Book note: Johny Pitts, Afropean

Just finished Johny Pitts’s Afropean: Notes from a Black Europe (Penguin). It is a remarkable and highly readable book which I strongly recommend. Pitts, a journalist and photographer from Sheffield in England, embarks on a journey across Europe to discover the continent’s African communities, from Sheffield itself, through Paris, the Netherlands, Berlin, Sweden, Russia, Rome, Marseille and Lisbon. Pitts, the son of an African-American soul singer and a working-class Englishwoman, is a curious insider-outsider narrator of the book which ambles from meditations on black history and (often American) literary forbears to chance encounters with black and brown Europeans in hostels, trains, stations, cafés and universities.

Is there a unity in all this? Hard to say, since as Pitts observes, these different populations, linked by an experience of marginalisation, come to be where they are via very diverse personal and collective histories. Some have come in their best clothes from former colonies to nations they were taught about as the motherland, only to find they had to make their lives in a place that was disappointing or hostile and where the white population — British, French, or Dutch — remain ill-disposed to see their new compatriots as being part of themselves. Others have fled war, persecution and trauma in Sudan or South Africa, only to find themselves exiled on the periphery of Scandiavian social democracy. And then there are the residual African students in a Russia transformed in thirty years from somewhere professing — occastionally sincerely — the unity and equality of all humankind, into a place where it is dangerous for black people to venture out at night for fear of violent attack or worse.

This is a very personal story and not a work of objective social science. But it is characterised by often acute observation, particularly of the gap between the image that European societies have of themselves as being basically tolerant and inclusive and a reality of systematic disadvantage in which populations of African origin (and others) almost invisibly do the jobs that keep our societies running. We’ve seen this when it has been people of colour who have worked and died through the COVID pandemic. He discusses the difficulty the Dutch have had in acknowledging their colonial past and the sometimes violent reaction that black people in the Netherlands have received when they’ve challenged the role that Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) has in winter festivities. His image of Sweden as a utopia for black professionals take a knock when he encouters both white Swedish racism and the reality of Rinkeby on Stockholm’s outskirts. The Parisian banlieu of Clichy-sous-Bois is a story of police violence and concrete desert. And St Petersburg is, well, just terrifying. In passing, he notices the discomfort of African American tourists with the bustle of Afropean life in Paris and tells us of the weirdness of his encounter with German antifa in Berlin,

The place he comes to love most is Marseille. This won’t surprise anyone who has been there. In some ways it is a hard and edgy city. When I was there a couple of summers ago I met with a student who’d witnessed a gang murder in her first week of living there. But the life in the streets of Marseille is astonishing: the mix of peoples, cultures, races, cuisines, life is unlike any city I’ve visited. It far exceeds New York, for example, in this respect. The charm of the city and Pitts’s romantic engagement with it may explain one of the few false notes in the book, his encounter with a black Egyptian nomad who has travelled the world and values experience over work or wealth. Maybe, but in a world of securitized borders where some passports are worth more than others there must be some further fact about this traveller that explain his ease of passage through the EU and United States: either he’s got money or he’s got a more valuable legal nationality than the Egyptian one he identifies with.

One measure of a book is the further explorations it excites and provokes, and Afropean succeeds wildly on that front. I’ve been listening to new music, making notes about authors I ought to get to know and films I need to watch. But it would be wrong to see this fine book mainly as a treasure trove of recommendations. Its value for all Europeans is in making visible what is often invisible in our cultures and societies and I hope in chipping away at the barriers that disadvantage our Afropean members, keeping so many of them unseen in grinding jobs at low pay. In the Financial Times only yesterday, the ever-complacent Martin Wolf wrote that

We are not going back to a world of mass industrialisation, where most educated women did not work, where there were clear ethnic and racial hierarchies and where western countries dominated.

Pitts testifes powerfully that those ethnic and racial hierarchies are with us still and that in many ways not much progress has been made.