Recently, I was re-watching Nicole Amartefio’s creative show, An African City. The show follows the lives of five fabulous women friends, returnees to Africa, currently living in Accra, Ghana. The friends are from different African countries – Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana. They have moved “back home” from North American and European cities and have found each other in Accra. The show tells of their acclimatization to life in a cosmopolitan African city, including the search for property, careers, economic success, and most importantly, men. Every time I have watched An African City, the ghost that haunts its edges overwhelms me. This same ghost, a concession to heteronormative African futures, haunts many “Afropolitan narratives.” But it has yet to be named explicitly. Instead, attention has been primarily directed to the exclusionary class politics that Afropolitan, whether as an identity, genre, or social movement, has raised.
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