When the rapper Stormzy bounded onto the stage at 2019’s Glastonbury Festival – spring-heeled and indomitable in a Banksy-designed stab-vest – it was an indisputable moment of triumph. But it wasn’t merely a significant victory for grime music or black culture in the United Kingdom. It was the culmination of a modern immigrant success story that had been building for at least half a century. For here, in the form of a 26-year-old second-generation British-Ghanaian from South Norwood, was evidence that a specific kind of black African Londoner had ascended to the top of the cultural hierarchy.
This is a story that begins not with the ‘Windrush Generation’ of Caribbean immigrants to Britain, but with post-1960s arrivals from African countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe and Congo. Some came from former British colonies in the wake of newfound independence; others seeking prosperity and an English education for their children. Now, in the 2020s, their descendants have unleashed a tidalwave of creativity and cultural production stretching from Lambeth to Lagos, Islington to the Ivory Coast. Daniel Kaluuya and Skepta; John Boyega and Christine Ohuruogu; David Adjaye and Lil’ Simz; Idris Elba and Edward Enninful – everywhere you look, across the fields of sport, business, fashion, the arts and beyond, there are people wielding huge influence who were raised in African families largely governed by the same immutable traditions.
In this book Jimi Famurewa, a British-Nigerian journalist, journeys into the hidden yet vibrant world of African London. Seeking to understand the ties that bind African Londoners together and link them with their home countries, he visits their places of worship, sits down at their dinner tables and restaurants, visits queer Afrobeat club nights, attends African Saturday schools, attempts to learn their languages and listens to their stories.
But this isn’t just a book of reportage and pleasant conversation with energetic, diverse Londoners. Jimi also uncovers a darker side, of racial discrimination between whites and blacks and, less well-known, between Africans and Caribbeans. He investigates the troublesome practice of ‘farming’ in which young black Nigerians were farmed out to white British foster parents, and reveals the friction between more conservative African customs and those of modern Londoners at the ‘limits of tradition’. This is a vivid new portrait of London as most of us have never seen her before.
