Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

“Scent of Africa” Marketed to “Afropolitans”
Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
11 May 2020
🖨️ Print Article

Fifty years after most African nations won nominal independence, ad agencies are marketing upscale products like the perfume “Scent of Africa” to so-called “Afropolitans,” a cohort defined by Dr Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, of Canada’s Queens University, as “mobile and relatively well-off” Africans. Adeniyi-Ogunyankin said Afropolitans are criticized for “trying to envision these same capitalist ways of consumption that continue to produce such inequalities.” However, she prefers to think of Afropolitans as Africans that are “aware of the world,” and part of it.

Africana Studies

Related Podcasts

Women Loom Large in African Secessionist Movements
Black Agenda Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford
Women Loom Large in African Secessionist Movements
14 May 2019
In Cameroon and the former Spanish Sahara, “women are using traditional ideas about power to drives these secessionist movements,” said 
A Grandfather’s Powerful African Microphone
Black Agenda Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford
A Grandfather’s Powerful African Microphone
26 February 2019
GoGo Breeze, an elder with a radio program on a provincial Zambian station, counsels listeners on wage theft and other problems facing the common p
Seton Hall Students Will Renew Push on Africana Studies
Black Agenda Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford
Seton Hall Students Will Renew Push on Africana Studies
17 December 2018
Students with the Concerned 44 movement, representing the 44 percent of students that are ethnic or gender minorities, plan to renew their protests

More Stories


  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    SPEECH: White Supremacy in U.S. History, Theodore W. Allen April 28, 1973
    09 Apr 2025
    “The principal aspect of United States capitalist society is not merely bourgeois domination but bourgeois white supremacist domination.”
  • Hands Off protest
    Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    HANDS OFF NATO? Not Palestine? Who got the memo?
    09 Apr 2025
    The Democrats’ HANDS OFF rallies included “HANDS OFF NATO” and excluded “HANDS OFF PALESTINE,” but not all rally goers got the memo.
  • According to one real-time price data aggregator, inflation has slowed to its lowest level since 2020. Getty/Newsweek
    Jon Jeter
    Will Trump’s Tariffs Trigger a Second Great Depression?
    09 Apr 2025
    The Trump administration’s escalating trade war has sent shockwaves through the global economy, with Wall Street giants sounding the alarm over an imminent recession. As markets reel and experts warn…
  • Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright
    From Uncle Tom to Cousin Cory: (Or, The Curious Case of Mr. Booker’s Senate Floor Minstrel Show)
    09 Apr 2025
    Senator Cory Booker’s recent 25-hour Senate speech is hailed by some as an act of resistance. Really, it exposes the moral bankruptcy of neoliberal politics, as his performative progressivism clashes…
  • Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    One Spring Day …
    09 Apr 2025
    "One Spring Day …" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us