What it means to be a black African in London

Since 2011, black Africans have been the dominant black group in the UK. Many of them are the descendants of those travellers who came to London in the 1950s from Nigeria, Ghana and Somalia and other African countries, seeking education and prosperity, and found a new home. They now not only hold prominent positions in British culture – from Bafta and Emmy award-winning Michaela Coel to the rap artist and publishing imprint founder Stormzy – but have reached those heights by using their experiences and heritage to explore what it means to be black British.

Settlers is the first book of Jimi Famuwera, a British-Nigerian journalist and broadcaster. In it he seeks to ‘carve out a distinct space for the African experience amid a black Britishness that can often default to a Windrush-adjacent West Indian story’. In doing so, he embarks on a personal exploration of what it entails to be a black African in London, what it means to settle, to assimilate, to be a custodian of tradition in a modern world, and what that costs. He takes the reader into London’s African communities, its churches and restaurants, tutor groups and nightclubs, markets and homes, and unpicks their history, complexity and future.

If the book is sometimes uncomfortable reading for a white Briton, it should be. Settlers is not an invective, or even really an admonishment, but it is plain in its criticism of empire:

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Diaspora is a word we use to denote an immigrant population away from its traditional homeland. But that it also suggests dispersal, displacement and exile is instructive. There is no untainted and uncolonised version of the mother country to return to. I am here because they were there.

Famurewa is a confident and energetic storyteller, and his journalistic background comes through strongly in the pictures he paints. He invites us to glimpse the ‘whir of seamstresses at work in tiny doorway operations off Dalston’s Ridley Road market’; the final ‘wiggling, glittery entity of pure joyful release’ at the Yoruba engagement ceremony of a British-Nigerian couple’s wedding celebrations; south London’s Studio 338, a daytime club that plays music at ‘sternum-juddering volume’; and a weekday morning on Goldhawk Road, where TM African Foods is ‘a whirl of colour and dazzling brightness and the kind of brusque, warm interaction that feels definably African’.

Unsurprisingly for the Evening Standard’s restaurant critic, Famurewa is particularly compelling when depicting and analysing London’s African restaurant scene, which he chronicles from the 1930s to the present – this year Ikoyi, a restaurant lauded for its West African cuisine, earned its second Michelin star. He deals deftly and sensitively with questions of authenticity (Ikoyi’s founders refuse to define it as a West African restaurant); who these restaurants are for; what is worthy of praise; and whether ‘relinquishing a degree of control is just a natural side effect of a food culture’s growing popularity’.

He also draws on his own heritage as a boy at school flustered into denial, having been accused of having a ‘big African nose’ and eating ‘bright orange rice’; as a teenager, the victim of racial slurs so old-fashioned he didn’t understand them; and as an adult with mixed feelings about attending services at mega churches.

Despite the obvious oppression and discrimination which has shaped the black African community, Settlers resists hopelessness. Famurewa describes himself as an optimist, and a feeling of joy, celebration and pride runs through the book. Amid the displacement, the code-switching and ‘cultural whiplash’, there is hope for the future:

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Maybe there is virtue in lives lived in the overlap of two cultures. Maybe you no longer need to pick a side. Maybe the new secret of squaring an African and British identity is to cultivate a way to be both.

Settlers is a pleasure to read, by turns lyrical, approachable, funny, sensitive and always well-researched. Famurewa is at his best when scene-setting, introducing the reader to characters, locations and situations that feel immediate and vibrant. He sweeps you along so thoroughly that you don’t realise until you close the book quite how much you have enjoyed it, how much you have learnt and how much it will stay with you.