Widening the Pool
When Black American Women Find African Mates

By Heidi Shrager

The last thing Talle Bamazi expected when he moved to New York City six years ago from Togo, West Africa, was to meet and fall in love with an American woman. The furthest thing from Jewel Talle’s mind when she moved out of the battered women’s shelter in the South Bronx and into her own apartment with her two daughters, was falling in love with a man. A black woman born in the Bronx, she was finished with men. Or so she thought.

One year after Bamazi became Talle’s manager at a children’s department store in the South Bronx, the two were married. Within two years, they had two sons. What made such an unlikely union possible is one of the mysteries of love and life. But the marriage might also be a racial and cultural trend, as demographic forces ceaselessly change the nation.

As immigration from West Africa to the United States has leapt from about 6,500 in 1988 to nearly 20,000 in 1998, more African-born men are marrying American-born black women. No single reason explains this gender combination. One potential explanation is timing: The greater availability of single African males helps offset the reputed shortage of “marriageable” American-born black males who, according to social scientists, suffer from high rates of unemployment and imprisonment and a shorter life expectancy.

Furthermore, African-American women tend to be better educated than black American males, a fact that also shrinks the matrimonial pool, experts say. In his seminal 1992 book on race relations in America, “Two Nations,” political scientist Andrew Hacker noted that “for every 100 black women currently being awarded bachelor’s degrees, only 59 black men are also receiving diplomas.”

Another reason African men sometimes attract black American women is a difference in behavior, according to some African-American women. For example, those who have been abused by American-born black husbands sometimes say that African men are more reliable income-earners who treat them well – despite a tendency to run the household with a strong hand.

Still, love is complex. As the stories of three New York couples illustrate, the decision by black American women to seek lifelong companionship with African immigrants can have cultural twists and turns, sometimes producing joy and fulfillment, sometimes pain and disappointment.

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When Bamazi Talle, came to the United States six years ago to study painting, he brought negative perceptions of African-American women. “We don’t have the same values,” said Bamazi, 34, a solidly built man with a gold hoop earring and a baritone voice that shifts swiftly between giddiness and solemnity. “I don’t need lazy ladies,” he said. “If you’re lazy, I can’t deal with you. If you talk back, I can’t deal with you.”

Jewel Talle proved his notions wrong, and today he wears a gold ring in a horseshoe shape that faces him to signify his heart is closed to other women. He remembers little things that set her apart from all the others, he said, like when she brought bread to him at work, stirring memories of his mother, who is a baker in Togo. Or when she saw his oil paintings – surreal images of African women performing rituals or symbolic depictions of war and infertility – and called him the next day to recite a poem she wrote about one of them.

A shapely woman of 26, with a narrow face and soft brown eyes, Jewel was reared in the Bronx by her great-grandmother. When she was 7 , she entered foster care and jumped between homes and schools throughout the state. She was estranged from her heroin-addicted mother, she said, who remained an addict, and was stricken with an HIV infection and other illnesses before dying when Jewel was 17. She has not spoken to her father in many years. He moved in with another woman when she was 7, and now lives in Baltimore.

When she thinks of her transformation since she married Bamazi, she winces at the thought of how things were with her former husband, an African-American vendor at Yankee Stadium. Her first love, he became her husband when she was 18 and he was 21. “He thought he was better than me, that I was nothing. And I truly believed that for a long time,” she said in a gentle, high voice. “All I thought I was capable of was changing diapers.”

She enrolled at Fordham University but dropped out after two weeks for reasons that to her remain unclear. “Maybe I thought I couldn’t handle it,” she said. But when she split with her husband, partly because of his physical abuse, she said, the option of returning to school evaporated. She was two months pregnant with Shanee, now 4, and their first daughter, Chantal, 6, was only 2. She lived in a battered women’s shelter for over a year and started collecting welfare before finding her own apartment, putting her daughters in day care, and getting a job.

When she met Bamazi, the strict manager at Cookie’s Department Store, she didn’t want to be on the floor with him, let alone date him, she recalled. A few months after they met, Bamazi saw Jewel crying at a bus stop, and learned about her troubles trying to shed an abusive husband. “I was so, up, set,” he said, reviling the abuser syllable by syllable. “I just felt so sorry for her.” He asked her if she wanted to return to school. “Don’t worry. One day you’ll be free,” Bamazi recalled telling her.

Eventually he asked her to his apartment, where he cooked dinner and showed her his paintings. Today, Jewel drops her head with embarrassment when she remembers her shock at seeing his lavishly decorated bachelor-style apartment. She had expected it to be filled with relatives from Africa, as was true of other African immigrants she had known. When she called him the next day to recite the poem she had written, Bamazi was touched. “I found my lady,” he recalled, beaming as he pounded his fist on the coffee table.

The next year, 1998, they were married at City Hall, and Jewel returned to school, eventually becoming a medical assistant. She also gave birth to two sons, Gnim, 2, and Leleen, 14 months. Now she is looking for a school program that will prepare her to be a physician’s assistant, a job with more responsibility and pay.

Bamazi has higher ambitions for his wife. He sees her eventually getting a medical degree. “She’s going to be a doctor,” he said flatly. “She doesn’t want it, but she will be.” While resisting the idea, Jewel acknowledges that her husband has opened up possibilities for her. “He helped me see my potential,” she said.

The marriage of Jewel and Bamazi has mostly been an uncomplicated blending of cultures. They agree that their sons are Togolese first, and then American. When they are older, Bamazi wants to move back to Togo, where the boys will become men in the eyes of the Kabye, Bamazi’s tribe. His wife supports his wish, as long as her sons do too, she said.

Meanwhile, Jewel has embraced her husband’s African ways. During a meal of fou fou, an African dish made of fish and chicken poured over a mound of whipped potato and cornstarch, Jewel occasionally joins Bamazi in eating with her hands, rinsing them throughout the meal in a pink plastic bowl of water.

She also has welcomed Bamazi’s younger brother Cha, younger sister Essohouna, and friend Nicolas, all arriving from Togo within the last three months and staying indefinitely with the couple and their four children in the family’s two-bedroom apartment in the South Bronx. And she doesn’t mind that Bamazi sends a chunk of his paycheck to his relatives in Togo.

Yet, Jewel retains her own cultural heritage. “Even though I respect his culture and I connect with it, I’m still going to eat my fried chicken and collard greens,” she said. “It hasn’t changed who I am; it’s added on to who I am.”

For his part, Bamazi said he has made compromises. In Africa, the men don’t clean, cook or take care of the children. But here, with a wife who works outside the home, he cooks and even changes diapers, he said, pausing to shout at his sister to discipline his son who was fussing with a box of crackers.

Essohouna, 30, has brought with her the traditional African role of younger sister, displaying obedience to her big brother and taking over most of the housework. Bamazi is pleased but still worries about the American influences that swirl around her, including those exerted by his wife. “Even Togolese women will change when they’re here,” he said.

Jewel is watchful but not fretting. She makes sure her husband and his Togolese brothers understand that Essohouna is there to help, “not to do everything.” Laughing, he said of her husband: “When he tries that king of the castle stuff, I’m like whatever.”

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Love has also had to weather the cultural divide between Moses Yahaya, 44, and Zaina Yahaya, 43. They met at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, the city where Moses moved from Ghana in 1987, and where Zaina was born and reared.

While Zaina thought Africans “weren’t too attractive,” and had no interest in dating an African man, Moses had already been married to and fathered a child with a black American woman. Prior to that he had an African-American girlfriend. He explained that he never looked for an African-born mate because they would then be obliged to care for two sets of relatives back home. Given his aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents and his two teen-age sons, Moses sends between $200 and $700 to Ghana every other month.

Zaina’s previous husband, father to her three teen-age sons, physically and mentally abused her, she said. “This marriage is a lot better.” A born-again Christian and a high-school teacher, Zaina looks forward to visiting Ghana with her husband, possibly next year. She has learned to make African dishes such as fou fou, goat meat and peanut butter soup, and like Jewel, she has tried eating with her hands. “The thing I can’t get used to is sharing a bowl,” she said.

But the perils of cultural mixing arise often, and just as Moses has trouble accepting certain things about his wife, there are other, more substantial things that Zaina can’t get used to about her husband. The most pressing issue is Moses Yahaya’s sister, who has been staying with the couple and Zaina’s 13-year-old son for three months in their Jersey City apartment. She wants to stay long enough to make some money to send back to her husband and children in Ghana; then she will return home. Zaina wants her sister-in-law to leave now.

“African Americans, we come for a visit, we leave,” Zaina said. “Or if we need a place to stay, it’s only temporary. But we want our space.” She accentuated the last word, then added: “Native Africans, they don’t mind. They even think it’s an insult if you ask them when they’re leaving.”

When Moses speaks of the situation, his tone quickly becomes hushed and desperate. “I can’t throw my sister out!” he said. “If I do that, my reputation back home would go down the drain.” Each passing day, with rising tension, is a compromise for both.

The pair has also had to make significant compromises on the amount of money Moses sends home. Completing a journalism master’s degree at Columbia University and working part-time as a truck driver, he doesn’t make enough to split his paycheck with overseas relatives, without squeezing an already tight budget.

Such disparities in familial obligation can be the source of the widest cultural rifts, and even the breaking point in many marriages. Americans stress the individual and immediate family. But African life is centered on the extended family and community, says Chido Nwangwu, a Nigerian immigrant and founder of the Houston-based USAfrica Online, an online publication targeting African immigrants. “Regardless of whatever I have achieved here in the U.S., I still know that I’m a product of the sacrifices of different members of my family, my extended family, my community back home in Nigeria,” he wrote in an E-mail message. “Most African men come with this knowledge to the U.S., not the banal foolish claims of being ‘self-made.’”

If Zaina has trouble with her relatives from a continent away, Moses has clashed with his wife’s ex-husband, her two older sons, and her two brothers, all of whom live only blocks away. When they first started dating eight years ago, Moses recalled, he even had fistfights with the men in her family. Though strife has subsided, tension remains. “They think I’m using her,” he said. And despite being an American citizen from his first marriage, he is still usually deemed an African, and thus a polygamist disrespectful of women, the couple said. “When his sister came, they thought she was his wife,” said Zaina.

Moses said he recognizes that most marriages between African men and African-American women are arranged so the man can obtain legal U.S. citizenship, but his is not such a case.

* * *
Neither was the marriage of Moustapha Sam and Belinda Pierre-Paul, which still ended in divorce. When they first dated in 1996, Moustapha recalled Belinda’s friends telling her he was using her for legal status. If that was true, he said, he would not have invested so much time and money into getting her daughter out of foster care, where she was placed at birth when Belinda was just 13. He also wouldn’t have sent her back to high school and then to nursing school, he said.

Sitting in his East Harlem apartment that he shares with his sister, aunt and nephew, Moustapha, a chubby restaurant manager, recalled life with Belinda. A 20-year-old Brooklyn native, she fell in love with not only him, then 25 and in America for only a year, but also his African culture. When he brought her to a party for the first time with his African friends, he said, she was drawn to the group’s sense of family. After hearing him refer to one African after another as his “brother,” she finally asked, “‘How many brothers do you have?’”

And Moustapha liked how she differed from African women. If she wanted to be sexually intimate, she would say so. In contrast, because of their upbringing, African women do not initiate sex, he said. She also taught him English and helped him assimilate into American culture.

However, problems began when Belinda got pregnant, Moustapha said. She wanted to keep the baby, but he said it strayed from their plan. “Babies are not something you just get up and have; you have to be ready for it,” he said. “I don’t want my children to go through what I went through; I want them to have more than what I had.”

Belinda, he said, told him the baby symbolized their love, and that if necessary they could get federal assistance once it was born. But he wouldn’t accept aid. “Now is the time in life to work, when you’re young and strong,” he said. “I don’t like nothing free.” She got an abortion, and then left.

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While Moustapha was not able to impose his views and cultural background onto his wife, Bamazi will continue to try to do so with Jewel. And if they are good for her and her children, she said, she will accept them. “She grew up poor; she was abused by her own parents,” Bamazi said. “Sometimes she didn’t have enough food to eat. We don’t want our babies to grow up like that. That’s the bottom line.”

Looking to the future, he said of his wife: “She’s going to have dreams for a better life. She’s going to grow. She’s going to have a nice job.” As for her daughters whom he said he loves very much, “They have to succeed.” Eventually, he intends to move back to Africa and open an art school. “To where my great-great-grandfather was born, that’s where I’m going,” he said. And Jewel said she will go too.