A little historical detour
Before we get into the conversation, a little historical side story: Simeon Booker, Mr. French’s cousin, was a prominent journalist who worked for Jet magazine. The magazine famously published photographs of Emmett Till’s open-casket funeral in 1955, after his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted that the world see what had been done to her son.
It’s a difficult piece of history, but an important one. You can read more here: JET Magazine Publishes Photographs of Emmett Till’s Open Casket Funeral | COVE
Anyway, back to our conversation!
On finding Africa, and the importance of moving around
Africa is central to his life and work, but how did that come to be?
His family moved to Africa for work, as his father was a paediatric chest surgeon. Later, he got the opportunity to work in Côte d’Ivoire and, voilà! It became his new home. He started exploring the continent and never really stopped. He even found his partner there. 🙂
Listening to him talk about travelling across Africa and encountering so many different ways of life made me think about how important it is to move around.
It also made me question myself a little. I can sit in a car for a hot minute in the US and drive somewhere completely new, but do I approach travel with that same curiosity when I’m at home in Africa? Why is it so easy to dream about visiting European Schengen countries while exploring our own continent sometimes feels like an afterthought?
Granted, travelling around Africa can be a hassle because of infrastructure, political wars and genocides, border restrictions, and the general logistics of getting from one place to another. But I also wonder how long I’ll keep using that as a reason not to explore more.
My biggest takeaway from this part of the conversation? Visit African countries, bruv! And not just because the Arsenal or PSG jersey says so. 😂
On power, conquest, and Pan-Africanism
Our conversation about power, conquest, and Pan-Africanism got me thinking about what it means to recognise that Africans share certain histories and interests, and what it takes to do something with that understanding.
I used to think Pan-Africanism was an idea more readily accessible to people in the diaspora, or to Africans who had been exposed to diasporic ways of thinking. But, as with most things in life, there’s nuance.
The idea that Africans might have shared interests isn’t particularly difficult to understand. The harder part is figuring out how we act on those interests, especially when there are so many things pulling us in different directions.
We know how much tumenyayaswa and we keep hearing that there’s power in numbers, to be honest it seems out of touch. And yet there’s also fear, propaganda, and the everyday business of trying to survive. Sometimes, survival takes up so much of our energy that it’s difficult to think beyond the immediate circumstances we’re dealing with.
As he pointed out during our conversation, we don’t always look beyond our noses to examine the underlying structures that shape our lives. We’re often busy dealing with the consequences without necessarily having the time or resources to understand how those structures work in the first place.
We also spoke about revolutionaries and how few there seem to be. Think of Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Samora Machel, Kwame Nkrumah, and the much more controversial Muammar Gaddafi. Their politics and legacies were different, of course, but they each became associated with particular visions of African independence, sovereignty, or continental solidarity.
I think it’s interesting how fondly many of our parents remember some of these figures. Perhaps it’s partly because they represented the possibility of a different future at a time when the fight for independence was so urgent. Their visions were powerful, and the desire for Africans to determine their own futures was something people could rally around.
It makes me wonder what happens to these collective visions over time, and what it takes for people to believe in them again.
Fun fact: Kwame Nkrumah attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. I love little details like this because they remind me that African and diasporic histories have always been connected in ways we don’t necessarily think about every day.
Anyway, honestly, go read his books.
On African populations, and the future of African minds
This next part of our conversation genuinely changed how I think about something I had taken for granted since primary school.
Growing up, we learnt that African countries have a young and growing population, with high birth rates and a much larger proportion of young people than many others in the world. I’d always understood this as a demographic advantage, but somewhere along the way, I’d come to associate that advantage with labour: a large population that could provide workers for other countries, particularly as their populations age.
Then he said something that made me stop and think:
“By the end of this century, African brains will make up the majority of brains on Earth.”
>> he broke my brain and shattered my version of reality
I’d never really thought about it that way. Why was my first instinct to think about all these people (and in myself) in terms of the labour they could provide elsewhere, rather than the ideas they could develop, the knowledge they could produce, or the things they could build at home?
It also made me think about how we talk about having children. In many of our communities, children are seen as wealth, continuity, and a source of security for the future. There’s a long history behind those ideas, although the realities of raising children today are obviously much more complicated.
But what happens when we start thinking about Africa’s growing population not just in terms of numbers, but in terms of the minds we’re raising?
I keep coming back to the importance of protecting and investing in the minds of Black children across Africa and the diaspora. Not just educating them, but giving them the space, resources, healthcare, and opportunities to develop their potential.
En fait, look at the world around us. Everyone seems to be running to get a piece of the continent, whether through investments in natural resources, access to markets, or even medical data. It makes me wonder who gets to benefit from these resources and who gets to decide how they’re used.
Because there’s no shortage of genius in African people. Despite the politics, propaganda, racism, capitalism, and all the other -isms, we see it in our creativity, ingenuity, and ability to imagine possibilities even under difficult circumstances.
And while these questions aren’t exclusive to Black people, the histories and circumstances shaping Black life, both on the continent and across the diaspora, make them particularly important to think about.
So, tafakari ya hayo.
On language, and the things it allows us to see
Our conversation about language brought up another question for me.
He speaks so many languages, and I found myself wondering whether the language he uses changes how he researches, the questions he asks, or even the things he notices. As it turns out, he does most of his research in English, largely because of its position as a global language.
That got me thinking about how much language influences the way we understand the world, particularly when it comes to research and the production of knowledge. Which ideas get published? Which ones reach a wider audience? And how much of what we consider authoritative knowledge depends on the language in which it’s presented?
I also found myself wondering whether Francophone Africans sometimes approach certain questions with a different kind of freedom than their Anglophone counterparts. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that observation, and I suspect there’s more to it than language alone. Perhaps the different colonial histories and relationships with former colonial powers have something to do with it, too.
Either way, it’s something I’d like to think about more.
Language isn’t just about being able to communicate with someone. It also influences how we express ourselves, how we make sense of our experiences, and which ideas we have the words to articulate. And when one language dominates research and academia, it inevitably affects whose work gets read and whose ideas travel.
I suppose that’s one of the things I appreciated about this conversation. It left me thinking about things I hadn’t necessarily questioned before, from the way I travel around Africa to the way I think about its population and the languages through which we understand the world.
I’ll leave you with Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination: A Manifesto. You should read that book, too. 🙂
-Holiness Kerandi