The Legacies of Empire in Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Mengestu's All Our Names

Abstract

Abstract While the Black Lives Matter movement is widely recognized and supported in Africa, its framing prioritizes experiences of anti-Blackness in the United States and the Black diaspora. This is partly owing to the movement's genesis as a direct response to domestic forms of anti-Blackness, including police brutality, disproportionate Black incarceration, and systemic inequalities, but also because, as Jemima Pierre argues, Africa is often perceived as “the site of racial otherness,” making engagements with racialization in Africa appear redundant. This paper considers how two contemporary African writers—Nigerian Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani and Ethiopian American Dinaw Mengestu—comment on anti-Blackness in Africa. This article views Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Mengestu's All Our Names as using trickster figures to critique the racially inflected narratives of modernity, Euro-American imperialism, and neoliberal capital in Africa. In the process, they invite us to join the dots between domestic patterns of anti-Black violence in the Black diaspora and Euro-American destruction of African lives through the debilitating systems of slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, and neoliberal capital in Africa. The two novels’ portraits challenge the Black Lives Matter movement's thin engagement with anti-Blackness in Africa by demonstrating how historic and ongoing dehumanization of Africans serves to normalize similar dehumanization of Afro-descended people across the globe.