DOI: 10.3390/genealogy10030104 ISSN: 2313-5778

Ntu Fracture: A Trifocal Intersectionality of Race, Gender, and Relational Theology in the UK African Diasporic Masculinity

Nomatter Sande

African immigrant men in the United Kingdom (UK) experience forms of suffering that transcend both the clinical framework of acculturation stress and the political narrative of racial victimhood. Existing scholarship frequently overlooks how race, religion, and gender historically entangle to construct diasporic identities. This paper investigates how African immigrant men in the UK navigate the constitutive forces of race, gender, and religion in constructing and resisting diasporic identities. The paper develops “Ntu Fracture” as a theological–anthropological framework to diagnose the wounding of diasporic masculine personhood at the level of vital relationality. The framework draws upon Bantu philosophy (Ntu, ubuntu) and Yoruba cosmology (àṣẹ), placing them in critical dialogue with Fanon’s sociogeny and Butler’s concept of precarity. Utilising a qualitative desktop methodology, the findings suggest a fractured subjectivity among African men in the UK driven by three main mechanisms: (1) institutional racism as recognition-severing, (2) immigration enforcement as obligation-interruption and (3) parenting surveillance as domestic colonisation. The paper concludes that the lived experiences of African religious communities within the UK’s hostile environment stem from historical constructions of race, religion, and gender, categories experienced as unified entities that collapse conventional distinctions between the sacred and the secular.

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