Africans pull together in Utah, 8,000 miles from homeland

SALT LAKE CITY — An amiable man in a suit and tie sits at the front of a small room. It is now 25 minutes past the official start time of the monthly general assembly meeting of United Africans of Utah and only three people have shown up, including the amiable man himself.

This is Amadou Niang, the president of the UAU. "The present moment is more important than what has been planned," he says with a smile, trying to explain what some people call African Time. If someone plans to attend a meeting, for example, and as he is leaving his house a friend drops over, the friend will always take priority.

Niang knows the difficulties of navigating between cultures, and how hard it is unite a continent. But he is optimistic and patient.

It's estimated that there are now at least 15,000 African refugees in Utah. These are the people the UAU is trying to energize, so they will have a stronger collective voice in a place that could so easily ignore them. Together, he tells them, they can start businesses. Together they can take care of each other, rather than relying on the government or charity.

"We Africans, we are a powerhouse in Utah now," he told them a few months earlier, at the annual meeting of the 3-year-old organization. A couple hundred people had gathered to honor the leaders of their individual communities — from Congo and Somalia, from Sudan and Rwanda, 16 countries in all, some of them also represented by sub-groups organized along tribal lines.

"If we get together, we are a big number, and numbers speak," he told them. "We are facing the potential of living the American dream. We can choose to live it or we can choose to fail."

He knows they are so busy just trying to survive. And that the common denominator between them is not a country or a religion or a language but the sadness of being displaced by torture and war.

So they may not see the value of an umbrella organization. They may prefer to spend time with their countrymen rather than with Africans from other countries.

Niang, and UAU vice president Cathy Tshilombo, are often ambassadors between the new life in America and the old ways left behind. Both are immigrants, not refugees.

Niang, who is working on his Ph.D. at the University of Utah in the department of education, culture and society, moved to the United States 11 years ago from Mali. Tshilombo, who is Congolese, lives with her husband in Tooele, where she runs a catering business and a nonprofit call Mama African Kitoko.