiful, but the price he's asking is exorbitant.  I leave his shop and move on.  Other vendors call me.  Oga, boss, look my side now, I go give una good price.  Others simply call out, oyinbo, white man."  At this point, the narrator turns tour guide.  "Young men sit in the interior of the small stalls on rafia mats or on low stools, their limbs unfurled.  I move through the warren shops, which like a souk is cool and overstuffed, delighting in its own tacky variety, spilling seamlessly into the cavernous indoor shop."  The writing here is become novel souk, describing itself much as we had expect from the creative writing student.  And we remembered this is Cole's first foray into long fiction, written after his return home to western Michigan, and then Kalamazoo College for his undergrad years.  Cole throbs on the notion of home self-consciously.  His sense of being away then back, though still mentally away, emerges when he mentions a friend named Ben, to his Aunt Folake and Uncle Bello.  His uncle tells him, he's a good man, this Ben, pretty hard working, conscientious.  He's Ogoni, you know.  A young Teju narrator then expostulates to his uncle about the hard times the Ogoni and Saro-Wiwa have experienced.  The response he receives is given in Yoruba and translated for us.  "Aren't they the ones who eat people?  Now, eating people might be taken several ways but what's most commonly understood is that it's witches who eat people especially at night when their windows are left open.  Those most likely to engage in this devouring are those nearest to home, close relatives because that's the Native Cameroon say, there was jambe, the strongest witchcraft is jambe [inaudible], the witchcraft of home.  Teju, narrator, plays the Oyinbo role perfectly in his response to his own relative.  "Oh come on, Uncle, come on, I say, why are you Nigerians so fond of rumors.  We, what I mean is you, are so tribalistic sometimes.  And anyway, don't our Yoruba people also have some kingship-related and grimly nonvegetarian ritual?"  Uncle Bello then left and treats Teju, narrator, to story about an albino being eaten in Ondo State in some fairly remote region near the tribals.  Our youthful narrator's eyes widened and we read, "The particular Yoruba choice of words made the story even funnier."  The global reader can appreciate that.  The refusal to translate directly the words [foreign language] leaves us outside and inside doubles in the sense that we can't entirely represent the local reader wanting to share in the pleasure of the words nuances, yet sure enough as the outsider being presented with his most delicate of insider African secret tale-telling that we should not really believe but maybe believe all the worst of the tribals, whatever that means.  With the shift from you Nigerians to we, what I mean is you, we are asked to share the joke and laughter as though the author were one of us or we one of them.  The outsider really brought into the fold, the insider knows that he cannot write this book without a glance over his shoulder to some remote tribal community.  To end with the words of [foreign language], "I think it's important to be on the right side of history and that means coming to terms with the fact that our faith isn't written in a foreign language but in our own languages."  But what is that language for Adichie, for Cole, for any of us who might be each in his or her own way not a speaker of just one language.  Not someone who can lay claim to just one home.  Thank you.
^M02:08:15
[ Applause ]
^M02:08:21
>> Toyin Falola: Thank you very much.  I wanted to raise the issues of audience.  Who is the new generation, what they're writing for?  And issues on our own African languages.  But time is not on us our side.  We still have one more speaker.  And we want to invite the audience to also participate.  I want to invite him, Professor Bangura to talk about Islam in terms of how it plays out with these new contemporary immigrants.  Professor Bangura.
^M02:09:05
[ Applause ]
^F02:09:10
^M02:09:14
>> Abdul Karim Bangura: OK.
^M02:09:15
^M02:09:31
Because of time, we'll make it shorter than I had anticipated.  And hopefully, there'll be other opportunities some other time.  But first, I want to just to make quick corrections on the brief bios you have.  I am no longer a professor at American University for a long time.  I'm still with the Center for Global Peace.  I don't want some young person registering for a cause and looking for me all over campus.
^M02:10:03
And I'm no longer also the ambassador of the ATWS to the United Nations.  This is what happens when we gain information from the internet.  Some of this information can be quite dated.  Just so that, I don't get into trouble with anybody.
^M02:10:22
^M02:10:26
Let's contextualize.  The first thing we learn about African Muslims in the United States usually begin with the slave trade.  How they came in tight ships and how Soliman Job, this is the ancestor of my mother from Futa Jallon.  So it's not just the Banguras are the kings in potluck but my mother also come from very high royalty.  I see Peter is laughing back there.  And we already saw the PBS series on Abdurakman, which went on for two weeks.  And we all know the famous story about the Amistad in a greatly extensive learn and give the Amistad lecture on that.  You can get out on the internet.  And we also know about the Islamic connections to the Amistad.  We are asked-- even the pastors that went to examine the busqu, we are being taught about Christianity, about Muslims they encountered in the place.  And we also know that the Yoruba Muslims and [inaudible] in particular were very instrumental in the reeducation of the Amistad when they returned to Sierra Leone.  And when we talk about the African presence is very well-established, is well-noted and many times, many of these facts were denied by Eurocentric scholars, that we have myths that Africans scholars were making.  We know about the great documents of the Piri Reis.  We know about the Qatar Emir [assumed spelling] even its own document of China, and a lot of other historical evidence that has been birth.  But until the PBS and the BBC corroborated what many African scholars were saying, these things were rejected as just myths, that Africans wanted to feel good and that's why we're talking about these things.  And the reconstruction by the PBS on the possibility of how King Abu Bakri could have sailed from Mali to here is well-documented.  And yes, the PBS series on that.  And the great calling power as you see the quote felt at home, said I'm an American, though when he stepped foot on Bunce Island, he felt that spiritual connection.  And this is what many of us who are pan-African is always striving to get our people connected on both sides of the islands of the Atlantic.  So, quickly to understand the African Muslim in the United States, to contextualize the African Muslim in the United States, we go back to Hajar or Hagar in English.  And being a Muslim, I'm attending a Roman Catholic school and served mass as an altar boy, I was fortunate to study my Bible from beginning to end, end to beginning and won the love of Bible scholarships and awards.  I love the Bible so much while I still studied my Koran.  And I was fortunate when I study in Italy to be supported by rabbis and had no choice but in respect for the people who give me food and shelter to study Judaism.  And I then began to learn more about this great African woman and how she connected Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.  And if you-- those of you who are familiar with the Hebrew Pentateuch, you can see the story from Genesis, 13 through 17.  For those of you who are familiar with the Holy Bible particularly in Galatians, don't just limit yourself to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, you begin to see where the connection is made that Abraham went on and built the Kaaba, which we Muslims do the honor as a very sacred place for our [inaudible], our way of living and how he constructed it.  Many, us, Christians don't read far past those four books, so we are not exposed to that knowledge.  And when we read our Holy Koran, we see the reconstruction of what is in the Pentateuch all the way to the Galatians to the Bible and how Ishmael became the father of the Ishmaelite from which Prophet Muhammad emerged.  So, when we talk about the African roots to Islam and the transcendentalization of Islam, we Africans, we black folks are in the center of this great experience.  And there's a great book Pentateuch called "Libre de la Biblia", which explains some of these connections and there's another great Italian book "Il Vangelo e la Torah", that is the gospel and the Torah.  That makes these connections.  And of course there is the great "In Ascorto del la tora", which is the listening to the Torah, which also make these wonderful connections, for those people who are more interested in learning about these things.  I say that to say, to give a background of why we African Muslims or black Muslims are very fortunate, very fortunate, because we find ourselves in a land that has a lot of tolerance for religion even though there are certain schisms every now and then that emerge.  And we can then say, how has Africans or African Muslims made these connections?  We can begin by looking at the transnationalism of African Muslims, that is an African Muslim that is African-centered.  And as the great scholar Molefi Kete Asante of Temple University tells us, African centrism involves placing at the center of every discourse of the African, whether on the continent or in the diaspora at the center of that particular discourse.  And we also know that African-centered encounters go back to the Tariq ibn Ziyad.  We all know that Ziyad not only funded some of the great Islamic schools, the Moorish Science Temple for example in Newark, New Jersey.  On that, the great Noble Drew was funded by this Moorish gentleman.  We also know and Professor Omoyeni Falola just mentioned in briefly passing that the great Wilmot, Edward Wilmot Blyden was very instrumental in creating a connection between the African and the Islamic religion.  Even going to the fact that he preferred, even though he was-- is a Christian, even going to the fact arguing that he preferred blacks or Africans to embrace Islam over Christianity.  And we also know that there are certain challenges, modes of challenges that African Muslims encounter in this part of the world.  They encounter continuous especially in the areas of environmental and attitudinal concerns.  We see how since the very vicious terrorist act of September 11, how Muslims, not just Muslims from the Middle East and East Asia but African Muslims also have encountered the same sort of harassment, the same sort of deportation in very large numbers than compared to all the non-Muslim Africans.
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We also see factors that impact the success of African Muslims.  These include cultural, economic, political and sociological factors.  We see that even our government have gone to the extent of imposing discriminatory security checks for all Muslims who would be entering the country at 115 airports, 14 seaports and these are usually entry points for many African Muslims that come to the society.  The challenges for the role of the State, we see that the State has some challenges dealing with African Muslims.  This seemed to be most predominantly targeted at African Muslims than other Africans, both in terms of the politics and in the legal arena.  And these were documented by even the United State government itself in targeting of certain groups that send phones to communities in Africa where they support Muslim organizations.  And we had the hijab as even legally stated as a trigger for security checks.  But with all these challenges, there are also opportunities that have come with them.  Unfortunately, the time is not on our side so this may be a rush job.  I apologize.  I was able to delineate nine particular aspects where new challenges have emerged and where opportunities have also come to the floor.  And Muslim and non-Muslim relations but for us to understand these aspects, we have to not only rely on one theory but in multiplicity of theories and methodologies for us to examine this.  When Omoyeni Falola asked me to be part of this, I started writing.  Believe it or not, I end up writing 85 pages of a paper and I just started scratching the surface because there was a whole lot more that I have to leave out.  And here, you can just quickly see our definition of the American family, Christian white middle class.  The ideal family has evolved though with the father who works as a manager in [inaudible].  They want you to slap you.  They kiss mother if you kick them on the sheen and 2.5 kids.  And as a recent methodologist, I am still looking for that half kid.  It's possible statistically but in reality, it is impossible.  I keep looking for the kid without a head.  And that goes spell well for the Muslim definition of what a family is.  And so, they are sometimes starting conflicts.  And even the hijab becomes a problem, this social identity.  So what's our real work?  Of course--
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Omoyeni Falola is now checking for his time.  Cultural relativism, yeah we have the hijab, the great Maryam, the number one revered woman in Islam.  As a mater of fact, the Surah Maryam is one of the most beautiful surahs in the Koran.  And what we, Christian did was we cut it into half.  Hail Mary, Mother of Grace, you know.  It is good.  But I got to read beyond that to appreciate the great Maryam.  Mother Teresa, we all love her.  She wears a hijab.  And you see all these great African-- these Muslim women.  They wear hijab and some choose not to wear hijab.  All of a sudden, hijab is now something suspicious.  We also see challenges in integrating Muslims in America.  And then you see, I gave you a theory, a methodology that I have meant to do that and I have all the results.  So, whoever is interested, send me an email.  I'll be happy to send you the paper.  So I will conclude by saying that a people who emerged from the great Hagar or Hajar, a people who today have the leader or the Chief Imam, the sheikh of the grand mosque in Saudi Arabia, have a whole lot of things to hope for despite the trials and the tribulations and the challenges.  And I conclude with a very short story, as soon as Donald Trump won the election, I have two web pages, my own person web page on Facebook and the African Books Heritage web page, one of the folks on my web page wrote, "For you Muslims who have been badmouthing Donald Trump, now that he has won the election, is people are going to be searching your Facebook pages and you might find yourself deported.
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The next day, I went and checked at those websites of all those folks who were writing so many bad things about the Donald.  And I am not lying to you, all of them had deleted all of the comments pertaining to the Donald.  And two, three days later, I checked all the folks who were not even on my list that we just communicate, those folks who were so vehemently opposed to Trump had already deleted everything on their web pages on Donald.  But more particularly, the African Muslims that I communicated with, some of them are not even communicating with me anymore about the Donald.  Why?  Because I think I was the only African, if I can remember, or the Muslim that predicted that the Donald was going to win this election.  I went in to write 11 factors of why Sister Hillary will lose.  And I am, by the way, a card carrying member of the National Democratic Council.  So, for me, it was very difficult to accept Sister Hillary's loss because I'm the one that coined the name Sister Hillary that became popular when she ran against Barack Obama two elections ago.  But we African Muslims, as I've been talking to them, have to engage the Donald just like we did George Bush.  George Bush came and said Africa was not in his radar screen.  When the terrorist attack happened, he has a war against Islam.  But we are able to communicate and educate and exchange ideas.  It changes views.  And what happened?  George Bush turned out to be the best president towards Africa than any other president before him, and definitely more so than the one after him.  I thank you and I'll shut up.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Toyin Falola: Thank you very much.  We now have to manage in 20 minutes for all the--
>> Abdul Karim Bangura: I gave you a little bit of time.
>> Toyin Falola: Where is John?  You want to do this or you should what--
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[ Inaudible Remark ]
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Yeah.  There have been so many issues on the table and the last one on specific identity.  And by the time, we're throwing the nation of Islam into it, you find more-- Mary, please, you want to-- Please go ahead.
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>> Mary: Happen to have lunch with a group from Fulbright organization and one of the women who had come here from Latin America originally came on a Fulbright and over a period of time, she became a resident, US resident and citizen.  And she mentioned that when Fulbright brought people from another country, they took great care to orient them to a new culture, and then they took great care to orient the community that they were going into to the immigrant, to the person coming in.  And I am wanting to ask you, folks, whether you've experienced that happening for African immigrants and would it be a good idea if it isn't happening and where could it possibly begin to happen?
>> Toyin Falola: What-- Let me start to answer that.  My introduction to the US was made possible by what we call Crossroads Africa Operation.  It was a New York agency.  It was a sort of NGO, it was an NGO.  And in 19-- I was finishing my PhD back then, 1980, and they invited me to-- like 12 of us to come and they took us to so many states.  So, I had that kind of formal introduction.  Well, for most people, I don't-- I'm not sure.  Bear in mind that the majority of people come in terms of-- they don't come as professionals like those first folks for me.  For those who come as professionals, they have done their PhDs here, the school system has already done that.  I don't know what.
>> Nemata Blyden: I could-- I just-- I'm not answering her question but I just want to say in light of I think my talk was Crossroads is an African-American organization, is it not?
>> Toyin Falola: I think so.
>> Kenneth Harrow: Yeah.
>> Toyin Falola: OK.
>> Kenneth Harrow: In response to that and thinking of Moses' presentation, it's kind of ironic.  We have a-- I'll speak only from Lansing but I bet-- Lansing, Michigan, but I think it's typical around the country.  We have a refugee center and when refugees are brought in, there's a good deal of attempt to assist in the integration into the culture and whatever, life, jobs and so forth.  But when students come to the university, we have very little of that, unless they don't speak English, then they have to pass an exam in English before they can go on and take courses.  In other words, those who were the best educated get the least amount of what you're describing and- whereas those who come in the most conditions of duress get the most.  It's kind of ironic.  There's kind of inversion. 
>> Abdul Karim Bangura: In this area, the best is the Ethiopian community.  Not only do they have a TV station now, a radio station, but they do even organize an annual conference.  And they have a center in Arlington whenever Ethiopians come and they meet them at the airport and then immerse them into the society on what happens.  And they give them also the support network, the transition from being immigrants into the society.  So I have to give the Ethiopians kudos for that great initiative.
>> Toyin Falola: Questions or comments?  Yes, please.
>> So, thank you very much for the presentations.  And I have a question that occurred to me, Moses, during your presentation, but I think it could be a question for the panel particularly Nemata and Kenneth as well, which was thinking about your discussions of US populations of African immigrants.  And the particularities of the sort of US history in which these immigrant communities find themselves implicated for a variety of reasons and how that may or may not differ if anybody can speak to this from immigrant populations that are moving to places of former direct colonization.  And I was thinking particularly, Moses, of your discussion of the sort of US idealism and humanitarian sort of white savior complex and the, perhaps, historically inaccurate sense in the US of the US is not a direct colonial power.  And so, Kenneth, I was thinking of this in your juxtaposition of a number of these authors who are writing from different kinds of spaces of immigration from the US or from places in Europe of former direct colonization.
>> Toyin Falola: Moses.
>> Moses Ochonu: Yeah, I'm going to-- I think there is a certain-- there's a certain ideal that operates within the US sense of itself, the way that Americans perceive themselves, and it goes back to the history of how Americans-- when it's obviously it's debatable because at some point, the US did have colonies, whether you want to call them colonies or not, that's a different question.  But it goes to the sense of the-- that Americans have of themselves as people who have natural solidarity for sovereign people, for marginalized people, for displaced people, and for people who have been colonized and brutalized and so on and so forth because we too went through those things and we came out of it ahead.  And so, therefore, it is our responsibility, almost a moral responsibility to help others.  So, it's a moral discourse, right?  It's a moral discourse.  Of course that then becomes almost like a-- It's almost like a blind spot that develops out of that.  Becomes a blind spot that prevents Americans, as I argued in my paper, from seeing the ways in which, you know, they've basically constructed an image of Africa as a place that produces refugees, right?  And as America, as a counterpart image of America, as a place that receives and nurtures and rehabilitates these refugees, right?  So, I think that sense of self, it's a very-- it's a moral discourse.  And most societies have that.  There's nothing wrong with that.  I mean, that's the root of nationalism and patriotism and all of that.  Well, that then becomes this discourse that, you know, is then projected even on through the immigrants themselves and constrains the way that immigrants themselves tell their stories, right, because they assume that, you know, stories, these stories have to fit a certain image of the African immigrant, being a refugee, looking for a economical opportunities and it leads to what examples that I give of outright fabrication, embellishment, of making up stories, of you know, talking about impossible events that are simply not true.  Because the more melodramatic, the better, the more positive the reception, right?  So it works both ways.  It works under their hand to reinforce this image of America's humanitarian side, side of humanitarian intervention.  But it also then becomes at least for the purpose of this panel, becomes a way to close off an examination of alternative migrant itineraries that do not fit into that template, so.
>> Toyin Falola: And there are two complications.  The first is the unreliable nature of the data of immigrants fed into Africa.  It's-- I have read many of them and they're so unreliable because they deal with exaggerations.  It is very difficult for individuals to say that they are not successful.  It's easier for them to do the opposite.  Even photography, you find someone taking a photograph in front of a car that doesn't belong to him and sending the photograph back to Africa.  So the slogan is, you either make it or you fake it.  As for me, doing this project, intensely data-driven, the complications are so many.  The other myth which we have to explore is that it is not true as you'll find in literature that movement to the west is far more-- Actually, internal movements within Africa is far more intense.  So, when Boutros-Ghali left the United Nations for the first time and was looking for a new thing to do, he was able to persuade Mubarak to set up the Arab Summit.
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And Mrs. Mubarak adopted it.  And that became, in one word, drafted into it.  And that zone, Egypt, Palestinian, Libya, that zone, 2 million people migrate every year, 2 million.  So, not only do we have to understand this damnation of Africa in the west, I think we may also have to begin to lock it within Africa itself, especially the extensive nature of the movement between Nigeria and Gambia.  It's so extensive.  But what we tend to focus is the Nigerians going to New York, the Kenyans going to London.  Now, we begin-- We have to begin to rethink some of this.  You what, I saw you yesterday, at Georgetown University, right?  Yeah.
>> Can you-- Is this on?  Oh, yeah.  My question is--
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Africans coming to America and the refugee status, the poverty, that's right, the poverty status.  My question is the Africans who-- the professionals who have found their homes in America left their countries but they left their ties with the people back home.  In that, in America, the sense is that you're an individual and that you may-- you're a self-made person and that you've pulled yourself up from your own bootstraps.  Wherein Africa, you're a member of a family and that family is extensive.  You have cousins and uncles and grandparents but now, you-- from the presentation that I've heard, now, you've set this notion that you don't have to have a family.  You don't have to have extensive village or tribe, even.  You can come to America and separate yourself from what you had back home.  Is that a good thing?
>> Toyin Falola: OK.  Well, that is not what our data is telling us.  The data is telling us the opposite of what you said.  Yeah, because I-- when I was introducing this subject, I told you about the data I'm collected in three states around here, Pentecostalism associations.  They're very strong.  So, take the Redeemer's Church of Christ by Adeboye.  There is no American city where that church doesn't exist.  Moses attends the one in Nashville.  I've been to his church.  So that-- So, he, if somebody-- let me give you one example.  If somebody calls me Toyin, that's my name.
>> Bad example.
>> Toyin Falola: I definitely know this is a stranger because nobody calls me Toyin.  Nobody calls me that name.  So in Austin, they call me Baba.  That's what they call me.  Well that Baba, which is a father and they're not my children and I'm the patron of say the Yoruba Association.  I'm a patron of so many of this event.  They've recreated them, the sociological time of affection and kinship.  Many of these things have been recreated.  So, what people have done is to rework this community back, only redefining them.  Since I came, we have attended meetings in Baltimore, firewood places.  So these things have been recreated.  Yes.
>> Nemata Blyden: I was going to add that I think it's an individual choice.  My students just finished their final project where they had to interview an African immigrant.  And I heard a whole host of ways in which the various immigrants that they interviewed are adapting to and choosing to live in the United States.  From the young man who's decided he's done with his country in Africa and doesn't have any extended family to a woman who has a significant network and has essentially recreated her life in the United States as it would have been in her home country.  So I don't think we can generalize in that way.
>> Moses Ochonu: Also-- OK.  I wanted to add briefly that we also have to understand that, even their decision to migrate, whether their decision is voluntary or involuntary.
>> Nemata Blyden: Makes a difference.
>> Moses Ochonu: There's a lot of people invested in their decision, beyond the individual back in Africa, right?  So that the choices that the immigrant makes when he or she gets to America, those choices themselves are constrained and shaped to a large extent by the expectational economy back in Africa in terms of what they choose to study in school, what kind of professional they're going to, these things are connected.  So there's no separation, I would say.
>> Toyin Falola: Yes, please.  Ah, but later ask a question.  Last two people here.  Please, let's take them-- who wants to.  Let's take-- who wants to--
>> I am very intrigued about the forced migration of Muslim Africans here in the United States.  And when you started your lecture about the Muslims, I've read a book by Sylviane Diouf who talks about the Muslims that were very important to the slavery work that had to be done to-- for the Africans here, let's say.  And I wondered-- And also, you talked about Amistad, I've never you-- No, I'm hearing more and more about that particular Muslim collection-- information about that.  And I just wondered how that affects all the Muslims who are coming from the continent here, from west, south whatever, because this-- the Muslims were a great force to destroy as the type of slavery that was held, hear and in sight for long time.  And no one-- well, some people do know that, but I just want to-- how does it follow through with current immigration in terms of the Muslim collection.
>> Abdul Karim Bangura: Unfortunately--
>> Toyin Falola: Abdul, please hold them.  They'll begin to asks.
>> Abdul Karim Bangura: OK--
>> Toyin Falola: So that we're not disrespectful.
>> Thank you.  Actually, what I want to touch on is and I'll be very brief.  I actually wanted to dwell a little on more on what Professor-- Dr. Ochonu remarked but it probably wouldn't be the time to dwell on that at this time.  So, in the interest of time, I will touch on what he said there and then maybe a subsequent venue, we could get into what he deals with because I really wonder if we have the-- I'll just abbreviate it by saying that Africans who are here in America, they've done stellar things.  You look at the instance of Lupita Nyong'o.  I think she's probably the last Black Academy Award winner to date.  There is also, you look at Victor Oladipo.  He just won an $84 million contract.  He is one of the-- these are all Africans who are here, they are born of African parents so if they wanted to be identified as Americans but at least they're all born of Africans.  And they're continental Africans.  And he is a rookie.  He's getting approximately $21 million a year.  The person who just designed this new museum of African-American--
>> Toyin Falola: Adjaye.
>> -- history and culture-- 
>> Nemata Blyden: Adjaye.
>> -- David Adjaye, you know, I think British-African architect.  Obama, you know, I can go on.  So, the stellar things have been done.  So, my point, I just want to raise is that Dr. Ochonu does talk about the fact that we're coming here and for this-- his thesis of psychosocial strategic migrants.  I would like to get him to that at some point but the point is we are coming here in droves and we're doing well.  So let's try to admit that.  There are still lots to deal with back in-- on the continent.  So probably maybe it's time for us to look at probably trying to see the best of both worlds.
^M02:49:58
You know, like for instance, Americans, those-- the [inaudible] for instance like to live in New York when it's warm and they like to live in Florida when it's hot.  So probably, we Africans too probably could consider, you know, coming here for technology and so on and then when it's all cold like now, we're back in Africa.  That's just this.
>> Moses Ochonu: That was good.
>> Toyin Falola: I'm sorry.  We won't be able to answer the questions.  I should have timed the Kluge Center when I started but I was in total panic about time.  So, I now want to close-- 
>> Moses Ochonu: Prof. just one sentence.
>> Toyin Falola: Please, go ahead.
>> Moses Ochonu:  OK.  My wonderful sister raised a very question, unfortunately, time did not permit.  Prof. Omoyeni Falola's colleague, Denise Spellberg, wrote a great book "Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an", how the Koran shaped the United States Constitution and the debates that went around the Constitution.  What she was able to document was Jefferson was learning from the enslaved Africans under him saw them worshipping facing the east and asked them, why you facing the east?  They said, that's because that's our mecca, the Kaaba and Africa unite.  So there are so many things Jefferson was able to learn from the enslaved people under him that shaped his own thinking.  It's not just the Koran that we have here in the Library of Congress that is displayed, that we know about.  But she has done a great job.  Anybody who wants to know more, please, get that book.  I'm not promoting it, but you know, I think it's a good source.
>> Toyin Falola: That's my colleague.  So let me thank Jason Dan [assumed spelling], the Director of the Kluge Center.  Dan was worried about the audience and when I got here, I was so happy because the audience is similar to what's they've had with other programs.  And hopefully, this conversation will continue, great books be written, a new sub-field will be created.  And we are very grateful that you are part of the history in the making.  Thank you very much.
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[ Applause ]
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>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.  Visit us at loc.gov.