Africa Is a Country

The Bronx, Ghana

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

The Bronx, Ghana

By
Sean Jacobs

From a New York Daily News story (from earlier this year) about Twi (Ghanaian language) courses being offered at Fordham University in the Bronx:

The Bronx boasts 43,000 African immigrants – up from 25,000 in 2000 – and nearly 20,000 are from Ghana, according to census reports. Many others are Mandingo, West Africans who are primarily from Senegal, Gambia and Guinea. “Mandingo speakers are the fastest-growing African immigrant community in the Bronx,” said [Mark] Naison [professor of African-American studies and history at Fordham University]. “I bet at least 15 mosques have opened here in the past 15 years, founded by Muslims from Mali, Senegal, Gambia and Togo.” Fordham’s Twi course was widely reported on the radio and television news in Ghana last year … ]Mike Mohigh, a Fordham student from Ghana] said he expects demand for the course to grow. “When I take the bus and subway, everywhere I go I hear people speaking Twi,” he said. [Fordham sociology Prof. Bernard Hayford, who teaches Twi]says the Bronx and Ghana are now so closely linked that a suburban housing development near Accra, the African country’s capital, is named after the borough.

Further Reading

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.