OUR INFORMANTS
THEIR STORIES
Mr. Atsu Dagadu
Friends with Karina
Atsu, the African drummer who is very passionate about spreading the music from his origin, has been living in Hong Kong for 7 years as a drum teacher. He was born in Ghana, a nation along the Gulf of Guinea in the sub-region of West Africa. His first language is Ewe, which is the language of the area he came from. In addition, he speaks fluent Ga and English and knows a little bit of Twi, another three languages commonly spoken in Ghana. Among all the languages, he emphasized, “English is the official one everybody get to use and Twi is the most popular (in Ghana).” Back in the days in Ghana when he was talking to his parents or siblings about topics like relatives’ birthday and family holiday, he would speak purely Ewe. When he was at school, he had to talk in English with teachers and classmates. In Hong Kong, English is the main language he uses. When he is talking to his church friends at St. John’s Cathedral in Central about religious issues, he uses English. However, he speaks both English and Cantonese at work. Knowing a few Cantonese phrases such as “zou2 san4” (means good morning), he finds them useful to communicate with his students in drum classes.
During leisure time, Atsu mainly socializes with his African friends in Hong Kong. Most of them are Ghanaians, and others are from Senegal and Nigeria. They usually hang out in the African bars (especially the one located at block B, 13th floor) in Chung King Mansions, Tsim Sha Tsui. Other popular places in Hong Kong, for instance, Jordan, Mongkok and Yau Ma Tei area are also his favorites to mingle with friends as well. Besides his African friends, he has local friends who are generally his students. In terms of experiencing the struggles in living in Hong Kong, Atsu holds a very positive attitude. “I like Hong Kong, I like the people and it is such a good place to live”, he said. The only thing he hates is the busy lifestyle and fast pace of this metropolitan city.
In his opinion, Hong Kong and the authority have done nothing to support or promote the languages and culture of Africa. Compared with Mainland China, where he sometimes travels for work, he has noticed certain activities in promoting African languages and raising the awareness about the African community among Chinese. Instead of counting on the government, he as an individual hopes that his own effort can help. So far, he and his team have been trying to hold African music festival, inviting talents from other countries to come to Hong Kong for music and cultural exchange. In the meantime, it can let local people know more about the color of music particularly those in Africa. He has been visiting a lot of local schools like the University of Hong Kong to teach African drums. Recently, he is working on the plan of organizing a Hong Kong African drum association. He believes there is no barrier in music which can bring people together, regardless of their differences in nationalities, backgrounds and languages.
Talking about his idea of African community in Hong Kong, he only knows little about the organization of African Community (HK) and he has never been to their meetings so far. To Atsu, African Community (HK) is an alternative since there is no such a community in Hong Kong just for Ghanaians. He appreciates their attempts in bringing Africans together, striving for the best of their rights, and giving them supports. Lastly, Atsu shares that he would like to pass the languages of Africa he knows to his children. If he marries a Chinese in Hong Kong in the future, he will definitely let them learn Chinese so that they can blend into the local life of Hong Kong.
Dr. Facil Tesfaye
Professor of Charis, Noman and Sehrish
Facil, originally from Ethiopia in the Eastern part of Africa, is a programme director and assistant professor of the School of Modern Language in the University of Hong Kong. He did his undergraduate studies in African Studies and Political Science at the Humboldt University in Berlin (Germany), finished an MA in Political Science from the Université du Quebec à Montréal, and completed his PhD in History from McGill University (Montréal/Canada). He left Ethiopia when he was 26 years old and started his journey of studying and working abroad. After receiving a job offer from HKU, he decided to come to Hong Kong in July 2014. Facil’s mother tongue is Amharic, the official working language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, and he speaks fluent French, English and German. When he is talking to his parents or most of the siblings, he normally uses Amharic. He uses French with only one of the sisters. When he goes to church in Ethiopia, Amharic is what people use there. In HKU, he uses English all the time. Nevertheless, he sometimes speaks French or German with colleagues who are from Europe. He occasionally talks to certain professors with a mixture of several languages.
During free time, Facil usually socializes with his friends here in Hong Kong. Perhaps because he has only been living in Hong Kong for less than a year, he just has a few local friends. Ethiopia are not where most of his friends from. In fact, his friends in Hong Kong are from different parts of the world. As a multilingual speaker, he uses four different languages with different friends. Most of the time, he finds himself code-switching using different languages while talking with them. They often hang out in bars, restaurants and friends’ homes. The hair salon in Chung King Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui that he mentioned is his “must-go” every time they need a haircut. In regard to the struggle living in Hong Kong, he firmly believes that not knowing Cantonese is his biggest problem. Worse still, he finds it difficult to learn Cantonese here. “Whenever I try to speak to local people in my broken Cantonese, they would cut you off and use English to talk to you right away”, he said. As a result, he has no way to practice his Cantonese. Compared with his days of studying abroad in Germany, a very monolingual country in his point of view, he picked up German promptly as German people were patient enough to wait and let him finish the sentence in German. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is a multilingual city where foreigners can easily survive and communicate with locals. Even though he has attempted to learn and take Cantonese course in one semester, he had no motivations and eventually stopped learning it since he found it totally fine to live in Hong Kong without knowing Cantonese.
In promoting the African culture and languages, Facil thinks that related activities are rather limited in Hong Kong. He sees most Hong Kong people barely have very little knowledge about Africa. Being responsible for the African music course in HKU, he however is glad to see that many HKU students are interested in African music. He hopes that more locals, not just students, can also have the opportunities to learn more about African culture.
For his idea and concept about the African community in Hong Kong, Facil recognizes that there is a Pan-African community who has their own association and gathering spot such as Chung King Mansions in connecting the Africans in Hong Kong. Yet he added, “of course when Africans meet, there is a tendency for them to stick together. But the fact that you came from Africa doesn’t makes you friends.” It is essential to know that Africa is more than just Africa as a whole. It is a continent with lots of countries having a large diversity of ethnicities, cultures and languages.
Mr. Laurent Ndijuye
Friends with Noman and Sehrish
Laurent is a Tanzanian-born third year PhD candidate at The University of Hong Kong in the field of Education specialized in Education Policy. He is one of the highly educated informants in our study. Prior to arriving to Hong Kong for his doctorate studies three years ago, he had completed his masters at the Columbia University and bachelors at the University of Cape Town. He also worked for the UNICEF as an advisor based in Tanzania, South Africa and Brazil starting from as early as after the graduation of his secondary school studies.
Laurent has been moving around to various countries in Africa back and forth at an early age, and like most people from the continent, his competency in African and other languages is worth noting. He is a fluent speaker of Swahili, which is one of the official languages in Tanzania, and the language spoken widely in many other parts of Africa including east, central and parts of southern Africa. It is the primary language spoken in his household excluding his mother. He speaks a tribal language called Kiha with his mother, and he explained his motivation to learn it when asked about his acquisition of the language, “I had to pick up later in life as I did not want to lose my identity”. He also acquired English through formal education. Despite English being one of the two official languages in Tanzania, Laurent feels that English is not widely embraced by local Tanzanians, and some may even treat it as a second class language. Another colonial language he learnt is French, which he acquired fluency through his education and during his time of employment at the UNICEF. Apart from speaking the aforementioned languages with great fluency, he also speaks Creole, Pidgin English and Kinyarwanda at conversational level due to his mobility in the continent.
When he first arrived in Hong Kong, Laurent had faced difficulties in adapting due to the language barrier. He shared a small incident which he initially thought was an issue of racial discrimination, turned out to be language barrier. It came to his realization that people in Hong Kong were not being unhelpful and ignored his enquiries due to his race, but it was actually due to the fact that they could not speak any English, and hence, they tried to avoid confronting him. Since then, he struggled to acquire survival level Cantonese, but not more because he thought he did not have a need to use it in the campus. Almost all of his PhD colleagues, undergraduate students, and other peers speak English with him. Moreover, as a Roman Catholic, the church sermons he goes to almost every Sundays are also conducted in English. Nevertheless, his social circle has a variety of ethnicities in Hong Kong including Chinese, westerners and Africans. He explains that there is no specificity in making friends and he enjoys casual hang-outs in Chung King Mansion and in the New Territories such as in Kam Tin where his Ghanaian friends reside.
In contrast to other ethnic minorities such as the South Asian community, where having similar struggles tends to be the primary reason of uniting a community, Laurent’s opinion seems to differ such notion and thinks ‘struggles’ comes second. He believes, as Africans, their skin color comes first when it comes to why they tend to identify themselves as a single community, especially in a Far East city like Hong Kong where there is not much familiarity with the African continent. He feels that there is not much visible support from the Hong Kong government regarding the promotion of African culture, except a handful of events held in the campus of HKU.
“Well, in HK, given that Africans are a minority of a minority, they are more united. At the end of the day, regardless of where you’re from, in other people’s perception (non-Africans), when you’re black, you’re a potential criminal regardless of whether you’re a Nigerian, or a Ghanaian, they’re just one (kind of) people.”
When asked about interracial marriage and whether if there is a possibility that he will marry a Chinese woman if he decides to settle in Hong Kong, he was very open to the idea. Although he had no concrete plans in the near future, he hoped to teach his child(ren) Cantonese, English and Swahili due to their high functional use in Hong Kong and Tanzania. Currently, Laurent is still deciding whether he would stay in Hong Kong to pursue a postdoctoral position, or go overseas, depending on the remuneration package he gets offered.
Ms. Michelle Ogwu
Friends with Charis
Michelle is the oldest of five daughters in a family of Nigerian descent, but has never lived there, or even been back to visit! Instead, her father’s work has as a construction worker has brought her family to live in the Philippines, mainland China, and, since 2007, Hong Kong. She now attends a local secondary school for ethnic minorities. Her family plans for her to stay in Hong Kong until she graduates and heads to the US for college.
Michelle’s upbringing has made her become fluent in English and Tagalog, while having enough Cantonese and Mandarin to get by in Hong Kong and mainland China. She does not speak any Nigerian languages, and seemingly has little knowledge of Nigerian languages and cultures. She tells me that her father “speaks Nigerian”, rather than Igbo, Hausa, or any of the other major languages spoken there. She speaks exclusively in English with her family, and attends an English-speaking church. However, at school, she speaks primarily in Cantonese with her teachers. She has two different groups of friends among her classmates - a Chinese group with whom she uses Cantonese, and a “many countries” group with whom she uses English. This international group of friends are comprised of people from Europe or other Asian countries. She has several African friends, mostly from West Africa, but they do not form a large part of her social groups, and she says she feels no special connection to people just because they are from Africa. Her father, on the other hand, has a social network of half Chinese people and half African people.
When speaking about the challenges she faces in Hong Kong as an African, Michelle remains upbeat. She faced a language barrier when she first arrived, but has since learned Cantonese at school, so that she can get around and converse with people. She can also write up to “60 words” of Chinese. However, she adds that her second sister has not been as good at adapting to the local language as her, and speaks only a little Chinese. Her youngest sisters are still very young, so their exposure to Cantonese at this age is likely to make them fluent in the language if they continue to grow up here. Michelle does feel discriminated against by some local Hong Kongers on the basis of her skin color, but is quick to add that this is not something she faces regularly.
Having grown up in three Asian countries while being African, Michelle understandably struggles with her cultural identity. She considers herself half a Hong Konger - while she is not an official citizen, she has been here for almost half her life, and feels that she knows the culture.
Michelle is travelling to Nigeria this summer to meet her family there for the first time!
Ms. Mujay
Friends with Charis
Mujay is a second-generation African in Hong Kong. Her father is from Sierra Leone, and her mother, while born in Guinea, was raised in Sierra Leone. After marrying and having their first son in Sierra Leone, Mujay’s father went to mainland China to study, and shortly thereafter decided to move his small family to Hong Kong, because he found it a “wonderful amazing place to live”. Mujay and her two younger brothers were born and raised here. None of the four children have never been back to any part of Africa, and have actually never met most of their relatives. Mujay now attends a local university, and is set to graduate next year.
Mujay’s first language is English, but she also speaks nearly fluent Cantonese, can can write a little bit of Chinese as a result of growing up in the local school system. She can also speak a little pidgin English, as well as Fulah (her mother’s dialect) and Mendi (her father’s dialect). She does not use these languages often, however, and continues to use English even when she calls her distant relatives in Africa. Her discomfort at using Fulah means that she cannot communicate at all with some members of her mother's family, who do not speak any English. Mujay’s family enjoys going to Tsim Sha Tsui, especially taking walks along the harbour and going to Chungking Mansions for the men in her family to visit the barber.
In high school, Mujay’s friends were mostly local Chinese students. Now, in university, she has a harder time finding close friends as many people around her are members of other ethnic minority groups, and often speak in their own languages, which she does not understand. When she does meet with these friends, they speak English together.
The language barrier is not the only thing that makes it difficult for Mujay to find friends. She feels that there is a lot of racism in Hong Kong, and her stories do prove that. “People always gossip when they see me, and they don't think I can speak Chinese, but I can hear them. You know, once it was very hurtful. I was crossing the street and I heard a man saying to his son,‘You need to take a bath when you go home because you passed by an African.’” Mujay also speaks out against the exoticization of Africans in Hong Kong. “In primary school, we were learning about different races, and our teacher said something good about black skin. After that, the girls in my class would rub my arm whenever they saw me. After a while I asked them to stop because it really pissed me off”. But even though Mujay faces racism on a regular basis, she remains optimistic about the future of Africans in Hong Kong. She believes that the new generation of Hong Kongers are more exposed to people of different skin colors.
Mujay definitely considers herself to be a Hong Konger as she “was born in hk and [has] lived here [her] whole life socializing with the people and doing what they do”. Although she is aware of African fellowships that gather in Tsim Sha Tsui and Central, and knows that her parents join them, she herself does not attend. She personally feels that since she has never lived in Africa, she does not miss it. Nevertheless, there are still things she does to keep in touch with her African roots, such as eating traditional food at home, keeping semi-regular contact with her family, and choosing to use her African name Mujay even though she has an English name.