Challenging Perceptions, Museum Puts Greeks of African Origin in Spotlight
Source: Balkan Insight
In a bright white room in the exhibition, music by the well-known black Greek musician MC Yinka is being played.
Visitors hear excerpts from speeches, vocals and music of people of African origin who are active in Greece and see a chronology of the African diaspora’s presence in Greece from the 1960s onwards, organised by the Greek Forum of Migrants.
The room highlights how the first migrant student associations were created in Greece in the 1960s and how they took part in the popular demonstrations against the military dictatorship.
It covers the establishment of the Pan-African Association of Greece in the 1990s, when advocacy efforts for the conversion of student visas into residence permits began.
It follows the creation the Greek Forum of Migrants in 2002 and the 2005-2007 black mothers’ campaign, “No to racism from the baby’s cot onwards”.
“We are talking about experiential real history that you don’t learn in schools, but by searching,” Afolayan insists.
The timeline includes various key laws, such as Law 3838/2010, passed in 2012. The law said a child born in Greece of foreign parents who had lived in Greece for at least five years, or who had completed at least six grades of Greek school, should acquire Greek citizenship from birth.
The timeline also includes the annulment of Law 3838/2010in 2013, when Greece’s Council of State judged it unconstitutional.
As a result, the children of migrants who were born and completed their primary and secondary education in Greece do not now automatically receive Greek citizenship; instead, their “Greekness” has first to be “tested”.
Under another piece of legislation, Law 4735/2020, which came into effect in 2021, the model of the written test was adopted. For many, the questions seem like a knowledge game that even many Greeks cannot answer. Income criteria have also been included as a condition for citizenship.
The exhibition closes with a Greek identity card issued to a young woman of African origin.
Afolayan recalls that he got his Greek ID two years ago. His father, who died last year, never got one.
“We’re not migrants; I was born here,” he points out. “It’s just a term to classify me ‘somewhere’. We want to explain that there are people [of African origin] who were born here – and we see their history here, and their identity,” he says of the exhibition.
“Africa is amongst us, in a way, in our lives,” he concludes.
The exhibition is on display until May 25 at the Benaki Museum in Athens.
The original article: belongs to Balkan Insight .
