Lucia Nixon, Wolfson College, Oxford

As a classical archaeologist, I take a long view of ‘Europe’. In Afropean, Johny Pitts visits seven countries. Five (Belgium, Germany, Holland, France, Portugal) were entirely or partly conquered/colonised by the Romans; these countries still, and incorrectly, insist on a pure, white ancestry dating back at least that far. (Challenging this assumption is unpopular: in the UK, Mary Beard was vilified for describing Roman Britain as racially mixed, despite good evidence). Pitts’ five countries became colonisers in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Sweden and Russia were different. The USSR invited people from Africa for political reasons, as Pitts explores. Sweden permitted immigration.

All seven countries (and the UK) are involved in non-reciprocal power relations, whereby European countries and their supposedly white values trump those from anywhere else. Pitts in Afropean is splendid on statues and museums as instruments of colonising power, such as where he talks about Tervuren’s Royal Museum for Central Africa close to Brussels (p.107ff). In Ostend earlier this year, the Belgian king Leopold II’s statue was vandalized for reasons Pitts helps us to understand. (See also Pitts’s October 2014 blog.)

For me, the sections on southern France are the high points of Afropean: Baldwin’s Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fanon’s Toulon, and above all, Claude McKay’s Marseille. Marseille, though not without its problems, is ‘a place where [Pitts] could exist in Europe without any question of belonging’ (336), a métis, mixed city (315), and ‘a physical embodiment of Afropea’ (336). Pitts mentions the arrival of Phocaean sailors in 600 BCE (318). It may be that a long archaeological gaze allows us to see this successful ‘transcultural tagine’ emerging even further back again (329). Europe has been Black and intermingled from its very beginning, and this makes Afropean as a study of that mixedness, a crucial book for our time.

Cite this: Nixon, Lucia. “A personal response to Afropean by a classical archaeologist.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 7 February 2026.

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This Writers Make Worlds and TORCH panel discussion was streamed live on 22 October 2020. It featured the author Johny Pitts in conversation about his ground-breaking travelogue Afropean, his 2019 notes on a journey around contemporary Black Europe. Together with Oxford academics Simukai Chigudu and Elleke Boehmer, Johny Pitts explored questions of black history, hidden archives, decolonization and community, and what it is to be black in Europe today.

Biographies

Johny Pitts is a writer, photographer and broadcast journalist, and the author of Afropean (2019). His work exploring African-European identity has received numerous awards, including a Decibel Penguin Prize and the Jhalak Prize. He has contributed words and images to the Guardian, the New Statesman and the New York Times.

Elleke Boehmer is a writer, historian, and critic. She is Professor of World Literature at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her most recent books are Postcolonial Poetics (2018) and To the Volcano (2019). She is currently on a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship working on a project called ‘Southern Imagining’.

Simukai Chigudu is Associate Professor of African Politics and Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. Simukai is interested in the social politics of inequality in Africa and his first book The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe came out in 2020. Prior to joining the academy, Simukai was a medical doctor in the UK’s National Health Service.

With thanks to the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford, Oxford Digital Media, and Tom Kirkby.

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Biography

Writing

Johny Pitts

One ‘cold October morning I set out in search of the Afropeans’, Johny Pitts begins his travelogue Afropean. The hope that fired him was to see the ‘rest of Europe through the eyes of black culture’, and find through conversation, music and wandering ‘a new configuration of ideas, connected to Africa and Europe but transcending both’ (59).

Afropean: Notes on Black Europe is a keynote response to our current decolonial and also divisive times—a reflective mosaic, and a lively though sometimes sober meditation on African identities in Europe. Across the travelogue, Johny Pitts follows often invisible pathways ways through the Black ‘frontier zones’ of some of Europe’s major cities—Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Moscow, Marseille, Lisbon—and encounters different African-origin communities and their complicated histories on his way. His deeply personal journey as a European with African roots also deeply mines collective Black history. As it unfolds, his travelogue composes a cumulative portrait of Afropean identity as cultural style, as beacon, as renewal, as European inflected radical hip hop, and as ribald anti-colonial and anti-capitalist critique.

Part-inspired by Caryl Phillips’ 1980s travelogue The European Tribe, Afropean explores what it means for Africans in Europe to live not so much ‘in limbo as … with liminality’ (4). At the same time, the book powerfully demonstrates that the so-called black periphery very much lies at the European centre, as Pitts says in the October 2020 YouTube interview featured on this page, quoting African American writer Toni Morrison. Afro-Caribbean and other African American writers and thinkers like James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon also inspire Pitts’ journey, and shape his reflections on the burden of black representation and the possibilities of cultural resistance.

Gathering pace and confidence as it goes, Afropean demonstrates how reframing our story in relation to our layered histories can bring new understanding of ourselves in our contexts. As Pitts writes, when Black roles are written into European history, ‘there are people you can identify with’ and this counteracts ‘the violence and depression of outsiderness’ (p.268). His book demonstrates that writing—and reading—can become a process of self-renewal and self-empowerment. For Pitts, Black history lies not in the past, but all around us; not only in the archive, but in the street.

Afropean is punctuated throughout with Johny Pitts’ own evocative black-and-white photographs and this adds significant depth to the story he tells. All the photographs feature Black Europeans, often on their daily commute and leading their ordinary and particular lives. Though they are also often overlooked and ‘invisible’, as Pitts explores, the photographs illustrate the extent to which Afropeans form part of the central warp and weft of Europe’s metropolitan life and culture.

—Elleke Boehmer, 2020

Cite this: Boehmer, Elleke. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 7 February 2026.

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