As the number of Africans immigrating to the Bronx steadily increases, others who have been here for years are looking to forge a more unified political presence to help their fellow Africans in New York City and in Africa.

One major step in the process of enhancing unity among Bronx Africans took place on July 29, when the first African United Day Festival was held. The festival’s organizers, who hail from a variety of African countries, said they hoped to promote African culture among non-Africans, and to instill a sense of cultural pride and belonging among Africans.  

“We don’t have only diamonds and gold,” said Djounedou Titikipina, one of the festival’s organizers. “When people know about our food, our arts, painting, dress, music, they’re gonna love it.”

Titikipina arrived in the South Bronx from the West African country of Togo via Toronto in 1999, and still lives in the same apartment he moved into back then. He now leads the African Committee for the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. He has also run his own business as a designer of African apparel in the Bronx.
Titikipina said the African community has grown enormously since his arrival eight years ago. According to the last census, the population of African-born residents in the Bronx was roughly 35,000, although informal estimates that  include more recent immigration put the figure significantly higher.

Titikipina remembered there being one or two mosques in the Mount Hope vicinity when he arrived. Now, as je counted all the recent additions in his head and on his fingers, Titkipina guessed there are seven mosques in the area, a number he himself seemed amazed by.  In all, he estimated that 80% of the mosques’ congregants are African immigrants.

“It’s the right time to do business, because the African community is growing,” he said.
Another of the festival’s organizers, Bourema Niambele of Mali, agreed that the influx of Africans has increased their visibility in the city, and that this is a good time to increase Americans’ awareness of the richness of African culture.

“Americans seem to have a curiosity about Africans,” said Niambele. “Africa was not known to Americans until recently—-only for famine, war.”
Niambele works as secretary of the New York branch of the High Consul of Malians, an international organization that helps Malian immigrant communities around the world.

When he first came to the US, Niambele worked in a car wash, and spoke little English.
“I didn’t know what the hell was meant by Social Security,” he recalled.
Niambele said he had an American girlfriend in Mali, with whom he eventually came to the US. “She tried to prepare me for it before I came, but I didn’t pay attention,” Niambele remembered with a self-deprecating chuckle.
Niambele sees many other Africans who are as lost in their new society as he was when he first got here ten years ago, and wants to offer services that will help them cope with their new surroundings.

To that end, the African United Day Festival, while a success in its own right, was just the starting point for organizing Africans. Niambele, Titikipina and other African expatriates plan to start a Bronx-based non-profit organization they want to call the African People’s Alliance, whose goal would be to provide health services, immigration assistance, job placement, and ESL classes for Africans. They said the Bronx African community is currently underserved, and needs a large catchall service center to tend to their needs.

Ramatu Ahmed, a Ghanaian woman who has lived in Highbridge for seven years, remembered how the festival organizers concluded that such an organization was needed.
“We asked ourselves, after the parade: what next?” Ahmed remembered. “That led to the idea to form an alliance. It was a collective idea.”
Ahmed adds that, along with providing services and a collective sense of hope to Africans in the Bronx,  the Alliance will also focus on rural development in Africa itself, and lend expertise garnered in the US back to the home continent.

“There is a saying in Africa,” said the multilingual Ahmed. “If the mother can’t sleep, then the child can’t sleep either. If Africa is not sleeping, how can we sleep?”
Djounedou Titikipina sees the African People’s Alliance’s ultimate goal in Africa just as ambitiously, but more abstractly.  He agrees the Alliance would lend tangible assistance to immigrants, but he also wants to spearhead a movement to introduce the Hausa language as a lingua franca among Africans.

Currently, Hausa is spoken by tens of millions of Africans in Nigeria and parts of several other West African countries. Titikipina sees its dissemination among even broader sections of Africans as a way to unite people from the continent while helping them to feel proud of their origins. He said that when he recently announced his idea to champion Hausa as an African lingua franca at a Bronx mosque, a packed house granted him a standing ovation.

“After Arabic, Hausa is the second language for translation of the Koran,” Titikipina said. “I myself speak Hausa, and I don’t even know where I learned it.”
Titikipina said that, in part, he has been alarmed at the rapid ascendance of Spanish as a dominant language in the Bronx since his arrival here eight years ago. He wants to introduce a language that could help unite Africans, in Africa and abroad— just as Spanish unites Latinos of every nationality.

Titikipina pulled out a phone card from his wallet and slammed it on the table. “You see this phone card?” he demanded, his eyes alight with the excitement of discovery. “It should say, when you dial: ‘for English, press one. For Spanish, press two…”

Then he leaned forward for the grand finale, “and for Hausa….press three.”