Street-Level Multiculturalism: Cultural Integration and Identity Politics of African Migrants in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is one of the Chinese cities that have attracted migrants from different countries. 93.6 % of the total population (around 7.3 million) are Chinese and 6.4 % (451,183) are ethnic minorities (HK Census and Statistics Department 2011). The number of ethnic minorities in Hong Kong increased significantly by 31.2 % from 343,950 in 2001 to 451,183 in 2011 (HK Census and Statistics Department 2011). By 1999, Hong Kong had positioned itself to become the world city of Asia. One aim of the marketing strategy of the city’s Brand Hong Kong programme is to maintain cultural diversity and a global network of people. Although the Hong Kong government claims that Hong Kong is a world and multicultural society, there is a relatively subtle form of racism and discrimination against migrants at the community level due to their culture, dress, and former refugee status (Ku 2006; Chan and Shum 2011; Crabtree and Wong 2012). Tang et al. (2004) found that Hong Kong Chinese rarely established friendships with minority groups. This is regrettable as cultural awareness and cultural tolerance among Hong Kong Chinese are necessary for making Hong Kong a true multicultural city. Over the first decade of the twenty-first century, there was a marked increase in the number of African migrants coming to Hong Kong. The migratory pattern and networks between Africa and Hong Kong started to emerge in 2001 when China joined the World Trade Organisation. Since then, there has been a significant rise in the number of African migrants travelling to China’s major cities such as Guangzhou and Hong Kong to explore economic opportunities (Bodomo 2016, 2). This created a visible presence of African migrants in Hong Kong. According to the email responses from Hong Kong Immigration Department (2016), there are 4,670 Africans (both regular and irregular) residing in the city. African migrants in Hong Kong are predominantly doing businesses, engaging in low-budget transnational trades across Africa, Hong Kong, and China or seeking asylum. African migrants are one of the smallest minority groups in Hong Kong. They fall into the “others” category of the census. Invisibility is one form of marginalisation. Given their small population but high visibility of their skin colour in the community, African migrants are often the subjects of suspicion, which generates misunderstandings between them and the Hong Kong Chinese in their everyday life interactions. Their presence has been receiving a lot of negative coverage in newspapers such as African migrants in Hong Kong are drug dealers, criminals, and Ebola virus carriers. These negative newspaper reports have inevitably further strengthened the social boundary and misunderstandings between African migrants and Hong Kong Chinese. The adaptation and integration processes of African migrants are problematic. However, how the African migrants adapt to Hong Kong’s life in the context of marginalisation is rarely explored in academic studies.

To fill this knowledge gap, this paper attempts to examine the process of integration and identity reconstruction among African migrants in Hong Kong. The state of appearing different provokes a strong emotion which results in the discrimination that distinguishes between “us” and “them”. Negotiation of this difference may be what is required to lead to the formation of friendships between migrants and the local population regardless of cultural differences. Multiculturalism is about coexistence of diverse cultures. Current literature on multiculturalism mostly uses a top-down approach to examine how governments adopt different policies to manage cultural diversity. How the migrants use their own culture, including music to enhance integration is often neglected. This paper examines how African migrants negotiate an identity and articulate “Africanness” by performing African drum music at various places in the face of marginalisation and exclusion as it exists in Hong Kong. Specifically, it analyses how the African migrants develop an appropriate space for meaningful contact with Hong Kong Chinese by using African drum music. Music is a resource with a psychological function (e. g. entertainment, emotional expression) and a social function (e. g. communication, the means to contact a supernatural world, identification of social groups). It “plays an important role in the negotiation, construction and maintenance of identities” (MacDonald, Hargreaves, and Miell 2009, 463). This paper aims to explore the role of African drum music in the integration of African migrants in Hong Kong.

Seeking to understand the complexity and fluidity of the relationship between the African migrants and Hong Kong Chinese, the paper raises the concept of “street-level multiculturalism” for analysing how African migrants experience and negotiate cultural difference on the ground. It focuses on how the African migrants develop the “contact zone” with Hong Kong Chinese by performing and teaching African drum music. In this paper, “street-level multiculturalism” highlights the encounters between the migrants and the local population in “micro-publics” (Amin 2002) (i. e. sites of playing African drums) which are sites of purposeful organised group activities where people from different backgrounds are brought together in ways that provide them with chances to learn new things. “Street-level multiculturalism” is a two-way process requiring a willingness to engage and change by the local population and the migrants, which, I argue, is determined by the benefits each side can get from the intercultural contacts. By playing African drums as a way to create the contact zone, African migrants provide Hong Kong Chinese with entertainment, happiness and a teaching of culture in exchange for more performance and teaching opportunities, acceptances and respects from Hong Kong Chinese.

In terms of structure, the first part of the paper attempts to offer a concept framework which is couched within three interrelated concepts bound together. These are integration, multiculturalism and identity politics. The second part of the paper provides background information about ethnic minorities in Hong Kong and the role of certain structural influences that affect the ability of Hong Kong people and migrants to interact fruitfully as equals. The third part of the paper presents findings of ethnographic and interview studies on why and how the African migrants use their own traditional culture – African drum music – to facilitate their integration process as well as negotiate an identity in Hong Kong. It proposes the concept of “street-level multiculturalism” which was developed based on the contact hypothesis and bonding and bridging capital originated from the works of Allport (1954) and Putnam (2000) respectively. The study concludes with a reflection and discussion on cultural policy in Hong Kong by arguing that traditional music of ethnic minorities in the host society, which is an under-researched area, offers a rich focus for research on multiculturalism, identity and cultural heritage of migrants.

The term integration has often been used by the host governments to describe strategies to promote inclusion of ethnic minority groups with the ultimate goal of achieving social harmony and racial equality. Integration strategies mostly include compulsory training on “national values” and citizenship and language a proficiency test in order to make sure that “migrants conform to the imagined normativities of the dominant citizens” (Mayblin et al. 2016, 961). This neo-assimilationist approach of integration (Kofman 2005) adopts a top-down approach to examine how the host governments use different policies and regulations to manage cultural diversity in the territories. However, this approach neglects the attitudinal perspectives of the migrants regarding the issue of integration as to how they interact with the local people and how their social relations are shaped and re-shaped in the process.

Integration is often conceptualised as migrants’ rights to gain access to, for example, education, employment, healthcare and housing (Ager and Strang 2008). However, the realisation of these rights requires the migrants to build a sense of belonging in the host society which is determined by the growth of relationships and contacts between the migrants and the local population (Mayblin et al. 2016). This “contact”, according to Mayblin et al. (2016), is important in understanding the development of mutual respects across the differences. Whether the migrants are included or excluded by the local population depends on the willingness to engage, and change, by the host population as well as the migrants (e. g. Alba and Nee 1999; Cook, Dwyer, and Waite 2011; Waite 2012). This is a two-way process. With a view of such, integration should be defined as “the production of new multicultural forms of living together as a result of a mutual openness to change, the breaking down of boundaries, and the mixing or hybridisation of cultural practices” (Mayblin et al. 2016, 962). In Hong Kong, Africans comprise both regular and irregular migrants. Some Africans in Hong Kong are asylum seekers whose legal statuses are yet to be confirmed. They get stuck in Hong Kong for years with a slim chance of resettlement. However, according to the Immigration Ordinance of Hong Kong, they are not legally entitled for local settlement. The neo-assimilationist approach of integration (Kofman 2005), therefore, cannot appropriately address this group of irregular African migrants in relation to the issues of citizenship and integration in the legal sense. Against this background, this research adopts the approach proposed by Mayblin et al. (2016) by focusing on the process of cultural integration of African migrants in Hong Kong.

Integration of migrants with the host society is evidence of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a contested concept that ‘posits difference as something “others” bring to the nation, and as something the nation can have through how it accepts, welcomes or integrates such others’ (Ahmed 2007, 235). Hong Kong is no exception. Its colonial history together with the strong influence of globalisation has generated migratory inflows of different non-Chinese groups such as Africans to the city. Colonialism causes the classification of people based on skin colour as what Law and Lee (2012) call ‘coloured race’: cruelty, vulgarity, stupidity, and irrationality, as opposed to white race with the highest class who represents civilization, development, elegance, wisdom and rationality (Law and Lee 2014, 120). The former colonial value system ‘assigned higher social status to white skin, was ultimately internalised by the colonised and acquired as true, even after the end of the colonial rule, becoming deeply ingrained in the cultures of the people’ (Olivotti 2016, 4). Multiculturalism in Hong Kong simply highlights the different cultural background of the residence of people. Freedom from discrimination, mutual respect and recognition as well as the sense of worth contained in the utopian project of multiculturalism are very weak under Hong Kong’s public policies and laws such as the Race Discrimination Ordinance (Law and Lee 2014).

Over the years, there has been a considerable critique and debate about the term multiculturalism due to concerns regarding their idealised connotations (Nederveen 2007; O’Connor 2010). Wise and Velayutham (2009) argue that multiculturalism is mostly approached through a top-down perspective as a set of policies concerned with how to manage cultural diversity. However, this approach neglects the most important element of multicultural life which is the lived experience of migrants (Wise and Velayutham 2009, 2). O’Connor (2010) argues that ‘multiculturalism has become disjointed; a political ideal and lived reality in largely different social spheres’. This argument does not mean that multiculturalism is misrepresented. Rather, the concept ‘is associated with elite ideals of cultural exchange and diversity that privilege Western middle class values’ (O’Connor 2010, 527). How is multiculturalism managed in everyday life? What is happening on the ground? To address these puzzles, the term ‘everyday multiculturalism’ has emerged, and is different from ‘official’ multiculturalism, which aims to examine the mundane, quotidian aspects of multicultural life (Wise and Velayutham 2009; O’Connor 2010). It delves into the day-to-day intercultural encounters that occur within a community. In this research, the focus is placed on the intercultural encounters between African migrants and Hong Kong Chinese and how the African migrants manage multiculturalism in everyday life.

Identity and difference have framed the theoretical structure for the contests around multiculturalism. It often draws us into the discussion of identity politics among the migrants in the host society. Identity politics are self-reflective and oriented towards the expressive actions of collective members (Melucci, cf. Cerulo 1997). The host governments construct and represent identity to draw boundaries for the inclusion or exclusion of people. What is unique in Hong Kong is that the government’s interpretation and practice of multiculturalism – as ‘Asia’s world city’ putting a lot of emphasis on its image and reputation for ‘diversity, inclusion and harmony’ in the world – ‘ethnic groups are unclassified for resource or provision of social services and minorities have not been included in the budgets or “disadvantaged groups” in the chief executive’s policy address’ (Law and Lee 2012, 122). Moreover, some minority groups such as Africans fall into the “others” category of the official census. The effect is to marginalise non-White others who are positioned at the lowest strata of the race hierarchy, as the colonial discourse on white race supremacy has deeply moulded the mind-sets of Hong Kong people, even after the colonialisation era (Law and Lee 2012).

Identity politics refers to the politics of minority groups or social movements who may or may not be marginalised (Bernstein 2002). These groups often engage in power politics, organised around their own oppression which has its origin dating back to civil rights struggles in the 1960s. Over the decades, however, identity politics has been criticised as being essentialist as it reinforces hegemonic social categorisations such as locals versus migrants, black versus white and men versus women (Seidman 1993). Due to the differences in what constitutes identity for various groups, identity politics has been criticised as preventing from coalition building (Yeboah 2014). Moreover, it has been criticised as perceiving identity movements as cultural rather than political movements since it is based on the static notion of identity (e. g. race or immigrant status) (Yeboah 2014). Regarding identity politics of migrants in Hong Kong, it has been made common by social movements organised by different migrant groups such as Indonesian and the Pilipino foreign domestic workers who demanded a right of abode in 2011 and protested against ‘modern-day slavery’ after an Indonesian foreign domestic worker was physically abused by a Hong Kong Chinese employer in 2014. In most cases, such groups engage in power politics due to their marginal status in the host society. For the Africans in Hong Kong though, their identity is not enclosed in power politics but mostly in the politics of negotiating their African cultural heritage and their Hong Kong experience. While it is often a manifestation of their culture, it does not mean that it takes no political meaning. In this research, it attempts to demonstrate how the Africans use their own traditional culture – African drum music – to create a meaningful “contact zone” with the Hong Kong Chinese in order to negotiate an identity in Hong Kong even though they are faced with marginalisation. The drum is the instrument that is mostly associated with the popular imagination of Africa (Agawu 2016). MacDonald and his colleagues (2009, 463) argue that music “plays an important role in the negotiation, construction and maintenance of identities”. It is a symbol of national or regional identity and migrants cling to their traditional music in order to preserve their identity in a foreign country. Therefore, the focus of this paper in identity politics of Africans in Hong Kong is couched within their articulating their “Africanness” through playing African drums in the context of marginalisation as it exists in Hong Kong. Africans’ engagement in identity politics is based on their marginal status. Their ability to negotiate their African culture and their Hong Kong experience is a politically conscious process.

In order to understand multiculturalism as it is lived, this paper uses the framework of everyday multiculturalism to examine how multi-culture is practiced at street level. The focus of this work allows us not only to question the challenges facing Africans in Hong Kong, but to also understand how the Africans negotiate an identity and articulate “Africanness” through playing African drums in the context of exclusion as it exists in a multicultural society. Semi-structured interviews of approximately two hours and participant observation of six months were conducted with twenty research participants. Special consideration was given to topics regarding their everyday life in Hong Kong, reasons they play African drum in Hong Kong, how they use African drum to interact with Hong Kong Chinese, and the challenges facing them when promoting African culture in Hong Kong. The interview questions were coded in order to assist the identification of themes in the data. The participants were recruited from the researcher’s personal network with social organisations and churches.

Multicultural imaginings remain firmly racialised in Hong Kong. Although the Hong Kong Race Discrimination Ordinance came into effect on 10th July 2009, which “makes discrimination, harassment and vilification on the ground of race unlawful, serves to ensure that people of different races are treated equally in Hong Kong” (HKSAR government 2005), this anti-discrimination law by itself has not eliminated racism, because deeply rooted social attitudes continue to reproduce racial prejudice and new forms of discrimination (Erni and Leung 2014).

When asked their impression to Hong Kong Chinese, many African research participants answered that Hong Kong Chinese were unfriendly or discriminative against Africans. “Language barrier” and “making Hong Kong Chinese friends” were two major common barriers among the research participants when they began to settle in Hong Kong. They expressed that it was very difficult to make friends with Hong Kong Chinese. When it came to the social setting where there were only Hong Kong Chinese, some African research participants said that they would not feel comfortable. Hong Kong Chinese tend to treat the African migrants as a group of “aliens”. I remember one day when I was waiting for a bus at a bus stop with a Ghanaian research participant in a Hong Kongtourist district. One Hong Kong Chinese asked me with suspicious eyes, “Is he your friend? Why do you make friends with the dead black ghost?” Black ghost is a Cantonese slang commonly used by Hong Kong Chinese as a racial slur against African migrants who are foreigners with black skin colour. Putting the word dead at the front shows the hatred of Hong Kong Chinese to them who are perceived as a group of uncivilised individuals, trouble makers and liars. Many African migrants in Hong Kong can understand the Cantonese slang dead black ghost. When they heard this in the conversation of Hong Kong Chinese, they would immediately stop them by saying loudly, “Don’t call me dead black ghost!” Besides verbally discriminating against the African migrants, the account of Kila, a Congolese, shows how Hong Kong Chinese often use their body language to show their racist attitude towards them. Kila came to Hong Kong in 1998 and he expressed unhappiness with racism in this society. He said,

The accounts above correspond to the arguments suggested by Velayutham (2009) and O’Connor (2010) that direct confrontation does not often occur in the everyday encounters between the locals and the migrants. Subtle forms of racism include some normalised actions such as a reaction of disgust, expressing the idea of uncleanliness and using derogatory names that reinforce the underlying power relations between the dominant (Hong Kong Chinese) and minority (African) racial groups.

The enactment of the Race Discrimination Ordinance demonstrated the willingness of the Hong Kong government to develop a protective multicultural society. However, the spirit and protective function of the Ordinance can be considered as a failure (Law and Lee 2012). According to Law and Lee (2012), Hong Kong can only be described as multicultural in a descriptive term. People from around the world live in this city; however, social exclusion and discrimination exist against non-white ethnic minorities in Hong Kong. Merely emphasising the exclusion and marginalization of migrants in Hong Kong, however, limits our understanding of migrants who are social actors. The following sections attempt to turn our analytic lens to position African migrants as subjects. It explores the extent to which African migrants can negotiate identity and cultivate integration in Hong Kong by using their traditional culture – African drum music.

The musical instrument mostly associated in the popular imagination of Africa is the drum (Agawu 2016). African drums occupy a privileged position in African culture because Africans play drums for multiple reasons, from “social events to secret society rituals, from planting the fields and pounding rice to life-cycle events such as naming ceremonies, initiations and marriages” (Price 2013, 231). African drums are also used for worship and processions of king and/or chiefs. African drum music has always served “as a powerful cultural crucible and signifier of African diasporal identity formation and engagement” (Zeleza 2012, 546). African drumming is transmitted orally through a system of apprenticeship under a master (Price 2013, 228–229). Therefore, playing African drums can help the African migrants living somewhere outside their home country to maintain their physical and imaginative connections to their countries of origin and ancestors. It can also help them in creating a sense of togetherness and strengthening their community in the host society.

In Hong Kong, African migrants have their own sites for drum music in their community gatherings as well as religious and other ceremonies such as New Yam festival, funeral and their country’s national day. The rise of African drumming in Hong Kong began in the late 1990s after the first local Afro-drum group, the Island Sundrum was established in 1991 (Lee 2010). In the 1990s, however, Hong Kong received a tiny number of African migrants. African culture, including African drum music was not widely known among the Hong Kong Chinese until 2010 when World Cup took place in South Africa. Since then, Hong Kong Chinese have been curious about Africa, Africans and their cultures. The African research participants have been playing African drums in Hong Kong for six to sixteen years. When asked why they performed and taught African drum music in Hong Kong, all research participants provided the same answer “we had a mission to promote African culture here”. Makha, a Senegalese research participant, is one of the African pioneers who started to perform and teach African drumming in Hong Kong at the turn of the twenty-first century. Back home, Makha was a professional African drummer. In 2000, Makha was invited by a British student in Hong Kong to become his drum teacher for two months. The British student flew all the way from Hong Kong to Senegal and they became friends. In 2001, the British student decided to invite Makha and two of his friends to perform African drumming in Hong Kong for two weeks. After that, Makha had work permit and managed to stay in Hong Kong. When he first came to Hong Kong, Makha said that no one talked about African drum music. He said, “Hong Kong people had no idea about Africa. There were a few Africans that time. I use to work in Central and I didn’t see anybody look like me.” Makha said Hong Kong Chinese were not friendly to him. When asked why he played African drums in Hong Kong, Makha said,

Dixon, a Ghanaian research participant, arrived in Hong Kong as an asylum seeker in 2006. He said when he first arrived in Hong Kong, Hong Kong Chinese couldn’t differentiate between his country of origin and Africa. He added, “they classified me as African, which is not bad, but they thought Africa was a country, they didn’t see that Africa is a continent. That’s the problem I need to fix”. Therefore, Dixon decided to promote African culture in Hong Kong. At first, he tried to give some public talks in different places such as schools. “But people [Hong Kong Chinese] just looked at me without any feedback. Probably they were thinking what this boring guy was talking about on the stage”, Dixon described. “I then thought if I played a musical instrument when I was giving my speech, it might change the whole atmosphere”, he added. In 2007, Dixon with his eleven fellow African migrants from Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Niger, Kenya and Togo, formed a musical group called Sankofa warriors. “Sankofa, is a Ghanaian word which means you have to go back and take it. You have to return back and take what you left. So it has a symbolic meaning, we are warriors and need to take back [practise] African culture, even we are outside our home country.”

The drum is a talking instrument (Agawu 2016, 127). Among African drums, djembe is the most popular one. When asked which African drums they mostly played in Hong Kong, all research participants said djembe drum and some also played dunun (a three bass drum). Djembe is made from lenke or djala tree, covered with calf or goat skin and fixed with ropes. In Hong Kong, there are a number of reasons that made djembe so popular among African migrants. In Hong Kong, the majority of African migrants come from West Africa. The djembe is associated with the ethnic group collectively known as the Malinke or Mandingue (Price 2013, 228), who settled in the region of West Africa associated with the old Mali Empire. Playing djembe is a West African traditional culture dating back three thousand years (Price 2013). Nevertheless, the migrants from Central (e. g. D.R. Congo) and East Africa (e. g. Kenya) also play djembe drum in Hong Kong for multiple reasons such as personal entertainment and social events. Djembe is a symbol of Africa. It is a symbol of joy, peace, unity and harmony. Plying djembe drum has a symbolic meaning that binds together not only the African migrants from different countries, but also the African migrants and the Hong Kong Chinese. In terms of the size, djembe drum is relatively smaller than other African drums such as the royal drum. It is easy for the African migrants to carry them to different places for performing and teaching. Moreover, in terms of the drumming techniques, “Djembe is easier”, Dixon commented. “For playing djembe, we just use bare hands. But for the Ghanaian aka drums, for example, we need sticks, hands and legs to control the sound, which requires higher technique”. Drumming is a communal event which requires participation from all present with singing, dancing and handclapping. For the purpose of promoting African culture in Hong Kong, this West African hand drum is fun and easy to play, which is best for the Hong Kong Chinese beginners.

In an increasingly globalised world, how to live in cultural differences is a challenging question for all members in the society. Assuming that socio-cultural integration is the solution that multicultural societies need and strive for, how can it best be achieved and promoted? One way to achieve this is to increase the incidence of positive factors which include any collective activities that promote positive intergroup contact. Contact zone, according to Pratt (1991), is a “social space where culture meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power”. Being positioned at the lowest strata of racial hierarchy in Hong Kong, the African research participants believed that they had to actively contribute positively to integration. They need a tool which assists them to gain acceptance and recognition by Hong Kong Chinese. Playing African drum music in different places is one way to achieve this goal by creating and developing cultural contact zone with the Hong Kong Chinese on the ground.

Representing difference: to stir up curiosity among the locals

Music, especially, traditional music can make people curious about another culture. It can also motivate people to get to know the people and the culture. Stirring up curiosity among the Hong Kong Chinese is crucial. When they perform djembe drums, the African research participants must put on their traditional clothing. Dixon recalled his first street performance experience in 2006. He described, “They found me strange. Why a jungle guy wearing strange clothing and playing a drum in Hong Kong?” Dixon was very optimistic. He was proud of the uniqueness of African culture. In the field, I observed that Hong Kong Chinese were excited about the djembe drumming performance, not only because of the unique sounds of djembe drum they played, but also because the African research participants dressed up their traditional clothing and had their costume on. They screamed and shouted loudly. Some of them even put their hands up and danced freely and happily in front of the drummers. After the performances, the Hong Kong Chinese would approach the drummers for photo taking. (See Figures 1 and 2) They also asked the drummers about the name of the clothing and the drumming techniques. I remember one day when I was accompanying Makha who had a drumming performance at a carnival, a Hong Kong Chinese lady and her two sons watched his play closely. After the performance, she approached Makha and asked, “I enjoyed so much! Do you live in Hong Kong? Do you teach African drum in Hong Lok Yuen [a housing estate in Hong Kong]? I live there and would like my children to learn from you.” By playing djembe drum in different places, the African research participants can not only demonstrate their traditional culture in the local community, but also stir up Hong Kong Chinese’s curiosity and motivate them to get to know more about the African migrants and their culture. It was often through this method that they recruited Hong Kong Chinese to attend their drum learning classes so that they could further develop their cultural interactions with them.

Figure 1:

Makha, a Senegalese, demonstrated how to play djembe drum in his studio. The drums are all made in Africa (Photo was taken by the author on 27th October 2016).

Figure 2:

Kaze, a Cameroon, was talking about the history of djembe drum to Hong Kong Chinese after his performance. (Photos was taken by the author on 9th October 2016).

Negotiating difference: playing as a social and cultural learning

What role then does the of djembe musical drum play in contributing to the cultural integration of the African migrants? African drums including djembe can be beaten solo or in groups (Agawu 2016). In some occasions such as company’s annual dinner events and private parties, the African research participants had solo-performance. They stood on stage and entertained the audience. Hardly could they ask for the participation of the audiences. However, in other occasions such as street performance, the African research participants prefer to play djembes in groups. Drumming is a communal event which requires participation from all present with singing, dancing and handclapping. When performing and teaching, the African research participants usually prepared extra drums for Hong Kong Chinese to play. (See Figure 3) Play offers a way of “engaging with the world around people, through observing and playing out patterns of behaviour and other social and cultural phenomena” (Marsh 2016, 2). It involves interactions with others. “Seeing culture is not enough, they need to experience the culture”, Dixon stated. Playing is a social learning. The African research participants initially play djembe drums with the Hong Kong Chinese, with considerable amount of interactions such as eye-contacts, physical and verbal communications. They talked and laughed together. Rarely could we see these harmonious interactions between the two groups outside this contact zone. African drumming music, I argue, is the tool that facilities the integration process of the African migrants in Hong Kong. Djembe drums are mostly tuned. The djembe drums of the African research participants are often tuned higher than the other accompanying djembe drums used by the Hong Kong Chinese. This practice has both practical and symbolic meanings. Practically, the African drummers who are advanced players ensure that their parts are being heard above the rest of the orchestra. This allows less-skilled Hong Kong Chinese players to follow easily. Symbolically, by tuning the djembe drum to a higher pitch, the African drummers could lead the group. The Hong Kong Chinese have to listen to their instructions, which balance- off their marginalising experience facing them in their everyday life.

Figure 3:

Kaze, a Cameroon, taught a group of Hong Kong Chinese how to play djembe drum in a church. (Photo was taken by the author on 13th October 2016).

Playing is a way of accommodating new knowledge and a way of cultural learning. In the field, the African research participants not only demonstrated how to play djembe drum, but also taught the Hong Kong Chinese African history and culture such as the name of the rhythm and why they played drums in Africa. “Besides forest, lions and tigers, Africa also has urban cities, have high rise buildings, just like Hong Kong”, Dixon aired his frustration regarding the ignorance of Hong Kong Chinese. By engaging Hong Kong Chinese in the djembe drum musical play, the African research participants can easily break down social boundaries with the local people. With djembe drums, they represented and negotiated cultural differences in the contact zone. Life in the contact zone aims at pushing people to change their existing habits of thinking and existing knowledge of ourselves and others. In this social space of cultural interactions, the contact zone initiated by the African migrants has facilitated them not only to make a living, but also to change the perceptions of Hong Kong Chinese regarding Africa and its people. The African research participants all felt that Hong Kong Chinese nowadays are more willing to accept Africans and African culture. “Over the years, we have been doing a lot in promoting African culture here. We all have passion. After they [Hong Kong Chinese] appreciate what you are doing in Hong Kong, they would put down their defence mechanism”, Makha said. However, this is not saying that subtle racism no long exists in Hong Kong. Rather, this research argues that the African migrants in Hong Kong focus their energy on the asymmetrical power relationships existing between the African migrants and Hong Kong Chinese and they are trying to bring about change in these power relations by using a non-confrontational approach.

The accounts illustrated in this article are of a number of African migrants who have been experiencing different degrees of discrimination and marginalisation in Hong Kong. In view of the failure of government policies to achieve cultural diversity, they attempt to use their own way to manage and practice multicultural life on the ground. The “street-level multiculturalism” I conceptualise here has been motivated by my participant observation with the African research participants who have engaged in various activities and interacted with the Hong Kong Chinese in different places which aimed to promote African culture such as school talks, cultural exhibitions, television and radio cultural programmes, drumming performance on the streets and drumming classes. The fieldwork has revealed the success of African drummers’ activities which were sites where the African migrants negotiated their own Africanness and their relationship to the diaspora, their country of origin and their ancestors. The concept of “street-level multiculturalism” is an attempt to theorise the intercultural contacts and networks of African migrants when using traditional culture to manage multicultural life on the ground.

The networking strategies of the African migrants had an impact. Concepts of bonding and bridging can be used. Putnam (2000:20) developed Coleman’s argument, distinguishing between bonding – “ties to people who are like me in some important way” – and bridging – “people who are unlike me in some important way”. Putnam argues that tight knit, bonding networks are important for “getting by,” but outward-looking bridging contacts are important for “getting ahead” (Putnam 2000, 23). The African research participants have strong bonding networks in the realm of promoting African drumming culture. Dixon’s Sankofa warriors musical group was a good example of how a bonding network with his fellow African migrants from Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Niger, Kenya and Togo, facilitated intercultural contact with the Hong Kong Chinese. Bonding networks can be transnational. Daniel is a Ghanaian, who has been living in Hong Kong for more than ten years. He has a drum repairing company in Hong Kong which imports djembe drums and other drum parts such as goat skins all the way from Africa. He said, “I began drum maintenance service in Hong Kong ten years ago. Because we, back home, have families who make drums, that’s their work. Or we have a professional, that’s their work; they have their own workshop, that’s what they do. So we just call some of them and they can get you the skin and send it over.” One week before the author completed this article, Makha said that he was recruiting his friend in Senegal to Hong Kong as a drumming teacher and was waiting for the immigration paper of his friend.

Bridging with the dominant population can assist the adaptation and integration processes of migrants in the host society. However, bridging network building requires a “tool”. This research highlights the importance of the “tool” in bridging. The African migrants used djembe drum as a “tool” to set up a cultural contact zone with the Hong Kong Chinese. Contact thesis argues that contact between cultural groups leads to better communication and hence less conflict and discrimination (Allport 1954). But some scholars argue that contact with others does not necessarily translate into the respect for difference that can achieve integration (Valentine and Harris 2015). That is to say, how to produce meaningful contact is important. Focus is placed on Amin (2002) terms “micro-publics” which are sites of purposeful organised group activities where people with different backgrounds are brought together and have chances to learn new things. In this research, the African research participants insisted that they must use the drums which are made in Africa. “Because we need a right tool to promote authentic African culture”, Mariane said. As stressed, playing djembe drum has both physical and emotional connections to the country of origin and ancestors. In the past few years, there has been an increasing number of Hong Kong Chinese drum manufacturers who produced djembe drums with plastic instead of lenge and iroko wood. “The wood drum is very heavy”, one Hong Kong Chinese drum manufacturer told me. However, Dixon commented, “But the sounds are different. This is not real African culture. We need right people who use right tools”. Throughout the course of my fieldwork, I found out that Hong Kong Chinese prefer to learn from and watch djembe drum played by the African instructors. Many Hong Kong Chinese learners told me that they wanted to learn authentic African culture from an African. Most African research participants expressed that Hong Kong Chinese nowadays are more willing to accept Africans, because of the popularity of African drum music. The contact here is meaningful. By playing African drums, African migrants provide Hong Kong Chinese with entertainment, happiness and teaching of culture in exchange for more performance and or teaching opportunities, acceptances and respects from Hong Kong Chinese.

Culturalists are people who emphasise the importance of culture in determining behaviour. Street level culturalists are the “human face” of multicultural policy because these people interact directly with the local population. In this research, African migrants are considered as street-level culturalists who directly interact with the local population. Africanness is constantly negotiated as a dimension of both individual and collective identities (Rastas and Seye 2016). It often includes talking back to the stereotypes, African people, African culture and their relationship to the diaspora. Symbolically, by playing djembe drums at various places in the context of marginalisation as it exists in Hong Kong, African migrants consciously engage in identity politics which is a cultural engagement, but not power politics featuring street protests and strike that fight against the authority. They are trying to mark cultural footprints in this host society. No doubt, their engagement in identity politics is based on their marginal status in this host society. For those regular African migrants, their engaging in identity politics is due to their immigration status as a professional drummer, being socially marginalised, who uses African culture to gain back recognition. For the irregular group, engaging in identity politics is a way of shielding themselves from legal sanction of working illegally. It is a way of not exposing themselves to the law and is a survival strategy for earning a living. Their ability to negotiate their African culture and their Hong Kong experience is a politically conscious process.

By focusing on how multiculturalism is managed at street-level, the intention of this article was not to argue the unnecessity of multicultural policy at government’s level, but rather to use the drumming experience of African migrants in Hong Kong as an entry point for exploring the relationship between ethnic minority culture, integration and multiculturalism, and its relevance for cultural policy of Hong Kong. This has provided a basis for two concluding points.

Firstly, multiculturalism should be conceptualised not only at government’s level as to how the government uses various policies to manage cultural diversity, but also at street-level as to how the migrants manage cultural diversity and negotiate identity through their encounters with the local population. This research has turned our analytic lens to position African migrants as subjects. It has explored how the Africans used African traditional culture – djembe drum music – to make meaningful contacts with the Hong Kong Chinese in the cultural “contact zone”. This is a move from analysing descriptive multiculturalism (governmental policy analysis) to practical multiculturalism (ground-level intercultural interaction analysis). Secondly, this approach of examining multiculturalism is highly relevant for cultural policy of Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s multicultural city status is being questioned, especially after the branding exercise in 1999 when Hong Kong was positioned as “Asia’s World City”. However, the experiences of African migrants in this research highlighted the insufficient cultural awareness and sensitivity of Hong Kong Chinese, suggesting that more resources should be devoted to develop their global vision. Hong Kong is a migrant society. Migration involves not only physical body movement, but also the movement of cultural capital of people such as unique skills, talents and cultural practices. Cultural ambassadors’ scheme is suggested so that migrants can promote their unique culture in the host society that can foster more intercultural contacts. Moreover, interracial marriage such as African men get married to Hong Kong Chinese women has become significant. Cultural heritage has become a hot research topic in Hong Kong recently, but it is mainly limited to Chinese cultural heritage. As a multicultural society, further research should be conducted on an ethnic minority cultural heritage policy that could better inform and encourage debates about the identity and cultural conservation among the second generation of the migrants.