Africa Is a Country

Darfur to Brooklyn

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Darfur to Brooklyn

By
Sean Henry Jacobs

Approximately 300 Darfuri immigrants from Sudan live in Kensington neighboorhood of Brooklyn in New York, making new lives.

On Sunday “The New York Times” published a photo essay on the daily lives of the approximately 300 immigrants from the Darfur region of Sudan who live in Kensington, Brooklyn. The images are by Dave Sanders, “a photojournalist who lives in nearby Park Slope, has been documenting the community since the fall of 2008.”

He was interviewed on The Times’ Lens Blog.  Sanders gets asked about his most memorable interaction:

I’d have to say the wedding, honestly. There was just so much energy and excitement and it did not stop. That wedding started very late at night and it went very early into the morning and it just didn’t slow down. It was impossible not to get caught up in that.

Actually, it was kind of funny. A number of people invited me. No one directly involved in the ceremony, but the community is such that anyone going felt like they could offer an invite to me. So I actually had about half a dozen invitations.

You can see the refugees, now migrants, doing, among other things, back-breaking work, at a wedding (above) and, Abdallah Abaker, a taxi driver, who paints in his free time.

We also learn that the largest group of Darfuris in the United States live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and that some move between there and New York City.

 

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

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The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.