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In An African City , Africa’s take on Sex and the City, five “single and fabulous” women from the diaspora return to Ghana’s capital Accra because it feels more like home than the western cities they lived in.
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The women belong to an elite segment of the African diaspora described by the writer Taiye Selasi as “Afropolitans”. They include a trilingual, Oxford-educated lawyer, an entrepreneur who grew up in Atlanta and is running a successful shea butter export business, a Texas-bred Harvard MBA graduate, an aid worker fresh from graduate studies in Washington and a journalist raised in Manhattan.
As these five women of Ghanaian heritage struggle with life back “home”, the inherent conflict of having what show creator Nicole Amarteifio describes as a “double identity” emerges.
Ms Amarteifio says she was inspired by a lecture given by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about “the danger of a single story” of Africa. “Producing a show like An African City is doing something about the ‘single story’,” Ms Amarteifio says. “It’s about going away from the storytelling of war, poverty, famine. It’s just not what we’re all about, there’s more to us than that.”
Cultural difficulties abound for the fictional “returnees”. Nana Yaa is embarrassed when her ex’s new girlfriend speaks to her in Twi — the mother tongue that she did not learn growing up abroad. She is shocked to learn how expensive rents are in Accra — and of the practice of paying a year’s rent upfront in cash — and is advised to date a wealthy “sugar daddy” or “uncle” who would buy her a flat.
Makena, the lawyer, is propositioned for sex in exchange for employment at a job interview.
All of the women complain about electricity and water shortages, bad mobile networks, potholes and other frustrations of life in a developing world capital. They are also shocked to find that men who ask them on dates are frequently married with children and worried when they learn that using condoms is not the norm among the Accra men they date.
Their rocky transition makes An African City far more than a copycat of Sex and the City. By focusing on a glamorous part of the diaspora population, it has sparked a lively and broad discussion of an important demographic shift.
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An African City highlights a segment of the global African population, says Semhar Araia, founder of the US-based Diaspora African Women’s Network, or DAWN. “Nicole Amarteifio is showcasing what it really feels like for anyone to return to their country of heritage, returning to the home you thought you knew . . . where maybe the culture you were raised in or grew up in is not aligned with the African one you come home to.” She adds: “She’s breaking the glass ceiling as it relates to who is African. She’s diversifying the number of African experiences.”
“This show is for sparking conversation,” says Accra-born, New York-bred Ms Amarteifio of the series she has written, directed and produced.
Ms Amarteifio worked in communications for the World Bank after graduate school at Georgetown University, hoping she “could change the institutions from within that were responsible for the global messaging about my country and countries throughout the continent”.
Over time, she changed her mind. “But I realised that all this [working on press releases] were baby steps. With a show like An African City, it’s a bigger step.”
Having no experience in television, Ms Amarteifio struggled to interest TV networks in her idea and eventually distributed the first season — financed by savings and her family — through YouTube. “By episode three we knew something was happening because as soon as we put an episode out, there would thousands of clicks on it.”
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In all, the first season’s 10 episodes have been viewed more than 1.7m times and dubbed into French and aired by the Canal Afrique channel. The second season — financed by sponsors — will air early next year.
Ms Amarteifio’s cast say they identify with the characters she has written. “I absolutely have experienced many of the ‘returnee woes’ that the characters on the show go through, from electricity [cuts] to bad roads to navigating the dynamics of family and what it even means to have natural hair as a black woman in your own country,” says Maame Adjei, who stars as Zainab, a Ghanaian born in Sierra Leone who moved from Atlanta to Accra to pursue business opportunities. In real life, Ms Adjei moved home from Philadelphia, where she studied healthcare finance.
Afua Rida, the 28-year-old show stylist, attended university in Montreal and worked in child psychology before moving back to Accra three years ago to look for work in the growing fashion industry.
“It’s a personal thing,” she says of her choice. “There are many forces moving against you, because when you move back there are so many challenges. You have to really have something inside you that’s driving you to want to be here and to contribute.”
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