GSR-2020-3909-095

I hadn’t visited The Gambia in 11 years. This time I was travelling as an adult woman with a freshly awakened longing to feel and see what my father had experienced growing up in ’the village’ in the 1960s. I was travelling with my new boyfriend from London, about to go and shake the hands of the people who used to call my grandfather their Alkalo, a regional leader of the Mandinka tribe. My aunt, who I’m named after, would not be there anymore, she had passed a few years prior. Everyone asked about my younger brother, and then about my two older sisters. I told them my brother is very tall and looks like my dad. Everyone was pleased to hear this.

We arrived very late to the new compound my father just had built, the wet season made it difficult for my dad to navigate the dirt roads in the sheets of rain, I got soaked from the small crack in the window I had made to let the humidity out.

Waking up on our first morning in the village the house and its courtyard are buzzing with little girls under the age of 12, all my cousins who I had not yet met.  Roughly 60% of Africa’s population is under 25 years old, according to the bureau of statistics The Gambia’s 2.62 million strong population is rapidly growing. The majority of my new cousins are girls, my cousin Tida (or little sister according to the Mandinka) is 11 years old and showing me how to wash my clothes by hand with bore-water and washing-up powder, whilst teaching me phrases in Mandinka. Tida’s extremely bright and kind and I wish that she’ll visit me in London when she gets older. Maimuna and Aisha are younger, 3 and 8, the girls’ mother Binta cooks every meal for us and this makes me feel uncomfortable at times.

Binta, the girls and my uncle Modou live in the neighbouring compound from us, most Mandinka communities live in similar family compounds. Visiting family members and elders of the community I noticed that many of these compounds have a stencilled number hastily painted on the wall. I asked Modou about this, my uncle who doubles as the local school’s head teacher explained that these stencilled numbers are part of the government's effort to map a census of people living in the compounds. After returning home I called the Gambian High Commission to ask more about these numbers and it turns out that they serve multiple purposes - they are addresses, postcodes, proof of address, register of residents and also serve as an identifier to prevent the same compound being fraudulently sold to multiple families.

My uncle spoke about how he and my father liked playing music and writing songs when they were young. Modou said that becoming a musician was out of the question, the world was too different for him and my father back then. Maimuna likes to sing and makes up new songs all day long. My uncle says that it makes him happy to know that his daughter is growing up in a world where she can become a singer if she wishes to. He spoke of how none of my aunts went to school and how within one generation all the girls are now studying. Aware that modernisation doesn’t happen over night my uncle sighed patiently with a tender small smile on his face every time he said this phrase ”it’s a new world” during our conversations, sitting and drinking bitter green Ataya tea in front of his compound.

Now back home, I think about the view from our yellow tinted bedroom window of the bushy compound yard. I think about how one night I ran outside that bedroom pleading for my uncle to help me capture a small gecko on the wall. He laughs at me for being bothered by such a small and useful animal (they eat bugs from the house he tells me). Watching my uncle and my father, two typically tall and serious men, run around trying to catch this small animal  my chest bursts with joy. I think about the compound numbers and how much they’re attempting to communicate yet omitting so much of these special and tender fragments of family life. Our new compound number is GSR-2020-3909-095 and these rolls of film are my way of adding more to those letters and numbers painted on our compound wall.

Afro-European: How Does Self-Portraiture and Migration Help the Realisation and Expression of a Mixed-Race Black European Identity When Language Lacks the Means to Do So?

Introduction

I find terminology tricky when trying to describe who I am. I'm not a first-generation Finn nor am I first generation European. My mother's family has been in the North of the European continent for generations, even for centuries. I'm half Finnish and half Gambian but I don't feel like I'm half anything, I feel full, a well-rounded human being identifying fully with my black African identity and my Scandinavian self. I don't however feel equally as “white” as I feel “black”. Identity is formed simultaneously by our internal selves and the way the world sees us. Our identities are a complex sum of social and inner perceptions as Erikson explains:

“We deal with a process "located" in the core of the individual and yet also in the core of his communal culture.... In psychological terms, identity formation employs a process of simultaneous reflection and observation... “ (Tatum, 2000)

Growing up in Finland with a darker complexion, I was not seen as “white” or in often cases even Finnish regardless of my deep ties to my home country. As Hud-Aleem and Countryman write, “Race is a category manufactured or socially constructed to distinguish a group of people

based on physical characteristics” (Hud-Aleem & Countryman, 2008). Due to my physical characteristics, I was conditioned to see myself as black; there were not many examples of mixed-race identity in Finland during my formative years. Later in life as I began to understand the depths of one's identity, I understood that I can claim both terms, black and mixed-race. I'm using both terms interchangeably in this paper when discussing people like myself who have black ancestry mixed with another ethnicity as I consider us a part of a wider global black community.

I did, however, feel a disconnect with those of my friends who were black like me but who had

been born in the Congo and moved to Finland as children, or who had parents both who had been refugees from countries such as Somalia and relocated to Finland, frequently with extended family. Many of my Somali friends were surrounded by a large community of fellow nationals around them but I lacked a similarly prodigious circle of Gambians and West Africans, which I believe had an effect on how I constructed my identity. Many of my friends viewed themselves more as Africans than Europeans because that's how the mirror of their community would reflect their likeness. I couldn't fully share their experience nor was I able to do so with my white Finnish friends. I felt black and yet I also felt more European than many of my brown- skinned friends.

This dissertation is a chance for me to delve into some of the specifics of understanding and growing into one's full Afro-European identity. Through autoethnographic study, I will be analysing how self-portraiture might be a way, for a mixed-race black European such as myself, to express and understand our complex and contemporary identity, when European languages in many cases fail to do so. I acknowledge that there are multiple ways to define Afro- Europeanism and to whom this definition applies. To keep this body of work focused and close to my personal experience, I will be referring to people such as myself, black African and white European mixed-race people in Europe as Afro-Europeans or Afropeans, I’ve discussed the terms further in Chapter 1.

As an Afro-European photographer, engaged in the practice of self-portraiture, and as a trilingual person, I will be using personal accounts and linguistic case studies to construct my arguments. I will harness the narrative qualities of autoethnography as instructed by Chang (2008) when sharing my experiences and primary research conducted during the past months. I recorded my experiences by digital dictation. These recordings were emailed to Dora Mentzel on the 25th of January 2024. I will also be using three self-portraits of mine and their analysis as primary research to interrogate whether they have helped me to understand parts of my identity as an Afro-European person.

I will also discuss migration and travel as a means of self-discovery for Afropeans as it has been a big theme in my and others’ journeys, Johny Pitts’ Afropean being a great example of this. A large amount of this research was conducted, digested, and written down during my travels through South Asia, Europe, and Australia at the end of 2023. I was greatly inspired by Pitts’ ethnographic investigation within Afropean and his journey through Europe whilst writing. I

cherished a similar opportunity and privilege to travel the world whilst writing this dissertation. The self-portraits I’ve selected as a part of my primary research were taken in Finland in 2017, in London in 2020 and in Australia in 2023. As there are three years in between each image I believe them to offer a prolific and broad overview of the development of identity through self- portraiture.