After my son was born last year, someone gave us a book to read to him about a giraffe that can’t dance. A few pages in comes this line: “Now every year in Africa, they hold the Jungle Dance.” Even though it’s a book I was reading to an infant, it struck me as tone-deaf not only to present a continent with fifty-four countries and multiple topographical regions as one monolithic entity but also to further the idea that it’s just a big jungle. One could say that’s a quibble, but it’s symptomatic of the West’s image of the continent, hardened into American pop culture by touchstones like The Lion King (for nearly a decade the highest-grossing animated film in history) and its subsequent Broadway musical (the highest grossing in history). The legacy of colonial power sometimes takes the form of entertainment with songs by Elton John.
When I brought the giraffe’s conundrum up with Tiffany Griffin, she immediately knew which book I was talking about: she’d read it to her daughter as well. And she was more than acquainted with the stereotype of Africa as one country full of animals. During the Obama administration Griffin worked as a monitoring-and-evaluation specialist and strategic adviser for USAID (United States Agency for International Development) with a focus on resilience and food security for a number of countries across Africa: Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Uganda, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Nigeria. The State Department under Secretary Hillary Clinton had an eleven-agency initiative called Feed the Future, and Griffin’s pedigree—she has a PhD in social psychology from the University of Michigan and did postdoctoral work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—made her a prime candidate to help establish parameters for strengthening resilience in vulnerable countries. “Secretary Clinton was feeling like we keep responding to the same crises in the same areas and in the same ways over and over and over again,” Griffin told me. “Bringing in food after every drought didn’t seem like the most effective or most efficient way to do development.”
The work involved visiting each country for weeks at a time, conducting interviews with residents, coordinating with embassy staff and partners in the field, and then synthesizing the data and submitting it to other branches of the government, the World Bank, the United Nations, and, ultimately, to legislators on Capitol Hill: “Congress has the purse strings and wanted proof that what we were doing was making a difference,” Griffin says. In the five years that she worked for USAID, she repeatedly encountered a dynamic consistent with much of her professional experience. Often the only African American person in the room, she found herself fighting to get others to consider her perspective: that resilience was partly a function of one’s context, a skill honed by years of navigating systemic adversity. This view often clashed, she says, with the American notion that being poor is the result of poor choices.
Griffin’s youth also informed her work and her worldview. She grew up in the 1980s in Springfield, Massachusetts, a midsize city where multiple communities—Black, white, Puerto Rican, Vietnamese—lived in the same neighborhoods. When the twin epidemics of crack and HIV hit Springfield, she says, it turned into a “war zone.” She saw people she knew transformed by the experience, to the point of becoming unrecognizable. But she also saw American media, including films made by Black directors, not considering an important nuance—that you could have a strong moral compass but be pulled in the wrong direction by social, economic and political circumstances. She went to Boston College with the goal of becoming a documentary filmmaker, but she found psychology to be a more compelling path.
These days Griffin works in a very different sphere. She and her husband are the owners of Bright Black, a social enterprise in Durham, North Carolina, that celebrates Blackness by sharing stories carefully curated through candles and fragrances. Their “scent stories” have been commissioned by the NBA, the WNBA, director Jordan Peele, Michelle Obama, and Project Backboard, an organization dedicated to renovating public basketball courts. In 2022, to celebrate the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, they created a scent called SUPREME, consisting of juniper, orange blossom, and bay. The candle artwork also featured a reimagined image of Lady Justice holding her scales, but with brown skin and dreadlocks. (Justice Jackson is now a frequent purchaser of that candle, Griffin says.)
Griffin and I met twice at coffee shops in Durham. She was in between stressful work situations and picking up her daughter each time, but she was intent on our discussions: “This is the chill part of my day,” she chuckled at one point.
Not all conversations are as linear or succinct as they appear. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.—Ed.
TIFFANY GRIFFIN
© Allie Mullin Photography
Cohen: I want to ask you something related to your background in psychology. Based on the time you spent in these different countries, how do you think geography affects psychology?
Griffin: I’m not a clinical psychologist; I’m a social psychologist. The field of social psychology was born in the late 1940s. Prior to that, the belief was that attitudes and behaviors are either learned or inherited. So if you wanted to change someone’s attitude or behavior, you had to change the person. In the late 1940s, however, a group of scholars, many of whom were trying to understand the underpinnings of the Holocaust, said that the prevailing views of that time—namely, that personality drives behavior—were not sufficient for explaining how the Holocaust had been allowed to happen. It wasn’t enough to simply say, “Hateful, deranged people do hateful, deranged things.” Although a portion of actors throughout the Holocaust were absolutely hateful and deranged, that didn’t completely explain the masses who participated or allowed the Holocaust to happen. The average German person didn’t necessarily hate Jews. But they did really like their comfort, and they focused more on that comfort than on the plight of a group of people they had “othered” in their minds. Even German government officials and people in the armed forces in Germany often indicated that they were just following orders. These forces together—a large group of everyday people turning a blind eye to what was going on, another group of people who focused on following orders, and a third group of people who harbored hatred—led to the Holocaust.
So these scholars, psychologists at the time, decided to do a series of experiments to try to understand how you could get normal people to do things that are absolutely insane. Many of these studies became known as “obedience studies.” And the conclusion they came to was that attitudes and behaviors are a function of the individual and the social context. It’s an interaction between the two. The social context, in Germany and elsewhere, pulled certain behaviors out of people that led to the Holocaust. Had the context been different, behaviors would have been different. At least, that was the conclusion of these early social psychologists. Before that time, psychology focused almost exclusively on characteristics of the individual. But here was this new branch of psychology saying that if you take the same individual and put them into different contexts, you can get completely different behaviors from that person. The idea fascinated me because it opened up all sorts of pathways to social change I hadn’t thought about before. Before learning about social psychology, I thought people alone had to be changed in order to make a difference in the world. But realizing that context could be changed to make such a difference was really intriguing to someone like me, who had grown up in a pretty horrible context.
Cohen: What context are you talking about?
Griffin: I grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. In the eighties it was hit very hard by HIV and crack. By 1987 or so a lot of businesses were boarded up. There were crackheads all around; people were abandoning their babies, stealing things. But to reduce the problem to “these are bad people doing bad things” didn’t feel fully sufficient. I knew a lot of these people, many of them really well, and they weren’t wholly bad. They were kind and helpful and compassionate, and at times they also made really horrible decisions in the midst of addiction and poverty and violence. They were complex. And social psychology showed me that it was the context that pulled some of this bad behavior out of these people. Had the context been different, they would likely have exhibited different behaviors. That was a big part of why I gravitated toward social psychology.
Now, to your question of geography and psychology. In short, yes, I’d have to imagine that geography impacts the psychology of people in different places. With respect to Africa, it’s hard to talk about it overall, but for me, one big difference between the African continent and the US is that Black people are a numerical majority there. Something about being in a majority created a sense of assuredness and comfort that I don’t often have in the US. Just being able to blend in. Clearly I’m American, but when I was in an African country, people would often interact with me as if I were one of them. And in Ethiopia in particular, some people would even come up and start speaking to me in Amharic. I think that experience does something to you.
When you’re part of a numerical majority and you look like everybody around you, that sends you a message about inclusivity and belonging. In the United States, people of African descent are in a minority, and spaces are incredibly segregated by race. It’s a different experience than when you walk into a space in an African country and people don’t look twice; you’re not questioned on whether you should be in that space.
Cohen: My question was more about whether, in the different countries you visited, the geography’s effect on psychology was different.
Griffin: I would have to say yes, but I’m trying to get my head around what we mean by the psychology. I don’t know that different places have just one psychology. But different countries definitely have different energies, different feelings, different vibes. At least, I think they do! I’ll give you examples: When I got to Rwanda for the first time, in 2011 or 2012, I was riding around in Kigali, which feels a little bit like The Jetsons, because everyone’s zipping around on these motorbikes, and the streets are so clean you could almost eat off of them. They’ve banned plastic bags. There’s no litter. They have these community-cleanup days. And yet there was a sense of being right on the verge of something exploding. It was like, at any moment, something’s going to pop off. And there was no reason to think that something was on the verge of erupting: Rwanda was, for all intents and purposes, one of the safest places in East Africa at the time I was last there. But there was also this palpable tension. It made the air almost thick. People were hyperaware of their surroundings. They made piercing eye contact. All that felt, to me, like a byproduct of having experienced the trauma of genocide.
The energy was different in Uganda or Kenya or Ethiopia or Senegal. When I got to Kenya, for example, there was this vivaciousness. I remember feeling like I wanted to samba through the airport—like, “Let’s go!” [Laughs.] In Ethiopia, by contrast, the atmosphere was very stern. Once, I couldn’t find my yellow-fever vaccine card at the airport upon entering the country, and I was really worried. They were not smiling. It was all about rules and order. In Senegal there’s an energy that I often describe as regal, like you’re walking among royalty. I don’t know how to describe it—the colors, the clothes, the dress, the calls to prayer, the smell in the air, the look in folks’ eyes. So, absolutely, different African countries have really different energies, different vibes, no doubt created by geography, history, language, culture, religion, and current events.
Most Americans don’t know history, and they definitely don’t know African history. The few who do have been taught in systems that largely don’t value Africa.
Cohen: What was your takeaway of how the American government views the continent of Africa?
Griffin: Well, I’m not sure about the government as a whole, but from my experience, there were different factions. There was a cadre who felt like people on the continent know the continent best, so we should be equal partners—or maybe unequal partners, with the weight put on people in Africa to make decisions and lead. And then there was an old-guard, white-savior-complex faction as well: “We’re going to come in and save these people; we know best.”
I often battled thаt attitude with respect to my work at USAID. I was tasked with helping the government define, measure, and design programs that would build resilience in some of the most vulnerable places on the planet. As a psychologist, I went in with the assumption that there were strengths in these communities, despite the vulnerabilities. As a social psychologist in particular, I assumed that we should be changing context, not exclusively trying to change people, their attitudes, or their behaviors. And as a social psychologist who had studied racial identity, racial discrimination, group dynamics, and decision-making, I brought a lens about race and history and power to my work in the government that wasn’t shared by most of my peers. This is because international development is dominated by economists who have very specific definitions of success. According to many of the economists I worked with, you couldn’t be both resilient and poor. It was antithetical to how they saw the world and to how they viewed the communities we were working with. Psychological research argues exactly the opposite: you most often find resilience among those who face the most hardship. I viewed the communities that we worked with—again, some of the poorest people in the world, many of whom were in Africa—as actually the most resilient. So, in my view, many of the economists I worked with needed a mental shift so that they could entertain the idea that the poor communities we worked with actually already held certain capacities that could help them escape poverty.
My starting point was undoubtedly a function of being a social psychologist, but it also came from being a Black American who had escaped poverty myself. There are assets that you develop—tenacity, grit, perseverance, and also social connection, support, and networks—that come from traversing negative circumstances like poverty. I partially saw myself and my journey in the lives of the African communities I worked with while in the government. It was a set of perspectives that met a lot of resistance from my peers and colleagues at the time, but I believe that my bringing these perspectives to my work at USAID actually did a lot of good, and hopefully had some lasting impact.
The other lens through which a lot of people viewed Africa was strategic. It’s resource rich. I would do briefings with different parts of the US government, for example, that viewed the continent as a pawn in a chess game of world politics. They felt that if it’s not the US controlling things there, then it will be China or Russia. So they figured keeping things stable on the continent helped the US stay in control of natural and other resources and also indirectly kept Americans safer by tackling groups like Boko Haram or al Shabaab. I don’t know how accurate any of that really is, but there are definitely people in parts of the government who think like that. They were interested in the resilience work I was doing because of the implications it had for the strategic importance of Africa. So there’s this utilitarian foreign-policy dynamic as well.
Cohen: Those differences you described between the old guard and the folks who felt the need to be equals—were those differences generational?
Griffin: I think they were more based on personality differences and people’s previous experiences—or lack thereof—with people of color. I wouldn’t say, “The older people felt this way, and a super-liberal, extra-woke younger group was fighting against them.” I was constantly fighting with younger people too. USAID in particular was mostly former Peace Corps folks who prided themselves on being worldly. But it’s this candy-coated veneer of worldliness where they can drop the name of any world capital. They have the technical knowledge, but if you ask them if they have any Black friends in DC, the answer is no, and that shows in their work. So, no, I would not characterize it as purely generational.
International development is a very white space, and the few people of color there are almost all first-generation Americans. People would often joke with me—though it’s kind of not funny—“You’re a Black unicorn,” because there were so few African Americans in the field. And there were nuances and perceptions and dynamics around oppression that I brought with me to the work. So it was novel for my colleagues to hear what I was saying about how poverty is systemic and a function of power dynamics and to have to grapple with that conception of poverty in a work environment.
In the eighties, America’s aid for Africa was just as much about the American ego as it was about Africa’s support. I don’t think African aid in the eighties was motivated by a deep understanding of power structures and the role of colonialism.
Cohen: As a Black American, how do you see this country’s relationship to the continent culturally—the attitude we have toward it?
Griffin: I think the prevailing attitude of most Americans toward Africa is that it’s a backward, stunted, unrefined land of need. Most Americans don’t know history, and they definitely don’t know African history. The few who do have been taught in systems that largely don’t value Africa. I can understand why people are ignorant in the purest sense of the word, but it’s not a neutral ignorance; it’s an ignorance that’s filled with stereotypes and misinformation.
In the government there was also an unspoken belief at times that Africans are hard to work with. Like, there’s an Ethiopian statistician I worked with—brilliant guy. My colleagues were constantly shocked that he was not going to let Americans push him around. The Ethiopian people in general have a certain pride. I think it’s because they have such an astounding grasp of their own history. Anyway, at work I would hear Americans say things like “The Ethiopians are so hardheaded.” I would think to myself, No, they’re just not pushovers. They’re resilient. They know they’ll get through whatever life throws at them, with or without the Americans. I think that was a tough pill for my American colleagues to swallow. Many of them sought deference, wanted to be needed, wanted to feel like an authority. I personally didn’t find the Ethiopians hard to work with at all—definitely no harder than Americans were to work with!
Cohen: There’s a moment in the recent Netflix documentary The Greatest Night in Pop, about the recording of the benefit single “We Are the World”: All these stars are gathered in a studio to sing at three or four in the morning, and Stevie Wonder starts singing the lyrics in Swahili. Someone stops him, saying that it’s not the language that’s spoken in Ethiopia—which was the famine-gripped country the song was raising money for, though the supergroup was called USA for Africa. Now, that song to me, as a white kid in the 1980s, was one of my first exposures to the idea that something awful was happening in a different part of the world. But when I saw that scene in the documentary, I started to wonder about what that particular moment did for Americans’ view of Africa. It painted the entire continent with the same brush, and it also created this idea that Africa was always going to need help.
Griffin: Drought conditions are becoming more frequent and more extreme around the world and particularly in the Horn of Africa, which has implications for agriculture, health, and of course hunger, but Ethiopians do not want to be the poster children of famine again. Many of them feel that they are still fighting the 1984 image of their country.
I can also see some of this here today—the tendency to paint Africa in broad strokes, I mean. My daughter attended an international school in Durham, and every month they would dig deep into a different continent. My daughter came home with this little book on Africa made out of colored sheets stapled together, and there were just animals inside. I was fuming. There was a tiger in the book! So not only did they reduce an entire continent to a horrible stereotype, but they got it wrong: there are no tigers native to Africa! I emailed the teacher and asked if I could come in and do a unit on Ethiopia for Africa month. She agreed, and I just went whole hog. I made two sets of flash cards. I brought in coffee; Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee. I brought Ethiopian food. I told them how the first Homo sapiens lived in what is now Ethiopia. I talked about ancient kingdoms, queendoms, language, culture. I brought all these artifacts for the kids to play with. I played them music. I played a video featuring major cultural dances from across Ethiopia. I became basically a teacher for the day just to humanize this continent through the humanization of Ethiopia. The folks at that school are arguably not bigots, right? They’re not screaming, “We don’t like Black people!” But they have grown up in a system that doesn’t know African history or about African monuments or about African technology or customs and practices; that doesn’t humanize African people; that doesn’t understand current events there. So it was of no surprise that they wouldn’t treat Africa the same way that they treated the other continents. It was of no surprise that they sent my daughter home with a book of animals—and not even an accurate one. This example may seem trivial, but it’s actually really insightful. This was in kindergarten. Americans have countless experiences like this over their lifetimes, which is why they develop such a shallow and often misinformed understanding of Africa.
Cohen: Do you feel like there were other moments in your lifetime like “We Are the World” that encouraged stereotypes about Africa in the US?
Griffin: We aren’t taught much about Africa in the US. When I was young in the eighties, Africa was basically characterized by two things: famine and apartheid. In public school I did not learn anything aside from “There is a continent called Africa.” I didn’t understand the differences between the north, south, east, and west of the continent or have any knowledge of its countries. That’s a function of American public education. Eventually, in college, I traveled to Antigua and then to Cape Verde, and that was my first understanding that there is this thing called a Black Diaspora. I discovered that, while there are cultural differences, of course, there are also common threads that unite people of African descent, whether they live on the continent or in the Caribbean or in other parts of the world. Those experiences were also the sparks that led to my current incredibly positive views of Africa as strong, creative, joyful, connected, and resilient.
Cohen: In the period you and I grew up in, America viewed different Black communities with different lenses: There were Black communities in the US, like Springfield, where the effects of crack and HIV were devastating and the term “welfare queen” had become part of the vernacular. The cultural view on these communities was “That’s their own fault, so we don’t need to support them.” And then there was the famine in Ethiopia, to which Americans were saying, “These people are in need, so we’re going to help them.”
Griffin: Yep, in one instance there’s blame. In the other there’s pity. Both are dehumanizing. In the eighties, America’s aid for Africa was just as much about the American ego as it was about Africa’s support. I don’t think African aid in the eighties was motivated by a deep understanding of power structures and the role of colonialism. Americans didn’t humanize Africans so they could feel connected to them. It was just pure pity. Largely uninformed pity. These days we’re not even seeing that. Look at what’s happening in Sudan right now. There is a crisis that is just as bad as the famine in 1984, if not worse, in terms of humanitarian need, but most Americans do not even know it’s happening, let alone who the factions are that are fighting and just how bad things really are there. I think it’s partly because the conflict is in Africa and also partly because there’s just so much tumult in the world right now that people’s brains can’t hold it all. There weren’t so many major conflicts going on at one time in the eighties. I’m just not sure humans are built to hold this much suffering in their consciousness at one time.
In the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s addiction in the US was construed as a choice. There was little to no compassion then. That stands in total contrast to how addiction is characterized now during the current opioid crisis. One of the biggest differences between then and now is the race of the addicts.
After college, my first job was at Boston Medical Center, the only public hospital in the city of Boston, which is bananas—that a major city only has one public hospital. No train went there directly. This was how I first started to piece together that racism is structural, not just interpersonal. I’d taken the job because I thought maybe I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. I was working on a research team, interviewing individuals who were infected with both HIV and hepatitis C and were also alcoholics. Doctors were really unsure how to treat this population, because HIV medications at the time deteriorated your liver, and so did hepatitis C. I came in to do psychological interviews, to complement the clinical side of the research. Most of my patients were Black and poor, and many had been IV drug users, which is common with those types of coinfections. And because they were alcoholics, they had this other layer of complexity and mental illness. We paid people twenty or thirty dollars for participating in an interview. But first we had to ask a series of questions called the Mini Mental State Exam [MMSE] to see if people were coherent enough to go forward with the interview—questions like “What day of the week is it?” “Where are you?” and “What city are you in?” Just basic stuff.
Early on in my training for this job, a guy failed the MMSE, which had never happened before on this study. The person I was training with was clearly flustered, and she said, “I’m sorry, you can’t be in the study.” And he said, “OK, give me my twenty bucks.” She wouldn’t, and it escalated. The way this relates back to structure, though, is that I think if someone wealthy had come in to do the study and hadn’t qualified, the interviewer would have said, “Thank you for your time. Here’s your compensation.” But because he was a poor Black person, there was that resistance. I was twenty-one years old at the time. We met as a team to discuss the situation, and I couldn’t believe how resistant everyone was to putting in a protocol to pay people for their time, whether they passed the MMSE or not. I remember participating in these team meetings and saying, “They deserve the same amount of respect. If they can’t do it, it’s not their fault. Pay them for their time.” I was the only Black person in the room—that’s been a thread throughout my life—and I was having to fight for this man to be seen as a person worthy of respect. The study was set up in a way that made this man’s humanity invisible.
Cohen: In the countries you went to in Africa, did you see anything like the type of substance-abuse epidemics we have here?
Griffin: Alcoholism was a huge problem throughout East Africa, which is where I spent most of my time. It was very gendered as well—most of the people battling alcoholism were men, which led to a ton of gender-based violence and abuse. And there was also khat. You’d see people nodding out and sitting on the road chewing it.
Cohen: Did the problem have to do with a lack of economic opportunities for men?
Griffin: Africa’s population is young. If those young people don’t have viable pathways to self-determination and employment, it leads to a desire to escape, which I think is very similar to here. People are like “I’m working my ass off, and for what? I still can’t afford anything!” Why wouldn’t you want to escape that?
Cohen: Did you get a sense that young people were pushing back against the extractive dynamics the rest of the world had imposed upon their countries, or was it just accepted?
Griffin: I definitely met some folks, particularly in Ethiopia, whose attitude toward aid workers was “You don’t walk on water because you’re from the West. We don’t care what you have. We don’t care what you say you’re going to give us. You’re no better or worse than anyone else. We’re starting from the point that we are equals.”
A lot of Ethiopians were also learning to speak Mandarin. They knew the Chinese were in their country, doing these long-term projects, and they were learning the language in hopes of leveraging economic opportunities they might get from the Chinese. I don’t know if learning Mandarin and engaging with the Chinese in this way indicates acceptance or just an acknowledgment of geopolitical dynamics: “I can play the game.”
Cohen: Some statistics have 40 percent of the continent’s population currently under the age of fifteen. That growth in numbers of youths could be extremely destabilizing if those opportunities don’t come to fruition.
Griffin: I think people are expecting that.
Cohen: People there?
Griffin: I don’t know about people there, but people here are definitely expecting it. The US government has entire offices that focus just on youth. At the time I was working at USAID, you had to think about how youth would be integrated into whatever programs you were designing, to make sure there were opportunities for them. So there’s some acknowledgment that this is a dynamic that is going to have a major impact in the very near future. And you can either leverage it, or it may destabilize a country and take you by surprise.
Nairobi, Kenya, 2023
© Michael Mwasi (FILMWASI)
Cohen: There was a recent piece in Granta by an American journalist about the presence of the Wagner Group in the Central African Republic. [A Russian private military organization, the Wagner Group has expanded its footprint in multiple African countries, propping up certain leaders in exchange for stakes in mining, coffee, or other resources. The group operates with relative impunity, using violence against the populations of these countries to further its interests.—Ed.] At one point the journalist speaks to one of the advisers to the country’s president, who basically says, “Yeah, of course these Wagner guys are horrible, but they’re providing something the United States never could”—development of oil, processing of minerals, creation of income. “So we’ll take that over the alternative.” They view the Wagner Group as the lesser of two evils, because the US attitude for many decades seems to have been altruistic in theory, but in reality that altruism is a form of control.
Griffin: I genuinely worked with great people who wanted to do great work and didn’t seem to harbor extractive ideologies. I can’t say that everyone felt that way, but many of the people I worked with were pretty motivated to do good in the world. That said, many across the continent of Africa feel like working with different foreign partners is essentially picking between the lesser of two evils.
Cohen: I read another story recently about the business of “remittances”: money Nigerian expats send back to families and friends. There was a statistic in there I found stunning: the Kenyan government is trying to put its people in one million jobs a year overseas to boost its foreign-currency reserves from remittances. The idea of sending young people away to build the country’s economy was surprising to me.
Griffin: I actually think what they’re doing is kind of smart. It recognizes that we live in a highly interconnected world economic system. If you analyze the system and see levers you can pull to create the outcomes you want, then you pull those levers. In the US we tend to think of people moving away to find jobs as a “brain drain,” because there’s no economic feedback loop. But the reason why this remittance system does work is because there is a feedback loop. If leaving the country equips individuals with assets, education, and income that also gets looped back into the country, that seems like a good thing to me. Where it gets complicated is: What portion of your GDP do you want to be dependent on this feedback loop? And what are the vulnerabilities of that? For a lot of families we surveyed, their number-one or number-two income source was remittances. And that creates a certain level of economic fragility you don’t see with a resource you can more directly control, like some facets of agriculture. But if remittances are one component of households’ livelihoods, then having different income streams in this way could actually be pretty advantageous, like a buffer.
The mentality of those expats is not just a promise to send money back. They want to. They’re honored to. I personally find it admirable.
Cohen: In 2017 I wrote a profile of a Ghanaian man at the University of North Texas who at the time was the only tenured professor of “African drumming”—a term that conflates all the styles of music on the continent into one—in the US. He had worked with the American composer Steve Reich when Reich traveled to Ghana in the 1970s and then came back and wrote his groundbreaking piece called Drumming. In doing research for the article, I found there were not many music-education programs in the country that featured music from Africa, and even many HBCUs didn’t have any African-studies courses. One of the sources I spoke to was a white American academic who had done musicological work in Ghana, and he said the reason a lot of those schools don’t have such programs is because American Black culture views Africa as a backward, dirty place. Now, his experience as a white man didn’t make his narrative the most reliable, but what I took away from writing the article was that there’s a dissonance in American academia when it comes to the continent’s history and culture. What was your experience?
Griffin: I disagree that African Americans think Africa is backward. As far as academia goes, in grad school and as a postdoc I found there was a lot of openness and genuine curiosity and inquisitiveness around not just Africa, but the African diaspora. For example, I did some comparative work looking at racial identity in the US, Brazil, and South Africa, and the implications of identity for public policies in each context, like affirmative action. The work was encouraged by my academic advisers, not viewed negatively. This was at a time when both Brazil and South Africa were looking to the US for help with how to implement affirmative action. You can’t implement affirmative action if you don’t know who’s who. In a country like Brazil, where there are more people of African descent than anywhere outside of Africa, some citizens most people would characterize as white were trying to milk the system by finding a great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather who was Black, then saying, “I’m Black,” as a way to get into school; they were leveraging their privilege to take advantage of a system that was trying to create equity.
We were working with the Brazilian government and explaining how it couldn’t use the US self-identification system, because there are something like 136 different racial categories in their country. [Laughs.] Most people who would be considered Black in the US wouldn’t describe themselves as Black in Brazil. They would describe themselves as “café con leche” or “canela” or something like that. I would say, though, that the US seems to be moving backward with respect to widespread societal openness and enthusiasm for cultural study. Just look at what’s happening with state legislatures prohibiting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at public universities, and high schools losing AP classes, and K-12 curriculum debates, and banning books, and all of the other opposition to equipping people with knowledge. There’s a clear resurgence in racism.
Cohen: A lot of white people writing about postcolonial Africa describe the building of nations or states on the continent as a “failure.” In your time there, did you get the sense that Africans themselves would use the term failure?
Griffin: You cannot come to the conclusion that an experiment has failed if it’s been intercepted. Just look at the case of Thomas Sankara [the former president of Burkina Faso and a vehemently anti-imperialist leader, who was assassinated in 1987—Ed.]. He was such an inspirational leader, full of integrity, incredibly charismatic, kind of like [American Black Panther] Fred Hampton. His assassination, which is often offered as a classic case of Western intervention in Africa, led to horrible destabilization. I often wonder what Burkina Faso and West Africa more broadly would have been like had Sankara lived.
In an earlier era there was more of a desire to work with the West as allies and partners. Perhaps African nations saw a constrained set of possibilities around their future, and to get where they wanted to go, they believed they needed these partnerships. Particularly in the eighties and nineties, and even the early 2000s, there was the idea among African nations that “this is how you do it: you work with the Americans.” More recently, however, I think a lot of Africans are feeling really frustrated at the legacy of working with the West. Now there’s more of a sentiment like “If you just leave us alone, we’ll figure it out. It might be rocky, and it might take some time. But we’ll get there.”
You can see this in the recent election in Senegal. [Bassirou Diomaye Faye, a left-wing candidate who spoke of ending the “French economic stranglehold” on Senegal, was elected.—Ed.] The election was backed by an almost electric sense of empowerment on behalf of Senegalese voters. It remains to be seen what happens there with such a smart, charismatic young leader who’s very anti-corruption. I’m optimistic and pretty energized by the political landscape in Senegal.
So you can’t say there’s been a failure of democracy in Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, or Latin America, because there’s been constant American and Western intervention in these places. And when countries have tried to withstand intervention, like Cuba did, we crush them with sanctions. So is Cuba “failed”? Maybe if they’d been allowed to be an active partner in the world, like China was allowed to be, the outcome for Cuba would have been very different. All of that being said, many Africans, particularly the youth, have legitimate grievances around the inability of their governments to create and maintain structures that allow them to thrive. And a lot of that is connected to corruption. But not all of it.
To help is to be human. That’s put so beautifully, and it’s not how we move through life in a country as individualistic as the United States.
Cohen: On the flip side, is there a different view of what “success” would be for people in the countries that you worked with, and how would it differ from the way the US government might define it?
Griffin: I don’t know what the overall US government’s definition of success in Africa is. Maybe countries being remade in America’s image? I don’t personally define that as success.
Within the work I was doing in economic development, success was defined as reducing the rate of poverty, reducing the severity of poverty among people who were already poor, and reducing hunger, particularly by improving children’s nutrition. Some of the qualitative research that we were doing was related to connectivity and social networks. I remember in the Somali region of Ethiopia a person told us, “To help is to be human.” If they had a good harvest, they were going to help their neighbor no matter what: it wasn’t enough for just their family to do well; they needed to share. A lot of folks on my team asked, “Why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you save the extra for later and invest in yourself or in your market? How are you ever going to get out of poverty if every time you have some left over, you share it with someone else?” My hope would be that Africans don’t lose that sentiment of connectivity shared in that household survey. To help is to be human. That’s put so beautifully, and it’s not how we move through life in a country as individualistic as the United States. We could learn a lot from that aspect of African cultures.
I think another dimension of how Africans define success is severing ties to the West and ending foreign exploitation. So this movement we’re seeing in West Africa to basically kick the West out—that’s how they’re defining success. They’re saying to the West, “Why do you have all these military bases here? You did it under the guise of helping us protect ourselves, and all we’ve seen is a proliferation of terrorist groups. So clearly it’s not working.” I think it’s bold. They want to figure this out themselves. It remains to be seen whether that’s the right move, but I think it’s what true independence looks like.
There’s a feeling in Africa right now that the West has been unable to fulfill its part of the bargain. Whether that’s because the West is focused on extracting resources or because it’s inept, I don’t know. But there’s clearly a shift in African nations’ ideas about who’s going to help them be the countries they want to be. I think some countries are betting on China and Russia.
China, for example, has done development very differently than America has. They come in and stay for a long time. The US has three-to-five-year projects; China’s are more like ten-to-twenty. They build infrastructure; the US won’t build infrastructure. So Africans are seeing, “I didn’t have a road. Now I have a road. There wasn’t a bridge. Now there’s a bridge. There’s a train system in Addis Ababa now because the Chinese built one.” If you see these very tangible benefits, you’re going to take that bet over US talk. But I don’t necessarily think the United States is the best bet either.
At the end of the day, I think all those bets are wrong. China is racist. Russia is racist. The US is racist. These countries, by and large, are not saying, “We love and respect Africans and people of African descent. They’re our equals.” None of them. Which is why Africans need to bet on each other. The Black Diaspora and the Global South need to bet on and support each other. When we rely on and leverage our own capacities, our own definitions of success, and our own notions of humanity, we’ll thrive.
