If you have been following along here, you know my bookshelf is heavily stacked with fiction. Give me a sweeping historical drama, a rich romance, or a brilliant piece of Afrofuturism and I am a happy woman.
Which brings me to Nnedi Okorafor.
I have been keeping my eye on Okorafor for a long time. Brilliant writer. Fearless imagination. And with her recent releases making the rounds again, so has her famous insistence on separating “Africanfuturism” from “Afrofuturism.”
If you are not familiar with the debate, Okorafor put her foot down and said: do not call my work Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is centered on the Black American and Diasporic experience. Africanfuturism is rooted directly in the soil, culture, and mythologies of the African continent.
On the surface you read that and think – okay, fair enough. Authors have a right to name their own art.
But if you sit with it for more than five minutes, a very familiar, very bitter taste starts to form in your mouth.
Because we are not just talking about literary sub-genres here, family. We are talking about the Diaspora Wars. We are talking about the long, painful, and increasingly commercialized chasm between Black Americans and Continental Africans. And while these literary distinctions are usually framed as a quest for cultural specificity, we need to be honest about what is really going on.
The wedge being driven between us is being funded, celebrated, and weaponized by the very Western system that oppresses both of us.
Let’s talk about it.
The irony of the white lens.
To understand why Okorafor wanted her own word, you have to understand where the word “Afrofuturism” came from in the first place.
It was not coined by a Black scholar in Atlanta. Not by a griot in Senegal. It was coined in 1993 by Mark Dery – a white American cultural critic. Dery looked at Black art, Black music, and Black imagination and put a white academic frame around it.
I understand why Continental African authors look at a term created by a white American to describe Black American trauma and say that does not fit my story. Continental Africans have a right to tell stories where Blackness is the default majority, rooted in Igbo cosmology or Swahili history, without running it through the filter of American racial politics. I get it.
But here is where I come in hot.
Who paved the road that allowed those Continental African books to be sitting on the shelves of Barnes and Noble in the first place?
Continental African creators are not publishing those books in a vacuum. They are walking into Western publishing houses that only created Diverse Voices departments because Black Americans bled, marched, organized, and sued for civil rights and institutional access over generations. The diverse publishing infrastructure that amplifies Continental African voices today was built on Black American labor, Black American struggle, and Black American sacrifice.
And here is the part that stings.
White corporate media loves a Continental African narrative right now. Why? Because to a white executive, Continental African stories often feel safer. They can celebrate distant mythologies and exotic aesthetics without having to confront the uncomfortable, immediate reality of American systemic racism staring them in the face.
So when Continental African creators use the house built by Black American labor to gain global platforms and then turn around and say we need to separate ourselves from your Blackness – it does not just feel like a literary distinction.
It feels like extraction.
From Wakanda to Essence Fest.
We see this dynamic playing out everywhere and it is tearing at the seams of our collective culture.
Look at Hollywood. When we lost the great Chadwick Boseman – a Black American man who carried the soul of Black Panther – where did the franchise pivot? They shifted the mantle to UK-born, Continental African, and Caribbean actors, pulling the center of gravity entirely away from the Black American experience.
Remember the end of the first Black Panther? Killmonger – a Black American boy from Oakland – forced Wakanda to realize that its wealth and isolation were a betrayal of the Diaspora. Wakanda opened its first outreach center in Oakland. It was a promise of reciprocity.
By the second movie, Oakland was a distant memory. The Black American anchor just vanished.
Now look at what has happened to our legacy institutions right here at home.
Essence Magazine and the Essence Festival. Built by Black Americans as a safe harbor for our culture, our R&B, our Southern heritage. Under new Pan-African and Continental African leadership, the festival pivoted heavily toward Afrobeats and global branding.
They hosted a Jollof versus Jambalaya contest.
Pitting West African Jollof against Louisiana Jambalaya as if they are rival sports teams. Are you serious right now?
Do the people running these brands even know their history? Enslaved Africans from the Rice Coast were specifically targeted and brought to Charleston and New Orleans because of their rice-cultivating genius. Charleston Red Rice and Louisiana Jambalaya are not competitors to Jollof. They are its direct, brilliant children – birthed through the trauma of survival on American soil.
To treat Black American foodways like a secondary competitor to authentic African food, right in the heart of New Orleans, proves that corporate leadership has completely lost the plot.
That is not Pan-African unity. That is cultural erasure dressed up in corporate Diaspora-washing.
The uncomfortable truth on the ground.
This is not just happening in books and magazines. It happens when we cross the ocean.
So many Black Americans go to the African continent on a spiritual pilgrimage, looking to stitch together a lineage that was stolen from them. And what do too many hear when they land?
You are not African. You do not know your tribe. You are just an American.
It is a heartbreak like no other. To be denied home in the country where you were born, and then denied home in the land of your ancestors.
On the flip side, when Continental Africans migrate to the US, many walk directly into the workplace protections, educational access, and civil rights infrastructure won by Black American blood – all while quietly holding onto Western stereotypes about Black Americans being lazy or uncultured.
It is a messy, painful, two-way street.
But we have to ask ourselves: who benefits when we treat each other this way?
Follow the money.
Here is the bottom line and I need everybody in the back to hear me.
The Diaspora Wars are a manufactured distraction.
It does not take a PhD in critical thinking to see that keeping Black Americans and Continental Africans at each other’s throats is the ultimate strategy for white Western self-preservation.
Look at the actual math. Continental Africa possesses 30% of the world’s remaining critical minerals – cobalt, lithium, platinum, gold – and over 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land. Black America represents a $1.8 trillion economic force with generations of expertise in Western corporate finance, international law, technology, supply chain logistics, and capital markets.
Now imagine what happens when Black American capital and technical expertise pair directly with Continental African resources and local sovereignty – without Western middlemen taking a 70% cut.
It would break the back of global white supremacy overnight. We would literally be the only game in town.
And that is precisely why the Western power structure loves these little cultural rifts. They need Continental Africans to view Black Americans as ignorant tourists with money. They need Black Americans to view Continental Africa as a corrupt, unwelcoming wasteland. Because as long as we are fighting on Twitter over whether a book is Afrofuturism or Africanfuturism, white-owned corporations continue to extract the wealth of the African continent and exploit the labor of the Diaspora.
That is not a coincidence. That is a strategy.
What real partnership actually looks like – and what it does not.
When I say we need to build joint partnerships, I am not talking about Black Americans rolling into the African continent trying to buy up local assets or stage corporate takeovers. We have had enough of Western financial paternalism, no matter who is holding the pen.
Let me be direct about something that gets misrepresented in this conversation.
Black Americans arriving in Accra or Lagos are not setting the prices. Ghanaians are. Local sellers see western money coming and price accordingly – sometimes five times or more above what they would charge a local buyer. That is not a Black American imposing extraction. That is a market responding to perceived wealth. And the downstream effect – land prices rising, locals priced out of their own neighborhoods – is real, but the origin point of that inflation is not the buyer. It is the seller who made the calculation.
Meanwhile, Black Americans are not arriving with colonial intentions. They are arriving with western habits – high speed internet, big refrigerators, the conveniences that come from a lifetime of American infrastructure – because that is the life they know. Expecting a Black American to live like a local Ghanaian to prove their solidarity is not a reasonable ask. It is a different kind of erasure.
The bitter irony is that some of the same people who inflated the prices, collected the money, spent it on Tobaski rams and custom made matching family outfits for the whole compound, are now the loudest voices calling Black American presence gentrification. The land is gone. The money is gone. And somehow we are the villains.
That is not gentrification. That is a setup with a moving finish line.
Real solidarity is not about acquisition or charity in either direction. It is Black American capital and Continental African resources meeting at the same table with equal standing. Infrastructure funded without sovereignty purchased. Profits reinvested locally, not extracted back across the Atlantic. Continental African expertise and community leadership setting the direction – not the partner with the bigger checkbook. Black Americans coming as collaborators with something to offer, not saviors with something to sell.
Where we go from here.
We have been separated by oceans, by slavers, by colonizers, by borders drawn by people who needed us apart for their own survival and eventually their own prosperity. And after all of that – after surviving all of that – we are out here fighting each other over book genres and festival lineups while the people who engineered our separation are still extracting from both of us.
That is the real embarrassment.
Not the Jollof. Not the Jambalaya. Not the Africanfuturism versus Afrofuturism debate. The embarrassment is that we are still playing a game designed for us to lose and calling it culture.
Nnedi Okorafor was right to name her work on her own terms. And we are right to name what is happening to us on ours.
We were not separated by accident. We will not reunite by accident either. It is going to take intention. Honesty. The willingness to sit across from each other and tell the truth about what we have done, what has been done to us, and what we owe each other going forward.
Read each other’s books. Learn each other’s histories. Call out the extraction when you see it – on both sides of the ocean. And then build something together that the Western world has spent five hundred years trying to prevent.
They are still trying.
That should be all the motivation we need.
Where do you see the Diaspora divide playing out in your own life – in culture, in business, in travel? And what would real solidarity actually look like to you? Drop it in the comments.
