From Bokoe Bullying to Afrobeats: Or how being African became cool in Black Amsterdam

This chapter explores contemporary West African popular music and dance in relation to the politics of blackness and Africanness in Afro-Europe. Contributing to current debates about the formation of new diasporic identities, I address the role that Afrobeats and Afrodance are playing in shifting the articulations of blackness and Africanness among young Afro-Caribbean and West African Dutch. Being hotly debated as part of identity politics, Africanness is also in fashion as a popular cultural style through which young people connect to and express their African roots. Based on anthropological research in Amsterdam, this chapter situates this trend towards African self-identification at the intersection of the global circulation of urban African popular culture and local shifts in the dynamics between Dutch Afro-Caribbeans and Ghanaians. I thus call attention to the practices of self-styling that are part of the process of becoming African. Discussing examples from the realm of music and dance, I argue that the current movement of “rebranding Africa” not only contests the marginalization of Africa and Africans in dominant Eurocentric narratives. It also reasserts the relevance of Africa(ns) in an emerging Black Europe, insisting on the distinctly African contribution to the larger project of black emancipation currently under way.