# Afropean by Johny Pitts - Blinkist

What’s in it for me? Discover the hidden narratives behind Black Europe.

Europe, just like America, likes to present itself as an open-minded, diverse, and multicultural continent.

But many people in and outside of Europe still use “European” as a synonym for “white.

” Black Europe is barely present in mainstream narratives of the continent’s history and culture – despite centuries of colonialism entangling the fates of African people and their European colonizers.

As a result, many Afro-Europeans who’ve lived in Europe for generations often feel like their home country doesn’t have a place for them.

As a British-born Black kid from Sheffield, author Johny Pitts experienced this feeling of displacement himself.

He often felt forced to identify either as British-European or as Black – but never as both.

That’s what inspired Johny to set out on a journey to the heart of Black Europe.

Traveling through Paris, Brussels, and Moscow, he wanted to experience for himself how Black history and culture have shaped Europe.

On his journey, he met Surinamese-Dutch activists, Congolese artists, and Black French militants.

He discovered a rich mosaic of Black writers, workers, and activists who were forging a new identity for themselves: Afropean.

In these blinks, you’ll learn  how Africans and Black Americans celebrated Blackness in 1920s Paris; how a Surinamese community center in Amsterdam is preserving Black history; and how Afropeans in Lisbon have created a tight-knit community.

In Sheffield, Johny witnessed his multicultural neighborhood crumble under socioeconomic pressures.

As a kid, author Johny Pitts didn’t think too much about what it meant to be Black in Europe.

His dad was a Black American singer from Brooklyn, and his mom came from a white, working-class British family with Irish roots.

The two had met in the 1960s, when Johny’s father was touring Britain with his bootleg band, The Fantastic Temptations.

They eventually settled down in Sheffield, where Johny was born.

But in Firth Park, the area where Johny grew up, his mixed heritage wasn’t all that unusual.

The key message here is: In Sheffield, Johny witnessed his multicultural neighborhood crumble under socioeconomic pressures.

Firth Park is a working-class district in Sheffield.

It started as a housing project for immigrant workers from British colonies in the late nineteenth century.

Today, it’s made up of a mix of those workers’ descendants; white working-class families; second-generation immigrants from Yemen, India, and Jamaica; and, more recently, refugees from Syria, Somalia, and Kosovo.

Johny remembers Firth Park as a rough but vibrant, dynamic, and racially tolerant neighborhood.

From the window of his childhood bedroom, he observed many of the multicultural dramas and comedies that played out on the streets below – from Yemeni weddings and reggae parties to gang shootings and drug deals.

It was this atmosphere that, from the 1970s to the 1990s, made Firth Park a hot spot for one of the most important Black cultural movements: hip-hop.

His white friend Leon and his Yemeni friend Mohammed introduced Johny to the Black underground hip-hop culture of Sheffield, which included illegal block parties and the pirate radio station SCR.

But by the mid-1990s, when Johny was a teen, the vibrant social and cultural life in Firth Park had begun to crumble.

Globalization and free trade had eroded many of the local industries that the working-class and immigrant communities relied on.

Under this increasing socioeconomic pressure, an air of depression and desperation began to creep into life at Firth Park.

Many of the friends Johny grew up with found themselves trapped in debilitating poverty and turned to alcohol, drugs, and crime.

Sheffield had once provided Johny with a proud, multicultural working-class identity.

This changed after his studies in London.

He increasingly felt that he had neither a place in the Black and Brown communities he’d grown up in, nor in the majority-white country that rejected them.

He began to wonder what it meant to be Black and European – and especially what it meant to be both at the same time.

He decided that the only way to answer these questions was to go backpacking across the continent and find out for himself.

Paris revealed the deep historical connections between Europe, Africa, and Black America.

Outside of communities like Firth Park, Black Europeans can seem invisible.

Many are first- or second-generation immigrants from former European colonies such as Mozambique and Ghana.

They work long and odd hours as cleaners, taxi drivers, or security guards.

And many live tucked away in housing projects at the outskirts of their cities.

This creates the illusion that there’s no such thing as “Black Europe.

” But it took only one stop in Paris to convince Johny that this is a major misconception.

The key message here is: Paris revealed the deep historical connections between Europe, Africa, and Black America.

Apart from London, Paris is one of the Blackest cities in Europe.

Quarters like Barbès-Rochechouart and Château Rouge are home to various African communities, boasting a rich tapestry of Moroccan shops, Senegalese restaurants, and Pan-African art galleries.

The connections between these African communities and France run deep – not least, of course, because of French colonialism.

Famous French author Alexandre Dumas, for example, who wrote classics like The Three Musketeers, was Afropean: his grandmother was an enslaved woman from the former French colony of Haiti, bought by a French aristocrat in the late eighteenth century.

But Paris also has some unexpected connections to Black America.

During the First World War, the US Army stationed an African American unit dubbed the Harlem Hellfighters in France.

These soldiers introduced French people to Black American culture – jazz music, especially.

By the end of the war, Parisians had acquired a certain taste for African American culture, and vice versa.

Concurrent with the Harlem Renaissance in New York, the 1930s Negritude movement drew famous Black Americans like writer Richard Wright and singer Josephine Baker to Paris.

They were joined by artists and intellectuals from former French colonies, such as writer Aimé Césaire from Martinique and Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor.

Together, these early Afropean revolutionaries made a point of celebrating Blackness as the apex of art and beauty.

Stumbling into a street protest during his visit, Johny unexpectedly found himself among their modern heirs.

Black Parisians from all walks of life were protesting the French parfumier Jean-Paul Guerlain, who’d just shamelessly used the N-word on national TV.

The fact that Guerlain felt comfortable enough to use the slur highlights a deeper issue of racism and racial injustice, which has gone unchecked in France for so long.

The racist comment dehumanized and made invisible the lives of many Black Parisians – people like recent North and West African immigrants, who are forced to live in the poor, sequestered banlieues at the outskirts of Paris, and who work low-paying, often hard-labor jobs.

Brussel’s Black community pioneered the new Afropean identity.

Brussels, Johny’s next stop, was once voted “Europe’s most boring capital.

” But the clean, bureaucratic surface of the city hides a particularly brutal chapter of Afropean history.

Belgium’s colonial rule in the Congo in the early twentieth century claimed the lives of over ten million Congolese people.

Here’s the key message: Brussel’s Black community pioneered the new Afropean identity.

During a visit to the Royal Museum of Central Africa (Africa Museum) in the outskirts of Brussels, Johny realized how little Belgium has reckoned with its colonial past.

The museum was built for King Leopold II’s World Fair in 1897, which opened with a “live” exhibition of 267 Congolese people shipped from Africa.

Today, the museum still hosts a dusty collection of relics from Belgium’s colonial rule, barely contextualized by modern-day explainers.

Even Brussels’ touristy city center is checkered with reminders of colonialist propaganda.

In a shop dedicated to famous Belgian cartoonist Hergé, Johny stumbled upon a comic book titled Tintin in the Congo from 1931.

This Tintin adventure features the beloved main character traveling to the Congo, where he encounters several gross, racist caricatures of Africans; poaches countless wild animals; and styles himself as the white savior.

This all-too-recent piece of colonialist propaganda, which Hergé didn’t renounce until 1970, conveniently glosses over the fact that the real reason for Belgium’s invasion of the Congo was to exploit the country’s rich resources of ivory and rubber – in one of the most brutal and violent processes to date.

From within the colonialist legacy of Belgium, the contemporary notion of “Afropeanism” was birthed.

It was Belgian-Congolese singer Marie Daulne who first used the term to describe her music project with Talking Heads singer David Byrne, which merges African and European influences.

Byrne later described Daulne’s music as a “subtle manifesto” for a new, holistic Black European identity.

The African community in the district of Matongé in Brussels provides more examples that embody what Afropean life looks like.

There, you’ll find a mix of Congolese, Rwandese and Sengalese restaurants, hair salons, thrift stores, and jazz clubs.

Wandering between these different African communities in Brussels, you’ll encounter many Black cultural nomads like Johny, who feel like they don’t belong to any class, race, or nation in particular, and who are united in this fluidity.

In Amsterdam, young Afro-Surinamese activists are preserving the legacy of African American revolutionaries.

Did you know that the New York districts Brooklyn, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant are all named after Dutch cities?

Like Paris, the Netherlands and its capital, Amsterdam, have deep historical connections to New York – many of which run through Amsterdam's Black community.

The key message here is: In Amsterdam, young Afro-Surinamese activists are preserving the legacy of African American revolutionaries.

The Netherlands’ biggest ethnic minority are the Afro-Surinamese – descendants of enslaved West Africans brought over in colonial times.

Though the Netherlands tends toward the typical European amnesia when it comes to their colonialist pasts, Afro-Surinamese people in Amsterdam have managed to form a distinct and proudly political community over the decades.

They played a role in the Harlem Renaissance of New York in the 1930s, supported the Surinamese independence movement of the 1970s, and had a hand in the spread of international Marxist politics in the twentieth century.

A modern hub of the Afro-Surinamese community, the Hugo Olijfveld House, sits right in the middle of Amsterdam’s red-light district.

It was taken over by Suriname's oldest association, Ons Suriname, in the 1970s.

Today, it's a multifunctional community center, which serves as a grassroots organizing space and DIY creative studio.

Among other activists, it hosts the New Urban Collective, a queer feminist network of Afro-Dutch students working to preserve Black history.

Their Black Archives contain thousands of writings of important Black thinkers – from Jamaican poet Claude McKay to American civil rights leader W.

E.

B.

du Bois.

The archive also contains the forgotten legacy of Dutch-American revolutionaries Otto and Hermina Huiswoud.

Born in British and Dutch Guiana, the Huiswouds met in Harlem, where they were welcomed into a thriving scene of Black intellectuals and creatives.

Otto later became the first Black founding member of the American communist party – and even met Lenin in Moscow.

But when anti-communist sentiment began to spread in the US after the Second World War, he was exiled.

He used his Dutch passport to migrate to Amsterdam, and Hermina followed soon after.

There, the couple quickly took the reins at Ons Suriname, and turned the Afro-Surinamese organization into a vehicle that advocated for socialist politics.

The New Urban Collective strives to preserve the stories of Afro-Surinamese activists like the Huiswouds in order to politicize and mobilize Dutch Afropeans in the present.

For example, they’ve played a leading role in the recent protests against “Zwarte Piet” – a racist caricature from a children’s Christmas story that Dutch people insist on celebrating by dressing up in blackface during the festive season.

When Johny checked into his hostel in Berlin, the receptionist explained to him that he was about to encounter “an ugly city full of beautiful, open people.

” Indeed, to Johny, Berlin in winter appeared quite harsh and unwelcoming, and when he wanted to join an anti-fascist demonstration in the city center, he first thought he’d accidentally run into a group of skinheads.

Berlin is home to a white-washed anti-fascist movement – and a thriving Rastafarian community.

But he quickly learned that the 4,000 or so rowdy-looking youths in dark clothes were actually members of the Antifa – an international anti-fascist organization with roots in Nazi resistance movements.

The key message here is: Berlin is home to a white-washed anti-fascist movement – and a thriving Rastafarian community.

The supposed aim of the Antifa march Johny joined in Berlin was to commemorate Silvio Meier, a member of the community who was killed by a Nazi gang in 1992.

Instead, though, it seemed that the event was mostly about blasting music, drinking beer, and getting into minor fights with the police.

Johny noticed that even though they were protesting the fascist and racist violence directly affecting Germany’s minority communities, almost all of the march’s participants were young and white.

As in many other European countries, racism is still a prevalent – and even deadly – problem in Germany.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, over 130 people have been killed in racially motivated attacks in Germany.

Among these attacks were the infamous National Socialist Underground (NSU) murders during the 2000s, in which ten German-Turkish people were killed.

At the Sudanese restaurant Nil in Berlin-Friedrichshain, Johny found a community that suited him better.

Here, he met self-styled Black prophet Mohammed, who invited him to the community center, night club, and youth center YAAM – the Young African Artist Market.

YAAM, Johny learned, was the multicultural heart of Berlin’s large Rastafarian community.

Ras Tafari Makonnen was an Ethiopian royal of the early twentieth century.

He was educated by a French Capuchin monk as a child, and later became the Emperor of Ethiopia.

His worldly, tactical, and socialist rule inspired a new religious movement in Jamaica that merged tenets from Christianity, African folklore, Black power politics, and Pan-Africanism.

In Berlin, Johny found that Rastafarianism, which represents the intersection of these beliefs and ideologies, had been taken up by white Germans and West African immigrants alike – many of whom would meet at YAAM.

This joyful clash of cultures reminded Johny of Afro-German poet May Ayim, who once wrote: “i will be African even if you want me to be german and i will be german even if my blackness does not suit you.

Stockholm boasts many Afropean success stories – but can be blind to the roots of racial injustice.

To many people, Scandinavian countries like Sweden represent a kind of European utopia: a good social security system, free health care and education, and a progressive, tolerant culture.

For Johny, Sweden was a refuge from the racial tensions prevalent in many other European countries.

Here’s the key message: Stockholm boasts many Afropean success stories – but can be blind to the roots of racial injustice.

From TV hosts to chefs to musicians like Neneh Cherry and Quincy Jones III, Swedish media is populated by many successful Black people – some with migrant backgrounds.

According to Johny, the open and tolerant atmosphere in Sweden is promoted by their socialist philosophy of folkhemmet, which encourages Swedes to view their country as one, big family.

But even tolerant Sweden employs a dubious double consciousness when it comes to issues of racial justice.

Saleh, a bouncer from Tunisia who Johny met at his Swedish hostel, summed it up this way: “People in Europe, they think they give immigrants a favor.

[But] we are only here because they destroy our countries.

” And he’s not wrong.

Unbeknownst to many, Sweden is currently the third-largest arms exporter in the world, right behind Russia and Israel.

Most of these weapons, which have fueled wars in the Middle East, as well as military coups in Africa, are made by the former Swedish car company, Saab.

And rather than learning about and confronting this shady notoriety, Johny noticed that some of the well-educated Swedish Afropeans tended to berate more recent Black immigrants for seemingly making little effort to follow Swedish cultural and social expectations.

For example, Lucille, an Afro-Cuban-Swedish student, voiced her concern that many young people now talked in “Rinkeby Swedish” – the slang of Sweden’s largest immigrant neighborhood.

Rinkeby is a collection of monotonous, gray high-rises similar to other housing projects for Europe’s poor, immigrant working-class.

Once upon a time, Sweden’s socialist Prime Minister Olof Palme had championed ambitious plans to provide immigrant communities with housing, public spaces, schools, and libraries.

But after Palme’s assassination in 1986 and the rise of global corporatism, many of these projects were forfeited, and immigrants were pushed further out of the city.

Commenting on this, British journalist Owen Hatherley once wrote that in Stockholm “social democracy was abandoned only for the poor, its innovations were retained for the bourgeoisie.

Modern Moscow bears little trace of the Soviet Union’s old multicultural ideals.

Of all the places he’d planned on traveling to, Johny was least excited about going to Moscow.

In recent years, Russia has seen a rise of racist attacks against immigrants, especially African students.

When he’d applied for a visa in London, even the clerk at the Russian consulate warned Johny not to walk alone at night.

But Russia wasn’t always such an unwelcoming place for Black people.

For example, one of the most important figures of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin, was of African descent.

His great-grandfather Abram Gannibal was born in Ethiopia, kidnapped and enslaved by the Ottomans, and later sold to Count Peter Tolstoy.

In another example, Paul Robeson, an African American actor and singer who traveled to Moscow on a shoot during the 1930s, was enthralled by how respectfully he was treated by the white working-class of the Soviet Union.

“Here,” he wrote in his diary, “I am [.

.

.

] a human being.

”  The key message here is: Modern Moscow bears little trace of the Soviet Union’s old multicultural ideals.

Without question, the Soviet Union’s communist ideology fostered a solidarity between Russia’s white working-class and Black resistance movements around the world.

In the fight against Western imperialism, oppression, and exploitation, the Soviet Union aligned itself with the civil rights movement in the US, as well as many African independence movements.

From the 1950s to 1980s, it even encouraged African students to study at Russian universities.

Consequently, many African and Black American leaders sympathized with socialist and communist ideologies.

Western powers fought back against these alliances with all their might.

American intelligence agencies were involved in assassinating a huge number of Black and socialist leaders around the world – from Martin Luther King Jr.

in the US to Olof Palme in Sweden to the Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba.

Eventually, and by all accounts, the West won.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and its communal, multicultural spirit started to wane.

New Russian leaders like Vladimir Putin fueled a wave of nationalism, xenophobia, and homophobia.

And now, many of the remaining African students regularly encounter overt racism from white Russian people – to the point that they don’t venture far beyond the campuses of the city universities.

A far cry from the multicultural ideals of the past, African students enrolled at The People’s Friendship University of Moscow today live a cold, depressing existence, sharing their campus at the outskirts of the city with local drug addicts and alcoholics.

In Marseille, Johny found a little Afropean utopia.

Bringing his journey full circle, Johny traveled from Russia back to France.

This time, he took a train around Provence, stopping a few times to admire some of the beautiful villas along the coast.

Many of these luxurious buildings are relics from colonial times – and, more or less literally, awash in the blood of African people.

The Villa Leopolda in the coastal village Villefranche-sur-Mer, for example – the most expensive villa in the world – was built by Belgian King Leopold II with his Congolese blood money.

And the Villa del Mare in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin once belonged to Congolese military official Joseph Mobutu, who conspired with Belgium and the US to assassinate Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.

One of the old French villas, however, was home to a true Black icon: James Baldwin.

The key message here is: In Marseille, Johny found a little Afropean utopia.

James Baldwin was born in New York and became one of the most important novelists of the American civil rights movement.

But because of his homosexuality, he was kept at arm’s length by many other Black thinkers of the time.

In the 1940s, he fled to Paris and became part of the Negritude movement, before settling down in the coastal town Saint-Paul-de-Vence.

Until his death in 1987, he used his little villa to entertain Black celebrities like Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Nina Simone, and Maya Angelou.

For a poor, gay, Black man from New York, he’d achieved an incredible feat: he was living the French dream.

Another kind of French dream is notable in contemporary Marseille, an industrial harbor city not far from Baldwin’s old home.

As a port connecting Europe to North Africa, Marseille has historically been a place of immigration, multiculturalism, and working-class politics.

It’s also the site of world-famous art and literature.

Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, for example, is set in Marseille.

And in his 1929 novel Banjo, Jamaican poet Claude McKay captured the debaucherous beauty of the city through the eyes of a young African protagonist.

To this day, Marseille is home to many North Africans from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, who successfully coexist with a large white working-class – and, more recently, immigrants from Romania, too.

The city’s unpretentious, communal working-class spirit immediately appealed to Johny.

For him, Marseille was the Afropean bohemia he’d been looking for.

In Lisbon, Afropeans from former Portuguese colonies have built their own little world.

Of all the cities he’d visited, multicultural, working-class Marseille had come closest to his personal dream of Afropea: a multi-faceted but interconnected community of African Europeans and European Africans, where people, histories, and cultures merged to stand against racism, fascism, and economic exploitation.

In Lisbon, he found another example of this kind of intercultural, working-class solidarity.

The key message here is: In Lisbon, Afropeans from former Portuguese colonies have built their own little world.

Many of Portugal’s Afropeans have roots in the former Portuguese colonies of Mozambique, Cape Verde, and Angola.

Bidirectional immigration between the two continents during colonial times has blurred the lines between the European and African identities.

Johny’s Lisbon guide Nino, for example, has a Black mother who identifies as Portuguese and a white father from Mozambique who was exiled after the country’s independence.

Many of these Afropeans live in a part of Lisbon called Cova de Moura, an illegal settlement of dilapidated, low-rise buildings reminiscent of a Brazilian favela.

Nino warned that Cova de Moura was a no-go zone for most outsiders, and even for the local police.

But, with Nino’s friend Jacaré by their side, Johny discovered a vibrant and colorful district – one with children playing on the street, and walls covered in murals of Black icons like Nelson Mandela.

Jacaré explained that despite the poverty and crime, “people wouldn’t leave if they could.

” When they visited the community center Associação Cultural de Juventude in the heart of Cova de Moura, Johny understood why.

The association, which was set up in the 1980s, functions as a children’s library, center for women’s rights, citizens advice bureau, recording studio, and much, much more.

When they arrived, a local band was playing live Afrobeat music, while residents were busting out their best Cape Verdean dance moves and drinking cheap beer.

Cova de Moura’s lively, festive street culture was the last of many concealed Afropean narratives Johny uncovered on his journey.

After Lisbon, Johny headed to his last stop, Gibraltar – the British headland on Spain's south coast.

On a clear day, you can see the shores of Africa from Gibraltar's “Europa Point.

” When Johny arrived, though, it was too cloudy to see more than a few yards ahead.

But after all his travels, he felt no need to see Africa from afar – after all, he’d already seen it from up close in many corners of Europe.

The diverse African communities across Europe convinced Johny that Afropea didn’t just have a past; it also had a vibrant present and a hopeful future.

Final summary

Black communities in Europe are a vital part of the continent’s history and culture.

Too often, these communities are left out of European national narratives, are disadvantaged by socioeconomic pressures, and are rendered invisible in increasingly gentrified cities.

Even though the threads of colonialism still run deep throughout European society, many countries have yet to properly reckon with their colonial past and its effects on African people.

But in spite of this, Afropeans have managed to create dynamic and rich communities all over the continent – from activist organizations in Amsterdam to Rastafari clubs in Berlin to community centers in Lisbon.