Take a close look at New York, and it will reveal itself as a city more African in character than any metropolis on the African continent—nowhere else in the world is there a comparable concentration of diverse African experience.
At first glance, the city has a feel familiar to anyone who has lived in an African city. In most of it, the overwhelming majority on the bustling streets are people of colour. Rap, reggae and salsa—all music rooted, originally, in Africa—blare out from every direction, and the sidewalks are jammed with tables on which incense burns and Jamaicans, Senegalese, Malians, Ivoirians and Ghanaians sell everything from religious adornments to cheap sunglasses.
Homeless people wander by, transporting the means of their improvised urban existence in supermarket trolleys, while sidewalk hustlers and dagga dealers work their angles. The wealthier and mostly white elite spend their days in a few upmarket business and residential enclaves, while poorer people of colour survive in ghettos wracked by drugs, despair and violent crime. Besides the few who live downtown, New Yorkers tend to reside tribally, in neighbourhoods that correspond to specific ethnicities—the city is less a melting pot than a salad bowl.
Nowhere is the African family more in conversation with itself than in New York City. That dialogue encompasses the full extended family, incorporating long-lost cousins and even branches who might, at first glance, appear to belong to other families.
Sometimes their conversation is raucous and celebratory; other times it is mute, reflective and even cryptic. Sometimes it is imbued with the love and solidarity inherent in any family; at other times it is inflected with the squabbles and feuds common to most families. But the conversation never ceases. Of course these figures are dated, and the proportion of black and Latino residents is substantially higher, by all accounts. And here, of course, is one of the best-kept secrets of the African diaspora—Caribbean Latino cultures have maintained their deep roots in Africa.
