What is the African in African-American?
by Sebabatso Manoeli
with Akua Naru
In the inaugural episode of Race Beyond Borders, I sat down with hip-hop artist, Akua Naru, who is really a theorist of the Black experience. She is known for her sagacious and prophetic lyrics as well as her classic jazz-hop sound. Paying homage to James Baldwin, Alice Walker and Tricia Rose, her music is steeped in the rich intellectual ancestry of poets, writers and thinkers who have shaped and colored the Black American experience. Through her expansive repertoire, her music invites us to see the world through her eyes.
In this episode, we spoke about Akua's vision of Afro-diasporic solidarity, the meanings and sites of freedom, and the urgent need to surface women’s work in hip-hop. In our conversation, she explained how hip-hop “is incantation” and liberation for her.
“There’s something very powerful about standing there with these rhymes and chanting – the way in which it awakens, the way in which the dancing body responds, the listening ear, the open heart. It’s something very spiritual …something magical…”
Akua’s craft, honed through hundreds of shows all over the world, has enabled her to experience the world. In our conversation, I found her simultaneous commitment to “the vast worlds of Blackness” and a wider humanity, striking – but in retrospect, unsurprising given the ways the art she creates resonates profoundly with audiences from Sao Paulo to Budapest to Khartoum.
“I’m a Pan-Africanist… I’m interested in, as you said, diasporic solidarity, I’m interested in the vast worlds of Blackness. Also, I’m interested in humanity…This is what I love about travel, it’s answered some questions, it’s raised others… What does it mean to be a human being? What does food look like in this place? What is the laughter like? … What kinds of stories do we tell children? What is considered appropriate and inappropriate? How do we dance? What do we dance to? What is the function of dance and movement in this particular space?”
In her evocative string of questions, Akua surfaced a paradoxical relationship between the particular and the universal. She noted how the more she travelled, the “Blacker” she became – partly in response to the anti-Black racism that plagues many societies around the world.
"I love black people. I’m ferociously, passionately, aggressively in love with black people, with the continent, with the African world."
Naru expresses this commitment through her lyrics, which uniquely demonstrate her intimacy with even the cartography of Africa:
“I could write the score to your laughter,
you stay by my side like Mozambique and Madagascar.” (Seraphim, 2015)
When I asked why she values the margins and the marginalised as a person born in the United States – the centre, she reminded me that,
“Toni Morrison taught us that we are going to do this work at the margins, and y’all are going to come and gather at the margins like it’s the centre, and so it is.”
This ethos, this cherishing of the ancestral voice of Toni Morrison, this placing of Africa at the centre, and the Black world at the forefront– this is how Akua Naru helps us all see the African in the African-American.
For more, listen here.
Show Notes:
The music featured in the episode includes Akua Naru’s own:
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Hip-hop artist and activist Akua Naru co-founded of the production and management company, The Urban Era. To date, she has released four albums: “...the journey aflame (2011)”, “Live & Aflame Sessions (2012)”, “The Miner’s Canary (2015)”, and “The Blackest Joy (2018).” She has recorded with Tony Allen, Eric Benét, Angelique Kidjo, Tuneyards, Questlove, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Christian Scott, Rah Digga, Mulatu Astatke, Bernard Purdie, Cody ChesnuTT, and more.
Akua has performed hundreds of shows in more than fifty countries across five continents with her 6-piece band. She has been an invited lecturer at Oxford, Cornell, Princeton, Brown, Fordham, University of Cologne (Germany), Ahfad University for Women (Sudan), and Pivot Point College (China), among countless others. Naru was a Nasir Jones Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University (2018-19) and is the current Race & Media Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity in America at Brown University.