Naming Something Already There
The term "Afropean" did not originate with a single inventor issuing a manifesto. It circulated in scattered form for years — used by musicians, particularly in the world of Belgian-Congolese and French artists working across styles blending African, European, and diasporic influences, and by small cultural publications — before it became widely associated with a specific framework. Marie Daulne, lead singer of the Belgian group Zap Mama, is frequently credited among the earliest public users of the term in the 1990s, applying it to describe her own mixed Belgian-Congolese heritage and the hybrid musical style it produced.
For roughly two decades, "Afropean" remained a term used unevenly, mostly within music and small cultural circles, without a sustained written framework attached to it.
Johny Pitts and the 2019 Turn
That changed with the 2019 publication of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe by British writer and photographer Johny Pitts, of English and African American descent, raised in Sheffield. Pitts's book, part travelogue and part cultural essay, documented his own journey through Black communities across the continent — Clichy-sous-Bois outside Paris (covered in this course's Unit 8), Matonge in Brussels (Unit 6), Rinkeby in Stockholm, and other neighborhoods rarely treated as connected sites of a single, coherent Black European experience.
Pitts's central argument was structural rather than purely descriptive: that Black communities across European countries, despite living under entirely different national histories, languages, and legal systems, shared enough common structural position — as racialized minorities inside historically monocultural nation-states built on colonial extraction — to constitute a genuine, connected identity, distinct from both African American identity and continental African identity, worth naming and studying on its own terms.
Deliberately Not Diasporic in the American Sense
Pitts was explicit, in the book and in subsequent interviews, that he did not want "Afropean" to function as a European import of African American cultural and political frameworks — the specific vocabulary of the U.S. civil rights movement, or American-style racial categories that do not map cleanly onto European legal and social systems (a point this course has returned to repeatedly, from lusotropicalism's contrast with racial democracy in Unit 7 to France's colorblind universalism in Unit 8). His stated aim was closer to documenting a genuinely European Black experience on its own terms — shaped by specific European colonial histories, specific European welfare states, and specific European debates over secularism, integration, and citizenship that have no exact American equivalent.
Why This Matters
The two-decade gap between Zap Mama's 1990s usage and Pitts's 2019 book illustrates something important about how cultural concepts develop: "Afropean" existed as a lived reality and a loosely used term long before it had a defining text, suggesting the identity itself preceded, rather than was created by, the framework that eventually named it systematically.
