AFRICAN DIASPORANS IN SWEDEN

“BLUE MEN” in Sweden

Despite its distance from the triangle of the Atlantic slave trade neither Africans nor African Diasporans are strangers to Swedish shores.² The nation’s early history of global trading and its only Caribbean colony, St. Bartholomew, contributed huge economic profits to Swedish ship builders, sail makers, exporters of salted beef, iron chains and other hardware that was used by slave-trading nations. The spin-off from the Atlantic slave trade included a continuous, though small, trickle of Africans and diasporans who were in service to, or at the disposal of, wealthy Swedes.³

Some were used as house servants in the homes of noblemen and aristocrats, but there are also written accounts of “blue men” serving in Swedish armies, of black women in convents and of black servants in royal palaces.4 It fact, even though Sweden was officially slave-free, having a black servant-boy or girl around the house was considered a challenge: it was one of the many symbols of one’s ability to “tame the savage”. Hence, written accounts of blacks in Sweden since the 1300s can be found in Swedish family and museum archives, church records and on road-show flyers. ⁵

Many of the descriptions of Africans and African Diasporans at that time compared them with monsters, devils or as someone from an uncivilized world.

From “Savage” to Lackey

Adolf Badin eventually became the caretaker for three royal palaces, had a library of 800 books, and was married twice to aristocratic ladies but left no living children. Popular with the Court ladies, it was rumored that he even had a child by King Gustav III’s sister, Princess Sophia Albertina, but this does not appear in any official records or in his autobiography.¹⁰

Badin survived during one of the most turbulent eras of Swedish Court intrigue. Upon the death of his patron, the Queen, in 1782, he was handed over to King Gustav III, who was eventually murdered in his own castle in 1792. He also had a presence during the regimes of he next two Swedish monarchs, Gustav IV Adof (1792/1796 -- 1809) and Karl XIII (1809 –1818), though his role in their Courts is unclear.

When he died in 1822 he was about 75 years old.

The Deliberate Neglect of A Role Model

Although well respected within the Swedish court at the time, Adolf Badin’s talents and contributions to the Courts he served are almost never mentioned in the history books used in Swedish schools.

Besides four fictional biographies about him, there has been one issue of a Swedish stamp commemorating him, and his character has had minor roles in a number of Swedish films and plays, most of which are focused on the murder of Gustav III”.¹¹

The most accessible physical evidence of his existence in Sweden are paintings of him in museums around Sweden, including The National Museum in Stockholm. The most widely known of these is a 1775 pastel drawing of him playing Chess in a Free Mason uniform adorned with ostrich feathers by Gustav Lundberg, located in Gripsholms Castle, one of those under his charge.

The pointed index finger on his left hand in the painting has had several explanations, none of which are agreed upon by the authors of books on him. Is it an obscene gesture, one of defiance such as the clenched fist of the 1960s, or one that aims simply to provoke the viewer?

The gesture remains a mystery and is not even made clear in his own unpublished manuscripts.¹² These contain comments such as “People are not Chess pieces, there is no black and white…., ” and “black and white are not colors, but extreme nuances… . “¹³

He describes his dream of spreading Christianity in Africa, and about a conscious link of himself to people and places in Africa. Had these been published at the time, Adolf Badin would clearly head the list of early spokesmen for Black consciousness.¹⁴

Otherwise, there is very little from his perspective about the day-to-day events at the Courts and monarchies he served, and nothing written by his widow, Magdalena Eleonora Norell (who was also known as “moriansänkan”, or the morian’s widow) has been published.

In his analysis of Badin in Swedish history, Allan Pred finds sees his images in paintings and films as an icon for the institutionalization of structural racism. But who knows, perhaps that index finger was his way of cautioning the viewer in making an erroneous judgment about him. That too, is part of this story.


Unfortunately, the written and oral histories of Africans and African Diasporans in Sweden is not yet a priority issue considering the size of their population. Aside for the occasional painting or records in church archives, there is hardly any historical literature about Africa’s peoples in Sweden, and even less about the many persons who campaigned to keep Sweden slave-free.

POST WW2 ARRIVALS:

AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTISTS AND POLITICAL EXILES

Shortly after World War II, Sweden opened up its doors to foreign labor migration. Most of this labor came from neighboring Scandinavian countries or from southern Europe, But during the 1950s and 60s, most African Americans who came to reside in Sweden did so to join family members (wives, husbands), or in the promotion of their arts.¹⁵



The largest number of this group came from the United States when compared to those from the Caribbean or South America, for example. Some now famous musicians and artists had brief residencies in Sweden, but there were some 100-odd lesser known musicians who lived here too.

Scores of jazz musicians, choreographers and others came to Sweden during that time and made lasting contributions to the development of post-war Swedish artists, dancers and singers.¹⁶

There were also a few writers and filmmakers, the most famous being Jack Jordan, who produced Georgia-Georgia (1972) which was directed by Stig Bjorkman. Mr. Jordan was also a co-producer of Ganja and Hess (1974, Kelly-Jordan Productions) and a number of theater plays in the U.S. A, during the 1960s.¹⁷

The early group also included painters, well-known boxers and their sparring partners, one of whom became a well-known anti-war journalist named Sherman Adams.

The most famous African American to visit Sweden was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Following his assassination, scores of African American men – and a handful of women – eager to escape the racial violence and political strife that was raging throughout the United States at that time landed in Sweden.

Nearly all the civil rights activists at the time came here and some stayed for a number of years. Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton and scores of lesser-known members of the Black Panther Party and other civil rights organizations found support, and in some cases refuge, in Sweden from the ravages of the 1960s in the United States. Sweden, its people and the policies of politicians such as Olof Palme welcomed us with open arms.¹⁸

Unfortunately, there can never be an accurate account of the number of African Americans who lived in Sweden at that time, or any other, for the simple reason that Sweden maintains statistics based on citizenship or place of birth, not race.

This means that even though the total number of “North American citizens” living in Sweden in 1998 was recorded as 14, 747 persons, there is no accurate record of how many were African Americans. Such a system of census taking clearly leaves the question of percentages based on race at the mercy of conjecture. Hence, there is little hard evidence to counter the notion that the African American percentages of “North Americans” in Sweden could never have been more than 3%. But even that small number would be a pawn in the political debates on the presence of U.S. Army deserters here during the 1970s.¹⁹




Next month: THE BAD ICONS OF THE 1970S

1 Madubuko Diakité was born in New York City in 1940, but has been living in Sweden since 1968. With post-graduate degrees from Stockholm and Lund universities, Mr. Diakité is currently a researcher in human rights law at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, at Lund University. He is the publisher of The Lundian Magazine (www.thelundian.com).
2 Throughout this article the phrase ”Africans and African Diasporans” includes Continentals, Caribbean islanders and North Americans of African descent. M. A. Diakité
3 Ingvar Svanberg & Mattias Tydén: Tusen år av Invandring, en svensk Kulturhistoria (Stockholm, 1992) p. 177.
4 Ola Larsmo in a synopsis of his book, Maroonberget (Stockholm, 1995). Available in Swedish at: www.olalarsmo.com Also in phone conversations with Ylva Eggenhorn, Liljekonvaljekungen  (Stockholm, 2000) in 2005.
5Larsmo, Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 From telephone conversations with Mr. Donald Clayborn of Perris, CA. in 1985. Mr. Clayborn lived in Sweden between 1969 and 1987 and conducted much research on Badin in Sweden and Denmark. He is the author of an unpublished film script on Badin.
8 Ola Larsmo, Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Modern Museum flyer on film by Yinka Shonibare’s film: The Assassination of a Swedish King. www. modernamuseet.se See also M.J. Crusenstolpe: Moriannen – Adolf Ludvig Badin; Ylva Eggehorn, Ibid; Ola Larsmo, footnote 2 supra.
12 Phone conversations with the author Ylva Eggehorn, 2005.
13 Larsmo, Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Based on conversations with the late Herbert Gentry, the painter. Mr. Gentry lived in Sweden from 1960 till his demise in Stockholm in 2003.
16 Conversations with the late Paula Watson, a piano bar player from Los Angeles, CA. Ms. Watson lived in Sweden between 1976 and 2003 when she passed away. A gifted painter on her own right, she played in thousands of piano bars and composed a number of her own songs, most of which remain unrecorded.
17 Based on conversations with Mr. Jack Jordan in Stockholm (The Best of Harlem), November, 1976.
18 Based on person experiences, meetings and photographs of these persons. M. A. Diakité. Special thanks also to Mr. McKinley Ruffin, of Chicago, Ill. Mr. Ruffin currently lives in Malmö, Sweden.
19 Foreign populations are counted only by ”citizenship” or ”country of birth. See Sweden in Figures



@2005 M. A. Diakité