1 Introduction

This article explores the literary representation of Afropean hybridity in Nikki May’s 2022 novel Wahala. It features three protagonists – Ronke, Simisola, Bukola – and one shared antagonist, Isobel. The sisterly trio is British-Nigerian, while Isobel is Russian-Nigerian. Ronke, Simisola, and Bukola belong to the London middle class. Ronke is a dentist and engaged to her Nigerian boyfriend, Kayode. Simisola is a fashion marketer and married to a white Englishman named Martin, whereas Bukola is a research scientist married to the Frenchman Didier, with whom she shares a mixed-race daughter, Sofia. The novel is mostly set in London and partially in Lagos. Narrated from the omniscient point of view, the plot structure revolves around the three best friends as focalisers, which is why each chapter is sequentially captioned as “Ronke,” “Boo,” and “Simi.” By contrast, Isobel villainously appears in all chapters.

I argue that the self-perception and cultural practices of these characters shape their Afropean hybridity in ways that extend the discourse of Afropolitanism and challenge the politics of contingent belonging. As theorised by Felipe Espinoza Garrido et al., contingent belonging refers to

how European publics engender and naturalise normative whiteness while subjecting people of colour, irrespective of their social status or class, to […] a conditional belonging that is strategically granted and revoked, meted out by “white Europe” when useful to its own interests.¹

However, the Afropean identities of Ronke, Simisola, Bukola, and Isobel undermine the racialised logic of normative whiteness and conditional belonging. Thus, despite being subjected to forms of institutionalised discrimination, the four protagonists exist as both Europeans and Africans, or as Europeans of African origin.

Indeed, Nikki May and her four protagonists belong to an elite class of African immigrants generally called Afropolitans, who have the privilege of travelling around the world. Although migrant writers hardly self-identify as Afropolitans (with the notable exception of Taiye Selasi and Teju Cole)² and others (for example Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)³ categorically reject the label, they represent what Isidore Okpewho has described as the new African diaspora. For Okpewho, the old African diaspora derived from the precolonial upheavals of the transatlantic slave trade, while the new African diaspora is a product of postcoloniality and globalisation.⁴ What also distinguishes the new generation of African immigrants is the fact that they manage to secure permanent residence due to their educational qualifications and skilled labour.⁵ It is in this general sense that these African immigrants are called Afropolitans by cultural commentators and postcolonial critics.

In recent times, however, there has been a rise of a new generation of Afropolitans specifically based in European metropolitan cities. They are called Afropeans or Europeans of African descent. The neologism “Afropean” was coined in 1991 by David Byrne and Marie Daulne to describe the synergy of African and European musical traditions in Zap Mama, an Afro-Pop band founded by the latter.⁶ It was later popularised by Léonora Miano, a Cameroonian writer who lived as an immigrant in France for more than two decades before relocating to Togo. Evocatively, in this connection, she published Afropean Soul and Other Stories in 2008, a collection of five novels that portrays Afropean identities and experiences.

In this discursive connection, Miano elaborates on the concept of Afropeanism in the introduction to her latest book titled Afropea: A Post-Western and Post-Racist Utopia. She offers the following definition:

an Afropean is a person of sub-Saharan descent born and raised in Europe. Individuals with this profile were the ones who promoted this ethnicity, claimed it as their own and aspired to embody it. The people concerned are first and foremost repositories of a European experience. It is in Europe that they spent their formative years, those of childhood and adolescence, whose importance for structuring personality is well known. Afropeans are often the children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren of sub-Saharan immigrants. Unlike their forebears, they have always lived as a minority.⁷

Culturally and geopolitically, Afropeans belong to Africa and Europe at the same time. Despite being born and raised in Europe, Afropeans maintain contact with their African heritage through transcontinental visits, cultural memory, and long-distance communication.

However, Miano’s definition leaves out Afropeans who identify as Black Europeans. These are ethnic minority groups whose Afro-Caribbean ancestors became naturalised citizens after the abolition of slavery in 1865 and through indentured labour migrations of the 1950s, rather than exclusively descendants of sub-Saharan immigrants. A notable case in point is that of Black British citizens. Unlike descendants of sub-Saharan immigrants, Black British people are not dual citizens.

This is the Afropean ethnic group that Johny Pitts presents in his travel memoir titled Afropean: Notes from Black Europe Afropean. He invests the term Afropean with ethics of cultural hybridity:

When I first heard it, it encouraged me to think of myself as whole and unhyphenated: Afropean. Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity at large. It suggested the possibility of living in and with more than one idea: Africa and Europe, or, by extension, the Global South and the West, without being mixed-this, half-that or black-other. That being black in Europe didn’t necessarily mean being an immigrant. Labels are invariably problematic, often provocative, but at their best they can sing something into visibility. […] growing up in a working-class area of Sheffield […] I began to notice a world that had been invisible to me before […] I had felt I was being forced to react against one culture or overidentify with the other.⁸

Typically, to identify as an Afropean is to simultaneously embody African and European cultural values. Moreover, the unhyphenated combination of “African” and “European” in the term Afropean undermines the othering logic of contingent belonging. Indeed, the self-identification as an Afropean is in itself evidence of successful hybridisation and enculturation.

2 Afropean Hybridity in Theory and Practice

As a theoretical and practical extension of Afropolitanism, Afropeanism foregrounds cultural hybridity. Afropolitanism and Afropeanism contemporaneously emerged in the early 21st century. As is well-known, the term Afropolitanism was coined by Taiye Selasi in her 2005 pioneering essay titled “Bye-Bye Babar.” Herein, Selasi not only announces the rise of a generation of Afropolitans in the 1960s, but also describes their defining attributes. She argues that Afropolitans are the “newest generation” of African migrants who “belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many” countries and that, for this reason, they are “not citizens, but Africans of the world.”⁹ According to Selasi,

what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is the refusal to oversimplify; the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honor what is wonderful, unique. Rather than essentializing the geographical entity, we seek to comprehend the cultural complexity; to honor the intellectual and spiritual legacy; and to sustain our parents’ cultures.¹⁰

Evidently, Afropolitan identities are products of the dialectical relationship between local and global cultures. By relativising the significance of African cultures, Selasi undermines the racialised discourse of Afrocentrism which, like contingent belonging, negates, even precludes, the interplay between the local and the global. From this perspective, Afropolitan identities cannot be forged outside the context of the cultural entanglement between the local and the global.

Among others, Simon Gikandi, Achille Mbembe, and Chielozona Eze have prominently theorised the cultural hybridity of Afropolitans. In his foreword to Negotiating Afropolitanism, Gikandi defines Afropolitanism “as a neologism to describe the social imaginary of a generation of Africans born outside the continent but connected to it through familial and cultural genealogies.”¹¹ For him, “to be Afropolitan is to be connected to knowable African communities, nations, and traditions; but it is also to live a life divided across cultures, languages, and states. It is to embrace and celebrate a state of cultural hybridity – to be of African and of other worlds at the same time.”¹² In other words, Afropolitanism is premised on the constant negotiation of individual and collective identities in the liminal space between African and non-African cultures.

This is the cultural hybridity within which Achille Mbembe’s theorisation of Afropolitanism is grounded. In Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, he underscores the anti-essentialist nature of Afropolitanism:

Afropolitanism is not the same as Pan-Africanism or négritude. Afropolitanism is an aesthetic and a particular poetic of the world. It is a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity – which does not mean that it is not aware of the injustices and violence inflicted on the continent and its people by the law of the world. It is also a political and cultural stance in relation to the nation, to race and to the issue of difference in general. In so far as African states are pure (and, what is more, recent) inventions, there is, strictly speaking, nothing in their essence that can force us to worship them – which does not mean that we are indifferent to their fate.¹³

Unlike Pan-Africanism and Négritude, Afropolitanism is a product of cultural hybridity. As the prefix and suffix suggest, Afropolitanism combines ‘indigenous’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ value systems in complex ways that negate notions of cultural purity.

Similarly, Chielozona Eze adds a psycho-social layer to the cultural hybridity of Afropolitans:

We call ourselves Afropolitans, well aware of the misunderstandings in the genealogy of the concept. We are not interested in denying any perceived privilege owing to our birth or status. We move around the world; we are able to be in at least two global cities in a year, and we encounter people from different ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds. But the truth is that spatial mobility is only symptomatic of our interior mobility. Indeed, what really counts is this interior mobility, that is, how negotiable our relation to the world is. One does not need to have crossed geographical boundaries to be Afropolitan; one only needs to cross the psychic boundaries erected by nativism, autochthony, heritage and other mythologies of authenticity.¹⁴

Eze implies that Afropolitans identify themselves beyond the strictures and prejudices of cultural essentialism. This anti-essentialist perspective is relevant to my analysis of Afropean hybridity as an ontological condition of belonging to Europe and Africa at the same time.

As related discourses and practices, Afropolitanism and Afropeanism exemplify postcolonial hybridity. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin note that hybridity is one of the most popular and contested terms in postcolonial theory.¹⁵ More illuminatingly, the three postcolonial theorists inform us that hybridity is synonymous with Homi K. Bhabha’s work, especially his concept of liminality.¹⁶ Indeed, in The Location of Culture, Bhabha contends that identities are produced within in-between or interstitial spaces of cultural difference and overlap, which are ambivalent and contradictory.¹⁷ It follows that, when two cultures meet, cultural identities – both individual and collective – are ambivalently articulated and negotiated.

However, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin bemoan the fact that “hybridity has frequently been used in postcolonial discourse to mean simply cross-cultural ‘exchange.’ This use of the term has been widely criticized, since it usually implies negating and neglecting the imbalance and inequality of the power relations it references.”¹⁸ A common example of this reductive and unnuanced use of the term hybridity is the word ‘mixed-race.’ It signifies the illusion of conceptual and ontological stability. On the contrary, though, a mixture constitutes a dialectical process in which racial identity is always in the process of becoming.

To avoid misapplying the term hybridity, I have described Nikki May and her four protagonists in Wahala as half-Nigerian and half-English. In doing so, I capture the reality of their identity ontogenesis rather than completion. It follows, then, that Afropean cultural identities are not homogeneously given and stable, but rather heterogeneously fluid, unpredictable, and even contested. I therefore proceed to examine how Nikki May puts the notion of Afropean hybridity into practice. I contend that she uses the term ‘mixed-race’ not in the narrow sense of cross-cultural exchange, but in the broader sense of Afropean hybridity. For the same reason, I will henceforth apply scare quotes to the term ‘mixed-race’ where and when necessary.

Nikki May was born in Bristol, Great Britain, but raised in Lagos, Nigeria. It is in this regard that her racial identity can be placed within the discourse of Afropeanism. What is ethically and aesthetically evident, then, is that May’s novel, like much of Afropean literature, incorporates some elements of life writing. Precisely this autofictional dimension is what May herself lays bare in the postscript section of Wahala:

I wanted my book to be entertaining, not issue based, but my three characters are mixed race so of course race crept in; it always does. I didn’t set out to write about myself either, but you draw on what you know. So, Ronke’s grandparents who wanted nothing to do with her – well, mine were similar. Simi dropping out of medical school, freaking her parents out – I’ll put my hands up to that. (Sorry, Dad.) Boo’s desperation to fit in, to assimilate – I’ve been there: straightened my hair and tweaked my name. But rest assured, Wahala is fiction … I don’t have anything in common with Isobel – at least, I hope I don’t!¹⁹

These authorial comments indicate the intrinsic overlap between fiction and non-fiction. After all, contents of fiction tend to resonate with socio-political realities, whatever their imaginative transcendence or stylistic sophistication. As Ato Quayson duly reminds us, calibration is a form of close reading that “oscillates rapidly between domains – the literary-aesthetic, the social, the cultural, and the political – in order to explore the mutually illuminating heterogeneity of those domains when taken together.”²⁰ In this understanding, May fictionalises and then closely reads her Afropean sensibilities in Wahala. She effectively uses Ronke, Simisola, Bukola and, to a minimal extent, Isobel as mirror images of her Afropean hybridity.

Corresponding articulations of Afropean hybridity obtain in May’s online interviews, YouTube videos, and podcasts both before and after the publication of Wahala in 2022. Among other pertinent issues, her interlocutors commonly ask what it means to exist as a British-Nigerian writer and the cultural implications thereof. For instance, in a 2021 interview with Alice O’Keeffe, May is quoted as complaining that:

Often when you are mixed race, other people decide how you are going to be identified. So you’re either too Black, or not Black enough, too white or not white enough. You often feel that you have to turn your back on one side of you, which is wrong. Why should we? I should be able to like pounded yam and mashed potato. […] I wanted Wahala to be a celebration of my two cultures […] Sometimes my sense of belonging is concrete, other times it’s elusive, but all in all, I got the long straw, two homes is twice the joy.²¹

For May, Afropean hybridity is a culturally enriching and empowering condition, hence a cause for celebration rather than regret. From this Afropean perspective, she problematises essentialist and Afropessimist tendencies.

Much the same Afropean attitude finds expression in May’s subsequent interviews. In a 2022 interview with Emily Watkins, May celebrates, even advocates, the cultural boons of Afropean hybridity, while at the same time criticising the politics of contingent belonging. In particular, she laments the situational irony in which Black European writers popularly, but nonetheless uncritically, depict the negative side of Afropeanism, thereby committing the fallacy of false generalisation, that is, universalising heterogeneous and personal experiences based on insufficient evidence drawn from unrepresentative samples.²² Similar Afropean insights feature in interviews with BellaNaija Magazine, Isabella Silvers, and several YouTube videos.²³ In short, May self-reflexively acknowledges the cultural interconnectedness of her Afropean identity and authorial persona without being blind to the racial vicissitudes of contingent belonging.

3 Afropean Self-Perception and Cultural Practices in Nikki May’s Wahala

This section analyses the literary representation of Afropean hybridity in Wahala. In particular, I show how the self-perception of the four protagonists – Ronke, Simisola, Bukola, and Isobel – translates into practices of cultural hybridity and an Afropean critique of contingent belonging. The following textual analysis therefore focuses on narrative moments of cultural hybridity involving the four protagonists. Ultimately, the analysis contributes to the aesthetic and thematic appreciation of Afropean literature as an offshoot of Afropolitan literature within the larger field of African diaspora studies.

Significantly, in this regard, May’s Wahala highlights the emergence and steady burgeoning of Afropean literature in the 21st century. In her 2011 study, Brancato confirms:

Afroeuropean literatures are proliferating all over the continent. Beyond the important contribution they make in terms of aesthetic innovation, it is crucial to acknowledge the potential that these writings offer to the dialogues between Europe and Africa and to the formation and consolidation of a new notion of Europe, seen not only as plural but also as effectively transcultural, a Europe finally recognising in its historical, ethnic, political and cultural identity the presence of strong influences from Africa as well as from global African diasporas.²⁴

Although Brancato traces the proliferation of Afropean literature across Europe, this literature is equally culturally important for the African continent as an extension of Afropolitan literature. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, she acknowledges this transcontinental overlap in a 2008 essay: Afropean literary texts are transnational and transcultural because they foreground a comparative perspective from which the geopolitical interaction between Africa and Europe produces hybrid cultural configurations.²⁵ As a result, cultural hybridity can be understood as one of the core features of Afropean texts.

As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin point out, “hybridization takes many forms: linguistic, cultural, political, racial, etc.”²⁶ However, May’s Wahala has received scant critical attention, as evidenced by a dearth of scholarly articles or reviews. The body of scholarship on this Afropean novel mostly consists of the author’s online interviews and conversations. In June 2024, Sued Musharaf Hussain Shah, Gulshan Naz, and Sajid Ali’s article “Racial Discrimination and Matrix of Oppression: A Critical Race Analysis of Wahala by Nikki May” was published. The critics employ critical race theory and feminism, arguing that May, as a British-Black female writer, addresses the interplay of racism, colonialism, class, gender, and identity within a matrix of oppression.²⁷ Arguably, this article hardly addresses cultural hybridity, much less approaches May’s novel from an Afropean perspective.

As a point of departure, my analysis challenges the politics of contingent belonging by foregrounding the Afropean self-perception and cultural practices of Ronke, Simisola, Bukola, and Isobel. According to Kuortti and Nyman, “the contemporary world is characterized by transnational migrations, cultural appropriations, and diasporic peoples, all contributing to increased cultural contact and mixing, and to the intermingling of the local and the global.”²⁸ In this diasporic context, hybridity interrogates notions and practices of racial purity, autochthony, exoticism, and xenophobia.²⁹ However, Kuortti and Nyman concede the fact that, far from being uncritically celebratory, hybridity accommodates cultural transformation beyond the confines of racial prejudice and essentialism.³⁰ To put it differently, if hybridity entails cultural inbetweenness, then identity positions and moments of self-actualisation are strategically fluid, negotiable, and transcultural. The implication is that May’s Afropean protagonists are culturally ambivalent. They occupy interstitial spaces within and through which the simultaneous articulation of African and European values becomes not only socio-politically possible, but also existentially indispensable.

One of the evocative scenes in May’s Wahala unfolds when Boo remembers her struggles to fit in in Yorkshire:

Boo had bad memories of being five. She’d been an outsider, wished her hair was straighter, her skin paler, her nose narrower. The only mixed-race girl in a small Yorkshire village – white mum, white stepdad, white stepbrothers. Desperate to fit in. Being inconspicuous had seemed the best way to achieve it.³¹

As the only ‘mixed-race’ child in the village, Bukola suffered the discriminatory effects of contingent belonging. To make matters worse, “[s]he’d never met her biological dad” because “he had abandoned her mother before she was born.”³² Consequently, Bukola stood out as a racial other within a predominantly white society, despite her identification with Yorkshire culture.

It is this childhood experience of being othered that compels Bukola to change her Nigerian surname in the false hope of escaping racist bullying at school:

She wasn’t much older than Sofia when she decided to change her surname. The register at school was daily torture.

“Boo Babangari?” the teacher would call.

“Bang. Bang. Boo!” the boys at the back would chortle.

So she asked her mum if she could use her stepdad’s name. […]

“Boo Whyte?” said the teacher.

“Oh no, she’s not! Boo’s brown!” the boys at the back would snort.

She’d never been outright bullied but she was made to feel like a misfit. One day she’d stand out – be picked on and poked at. The next she’d be wallpaper – overlooked and ignored.³³

Demonstrably, Bukola’s sense of identity oscillates between belonging to and exclusion from Yorkshire. The more she tries to remain inconspicuous, the more her skin colour and Nigerian surname put her in the spotlight. Again, the more she tries to assimilate through the British surname, the more she is categorically rejected by being reminded of her ‘mixed-race’ status.

As an Afropean novel, however, May’s Wahala contributes to the demythification of othering, as becomes apparent in Bukola’s attitude shift towards her hybrid identity:

It wasn’t until Bristol (chosen mainly for its distance from home), where she met Ronke and Simi, that she started to feel comfortable in her skin. They were the first mixed-race people she’d ever spoken to and to them, being brown was an asset, not a liability. It meant you could always fit in – with black people, white people and all shades in between. They pitied the poor souls with one solitary culture, who used fake tan (or worse – bleaching cream). They were proud of being half Nigerian and half English. They loved jollof rice and fish finger sandwiches. They had two football teams to support.³⁴

As mirror images of Nikki May, Bukola, Ronke, and Simisola realise that their Afropean status is a cause for celebration rather than concern. That is, the ontology of Afropeanism is bound up with cultural hybridity affordances that elude essentialist expressions of racial identity.

With this newfound raison d’être, the three protagonists not only forge Afropean solidarity, but also redefine their transcultural goals and roles: “Determined to fit in, Boo softened her Yorkshire accent and squashed down her shyness. The three of them were soon a unit – The Naija Posse. They were Boo’s first real friends. She felt connected. She liked it.”³⁵ Indeed, having been raised in Yorkshire, Boo picked up a strong English accent that enables her to make necessary Afropean adjustments.

In May’s novel, similar Afropean solidarity and adjustment emerge in Simi’s childhood memories:

It was their color that had thrown Simi and Isobel together. Mixed-race kids were unusual in 1980s Lagos. It wasn’t that different in 1990s Bristol – that’s how she met Boo and Ronke too. It was natural – you had an affinity, a bond – there was nothing prejudiced about it. Simi believed it was impossible to be racist if you were mixed. The more of us the better. If only the world would shag racism into oblivion.³⁶

The visual imagery of shagging racism into oblivion highlights the necessity of cultural hybridity. In other words, if the world penetrates and impregnates racism with cultural hybridity, ‘mixed-race’ identities would proliferate. Ultimately, racism would lose its essentialist anchorage.

However, like Boo, Simisola reveals the institutionalised discrimination against ‘mixed-race’ children both in England and Nigeria. Simi suffered more segregation when she relocated to the seaside village in Devon. Luckily, her white mother and grandparents shielded her from various racist attacks.³⁷ What therefore connects Simisola, Isobel, Bukola, and Ronke is the existential imperative to uphold both European and African cultures in ways that resist the othering logic of contingent belonging.

By contrast, Ronke’s maternal family in Maidenhead participates in her racial discrimination. This unfolds when Ronke replies to an email from her white mum Mary Payne, requesting her to visit them so as to meet Aunty Sheena:

Aunty? What a joke, Ronke thought. If she’s an aunt, I’m a size zero. Sheena was a bitch. Ronke made excuses for her grandparents: It was the 1970s, mixed marriages were unusual, they lived in the sticks and were old-fashioned. But it was hard to make excuses for Sheena. She lived in metropolitan, multicultural London; she’d grown up in the swinging sixties. What was her excuse? When Ronke was fourteen, the evil cow had suggested she straighten her hair – so she would look normal. Yup, she used the word “normal.”³⁸

Like Boo’s parents-in-law, Aunty Sheena’s perception of and relationship to Afropeans is dictated by visceral prejudice. That is why she mistreats even her own niece, as further illustrated by stereotypical mockeries of Ronke having a “plump African arse” yet no bone through her nose, not to mention her failure to use a knife and fork.³⁹ However, as with a culturally ambivalent British-Nigerian citizen, Ronke deletes her confrontational reply and acquiesces to the visit request. Thus, despite her aunt’s racial prejudice, Ronke perceives herself as both Nigerian and English.

Even though Ronke, Simisola, and Bukola are subjected to the exclusionary practices of contingent belonging, their cultural ambivalence accentuates their Afropean presence. Brancato notes that Afropean literature “dismantle[s] the notion of [European] culture as a delimited space and emphasise[s] instead the continuous fluctuation of cultural influences and therefore the continuous transformation of everyday cultural practices.”⁴⁰ In doing so, Afropean texts expose essentialist slippages of contingent belonging. By contrast, the label of and identification as Europeans of African origin tellingly affirm the ethical necessity and viability of cultural hybridity.

In May’s Wahala, Ronke, Simisola, Bukola, and Isobel also display their Afropean hybridity through diet. They eat both European and African cuisines, as illustrated in the opening chapter. The setting is Buka, a Nigerian restaurant in London:

POUNDED YAM AND EGUSI? Eba with okra? No, it had to be pounded yam. But maybe with efo riro. Ronke ran through the menu in her head as she walked up the hill to Buka. She knew it by heart but that didn’t make choosing any easier. As usual she wanted it all. […] Ronke had been looking forward to their Naija lunch all week. […] The Nigerian flag outside Buka was looking a little tatty, frayed at the edges.⁴¹

As this passage shows, Ronke and her friends have the Afropean privilege of accessing Nigerian cuisines within London. Buka’s menu is reciprocally Afropean, as evidenced by the champagne and wine starters.⁴² We are later told that, apart from Nigerian food, Ronke loves Italian, Indian, and Lebanese cuisines.⁴³ It stands to reason that Ronke frequents other restaurants in London besides Buka.

However, the narrative significance of Buka is that it provides the setting for other forms of Afropean hybridity:

She pushed open the door and stepped out of the suburban London and into downtown Lagos.

The smell hit her first. Smoky burned palm oil, fried peppers and musty stockfish. Next came the noise: Fela Kuti blared out of the speakers, struggling to compete with the group of three men at a corner table, talking over each other. And because this was effectively Nigeria, their voices were louder, accents stronger, gesticulations wilder.

The waiter looked up with a scowl. As Ronke turned to shut the door, she knew his eyes would linger on her arse. It felt like home.⁴⁴

This passage foregrounds the thematic conceptualisation of “Africa in Europe, Europe in Africa” vis-à-vis their transcultural histories in African Anglophone literature and media. Quite literally, Lagos is in London and London is in Lagos. That is why Ronke fails to distinguish Buka from Nigerian restaurants. Indeed, Buka’s ambience, cuisines, and arse-ogling feel like home for her.

Ronke’s Afropean movements to and from Buka transgress the cultural boundaries endorsed by the politics of contingent belonging. As Nyman contends, “hybridity has the potential to question literary, cultural, and ideological phenomena that have commonly been presented as clear-cut and allegedly pure, with established boundaries.”⁴⁵ From this transcultural perspective, Nyman further states that:

Although the commonplace idea of the border centres upon geopolitical and territorial borders, borders are also social, cultural, and symbolic, and crossing them is a way to challenge fixed ideas and borders. Borders are not natural but rather “contingent social and cultural productions” and “instruments of power” […]. Allowing for contacts and interchange, they function as sites of hybridity generating new positions of identity.⁴⁶

By effectively experiencing London as Lagos, Ronke demonstrates the dynamism of her Afropean hybridity. Her cultural familiarity and identification with London and Lagos enable Afropean self-positioning and self-fashioning.

In this Afropean context, Buka can be compared to another restaurant that Ronke, Simisola, Bukola, and Isobel patronise: “For weeks, Isobel had raved about Come-Chop, the new Nigerian fusion restaurant in Mayfair. […] Come-Chop’s head chef had won a Michelin star at a fancy Nordic eatery and his business partner was a Nigerian mixologist.”⁴⁷ By implication, then, the Nigerian business partner does not only mix cocktails, but also African and European cultural influences.

Clearly, inasmuch as Nigerian food is concerned, the protagonists in May’s novel are spoilt for choice in different locales of London. So, for instance, Isobel orders “an agbalumo spritz” (Italian cultural influences) for Ronke, which is one of the “Lagos-inspired cocktails.”⁴⁸ In appreciating the Afropean ambience of Come-Chop, Ronke muses that “[i]t wasn’t Nigerian, but it did have distant echoes of home.”⁴⁹ London thus provides a transnational space within which European and Nigerian cultural influences intermingle in ways that shape the Afropean identities of Ronke, Simisola, Bukola, and Isobel.

Not surprisingly, London also offers easy access to Nigerian cooking materials: “So this morning Ronke had trekked to the ethnic store in Balham for a bag of Nigerian honey beans and to stock up on other essentials. Tatashe peppers, De Rica tomato paste, ground crayfish and palm oil.”⁵⁰ In turn, diet hybridity engenders ambivalent sentiments of homeliness: “Ronke let her mind drift back to Lagos. Aunty K giving young Ronke a cookery lesson […]. Ronke still thought of Lagos as home, even though she’d left when she was eleven. She knew Simi felt the same.”⁵¹ This Afropean ambivalence further emerges when Ronke visits Isobel’s London residence: “She heard a tinny, chimed version of the Nigerian national anthem, took it as a good sign and sang along. Arise, O compatriots, Nigeria’s call obey …”⁵² The national anthem sentimentally transports Ronke to Nigeria, even though she is physically in England. It follows that she experiences and articulates her homing instinct both in England and Nigeria.

In May’s Wahala, Afropean hybridity also manifests in transcontinental/transnational visits and social gatherings. Whenever relatives of the protagonists visit, they bring along transcultural foodstuffs. For example, Ronke’s aunt – Aunty K – brings “Maggi, gari and Panla fish” from Nigeria,⁵³ while Simi contemplates lodging his visiting father and stepmother in a hotel “where mama T could cook her stews” because she cannot “eat English food in England.”⁵⁴ In both scenarios, Ronke and Simi maintain their diet flexibility in order to host the relatives without the racial prejudices of contingent belonging.

Nikki May further depicts the diet hybridity of her protagonists at Sofia’s party by comparing the cooking skills of Ronke with those of Lorraine Pascale – a Black British chef:

As usual, Ronke was in charge of the food. And as usual, she’d gone overboard: finger sandwiches, sausage rolls, plastic cups filled with popcorn, mini bagels paired up to look like headphones, bowls piled high with crips, pretzels, vegetable sticks and fruit. Simi knew there’d also be a huge pot of jollof and chicken for the adults. And pasta salad and quiche for vegetarians and the less adventurous. Classic Ronke: a fat Lorraine Pascale.⁵⁵

By evoking the world-famous figure of Lorraine Pascale, Nikki May draws attention to Ronke’s transcultural cuisines. Indeed, as the party menu indicates, Ronke has prepared food to suit both European (especially Didier’s parents from France) and African tastes. The novel informs the reader that Ronke, Simisola, Bukola, and Isobel also eat broccoli, sushi, spaghetti, salmon, couscous, and green beans. To strike a transcultural balance, Nikki May provides recipes for “Ronke’s Jollof Rice,” “Ronke’s Chicken Stew,” and “Aunty K’s Moin-Moin” after Wahala’s epilogue.⁵⁶ As Afropeans, May and her protagonists underscore the transculturation of Nigerian cuisines in England.

Social gatherings in May’s novel also contribute to the Afropean critique of contingent belonging through fashion and language hybridity. One such occasion is an outing at Ronnie Scott’s Funky Nation in Soho. Amid the fun, Isobel invites Simi, Boo, and Ronke to “[a] proper Naija party!” with lots of “[f]ood, dancing, music” to be held at Sky Garden.⁵⁷ They all plan to wear Nigerian traditional clothes and, for this reason, Isobel has a Nigerian tailor flown from Lagos and accommodated at Kennington.⁵⁸ During the party, “three men dressed in white agbadas were drumming on batás, Nigeria’s famous talking drums.”⁵⁹ In terms of food, there are Afropean dishes, one of which is “jollof rice, fried chicken, dodo, cling-wrapped balls of pounded yam, egusi stew, seafood okra and peppered snails.”⁶⁰ As Afropean subjects, however, Ronke, Simisola, Bukola, and Isobel change their dress codes in different contexts. They also follow London fashion, global technologies, and American lifestyle.

Wahala also subverts the exclusionary politics of contingent belonging through language hybridity. By incorporating a diversity of different linguistic registers and words in italics, May’s novel undermines English as the superior language. Throughout, then, she creates a heteroglossic effect, that is, a diversity of collective and individual speech types inflected in different social settings.⁶¹ Indeed, though dominantly written in English, the plot structure of Wahala is interspersed with Nigerian Pidgin, Yoruba words, and French expressions.

In May’s novel, language hybridity transpires in Boo’s constant conflict with Didier over his French lessons to their ‘mixed-race’ daughter Sofia. She describes the lessons as one of Didier’s “crap ideas,” while the husband insists that “[s]he’s half French and it’s important she speaks her language.”⁶² What is racially contentious here is that, being ‘mixed-race’, Sofia has to learn both French and Yoruba, or at the very least Pidgin English. That is why Boo complains to Simi that: “Didier’s French lessons are going swimmingly. Chienne de vie is her [Sofia’s] latest phrase.”⁶³ Didier’s focus on France can also be discerned in Boo’s other complaint that they always go to France for Christmas holidays but never to Lagos.⁶⁴ Nonetheless, in the spirit of Afropeanism, the family code switches between English, Nigerian Pidgin, and French, no matter how disproportionately. By contrast, Ronke fluently code switches, as becomes evident in her conversation with Aunty K:

Her accent had become Nigerian. Her voice louder, her syntax altered. It always happened when she was with Aunty K. Boo called it weird. Simi called it being bi-accented, making it sound like an impressive skill. A skill Simi didn’t utilize – she only dropped her Received Pronunciation when she was taking the piss out of someone.⁶⁵

Unlike Boo and Simi, Ronke uses her bi-accent skill to maximum effect in order to meet the demands of different social settings.

4 Conclusion

In this article, I have analysed how the self-perception and cultural practices of Ronke, Simisola, Bukola, and Isobel translate into Afropean hybridity and a critique of contingent belonging. They view themselves as Europeans of African descent who proudly embody cultural values of England and Nigeria at the same time. In turn, this Afropean self-perception exerts a hybridising effect on their cultural practices, namely identity formation, diet, language, and fashion. Indeed, as mirror images of Nikki May, Ronke, Simisola, Bukola, and Isobel fulfil the authorial master plan to present Wahala as a celebration of English and Nigerian cultures.

In a related context, this study has also addressed the relationship between Afropolitanism and Afropeanism, which remains yet to be explored in greater detail. Since the publication of Taiye Selasi’s pioneering essay “Bye-Bye Babar,” Afropolitanism has become an interdisciplinary buzzword. In recent years, Afropeanism has emerged as a discursive offshoot of Afropolitanism. There is need therefore to analyse literary productions of Afrodiasporic writers through a comparative lens of Afropolitanism and Afropeanism. How do the two discourses shape each other with regard to literary creativity and criticism? Another avenue for further research is to compare Nikki May’s Wahala with her latest novel This Motherless Land.⁶⁶ Again, this study has touched upon an Afropean nuance that requires future investigation, namely the comparison between Black British citizens and descendants of sub-Saharan immigrants.

Significantly, then, this essay contributes to the overarching theme of Africa in Europe and Europe in Africa vis-à-vis the transcultural histories and practices of the two continents as represented in African Anglophone literature and media. My reading of Afropean hybridity in May’s Wahala has demonstrated that African and European histories are ambivalent and entangled constructs that require a new approach and perspective in this age of global modernity. As the transcultural life-worlds of Ronke, Simisola, Bukola, and Isobel show, the notions of identity, belonging, and home are porous and blurry.