Teranga occupied a brick basement located down an alleyway off the buzzing square of Piazza Bellini in Naples, Italy. Setup by Judicael Ouango, who moved from Senegal to Naples, Teranga was an afrobeat nightclub run by migrants for migrants, born from the belief that “everything that lives has the right to live well”. Judicael is a profoundly generous writer, DJ, and space-maker. When he arrived in Naples in the late 90s, he “realised there was nowhere for people like us, no places to go. Migrants need a place to simply feel human”. He knew that a nightclub had the potential to be that place, and so he founded Teranga. Valuing migrant life is at the heart of Teranga’s story. 

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A note on language: I refer to the Teranga community who have unsettled immigration statuses as migrants – a naming used to recognize an experience of displacement. However, identities expressed in Teranga go beyond the labels ascribed to them from a lexicon of borders. Individuals in Teranga can and should be defined by the movements they make on the dancefloor. With that in mind, they are also referred to as clubbers and dancers – titles they’ve claimed and shaped for themselves – flowing from freedom of movement. It’s also important to frame my positionality: I am not a migrant living in Naples, so this is not a club designed for me. I’m reflecting on this space as an urbanist, as a writer, and as someone who loves dancing to music. I’ve felt in my own locale the electricity of marginalised people creating community together in understated spaces; I recognize that electricity in Teranga. 

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“teranga means welcome, but in a very wide sense. I open my door and keep it open as long as you wish” — Judicael

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In Wolof, the principal language of Senegal, ‘teranga’ translates loosely to ‘welcome’ and ‘hospitality’. As Judicael told me: “teranga means welcome, but in a very wide sense. I open my door and keep it open as long as you wish”. It’s a fitting name for this nightclub. Nevertheless, the financial pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic forced Teranga to shut its doors permanently. As such, the glimpses of the club offered here had to be scavenged: fragmentary conversations over Facebook Messenger with Teranga’s founder Judicael; a Zoom interview with Sophia Seymour, Daisy Squires and Lou Marillier – the directors of the beautiful documentary Teranga: Life in the Waiting Room (2020); stills from the documentary itself. 

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These snatches of Teranga’s unofficial archive feel like those moments in a club when the wash light’s beam briefly illuminates the crowd, and you fully see that you’re not alone. To understand Teranga is to understand an example of space-making done right: grounded in a politics and praxis of care, joy, and the opportunity for forging new connections on the dancefloor. The club provides a blueprint for enacting such space-making: we need more Terangas in our nightlife and in our built environments.

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A typical Saturday night at Teranga: queuing in the alleyway with clubbers chatting animatedly in Wolof and/or French and/or Italian; descending stairs into a crowd already dancing to the syncopated melodic bass of reggae. The basement seems cavernous; sloping walls, sweaty bodies, magenta disco lights bouncing off the ceiling. The bar’s at the back of the room, and next to that, the DIY DJ booth. As well as founding the club, Judicael is a resident DJ (aptly called DJ Teranga). If he’s on the decks he might start mixing bongo flava from artists like Tekno or Diamond Platnumz, or delivering back-to-back dancehall. Come a few hours earlier and you can sit at one of the low wooden tables near the door, and order fufu or acheke or thieboudienne – West African dishes prepared in-house. In the daytime the space smells more like a relative’s kitchen than a club, especially on Sundays when children eat for free. As Judicael synthesised: “In 170 metres squared people of all generations and nationalities were accepted. My food and music was yours, my home as well, and time didn’t matter”.

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Naples as a metropolis has a long history of incorporating the marginalised within its urban processes. Neapolitans have, to an extent, a shared experience of existing within the cracks. This identity is mirrored through what the philosopher Walter Benjamin observed in 1925 as the city’s architectural ‘porosity’. Unlike the more traditionally segregated Italian cities of Verona or Milan, the spatial order in Naples’ public realm feels informal; inventive space-making emerges in a makeshift manner, which reshapes the street through cross-cultural exchange. Teranga adds to that spectrum of spaces, using grassroots status to critique the normative.

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However, even in this city forged in the margins, migrants still face an extremely and deliberately restrictive geography. The Teranga documentary spotlights the lives of two Gambian migrants, Fata and Yankuba, who frequent the dancefloor while they wait to be permitted by the Italian state to live as legal citizens. It takes on average five years for a decisive response to an asylum claim, during which time migrants have no access to citizenship rights and are excluded to remote reception centres – spaces defined by locked gates and curfew constraints.

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Against these isolated and isolating reception centres, Teranga offers the opportunity for connection. As a grassroots nightclub, the space is literally and figuratively more in touch with those who move through it, a proximity that is deeply felt in Teranga’s cinematography. Sophia, Daisy and Lou invite us to see beyond a visual economy that prioritises state-constructed narratives, showing us not the outside of the club’s building and how it might be classified and categorised, but instead the processes in which the clubbers inhabit the space: through dancing, sitting, mixing tracks and laughing with friends.

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Tom Wilkinson, an art historian and nightlife enthusiast, observed that in most nightclubs the architecture fades into the background, to leave more physical and metaphorical room for the dancefloor. To some extent this is true in Teranga; the crowd and the DJ occupy the central focus of the space. However, the interior furnishings of this club could never truly fade into the background, because the design itself challenges the everyday lived experience of migrants. Most migrant reception centres in Naples do not have a communal table or sofa – except for the overcrowded dormitories, there are no shared spaces in which to talk, to laugh, to be in communion with each other. By contrast, Teranga is categorically designed for an inclusive experience of us: the kinship engendered by the space is tangibly encoded within the typology of the nightclub. In our interview, Sophia explained: clubbers “can go to Teranga on their own, and know they will bump into people and dance, or they can sit with their four mates in the corner and just be together”.

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Even though not all clubbers at Teranga have had the same life experiences, dance and music facilitate connection across differences. As Sophia put it: “you can be into the same afrobeat music as somebody from Nigeria and someone from a suburb of Naples, and you can get down and dance to it and love it together, and that creates safety, that creates connection, that creates togetherness and joy”. Although in the morning, when the music ends, migrants will take the first train back to their reception centres and the Italian-born Neapolitans will walk in liberty to their homes, for those few hours before morning arrives, this collective experience of connection defies drawn borders and drawn hierarchies.

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In Wolof, the word teranga describes what is offered to a guest, whilst also ensuring that the guest feels able to reciprocate as an equal. Teranga is a verb, noun, adjective and attitude; synonymous with being part of an expansive family.

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The connection facilitated by this space is intentional. In Wolof, the word teranga describes what is offered to a guest, whilst also ensuring that the guest feels able to reciprocate as an equal. Teranga is a verb, noun, adjective and attitude; synonymous with being part of an expansive family. As the Teranga directors agreed, there’s a sense of nominative determinism happening here. Daisy encapsulates the sentiment when she told me, smiling: “it’s a club conceived to be a refuge. That’s part of its DNA. It’s not just by accident we all made friends here”.

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Some might not classify this nightclub kinship as truly meaningful, but such judgements overlook the potency of Teranga for people who arrive alone in a new city, separated from their biological family. Kinship in Teranga is about collectively forging familiar space: local Neapolitans and migrants alike gain new kin in the club. This kinship demonstrates that state-sanctioned segregation doesn’t function, because people will find a different definition of kinship regardless. Connection in the club is intertwined and untidy: it resists categorisation. The drawn hierarchies of the immigration system are not necessarily lived out. Although migrants are consigned to remote reception centres, they still experience and shape a connection and closeness with the cultural, social and emotional fabric of the city.

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State resources towards migrants in Italy are pervaded by the ongoing logic of emergency, manifesting through the excessive externalisation of state services. Landlords of reception centres receive an average of thirty-five euros per migrant per day, intended for rudimentary necessities. This income is often syphoned into the pockets of officials, exposing the realities of care-as-commodity and the detached neglect of state-organised approaches. The endlessly capacious lives of migrants are minimised to basic survival, and in the shadow of the overwhelming statistics of people who have lost their lives in Italian detention centres, reception centres and in the Mediterranean sea, we know that even survival can be made impossible.  

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Teranga dismantles the idea of substandard refuge as an inevitability for migrants – to repeat Judicael’s philosophy: “everything that lives has the right to live well”. Judith Butler understood this when she wrote that there are at least two senses of life: ‘the one which refers to the minimum biological form of living’ and another which establishes conditions ‘for a liveable life with regard to human life’. It is this second definition which Teranga makes space for: on the dancefloor.

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The artist Sable Elyse Smith calls the act of dancing in a queer nightclub ‘a punctuation’. On a practical level, the dancefloor in Teranga punctuates. For many migrants, their days consist of going to the reception centre, going to see their lawyers and going through their asylum case. As Daisy put it: “that’s what our friends’ lives have been made into, a process of waiting for their documents. Teranga is like a break”. The dancefloor is (as all punctuation is) a break in a pattern; a welcome interruption in a routine of waiting. 

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The nightclub is also a break that makes space for multiple emotions felt on and beyond the dancefloor. A third of the way through the Teranga documentary we are shown the graceful movements of dancers in the club, elucidated by soft purple light. Above the music Yankuba’s voice elucidates: “Teranga is not like a normal bar whatsoever. A normal bar people are feeling great at home and then they go to a bar to get some extra greatness. Teranga is where we go to scrape off thinking about your dying friends in the sea thinking about your dying friends in the desert thinking about the imprisonment and things like that. We need it to feel alive again”. It's this understanding of the absolute need for the dancefloor that makes Teranga so unique.

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"Teranga is where we go to scrape off thinking about your dying friends in the sea thinking about your dying friends in the desert thinking about the imprisonment and things like that. We need it to feel alive again" — Yankuba 

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There is still a potential criticism: one can imagine tabloid papers running the headline: ‘Nightclubs for Migrants are Unnecessary Luxuries…’ etc. I borrow David Graeber’s essay title in response: What’s The Point If We Can’t Have Fun? Having fun is a radical act of resistance against a system that seeks to reduce migrant life to a minimal existence. It is essential for lives made more violent by borders. Lou, co-director of Teranga, reflects: “It’s not that [migrants] are consciously resisting by being together, by sitting on a sofa or partying, but it does feel like resisting, the fact that they are not letting that system destroy them, which is really dehumanising and corrupt and awful. The fact that they are still having fun and living, not just surviving, but having a life that you deserve when you are young anywhere”.

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Talking about Teranga takes on a different meaning when its doors are closed. The film stills from the documentary now portray locations beyond the actual, privileging the nostalgic over the tangible. Yet alongside the very real loss of the club, Teranga provides a staging ground for future space-making. Such spaces may not always be perfect, and they cannot offer everything, yet nonetheless they orientate us towards a living principle. Teranga shows what it means to demand joy, to demand connection, to demand a liveable experience of human life. In the closing minutes of our online conversation, Sophia remembered a quote she had read from a book by Alexis Okeowo, which she felt epitomised the legacy of Teranga. She paraphrased: “the idea of survival is hazy: it can mean more than just staying alive; it can mean leading the life you feel entitled to have”.

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P.S. For more about the dancefloor, community, and what nightclubs can offer, then please read Emma Warren’s work. Shoutout to her, always.

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