AfricaResource The Place for Africa on the Net

The Socialist leader François Hollande has questioned the cost of the scheme, and said there were better ways to prove family links than generalised testing. Immigrant welfare groups described the plan as unacceptable. One warned it could lead to dire consequences for France's diplomatic relations with other countries. Daniele Lochak, a former president of GISTI, a group providing information and support for immigrants, suggested that procedures would be abused. "It's obvious that applicants who refuse [DNA tests] will have every chance of having their visas refused," she told Le Monde.

The discussions will take as their starting point the belief that Africa radically concentrates some of the major problems facing humanity as a whole but also that the continent offers us some of the most innovative clues for reading and interpreting today’s world. As the title suggests, the aim is not so much to analyse yet again what Africa is or how it is different from the rest of the world, but rather to underscore the ambivalence of the African experience and to highlight the questions raised by the continent at a universal level.

Despite their European presence Africans are frequently denied belonging in the European space and their movement into Europe is increasingly problematised and associated with politics of securitization. In all our regions (particularly in Sicily) African migrants have become part of the local social and economic fabric, which shows that even remote regions and outposts of the EU can no longer be imagined as monocultural.

The 2000 Census recorded 881,300 U.S. residents who were born in Africa. By 2005, the number had reached 1.25 million, according Brookings Institution researcher Jill Wilson. Since 1990, the African population has more than tripled in places as far-flung as Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis, where Africans now constitute more than 15 percent of the black population. The biggest magnets are New York City and greater Washington, including its Maryland and Virginia suburbs; Wilson estimates that the African-born population in each area has soared past 130,000.

The 1990 population census (the most recent available offering a racial breakdown) puts the city’s white population at 3.1 million, it’s Asian population at 500 000, it’s “Black” population at 2.1 million and it’s “Hispanic” population at 1.8 million. Of course these figures are dated, and the proportion of black and Latino residents is substantially higher, by all accounts. The terms “Black” and “Hispanic” however, are a little confusing: The overwhelming majority of those New Yorkers termed “Hispanic” are from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. And here, of course, is one of the best-kept secrets of the African diaspora–Caribbean Latino cultures have maintained their deep roots in Africa. Demographically and culturally then, New York reveals itself as a substantially African metropolis.