Restricted affiliation: the costs of otherness among Afroczechs

ABSTRACT

The increasing presence of African diasporic people in Europe and their identity politics have given rise to a proliferation of studies on their experiences, albeit with the exception of central eastern Europe (CEE). This research expands on this scholarship by addressing lived experiences, racialisation processes and struggles to belong among Afropeans in Czechia. Grounded in ethnography the study draws from narrative interviews with self-identified Afroczechs who are closely connected to both their African heritage and their Czechness. We conceptualise their identity politics as Restricted Affiliation in a sense that the state of belonging to Czechia has distinct limits due to the high costs of racial Otherness they experience. The findings demonstrate the limits of a shared language vis-à-vis racial ideologies in Czech national identity constructions and contribute to more visibility and further theorising of Czech blackness.

KEYWORDS:

• African diaspora
• Czechia
• identity politics
• language
• race
• Afroczech

Introduction

In many ways our world remains a “world of races”, whether we admit it or not. Although this fact is often denied, the racial signifier is still in many ways the inescapable language for the stories people tell about themselves, about their relationships with the Other, about memory, and about power. (Mbembe 2017, 55)

On January 6th, 2023, Czech Catholic society, together with Christians all over the world, celebrated the tradition of the Biblical Magi, also known as the Three Kings, or Three Wise Men. Depictions of three noble men bringing gifts to baby Jesus have existed since the first century and their presence is common in nativity scenes. One of the three kings, Balthazar, has historically, and traditionally been depicted as a person of colour. In Prague, in January 2023, this king was personified by a white Czech person in blackface.¹ As a result, a petition was initiated by a young Afroczech woman, calling for an end to this practice explaining that it was disrespectful, hurtful and humiliating towards non-white residents and people of African heritage in Czechia.² While the petition quickly gained some signatures, there was also aggressive backlash against it. In the days that followed, its author received such hateful, racist and, in fact, threatening Emails that she feared for her life and decided to take it down. The incident also gathered media attention and one of the leading Czech online news sites published parts of the petition including the initiator’s name along with comments from stakeholders in the Catholic church, all white and male, who criticised and dismissed the petition. The author of the petition was not approached to provide a statement in the article and after its publication the young Afroczech woman reclused herself. In a personal interview with us in late April 2023, she explained that she felt misrepresented by the article and that the aggressive backlash through social media frightened her to the core. Hence, she herself decided to avoid the media despite repeated invitations to interviews and talk shows. Sadly, her experienced emotional and psychological costs of Otherness were too high.

We started the article with this recent incident because we consider it symptomatic for the everyday struggle and sense of restricted affiliation many Afroczech people feel and experience in Czechia. It is also an apt example of how problematic African heritage and “race” emerges in the specific Czech context because it reveals the common misconception among Czech people that racism is only something which exists through consciously malicious action and behaviour. Given the poorly researched field of Czech racial politics, we have rather humble ambitions in this paper. Primarily, we want to portray narratives of belonging among Czech citizens with African heritage in order to show that this search for identity is, in many if not most cases, characterised by immense challenges and struggles. The focus on specific European contexts is important because the extent and the specific ways in which Afropeans feel and are seen as “Other” varies greatly from country to country (Eldar 2022, 9). In the Czech context, Shmidt’s (2020) pioneering work shows that “race science” was essential to the country’s nation-building process, and that despite the rejection of German race theories, the strive for white homogeneity was very much at the core of the national identity. Czech society at large continues to imagine itself widely as hegemonically white, and people of colour are regularly seen as Other. Being permanently perceived as such an Other, even if one’s own sense of belonging is rooted in Czechness, comes with certain costs and we conceptualise the result of these costs as restricted affiliation. Theoretically grounded in the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis 2006, 2011), this paper shows how various dynamics of marginalisation lead Afroczechs to experience high social, emotional and psychological challenges which we conceptualise as “costs” and which result in a sense of not fully belonging to Czechia. But we will show that Afroczechness is a legitimate Czech national identity trajectory in which multiple Czech and African reference points intersect in the negotiations of these complex ways of being in the world. The first part of the paper provides contextualisation to the politics of race in Czechia, before we briefly discuss conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues. The backbone of the article, presented in the later sections, is the discussion of Afroczech narratives which demonstrates that despite a heavy politics of Othering in Czechia, a generation of young African-descended Czechs are forging new ways of becoming and being Afropeans.

White homogeneity and race evasiveness in Czechia

This article emerges as part of a larger study on African and Afroczech lives in Czechia which is funded by the Czech Research Foundation (GAČR). Czechia and, in particular, the countryside remains not only a predominantly white but sometimes solely white space. There is a long presence of minorities such as Roma and Vietnamese people, particularly in middle-size cities, but African people or people with African heritage have not had a strong presence in the Czech societal make-up. In 2021, there were merely approximately 4000 individuals from sub-Saharan African countries registered as long term residents in the country.³ When, in response to the murder of George Floyd in early 2020, the Black Lives Matter protests spread across the globe, the Czech President at the time, Miloš Zeman proclaimed that the slogan Black Lives Matter (BLM) was in itself racist “since all lives matter” (ČTK 2020).⁴ As a movement seeking social and racial justice, BLM has not been understood and largely deemed irrelevant in Czechia by many if not most citizens. One can argue, indeed, that from an overall perspective, a common sentiment prevalent in the country is that “race” is not a “thing” Czech people are in need to engage with. Also not least, we would like to argue, because racial diversity is not desired.

European discourse, of course, more generally has a long history of the idea that giving significance to the notion of race and recognising racial differences might implicitly feed racism. This is so, despite the fact that for decades people of colour all over the world have argued that their quotidian experience with “everyday racism” (Essed 2002) makes race a tool of exclusion and discrimination and, therefore, proves that “race matters”. And yet, a not uncommon “evasiveness” to speak about “race” continues to permeate much of European discourse. The general lack of attention given to the subject has been framed as a “disavowment of race” (Migliarini 2018), as “race as an absent presence” (Balkenhol and Schramm 2019), or as a shunning of race (Foner 2018). More recently, perhaps with the exception of France, but with dramatic consequences, as we have seen recently, European societies have increasingly engaged in “race talk”. The European Commission facilitated the 2nd European summit against racism on 21 March 2022 with a clear aim to end structural racism and racial profiling (De Groot 2022).

In Central Eastern Europe (CEE) racism has generally been constructed as something that only really happens in South Africa or the US (Law and Zakharov 2018, 118). However, the reports on racist behaviour of border officials against African migrants from Ukraine at the start of the war (Balogun 2023), triggered further reflections. In Czechia, conversations about race have significantly increased among younger generations after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. After all, for several generations, African people and individuals who have an African parent, have been present and there are many who feel more Czech than African. Since the early 1960s, students from diverse African countries attended academic institutions in socialist Czechoslovakia. The “University of 17. November” [Univerzita 17. Listopadu] in Prague, was a specific tertiary institution designed for students from the so-called third world (Holečková 2010) which functioned in the years between 1961 and 1974. Students came from various African countries, but given the Marxist orientation of the institution, Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Sudan were on top of the list. However, there were also many young Africans, almost exclusively men, who came to study at other universities in Prague. Furthermore, there is a well-known documented group of 60+ Namibian children who arrived in Czechoslovakia between 1985 and 1991, many of whom had to return later to Namibia (Machalík 2007; Mildnerová 2020, 2021; Miškařík 2019). Since the democratisation in the early 1990s, more and more Africans have moved to the country, many have Czech partners and co-parent Afroczech children.⁵ Despite a growing presence of people of colour in Czechia, race evasiveness continues to be very strong, both in public and academic discourse. There is resistance to acknowledge that there are specific Czech conditions “which concretize the notion of race” (Goldberg 2006, 332) which are worthwhile to be studied. In fact, “there is a shortage of explanations about the racialisation of Black/mixed-race people”, more broadly in the CEE region (Balogun 2020, 1197).

At the same time, there is some historical scholarship which has shown that Czech people were fully complicit with the principles of colonisation, ideologies of white supremacy and the legitimacy of the forceful subjugation of African “inferior” people. Czech individuals, Czech territory and the society as a whole benefitted to a significant degree from the European expansion and conquest. There is work which shows, that there were merely sporadic objections that were raised in the early twentieth century which concerned specific instances of brutality against Africans on the continent, especially those perpetrated by German colonialists (Křížová 2020). Arguably, however, this had more to do with the rivalry between Czechs and Germans rather than a genuine concern for the conditions of native populations. Without doubt, there was certainly a colonial enthusiasm among Czechs and the possibility of acquiring the territory of contemporary Togo was seriously discussed in the Czech press after the First World War (Křížová 2020). Also, in the early years of the twentieth century, there was a so-called Abyssinian Village with several African “performers”, including entire families which was a popular part of the Jubilee Exhibition in Prague (Herza 2020b). There is also a body of work (e.g. Gedlu 2007; Jakubcová 2018; Záhořík and Dvořáček 2014; 2017; Zídek and Sieber 2007) which addresses the complexities in the relationship between Czechoslovakia/Czechia and African countries. When studying race in Czechia, it is paramount to recognise that representations of African people were firmly rooted in the ideology of Czech superiority and the idea that African natives are positioned much lower in the hierarchy of human civilisation. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that race science and eugenics had multiple implications in the Czechoslovak territory and, in fact, the pseudoscience of race produced throughout the twentieth century acted as “an agent and a structure of nation-building” (Shmidt 2020, 2). More broadly in the context of the CEE region it has been argued that “eugenics is an important mechanism through which race and racism have been reproduced” (Balogun 2022, 2481). Czechia is no exception to this.

Against this historical background, it is rather puzzling that race is not yet widely recognised as a useful category in the study and analysis of belonging and identity of the Czech nation. It seems, in fact, an ironic twist that, on the one hand, race is absent from most scholarship, but, on the other hand, there is a common outright rejection of racial diversity which has been a symptom of the populist politics in most CEE regions (Kalmar 2022). By focusing on the racialisation of Black/mixed-race people in Poland, Balogun has shown how racist ideologies play out in dynamics of who is accepted as a Polish person and who is not. The Polish Lebensraum (Balogun 2018) and “Polish-centrism” (Balogun 2020) manifest as everyday “biological practice” based on ideologies of racial hierarchies which constantly reproduce differences which create an ingroup and an outgroup. These dynamics “are made possible by the processes of normalisation and naturalisation of hierarchies” which are reflected in much of our data analysis as well. It is also portrayed in a recent non-academic book that contains interviews with Afroczechs (Ubam 2021).

However, in Czechia, more generally there is paucity of research on people with African heritage. Some scholars (Ambenji 2021; Gerstnerová 2011; Jirouškova 2002) studied aspects of integration among first-generation African migrants in Czechia but their studies did not seriously consider issues of belonging among Czech people who have African heritage. While Ambenji (2021) discusses some aspects of discrimination in relation to, for instance, shopping, flat hunting and immigration office services, the challenges described focus largely on the lack of Czech language skills rather than race-related dynamics. This study and its unprecedented focus on Afroczechs who are proficient in the Czech language constitutes a markedly different reality as language serves as a marker of Czech belonging. We aim to provide a lens through which we can advance our understanding of a CEE African diasporic context and learn to see the meanings and realities of race in Czechia. This research lays the ground upon which we can further the study of prevalent racial ideologies in Czechia and an understanding of how they contribute, in the case at hand, to quotidian racial challenges experienced by non-white Czechs.

Concepts, theory and methodology

The concept of “race” as a socially constructed category of human belonging and its intertwining into identity politics is constituted in fundamentally different ways in Anglo-American centres of research than in Czechia. The ways in which Czech people think or talk about “race” or the ways they reject engagement with the concept are heavily influenced by the problematic discourse of “colonial exceptionalism” (Herza 2020a). This entails Czech perceptions of “innocent” or neutral self-identities on the basis that the country did not have an active role in the slave trade and also had no African colonies. This positioning is deeply problematic and hampers a sense of critical “whiteness” among Czech people (see also for recent discussions: Rudwick and Schmiedl 2023; Rudwick and Simuziya 2023). The country’s hegemonic whiteness is the root of the high costs of Otherness experienced by people of colour. The intersections of race with other social categories are never static and there are multiple variables which contribute to power and identity politics which yield insight into the complexities of the human condition (Crenshaw 1991). As the reader will see throughout the empirical section of this article: racialised identity politics are constructed in social actions, they are also the products of particular historical and contextual conditions and they are also intermeshed in multiple social divisions (Yuval-Davis 2011).

The study is ethnographic in a sense that we moved and operated fluidly inside and outside the “field” as participant observers over a period of about one year and a half. In many instances we did not actively go “into the field” but the “field came to us”. In this article, we focus on a group of thirteen participants⁶ who self-identify as Afroczech and have lived in the country for a minimum period of twenty years. Individuals were between 22 and 48 years young at the time of the fieldwork (January 2022–June 2023); they had a diversity of socio-economic and educational backgrounds and all had links with at least one African country. All participants spoke fluent Czech with most of them also being proficient in English. The time we spent in the company of our participants ranged from a few hours to several days and much data we collected stayed unrecorded. For the analysis of this paper, we focus on what we term the costs of Otherness which was one of the predominant themes emerging from narrative interviews and observations. The article is also, to some extent, autoethnographic as the second authors, Angela, is an Afroczech woman herself. This positionality enabled her to provide understandings and insights into her personal search for belonging that go beyond classic ethnographic encounters and interviews. These autobiographical reflections also serve to emphasise and explain some of the points brought up by participants. But before we give voice to our Afroczech participants we would like to (1) define this group of people and (2) explain why we, throughout this paper, consistently make use of the term “Afroczech” without the hyphen. As for the first point, we define an Afroczech person as an individual who derives belonging from diverse African heritage but also importantly self-identifies as Czech. Many Afroczechs are bi-racial with one parent from an African country and the other from Czechia but two of our participants have African parents but a life trajectory in Czechia. The majority of our interviewees have mother-tongue proficiency in Czech and have lived most of their lives in the country. The two participants who are not of mixed race, speak fluent Czech, have been Czech residents for decades and see themselves as members of Czech society.

Regarding the second point, the unhyphenated perspective of the term Afroczech serves to emphasise the simultaneous belonging to a sometimes biracial, but always bicultural and bilingual identity as a “full” Czech and “full” African person at the same time. We purposely do not subscribe to a separateness of the various elements of this multifacetted identity. In other words, the African heritage is part of an individual’s Czech identity and Czechness is part of the African identity. Our approach is inspired by Pitts (2019) usage of the term “Afropean” who describes his own search for belonging as finding relevance in this unhyphenated identity that encouraged him to think of himself as a complete whole rather than as someone who has two deficient parts which make one whole. It provides a space where Africaness/Blackness contributes to shaping European identity and encourages the understanding that there are not two (deficient) parts but two entirely whole (proficient) identities. Nonetheless, as will be seen in the text below, African and Czech elements in the identities are also experienced as distinct (if not separate at times) by Afroczechs, not least because of the ways in which they are perceived by members of Czech society. The analysis serves to show that in everyday life encounters there are binary and contrastive identity ascriptions because of a perceived incompatibility of Czechness vis-a-vis Africaness. The distinction is, however, not only external and other-ascribed; in certain contexts Afroczechs themselves juxtapose their Czechness with their Africaness. Participants’ narratives give testimony to a double consciousness (Du Bois 1994 [1903]), they have self-ascribed identities but at the same time, they also carry the ability to look at themselves through the eyes of mainstream white Czech society and, as a result, they are acutely aware of their Otherness. The narratives also show that Afroczechs actively emphasise one identity over another dependent on space and context and that forms of Czechness vis-a-vis Africaness create fluidity in the making of Afroczechness. The analysis also unravels the costs of Otherness in Czechia through tangible and anecdotal stories and it illustrates the multiple ways in which race is fluid, contextual and negotiated.

Living afroczechness

All our participants have a sense of belonging, although to varying degrees, to the Czech language, Czech society and to Czechia as a home country. While it seems that this Czechness is particularly embraced and appreciated when in the company of Czech people and in Czechia, it also serves as an identity tool when travelling. The Czech language is widely perceived as “special” among our participants, and this is due to its perceived richness of expression, and it being seen as a carrier of cultural heritage, also the personal cultural heritage of the participant.

Importantly, not all self-identified Afroczechs have immaculate proficiency in Czech. Nigerian-born middle-aged Thabisa, for instance, came to Czechia only as a young adult and while she is fluent in Czech, she has a strong accent and far from flawless grammar. In explaining how Czechia became her home and why she identifies as Afroczech, Thabisa emphatically proclaims “I really travelled a lot but here [in Czechia] I found my peace, I feel safe, and I feel at home”. Her narrative also testifies, however, just how much of a struggle it was for her to receive permanent residence and become a citizen. During this decade long struggle she also had multiple experiences in which she was not only othered but discriminated against. Exclusion due to her lack of language skills and racism due to her African roots constituted big obstacles, some of which made her initially quite desperate. Frustrating encounters with non-English speaking immigration officers and lack of services in the retail industry lead her to work very hard on her Czech language skills. She credits her own determination for the ultimate success of making a good life in the country rather than having felt welcome. The racialising and racist incidents she and her children experienced, both at institutional and at interpersonal levels, gives testimony to the extent of her determination. Thabisa is, all in all, very appreciative of Czech society as a cultural and national group and this plays an important role in her Afroczech identity-making. She unambigiuously identifies Czechia as her home and she embraces the feeling of being part of a safe and secure society.

Petra, who is in her mid-twenties has a Czech mother and Ghanian father, who split up shortly after she was born. While she also appreciates other aspects of living in the country, such as the safety and low crime, it is the Czech language that plays a paramount role in her identity-making. This linguistic belonging informs Petra’s existence to a high degree, and it is thus not surprising that she works as a Czech writer and copyeditor. Most of our interviewees, in fact, are urban professionals who operate in Czech most of their day and feel, at least to some extent, at home in this language. And yet, many of them point to the limits of language against the power of racial ideology. Zimbabwean-Czech Tim, for instance, is full of anecdotes about his many experiences of situations where he initially only spoke to someone on the phone who then had an imagination of him as white and could not hide their “disappointment” that he was of African descent when meeting physically. The constant racial Othering is “annoying” for him, and he wonders whether it will ever change. He also sees the complimenting on his “excellent Czech skills” throughout his life as an annoyance because Czech is his mother-tongue and expresses much of who he is. In his elaborations of his own Czechness feature habits, values, and also food, and he provides, as did other interviewees, specific examples such as pastry, sausages and not least beer. “There is so much I love about this country” he passionately assures us and then continues to say that he could never have as good a life in Harare (where his father resides) as he does in Prague. This is not to say, however, that he does not treasure the visits to his father’s country and that southern Africa is a region where he wants to spend more time.

Erika, is a young woman who grew up in Czechia and has Nigerian parents who live professional lives. According to Erika, her dad will never set foot into the MHD, the Prague public transport system, due to a violently racist and clearly traumatic incidence he experienced in the early 2000s. Her parents speak Czech but not with the kind of first-level proficiency Erika herself can claim. She describes at length the love she feels for the Czech language and culture, and she refers to what she calls “weird stuff” which makes up her Afroczech identity. Part of this is that she finds herself appreciating Czech šlágr⁷ music as a significant part of her linguistic and cultural belonging. She emphatically proclaims: “it’s more like I enjoy it because it’s just so Czech and not for what it is”. While she is also fully proficient in English, she has experienced Nigeria’s multilingualism as somewhat alienating during her visits to the country. In juxtaposing the language situations, she explains: “This [Czechia] is a place where – unlike in Nigeria – I can walk around and understand what is happening”.

Beyond an appreciation of its communicative value the Czech language is venerated for its rich history, depth of expression and, not least its literary works. Many of our participants speak about their emotional investment in the language and their strong sense of belonging through it. It is clear that the politics of linguistic identity (Rajagopalan 2001) are rooted in the Czech language for the majority of our participants. Ironically, however, as Tim and several others point out, there are distinct limits to the feeling of belonging in Czechia through linguistic identity. In particular, the bi-racial individuals highlight race as the quintessential aspect of Otherness in their existences and the narratives show that in many instances the costs are high in terms of mental, psychological and emotional health. Peter, for instance, openly speaks about his decade-long experience with psychologists and refers to one in particular who made him aware of a high rate of suicides among Afropeans. He alerts to the fact that Afroczech children of Czech mothers often struggle even within their own families to have their experiences with racialisation, exclusion and blatant racism acknowledged, let alone addressed. Tereza whose father is from the DRC describes that even her own Czech grandmother would make deeply hurtful comments about Africans in her presence. While this would not be the case with her mother, she would nonetheless brush off worries about racism that Tereza voiced. This is echoed also by Noah:

So, the Czech parent goes: “you have racial problems? Agh … bullshit, really you are making this up”. My mother was the same. It’s like you say to a child who has a stomach pain, to just get over it because it’s not really there … Till today we have huge fights over this.

Noah’s narrative very much focuses on his multiple sense of Otherness due to his race in Czechia and he accuses the government of being complicit with racist institutional practices. This is the experience of someone who grew up most of his childhood in Nigeria and only moved to Prague in his late teens. Noah had a privileged upbringing, both in terms of financial and socio-political status as his father was a recognised professional in Nigeria. Moving to Czechia in the 1990s when neo-Nazis roamed the streets all over Europe was deeply traumatic and continues to have effects on him until today when he is in his mid-40s. While he feels that racism is no longer as overt on the streets of Prague, and he no longer fears getting beaten up on the open street while people were just watching as apparently was the case in the 90s, he nonetheless has many examples of systemic racism in schools, sports clubs, cultural centres and other state institutions. Our interviews, more broadly, show that Afroczech teachers in state schools, for example, have first-level experience with the systemic nature of racism in the Czech education system and a persistent undermining of their skills. “Many parents simply do not want their child to be taught by a brown person”, says Noah. In one of our conversations, Noah also argues that most people who were born with African heritage in Czechia have been conditioned to accept quotidian racism. Noah’s Czechness is a somewhat reluctant one, in a sense that he does not have a strong sense of belonging to Czech people. This becomes clear through the consistent usage of “Czech people” in a third-person reference. In fact, he sets himself apart from Czech society to some extent because he sees its racism and xenophobia as significant features. While Noah’s positioning is more critical towards Czech society and generally more radical than that of most of our participants, every single one of them is able to recount situations where they felt that their Africaness or their blackness put them at a disadvantage or even excluded them outright. In most interviews, the costs of this Otherness were exemplified through a myriad of anecdotes that narrate the pains of being non-white in Czechia. Importantly, however, as will be seen below, this struggle not only manifests in relation to Czech society but also comes afore in relation to other members of the African diaspora and continental Africa.

Otherness and double consciousness

Afroczech individuals struggle for belonging not only in Czech society but also in relation to their African heritage. In most instances, there are distinct experiences of Otherness that create complex and at times, conflicted identities which are charaterised by a double consciousness (Du Bois 1994 [1903]). There is one’s personal awareness of one’s Czech- and Africaness and a sense of belonging to more than just one place but then there is also the aspect that participants see themselves through the eyes of white people and their racialised experiences trigger an internal struggle. The concept of the “double gaze” as coined by two South African scholars is also applicable to the experience of Afroczechs. Accordingly, race ideologies are marked by a white and a black gaze, the “white gaze controls and inferiorises” (Canham and Williams 2017, 28), while the black gaze is a “form of surveillance and disciplining that seeks to marshal certain forms of blackness” (Canham and Williams 2017, 29). Indeed, several narratives speak to the inferiorising experience through encounters with white Czechs, as well as a surveilling or “grilling” experience when socialising with other Africans.

One persisting narrative which repeatedly featured throughout our fieldwork is the early realisation of one’s Otherness/Africaness and/or blackness in early childhood. Sudanese-Czech Winnie, who is a successful writer and facilitator and spent many years abroad described in detail how she “just knew” already before going to kindergarten that she was “different”. Many others felt that it was only in a collective, e.g. in kindergarten and school which triggered their own realisation of their difference. Invariably, participants spoke about being confronted with their Otherness by another child who, for instance, suddenly no longer wanted a friendship with them. The details involved idiosyncratic patterns but generally very hurtful memories, with the incessant feature of the explicit reference to the friend’s parents having said that one should rather not speak with the black child because s/he was not Czech. Other narratives also referred to teachers and caretakers singling out the Afroczech child and making her/him feel inferior or deficient, deficiently Czech. Winnie, who grew up in a small village, described how she already became aware of her difference as a very little girl because of a feeling that no one was like her, not her father, not her mother, not any other person that she knew. This realisation gave her the feeling of non-belonging and unhappiness. When she started school and was able to read, she kept studying the atlas searching for a place in the world where she would feel “home”. In Winnie’s memory the situation still worsened once her mother gave birth to a white child with her new Czech husband because in the absence of her own biological African father, her own darker skin tone became her everyday “in the face” Otherness. Winnie describes her frustrations about society’s response to her in this way:

We feel “Other” based on our skin colour and hair texture, however some Czech people dismiss our feelings by saying that within Czech society, we are simply “distinctive”, […] they usually follow up with examples of how white people with red hair or freckles also get stared at or commented on.

Winnie did not hide her anger about the absurdity of comparing red-haired white women to the experience of black females in Czechia. While her stories express much frustration and a belonging with limits to Czechia, they also echo a strong yearning for being accepted as a “full Czech”.

Zuzka, on the other hand, speaks at length about her emotional lack of attachment to the country and feels that Czech culture is not appreciative of loud and expressionate people like herself. Her recollections about her childhood speak to a conscious suppression of what she sees as her African nature. Clearly, there is a strong sense of disappointment among many Afroczechs about people dismissing the racism they encounter and several participants even complained about their own friends and family members who look for explanations other than racialisation and racism. Tony, in particular, feels that Czech people continue to excuse behaviour which in other countries such as the US or UK would unambiguously be seen as racist or microaggression. She also comments on the irony, that many Czech seem to think that race does not matter and yet there is an acute awareness of how different Afroczech people are. This Otherness plays out in numerous ways, sometimes even in their own families: “You’re already noticeable, don’t wear such bright colours to exaggerate it!” was one Czech mother’s advice to her mixed-race daughter.

Africa as the entire continent or specific countries serve as significant reference points for every single of our participants and almost all have relationships with African relatives and friends. There are many ways in which a Pan-Africanness is constructed and performed among our participants although for some Afroczechs, their African ethnic or national identity is more important than their continental identity. Not all these African ways of belonging are necessarily rooted in deep knowledge of the culture or language of the particular ethnic group, but often a specific African country serves as a significant identity tag and also as a racial marker. Indeed, Africaness and blackness is conflated in many instances. Of course, there are many individual differences, some of the bi-racial participants who did not grow up with their African fathers or had fathers who did not teach them much about their specific African roots also feel no particular sense of belonging to any specific African country. Blackness rather than Africaness is then a dominant identity marker. Those who lived over an extended period or regularly having visited their African home country and have relationships with relatives and friends have in their own words “Africa in the heart”, and many can speak for hours about the specificities of African foods, customs, events, etc.

Thabisa, for instance, says she loves her Yoruba culture, but she is not uncritical about it either. Another interviewee emphatically described her Zulu background and how much this ethnicity meant to her. Having stayed or travelled to the African home country has strong significance for many of our participants. Narratives suggest that the African soil provides a comfort that Czechia sometimes fails to offer. Erika’s description is worth to quote at length here:

I think I am more comfortable in my blackness or my Africaness when I am in Africa- because sometimes … you know growing up here and going to schools and neighbourhood where I am, like, the only black kid, sometimes you try to conform, you know … to whiteness and to being more like your white counterpart … and so, sometimes I would try to like … hide … .

Erika’s deliberations echoe what Du Bois (1994 [1903]) described as two worlds within and without the Veil. Given the “the awful shadow of the Veil” (Du Bois 1994 [1903], 47), Erika hides part of herself because she knows that it is this part which might cause her to be excluded in Czechia.

For Angela, her first visit to the African continent, in her case Senegal, was also a turning point in her life: “I finally understood some parts of myself and also of my father’s personality that I could not understand before”. Distinct differences quickly sound stereotypical, also to some of the interviewees’ themselves, but, at the same time, the lived experiences of specific communicative, culinary, cultural, linguistic and aesthetic aspects are nonetheless “real” impressions and Angela describes her own sense of “coming of age” as an African woman as a deeply emotional one. Upon returning, social media, in particular Afrocentric and black platforms which also engage with dual identities and mixedness provided a space in which she could find a home: “It offered me comfort and a sense of belonging to the African diaspora that I never experienced before”.

Peter, who grew up almost half of his life in Nigeria with his local father and Czech mother comments on the non-nuanced and contradictory racialisations he experienced as a “white” person in Nigeria and as a “black” person in Czechia. And yet, in Nigeria he felt to be a part of a specific community of bi-racial children with European mothers and he emphatically remarks in this context: “we were our own ethnic group there”. Clearly, there was a certain comfort that came with the construction of this collective identity. In Czechia, in contrast, he never experienced such a sense of community although he knows several other Afroczech people. While travelling to the African continent has comforting effects for most of our interviewees, there is also a distinct search for Africanness in Czechia. “Melanin Kids”⁸, for instance, provides a space for young people of colour to gather, but this community can also be a challenge for some Afroczechs. As Angela explains, there is a sense that one must “subscribe to a certain level of blackness” and if one fails to represent this level, you might be seen as “czech-itized” and perhaps also “not quite” included. Several participants also describe similar situations by speaking about a “grilling” or “roasting” experience. Indeed, the “black gaze” (Canham and Williams 2017) is also significant and it triggers a concern about lacking authenticity or “proper” blackness and feeling insecure about one’s own identity. Kim self-reflectively remarks: “There are lots of things that I personally do or don’t do that may be seen as taking away my blackness”. The sense of not being black or African enough in a circle and community of other Africans is not the only struggle to authenticate oneself. Ironically, it goes both ways: “I got that my whole life. I often felt that - like I am not black enough or I am not white enough”, says Tom. Angela reflects on her own sense of belonging in the following way: “There is a certain ambiguity in many of our identities and I think a lot of us struggle to find their ‘true’ self here”. The costs of Otherness play out individually as a struggle for authenticity and the experience of not being quite enough but the effort to mitigate this feeling was commonplace among the participants. This “not quite belonging” is a challenge to peoples’ sense of being which we conceptualise as restricted affiliation.

Restricted affiliation

The following vignette serves to illustrate how restricted affiliation manifests: A theatre performance in Prague during autumn 2022, the crowd moves to their seatings as the doors to the venue open. A young Afroczech boy at the age of fifteen, Lukaš, sits down next to a middle-aged eccentric-looking woman. Smiling at him, the woman asks him in English: “Hi dear. Where are you from?”. His immediate response is multimodal, while pointing with his hand to a white woman in front of him, he says “Moje matka je Česka” [My mother is Czech]. Lukaš’s response is revelatory. Although he speaks perfect Czech, was born and has lived his entire life in the country, he refrains from simply responding to the stranger “I am Czech”. Instead, he constructs his identity in reference to his mother who would be seen less ambiguously as Czech due to her whiteness. Lukaš’s life trajectory seems to have taught him that to claim Czechness might trigger an unwanted response, and potentially another set of questions.

The belonging and affiliation to Czechia is no straight-forward experience for Afroczechs and is characterised by distinct limits. We conceptualise this as restricted affiliation, as a both other- and self-ascribed limited sense of belonging that is constructed through experience and in dialogue with mainstream society. Regrettably, Czech mainstream media and public opinion about Africa, which has many negative aspects, also affects, to some degree, the ways Afroczechs engage with their own African roots and by extension also their race. Due to the common negativity our participants encounter, some also feel ambivalence towards their Otherness which results in mental and emotional health issues. On the one hand, most participants want to embrace their Africaness and their blackness, on the other hand, they are weary to express it too openly because in the words of one interviewee: “it is as if a non-white Czech simply doesn’t exist”. This and similar experiences have been noted in the literature on mixed-race individuals in Poland (Balogun and Joseph-Salisbury 2021) and they give testimony to the limits of acceptability of black CEE identities in CEE.

One of the most persistent narratives of our participants is a distinct unsettledness in Czechia, a sense of not being welcome due to a climate of constant racialisation and racism. Tyler (2018) conceptualised a “racial stigma” prevalent in Czechia and its borders which manifests in deeply anti-migrant sentiments and a deep suspicion towards non-white individuals. There is a populist Czech narrative of the country and its people being under constant threat and in an existential struggle against invading foreigners and this has also been framed explicitly in racial terms (Tyler 2018). The racial stigmatisation leads Afroczechs to dis-associate themselves of Czechness in some instances and contexts. It also led some to socialise with who they describe as “other outcasts”, people who are different from mainstream society in various ways, urban sub-groups, marginalised communities and, more generally people of colour. The multiple discriminatory practices experienced on the basis of the racial stigma, are the costs of Otherness and they serve as a constant reminder that there are limits and restrictions to their Czech belonging. There is a restricted affiliation.

Because race and colour has been essential in the propagation of a migrant threat that endangers the country’s whiteness, the belongings of Afroczechs to Czechia are permanently challenged. The common perception and construction of them as “black other” by society is a constant theme for most Afroczechs. While they themselves might feel very Czech, quotidian experience with this Othering leads them to also be cautious in the public construction of their Czech identities and, in many instances, they are not able to construct an identity which does claim full belonging to the place: hence a restricted affiliation. What more than a century was described as the Veil by Du Bois (1994 [1903]) continues to characterise the lived experience of Afroczechs which, however, also allows for the understanding of a more complex reality. The majority of white Czechs have limited understanding of black people, whereas the latter have a profound understanding of the societal fabric, cultural frameworks and even the methods Czechs employ to Other them. While Afroczechs are constantly challenged and at times debilitated due to the limited horizon of restricted affiliation, they also have a chance to defy the limitations and to illuminate mainstream society of the racial complexities that European national identity work entails.

In this sense, restricted affiliation is not only a curse but also a chance as Afroczech individuals are icons of the fluidity of race and knowledge of which can ultimately break the national myth of racial homogeneity. Anti-racist advocacy work and the creation of spaces in which Africaness and Czechness are united offer an opportunity for white Czechs to rethink their assumptions about what Czechness entails. Many young female Afroczechs are involved in such anti-racist advocacy work in Czechia which includes, for instance, the counselling of bi-racial and adopted African children. As Afroczechs start claiming limitless belonging to Czechia the imagination of a white nation has the potential to be debunked. And yet, for the time being, several Afroczechs also play with the idea of moving to a place which is more racially diverse, “more colourful”, a place where the costs of Otherness are not as high.

Conclusion

This article contributes to the growing literature on Afropean belonging and it portrays identity trajectories among individuals who have a sense of both African and Czech belonging. Against the background of the imagination of Czech society as a homogenously white one, Afroczech people negotiate their identities in a climate in which permanent racialisations and racism take place. The sole most significant empirical finding of this study is that self-identified Afroczechs experience their Otherness as involving emotional and psychological costs. We theoretically conceptualise the result of these costs of Otherness as restricted affiliation, a conscious allignment with Czechia but one that has limits. While the national language in this case (Czech) can be considered a deeply significant constituent of Czech nationality, the lived experience of Afroczech individuals demonstrates that it mostly does not suffice in Czech national identity-making. In another CEE context, Poland, Ohia-Nowak (2016, 2020) has already shown how the language of racism constitutes itself through complex racial ideologies that are ingrained in society and this puts non-white people “outside of the imagined body politic of the nation” (Balogun and Joseph-Salisbury 2021, 248). These hegemonic constructions of Whiteness prevalent in the CEE region make racial diversity a zero-sum game in which Africanness or Blackness is perceived as incongruent with Europeanness. Afroczechs feel a constant pressure to authenticate themself as a Czech person which creates quotidian challenges. And yet, restricted affiliation can also be seen as an opportunity and a chance as it offers a platform upon which marginality and racial discrimination is exposed, and, at the same time, racial fluidity and racially diverse European identities lived. However, for Czech blackness there is still a long and bumpy road ahead before full recognition will be achieved.

Ethics statement

The research design and methodology were evaluated by the funding agency of this research, the Czech Research Foundation. All research participants voluntarily participated in this study and were provided with the ethical codex for this research. All individuals gave their consent to be audio recorded during the interviews and agreed that extracts of their narratives might feature verbatim in the study. All names employed are pseudonyms in order to assure anonymity of our participants.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Czech Research Foundation (GAČR), grant number 22- 19820S. We would also like to thank the Research seminar group of the Czech Academy of Science for a fruitful discussion on this paper and Martin Fotta for his very constructive comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Lastly, we would like to sincerely express our gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their extremely valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Grantová Agentura České Republiky [grant number 22-19820S].

Notes

1 Blackface is a practice that is “steeped in centuries of racism” (Clark 2023), the mocking and dehumanising portrayal of people of colour by white actors in US American minstrels and European “freak shows”. Until recently, it was still practiced regularly all over Europe (most notably Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands) despite people of colour having spoken out about the practice for decades. Aptly put, it is a “phenomenon signifying the historical ramifications of contemporary discourses of racism” (Sommier 2020, 70) and in many western European countries the practice has been abandoned.

2 Given our commitment to decolonial scholarship and the preference for emic categories, we employ the term Czechia, not Czech Republic since this is the preferred term of most Czech academics” writing in English.

3 Czech Statistical Office (ČSÚ). 2021. “T02 Foreigners by Category of Residence, Sex, and Citizenship as at 31 December 2021.” https://www.czso.cz/documents/11292/27914491/2112_c01t02.xlsx/27555e04-231a-4d6c-96ae-b07c4ca16ce8?version=1.0

4 https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/czech-president-milos-zeman-black-lives-matter-is-racist-since-all-lives-matter [accessed 29.01.20230].

5 Several individuals born to such couples participated in our study. Importantly, however, we also include individuals who self-identify as Afroczech even though both their parents are from an African country. It is the bi-cultural and transnational identity which formed the basis for the selection of the participants and not a bi-racial background.

6 All participants voluntarily participated in this study and were provided with the ethical codex for our research. All individuals gave their consent to be audio recorded during the interviews and agreed that extracts of their narrative might feature verbatim in this research study. All names employed are pseudonyms in order to assure anonymity of our participants.

7 Šlagr is a folk music genre frowned up on by many if not most young Czechs.

8 Melanin Kids started in 2017 as a Facebook group which now has 404 members that include black and mixed-race people living in both Czechia and Slovakia. Later an Instagram account was also created which promotes individual members of the group as well as community events such as parties, events and trips. One of the activities is also an Afrocentric book club.